One of the reasons why you justify gaming during the winter is that it’s too cold to go outside, so you have “nothing better to do.” Especially if you don’t have a car.

Here are the top five activities to replace gaming during the winter:

So instead of being at home and being bored all day, you might as well game. Plus, gaming isn’t any worse than just sitting around watching TV or mindlessly browsing the internet.

Sound familiar?

But the truth is, we all know that is bullshit. There are millions of people out there in the world right now who don’t game and manage to do just fine during the winter months.

So no, just because it’s winter that does not mean you can justify gaming. To help you, here are the five activities I would recommend for you to try:

Looking for more ideas? Download 60+ New Hobby Ideas to replace gaming.

1. Programming/Web Design

In the last six weeks I’ve made $2,250 building websites for my friend. Who wouldn’t want an extra two thousand dollars right now? By developing your skills in programming and web design, you too can create these kind of opportunities for yourself. Check out codeacademy.com

2. Cooking

In the video on five things I wish I had done differently when I was 18 years old, I shared how I wish I had learned more about diet and nutrition sooner, because of the impact it had on my health – my energy, my acne, etc.

In the winter months, learning how to cook is a fantastic skill to develop. Every person on the planet needs to eat, and knowing how to cook means you can provide value to any person out there. How many other skills are that universal? Plus, it will help your dating life. 😉 Check out the 4 Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss (affiliate link)

3. Yoga

As a gamer you’ve spent a ton of time sitting in a chair with poor posture gaming your heart away. This has major health implications. (Just read this.)

Yoga is a great way to stretch and release the tension in your body. Plus it helps you reconnect with your body (something you haven’t been doing when you’re just numbing yourself with games) and yoga teaches you mindfulness – an important skill to develop in your life – especially after you quit gaming.

4. Reading

What better time than the winter to catch up on your reading list. If you need ideas, here are the five books I recommend for you that will help you quit gaming.

5. Music Production

You may not have a guitar or other instrument to play, but if you’re reading this you have a computer and that gives you the opportunity to learn more about music production.

My friend Cam Heathman (also known as Otter Point) was a gamer who played over eight hours a day. After he quit he took up music production and now he has songs signed to record labels and he DJs at clubs. I recently interviewed him as a bonus for Respawn v4. You can listen to it for free here.

[powerpress]

Looking for more ideas? Download 60+ New Hobby Ideas to replace gaming.

Bonus: Still not sure what to do during the winter?

Take the Game Quitters Challenge, which is a 30-day challenge intentionally designed to help you develop skills like courage, discipline, social skills and much more.

A big part of the challenge is about finding time in your life to do the things that are important. The guide Cam provides helps you do that. I wouldn’t turn down this opportunity. His challenge is worth making the time for, especially if you are trying to replace video games.

If you’re curious, you can download a sample of the Challenge here. (scroll down midway)

I hope that helps. Remember, gaming was just an activity, so it doesn’t matter what time of the year it is, in order to successfully move on you need to intentionally choose new activities to replace gaming with.

What activities are you going to replace gaming with this winter? Share your answer in the comments below.

When you quit gaming it’s important to be aware of the times you will be the most vulnerable to relapse… and the holidays are one of those times.

Here’s how to avoid gaming over the holidays:

Gaming over the holidays is something you’ve always done – it’s been your routine. You’re done school for the semester, you’ve been fulfilling all of your obligations and now you have all of this free time, so what better to do than binge game?

But what happens is although during the holidays there aren’t any “real” consequences to your binge gaming, it does create problems as you go back into the next school semester.

One quick example is your sleeping schedule – it’s all over the place and getting back into the school routine becomes a stressful experience, instead of flowing back into school and handling your business like a boss.

To avoid gaming over the holidays you need to start shifting the mindset that you use to justify gaming. Part of that mindset is the way you see your obligations and the way you see your free time.

During the school semester you go to class and fulfill your obligations – something out of your control because you have to go – but what happens is when you are done your obligations for the day, you feel that much more control over your free-time – it’s time that you can do whatever the fuck you want with.

And that tends to be gaming.

However this mindset only keeps us at the status quo. Our time and energy are the two non-renewable resources we have, so if we are constantly using them to just fulfill our obligations and then kill our free time, we aren’t moving forward towards our goals and instead we’re staying in the same place.

Although the holidays are a time to relax and recover from the school semester, they are also a great opportunity to invest your time into the things you truly want to do – into developing new habits and pursuing new goals you have.

To avoid gaming over the holidays, follow these two tips:

Create structure with a schedule.

When you’re going to school you have a lot of structure, you had to wake up at a certain time, you had to be at school at a certain time and most of your day was planned out.

During the holidays you lose all of that structure, and that can cause you to experience a lot of boredom, and boredom leads to gaming. Setup a schedule using an agenda or Google Calendar (what I use) to plan new activities ahead of time.

Create a project.

The holidays are a great time to create a new project that will help you learn a new skill or help you towards your goals. Is there an app you can build? Do you want to learn certain songs on a guitar? Reach a new level in a new language? Start a podcast or website? You have enough time to make progress in one of these during your winter break.

Last year for example I wanted to read five books, so I did that and it was awesome.

If you need ideas for new activities to do during your winter break, download 60+ New Hobby Ideas.

Potential Triggers: Friends and Family

One last thing to be aware of on your winter break is that it’s easy to become triggered by your friends.

You see your friends getting new games… or they get an Xbox or PS4 for Christmas, and it’s easy to feel envious or jealous of them. In this moment it’s important to remind yourself why you’re quitting games and why it’s important to you.

You also want to be aware that because your friends are on their break, they are going to be gaming and will potentially even ask you to play too. If you’re worried about this, watch this video on what to do about your gamer friends.

Finally, your family might want to buy you games because that’s what they’ve always done – that’s what you were into and they know it was important to you.

So if you’re worried about this, Christmas is the perfect opportunity to talk to your family about how you’re moving on from games and share with them the new hobbies or ideas you’re excited about and maybe they can help you with that instead.

For example, last year for Christmas my family bought me a GoPro, because I had talked to them about how I wanted to start a YouTube channel. And voila, here we are.

So use Christmas as an opportunity to connect more with your friends and family (outside of games), and make the most of the time you have to pursue the new goals and dreams you have.

What are your plans over the Christmas break? What new hobby or project are you going to launch? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

If you’re looking for some extra help over the holiday season to avoid gaming, check out Respawn.

Gaming has always been your reward. You’ve done well on a test, so you get to game. You’ve finished a semester at school, so you get to game. Gaming is your reward.

But this is also one of the reasons why you can relapse after you quit. You’ve done well and you want to reward yourself. So how do you reward yourself without gaming? Press play:

Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with gaming as a reward. If you want to game, go ahead and game. But if you’re reading this right now it’s safe for me to assume that you want to remove gaming from your life.

So if that’s the case, and you want to avoid a relapse in the future, it’s important for you to find new ways to reward yourself without using gaming.

It’s this notion of being intentional that is so important on your journey. If you’re not intentional with the things you do, you’ll go to what you know (your habits), and in this case, your habit is to game.

There are 2 types of rewards:

1. Extrinsic

This is a reward that is outside of yourself. Maybe it’s something you purchase. An example from my own life is that every time I go to the gym, I buy myself a coconut water. It’s a simple reward I look forward to and it encourages me to go to the gym more often.

Now the opportunity to reward myself with a coconut water isn’t the only reason I go to the gym. I also go because it makes my body feel better, it builds strength and muscle, I look better in clothes and it helps me de-stress. But a silly little coconut water also helps a lot. 🙂

2. Intrinsic

This is a reward that is inside of yourself – how you feel about yourself. An example from my own life is when I spoke at TEDxBoulder.

What you might not know about that talk is that I had never spoken on stage before… so I was very, very nervous. What helped me persevere is that I knew once I finished it my reward would be an immense amount of confidence in myself. I would be able to increase my self-esteem and be proud of who I am.

Not because I spoke at TEDx (although that’s cool), but more that I was able to push through the fear and adversity I faced in doing the talk in the first place.

I didn’t need to have a coconut water after TEDxBoulder because the sense of pride I had in myself was enough.

Back to you

How can you play with this and learn more about yourself? What extrinsic rewards could you have? What about intrinsic? The key is to identify them beforehand so you aren’t making these decisions on autopilot (which is when you’ll go to what you know, which is gaming.)

Share the new rewards you’re choosing for yourself in the comments below.

If you are still playing games but you want to quit right now, check out Respawn.

Should you watch gaming streams? Press play and find out:

After you quit gaming what you realize is that you also spend a lot of time watching gaming streams, which happens because you want to kill time and learn about new games, but also because you enjoy following the different personalities of the streamers.

I used to watch streams as well. I remember following along when Day9 first started streaming and I really enjoyed it… but the truth is, after you quit gaming you need to stop watching streams.

The reason is because streams are one of the top reasons why people relapse. When you watch streams it makes you want to play. It’s easy to think it’s not going to, but the more you watch streams, the more you’ll want to play.

Read: What Triggers Should You Watch Out For?

When you quit gaming you will experience cravings to play. Cravings are inevitable, and because of this you want to not only learn how to deal with them, but you also want to mitigate them.

By not watching streams you’re taking a positive step to mitigate your cravings and set your recovery up for success.

Now one of the reasons why you will justify watching gaming streams is because it’s no worse than watching TV, which is true… but you’re not quitting games to just sit around and watch TV all day. This is the same justification you can use to spend way too much time on Discord – because you think well you’re just hanging out with your friends.

You’re quitting games because you want to start living your life to the fullest.

To do that you need to start creating bigger goals for yourself. The more time you sit around mindlessly browsing the internet, watching gaming streams or watching TV, the less time you are spending on your goals.

Remember to always come back to what you really want to do. Why do you want to quit gaming? What’s your purpose? What are you trying to accomplish?

When you were gaming you were thinking of your life from a place of how you can be entertained all day and numb yourself from your life.

Now that you’ve quit, you want to start thinking about how you can set your life up for success, what you can do on a daily basis that will lead you to reach your goals.

When you start thinking of your life on that level… spending your time watching gaming streams just doesn’t really fit anymore. This also goes for websites like Reddit that you waste time on.

3 tips to avoid watching gaming streams:

1. Find replacement activities.

When do you watch gaming streams? I bet it’s when you’re at home and you’re tired and bored. So what can you do instead when you’re feeling this way that will lead you towards your goals?

Things like watching TED talks, watching documentaries, learning a new language, reading (Read: 5 books I recommend) or listening to podcasts are all good replacement activities for gaming streams.

If you need other ideas, look at our guides on screen-free activities and summer hobbies.

2. Find new role models and mentors.

One of the reasons why you watch streams is because of the different personalities you get to hang out with> Many of these streamers you have been watching for years and this will create nostalgia. (Watch: How to deal with gaming nostalgia.)

To combat this you need to find new role models and mentors to watch instead. Here are a few people I would recommend for you:

• Alexi Panos
• Preston Smiles
• Tai Lopez
• Lewis Howes
• Sam Harris
• Joe Rogan

Instead of watching streams and encouraging you to play video games, these people will help you live your life to the fullest.

3. Be busier and be out of the house.

The more you can be outside of your house the better. You’ll have less time to watch streams, you’ll be less tempted to game (you won’t be bored at home) and you can invest your time in more productive activities.

Watch: How to get out of the house more often

So I hope that helps you out and if it does I’d love to hear what your new activities are going to be instead of watching streams. Share your answer in the comments below.

If you are still playing games but you want to quit right now, check out Respawn.

When you quit playing video games it’s an emotional experience, and you need to be aware of this because your emotions will influence your behavior. So what are the seven things you should expect after you quit gaming? Press play and find out:

When you quit gaming certain events are predictable. We all seem to go through the same things.

Because of this, we have the opportunity to prepare for them ahead of time and that way, when they occur they don’t catch us off guard and potentially cause us to relapse.

Success is when preparation meets opportunity.

Here are the seven things to expect after you quit gaming:

1. You will have tough days.

Not every single day will be easy. Some days will be easy, some days will be hard. That’s ok. This experience of moving on from playing video games is a new beginning for you, it’s a new chapter in your life.

Don’t get too attached to having a good day every day. Otherwise you’ll get frustrated and stressed out, which will only cause you to want to game.

2. Your experience will be like a wave.

Be prepared to experience a wide range of emotions, and these emotions can come out of nowhere. Some days you’ll be happy, others you’ll be nostalgic. Some weeks will fly by, others will crawl. Ride the wave and keep moving forward.

3. Your detox might take more time.

Although we recommend for you to go through the 90 day detox, 90 days is just a general guideline. Your recovery might take more time. Focus less on the specific number and days and instead continue to build your life without games.

4. You will have urges and cravings.

This is a normal part of your journey. Depending on how much you gamed your urges and cravings will reflect that in their intensity. The more you gamed, the more intense your urges and cravings. That’s ok.

If you’re experiencing urges and cravings it’s a sign that you need to go through this detox. This video will help you deal with urges and cravings.

5. Your gamer friends might not support you.

Some of your friends will support you, while others will not. This can suck and hurt in the moment, but what you need to remember is that the ones who support you are your real friends, and you can let the others go.

Watch this video on How to Stay Friends With Your Gamer Friends.

6. You will probably be bored sometimes.

One of the main reasons you gamed was to avoid boredom, so it’s crucial to be prepared for potential boredom after you quit. Make sure you have chosen new activities.

Also remember that part of the reason why a 90 day detox is so important for you is because due to the amount of gaming you’ve done, your brain may have experienced structural changes and these changes may be causing your feelings of boredom.

Watch this video on What If You Find Other Activities to Be Boring? for more on that.

7. You might even relapse.

Relapse can be a natural part of the addiction process, and although we don’t want to relapse and I don’t encourage it (duh!), the reality is that it’s common and by preparing ahead of time in the event that it does occur, we can bounce back quicker.

Relapse doesn’t have to be a bad thing if you learn from the experience. When I relapsed after being game-free for eleven months it taught me what I was missing in my recovery to be successful.

Watch this video on What to Do If You Relapse and Start Gaming Again for help with that.

Now that you know the seven things to expect after you quit gaming, you can be prepared ahead of time and avoid failing in your recovery.

To succeed, take these 3 steps:

1. Focus one day at a time.

Your mindset should be to win the day, every single day. Again some days will be easy, others will be hard, and that’s ok. The key is to just win the day. To win, just don’t play games. Easy right?!

To win the day, I recommend starting your day strong and focusing on the finish. By starting your day strong in the morning you will build momentum that can carry you throughout the day. Start with day with a meditation habit or gratitude journal. Read: The Morning Miracle by Hal Elrod (affiliate link)

Now it’s great to start your day strong but sometimes shit happens, and things come up during the day that stress you out. So whatever happens throughout the day, remember to finish strong. How can you end the day on a positive note, regardless of what happened?

2. Be intentional in choosing new activities.

The key word here is intention. If you’re able to stay busy you won’t be bored, if you’re not bored you won’t be tempted to play games (as much), so make sure you have chosen new activities.

3. Start a daily journal.

Writing is really important to process your experience and clarify your thoughts. Especially right now when you’re mind can play a lot of tricks on you with any number of different justifications to continue gaming.

Start a daily journal, even if it’s just a sentence or two every day. You can start your journal here (and read the journals of others currently on the same journey as you) on the Game Quitters Forum.

Don’t underestimate how much of an impact a supportive and encouraging community can have on your journey.

I hope that helps, and if it does I’d love to hear what your new activities are going to be or which one of these events gives you the most trouble? Share your answer in the comments below.

If you are still playing games but you want to quit right now, check out Respawn.

When you make a big shift in your life, like moving on from playing video games it’s important to take steps to improve your overall perspective.

As I’ve shared in the past, reading books is one of best and easiest ways (Read: 5 Books You Must Read) to do just that, and today I want to share with you another easy and accessible way, using podcasts.

Here are the five podcasts I recommend for you to listen to that will help you live a more meaningful life:

The thing I love about podcasts is that they are:

1. Free.
2. Accessible. (They work on both your mobile device and on a desktop.)
3. Audio-based. (So you can listen to them on the go while you’re commuting, at the gym or even while eating lunch.)

And there are thousands of different ones to choose from and virtually any topic you can imagine. I tend to focus on ones that revolve around personal development and business, because those are the topics I’m interested in, but whatever your interests are, there’s likely a podcast dedicated to them.

So here are the five podcasts I recommend for you, including an episode to check out for each:

1. The Tim Ferriss Show

On this podcast Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-Hour Work Week, 4-Hour Chef and 4-Hour Body interviews a wide-range of guests (movie directors, startup founders, comedians, authors, etc, etc) about what they do that allows them to achieve the level of excellence they do. From the habits they have to the book they read, each episode is different and I always leave with something I can apply to my own life.

Episode I recommend: Brené Brown on Vulnerability and Home Run TED Talks

2. Waking Up with Sam Harris

Sam Harris is one of my favorite thinkers. If I could only listen to one person speak with the rest of my life, he would likely be that person. His podcast focuses on topics of philosophy, spirituality (without religion), politics, meditation and much more. The thing I love about Sam Harris is that the way he approaches these problems help me understand more about the dynamics at play within each of them, and that helps me form my own thinking about a topic.

Episode I recommend: Shouldering the Burden of History, a conversation with Dan Carlin.

3. The Art of Charm

One of the top rated and longest running podcasts, Jordan Harbinger has been interviewing guests on personal development, dating and business before many others got into the game. With over 600+ episodes Jordan tends to be a more “in your face” interviewer who likes to cut through the bullshit.
Cole Hatter (Episode #416)

4. Hardcore History

Regardless of how interested you are in history (I wasn’t really), Dan Carlin’s approach to each series will keep you engaged and teach you a lot about our world, where it’s come from and where it’s likely to go in the future. I love this podcast because it helps to expand my thinking in a way that reading personal development books simply cannot.

Episode I recommend: The Wrath of Khans series. Mindblowing.

5. Smart Passive Income

If you’re reading this you have enough technology in front of you that your opportunities are literally infinite. This is an opportunity you have that is unique to our present day and in my opinion, it’s worth leveraging in every way you can.

One way to do this is to pursue business opportunities, even if they are small revenue streams on the side. Especially with you going through so many changes right now, it’s a great time to try new things and explore the opportunities you may have through an online business. If you’re interested in this at all, take some of the free time you’re spending on mindless browsing and invest it into the Smart Passive Income podcast with Pat Flynn.

Episode I recommend: How Nathan Chan Built a 6-Figure Digital Magazine and the Marketing Strategies We Can All Use

So there you have it, the five podcasts you can check out that will help you live a more meaningful life. As I said before, throw some of these on your phone and listen to them while you commute to work or school, at the gym or while you’re eating lunch. I personally listen on 2x speed and always take notes!

I hope that helps, and if it does I’d love to hear which podcast you’re going to start with in the comments below.

P.S. If you are still playing games but you want to quit right now, check out Respawn.

When you quit playing video games it’s easy to feel a void in your life. Initially you think that void is in how you spend your time, but the truth is the void is in the meaning of your life.

When you were gaming you had a strong sense of purpose because of the way games are structured for you to progress. But now that you’ve quit, how do you find your purpose? Press play and find out:

Struggling to find your sense of purpose is something that I’ve personally struggled with too. I remember feeling so frustrated every time someone suggested for me to find my purpose because I knew the advice was correct but I didn’t know how to actually do it!

And I believe this happens because of the way the statement is phrased, which causes two issues: Find your purpose.

1. Find your purpose.

The first mistake we make when we’re trying to find our purpose is that we think we’re supposed to just find it, like it’s some magical thing out there in the world for us to discover.

Now this isn’t entirely inaccurate (especially the “discover” part)… but what I’ve found happens is that we end up waiting around for our purpose to find us, instead of taking action and choosing our purpose.

You don’t find your purpose, you choose your purpose.

2. Find your purpose.

The next mistake we make is that because the word “purpose” is singular, it appears to us as though we only have one purpose instead of being able to have many. So if we have different interests, we get stuck trying to pick one thing.

Our purpose is not one thing, it can be many things. Our purpose evolves over time and it can change. Don’t get too caught up in having to know your purpose right now, allow it to evolve over time as you gain more clarity by taking action towards the things that you’re interested in.

What to do next

Instead of getting overwhelmed with trying to figure out what your grand sense of purpose for your entire life is right now, break your purpose into smaller segments.

What is your purpose for the next year? Next month? What about this week? Today?

When you break it down it’s easier to take action on because you’re not so overwhelmed. Overwhelm breeds frustration, kills motivation and creates inertia.

Breaking things down into smaller steps helps you bypass overwhelm. When you break it down into smaller steps, you can have a great day, today, and use that momentum to build progress over time.

Next, now that you’re beginning to take action on the things that you’re interested in, pay attention to what it is, specifically, that you enjoy about these different things. This will help you gain more clarity. You can also focus on what you don’t want to do.

My three major goals

A few years ago I realized I had three major goals: I wanted to be happy, I wanted to be in the best shape possible and I wanted to create an impact.

This became my purpose, this became my vision. I used this vision to guide my actions, and began to study more about positive psychology, fitness and nutrition and business.

Game Quitters is the project I launched to accomplish my third major goal.

Let your vision guide you, not your current circumstances.

Think about where you want to go. Think about what your vision is, and choose a timeline that suits you. That can be a year from now, a month from now, this week or even today. The timeframe isn’t as important as just having something to focus on, and then allowing it to grow and expand as you gain more clarity.

Finding your sense of purpose is all about learning more about yourself.

Think about this

Right now you’ve just quit playing video games and now you’re feeling a bit confused and lost. You’re lacking meaning in your life.

But you’re on a mission right now to redefine your life. You’re on a mission to create a new life for yourself. And that is your sense of purpose!

It’s about learning how to make new friends. It’s about learning how to be happy again. It’s about learning how to find your passions. It’s about learning how to live a meaningful life.

And in this process you’ll learn more about yourself, you’ll gain more clarity and you’ll find a greater sense of purpose.

So this is all happening right now. Continue to do the work and you’ll get the results you’re looking for.

I hope that helps, and if it does I’d love to hear what your purpose is today, this week, this month, this year, whatever timeframe you choose in the comments below.

P.S. If you are still playing games but you want to quit right now, check out Respawn.

When you’re trying to learn something new in your life it’s easy to get frustrated at your lack of progress. And this frustration leads to discouragement and before you know it you’ve either given up on learning your new skill or gone back to old habits.

This is especially common when you go to move on from playing video games. Thankfully there’s a framework out there (which I will share with you today) that can help you understand the point that you’re at in your journey and what you need to do to continue moving forward.

The truth about moving on from games is that it’s a learning process, and the main thing you’re trying to learn is how to live a meaningful life. The benefit of this is that you can apply different learning models and techniques to improve your chance of success.

One of these is the Four Stages of Competence, and it was developed by Abraham Maslow. This model helps you understand the different stages that you’re at and how to move forward towards the next one.

Here are the four stages

Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence

In this stage you don’t know how to do something, you might not even recognize the deficit you have in it and you might not even recognize the value in it either.

For example, when you were gaming a lot, you justified it because life outside of games wasn’t that much fun anyways, so you might as well be gaming. This is unconscious incompetence, you don’t know know what you don’t know.

To move forward: You have to recognize your deficit and recognize the value in learning your new skill. Your desire to learn is really all you need.

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence

In this stage you might not know how to do something, but you recognize the value in it and you recognize the deficit, and you’re beginning to take action and make mistakes to learn.

To move forward: If you’re taking action, whatever action you know you can take, and making mistakes along the way you’re on the right path. Keep going.

Stage 3: Conscious Competence

In this stage you’re beginning to understand how to do your new skill, but it takes a lot of concentration and focus in order to do it.

This is the stage where we tend to get frustrated because we have to focus so much and it can make us feel like we aren’t really making progress. But that’s not true! It’s just we haven’t learned our new skill to stage four!

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence

Now the skill is second nature and we have the ability to teach it to others. It doesn’t take too much effort for us to be consistent day after day.

What you should focus on

To move from one stage to the next there are three principles you want to focus on every day:

1. Desire

The only difference in any of these stages is your desire inside to learn and grow. Before doing anything else, reconnect with your desire to learn and grow.

2. Action

You have to take action if you want to get results. By taking action you are able to make mistakes and learn from them. Try one thing, see how it goes, try something else, see how it goes and compare the difference between the two.

3. Focus

The main difference between people who are more successful than others is that they focus. Without focus you can take all of the action you want but it may not lead anywhere. Focus, focus, focus. I can’t stress this enough.

Applying this to you

If you’re someone who’s just quit playing video games and you’ve chosen some new activities and you’re having to really focus on that and it’s hard for you to not feel bored all of the time, you’re most likely in between stages two and three.

Concentration is your path forward.

If you’re someone who’s quit gaming for awhile but you’re not necessarily feeling fulfilled, this is something you just need to continue to learn about. You need to continue to take action and fail forward.

What helped me was learning through contrast. Try something, see how it feels, try something else, see how it feels and understand what the difference is between the two. This can help you gain more clarity about what it is that you do like.

So I hope that helps and if it does, I’d love to hear what stage you’re at and what action you’re going to take moving forward in the comments below.

If you haven’t quit playing video games yet but you’re ready to get your life back on track, check out Respawn.

If you want to learn about a specific topic, reading is one of the fastest and easiest ways to do just that. Here are five books you must read that will help you quit playing video games:

I haven’t always been a reader, in the first 22 years of my life I had read a total of three books ever. Recently my father even mentioned how surprised he was that I turned into a reader.

But since then I’ve been reading as much as I can, totaling over 60 books in the last three years alone.

Why the change?

Because reading is one of the easiest ways to become smarter. And who doesn’t want to become smarter, right? Reading has made a huge impact on my life. My only regret is not starting sooner.

A mentor once told me that if I wanted to learn anything about any topic, all I had to do was to pick up the top five rated books on the subject on Amazon, and after reading them I’d have a wealth of knowledge on the subject.

I completely agree. So I try to read one new book each week. And that might sound like it takes a lot of time or effort, but it really doesn’t. That’s a myth.

If you read 10-15 pages per day (about 30 minutes based on average reading speeds), you can easily read a new book every week or two.

If you go with audiobooks instead, and put them on 2x speed, you can fly through books and still retain the information. I put them on during any commutes I have, while I’m at the gym, and any other dead time in my day.

Here are the five books I’d recommend you read to help you quit playing video games:

1. The Power of Habit by Charlie Duhigg (Amzn)

Gaming was your habit, and one thing we know about habits is that if you don’t replace them with a new one, you’ll continue to do what you’ve always done. The Power of Habit is one of the best books out there on understanding how to build habits. Read this book.

2. The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson (Amzn)

My life improved dramatically when I started to focus on the little things I could do each day that would compound over time and lead to big results. The reason most of us fail at the things we want to do is because we get overwhelmed with the task at hand. The Slight Edge will teach you a framework to overcome this and make the real progress you’re looking for.

3. Hooked by Nir Eyal (Amzn)

This is one of the most interesting books I’ve read in awhile. The premise is about how to build habit-forming products, and how apps and games hook us into compulsive behavior. It’s full of scientific research but with Nir’s writing style it’s easy to read and you’ll fly through it.

4. In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté (Amzn)

I love this book because it teaches you how to understand addiction in general, and not only focuses on the physical dependence/brain side of the addiction equation but also the environment influence as well – which you know I speak a lot about. If you’ve ever wanted to get a deeper look into what addiction really is, this is the book for you.

5. Gorilla Mindset by Mike Cernovich (Amzn)

Cernovich is a controversial guy but don’t mistake that with the power of this book, because it’s packed full of gold. I believe there is nothing more important than mastering your mindset, and this book is a how-to guide on how to do exactly that. It’s a refreshing take on a topic that so many self-help books talk about but don’t teach you how to actually master the skill.

Bonus: Resilience by Eric Greitens (Amzn)

As I shared above with Gorilla Mindset, Resilience will teach you about mental toughness and your ability to persevere from another angle. The book is a collection of letters between Greitens and another member of the military who was experiencing PTSD upon returning home. I listened to this on Audible and loved it.

Next:

Pick one book from the above, whichever one you feel most inspired to read and start there. If you think all of them are interesting, read The Power of Habit, first and The Slight Edge, second.

Don’t underestimate the impact reading can have on your life. If you even read one book each month that has the power to change your life (one in the personal development/business/finance realm), you will look back on them a few years from now and be able to see the tremendous growth you’ve had by doing so.

If you want to read a book specific on helping you quit playing video games right now to get your life back on track, check out Respawn.

How do you stop mindlessly browsing the internet? Find out in today’s episode:

Mindlessly browsing the internet is a major problem you can experience after you quit playing video games. And this happens for a specific reason: By removing games you’ve removed one of the, if not the, major part of your life. They were a main way you spent your time and fulfilled certain needs you have.

Because gaming was a way you fulfilled certain needs you have, if you’re not intentional with how you fill that time after you quit (if you need ideas, check out 60+ New Hobby Ideas) than you will go to what you already know.

And what you knew was gaming. But now that you’ve quit you’ll go to the next most comfortable thing, which is browsing the internet – especially because it’s a “great” way to kill time.

Before I get into the three steps you can take to quit, I want you to remember that this all starts with you, and it starts with you being honest about why you want to quit gaming in the first place.

You aren’t quitting so you can sit around and be bored all day, browsing the internet. You are quitting because you want to start living your life to the fullest, and gaming is no longer giving you that sense of fulfillment that it maybe once did.

Here are the three steps you need to take to stop mindlessly browsing the internet:

1. Choose new activities.

These activities should fulfill the same needs that gaming fulfilled for you: Temporary Escape, Social, Constant Measurable Growth and Challenge.

Now I believe there are three different types of activities you want to pick, and you can learn more about those in Respawn, but one of the types is something to do at home when you’re tired and bored.

If you need ideas, check out 60+ New Hobby Ideas. It’s best if these activities are off the computer.

The key is to avoid boredom, because it’s boredom that you will use to justify sitting around browsing the internet.

2. Focus on engagement, not entertainment.

Gaming, and browsing the internet both come from a place of you wanting to be entertained. They come from a place of you wanting to be stimulated and instant gratification.

This might work in the moment but long term it’s not sustainable and it’s not giving you what you really want, which is fulfillment. Fulfillment comes from engaging with your life, it comes from you checking into it instead of checking out (with entertainment).

Think about what you really want. What are your goals? What are your dreams?

Separate your desire to be engaged from your desire to be entertained. One way to do this is to create projects to work on. This helps give you something specific to focus on, and that helps your engagement.

When you have nothing to do you will desire stimulation, and entertainment is the quickest way to fulfill this desire. But it’s not leading you to where you want to be.

3. Sit with your urges.

We all experience urges to procrastinate. This is an unavoidable occurrence in our life. There’s nothing wrong with this, but what we need to do is prepare beforehand so when this happens we know how to respond properly.

And that way is to sit with it. We don’t need to escape our urges, we can just be there with it for a minute and once it passes we can get back to what we need to be doing.

Remember, the computer is where your comfort zone is, so even after you quit it’s easy to just mindlessly browse the internet. But this isn’t leading you to where you want to be, and it’s not the reason why you quit gaming in the first place.

You have to become comfortable being uncomfortable, and to do this you need courage. Courage is developed in baby steps, but without the courage to get outside your comfort zone you’ll continue to just procrastinate on living the life you truly want to live.

So I hope that helps and if you want to develop more courage in your life, take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

How do you deal with gaming nostalgia? Find out in today’s episode:

After you quit gaming it’s common to experience feelings of nostalgia, and this can be a problem because these emotions create cravings to play.

One of the reasons why this happens is because gaming meant something to you, and you can acknowledge that. You don’t need to shy away and pretend gaming wasn’t meaningful to you, it was, but that also doesn’t mean you need to continue to play.

I still experience this from time to time too, even though I haven’t played a video game in over 1600 days. One day in particular stands out for me recently.

I was laying in bed and for whatever reason, I started to remember all the good times I had playing games. I was thinking about one game in particular, I couldn’t remember the name but I knew it started with a G.

A few days later I was answering questions on the StopGaming subreddit, and one members story featured the game I was thinking of a few nights before.

Immediately I could feel my emotions intensify and I began to get a craving to play.

This was no good, right?

Well, although it wasn’t great to have this experience, I was able to overcome it and I didn’t give in to my temptations. And this happened because I knew how to respond in the moment, and that’s what I want to share with you today.

Before I get into the steps you can take to deal with nostalgia, it’s important to remember that your life is going to go through different phases. Growing up I played a lot of hockey, and then I retired at the age of 18 and that phase was finished. This is no different than the various groups of friends I’ve been a part of throughout my life and how that changes too.

Gaming was also a phase in your life.

You’re going to go through many different phases, and that’s ok. They all mean something unique to you and that’s part of the magic of life. Don’t get too caught up in comparing them to each other.

The sooner you accept this the sooner you’ll experience less stress and anxiety in your life. The more you worry, the more anxiety you experience on a daily basis the more nostalgia you’ll have, because it’s a way of escaping the present moment.

Anytime you experience nostalgia, try and pay attention to the state you’re in in the moment, because this will give you an indication of whether you’re just remembering the good times and different phases of your life or you’re anxious and trying to escape the moment.

Here are the three steps you can take to deal with gaming nostalgia:

1. Do a gratitude journal.

To do it, write down some things you’re grateful for. I like to go for ten. This will help recenter yourself and help you focus on what you do have instead of what you don’t. Gratitude is scientifically proven to help you experience more optimism, joy and reduce stress.

2. Stop comparing: then to now.

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt

When you compare which phase of your life is better than the other it’s only going to make you feel bad, which is the opposite of what we’re trying to experience. Your life has phases, it’s ok and neither is better or worse than the other because they are all part of your life story.

3. Always be exploring.

Be adventurous and create new memories every day, every week, every month, every year to be nostalgic about.

So I hope that helps you guys out and if you want to live a life of more adventure, take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

As a gamer the chance of your style being poor is high. Sorry, it’s just the truth! But it doesn’t have to remain that way because today my friend Sunjeev Prasad of Street Gentlemen is here to teach us three steps to improve our style:

Improving my style has had a major impact on my life and I know it will help you out too.

When it comes to style it’s easy to focus on how it will improve the way other people perceive you, but I think this is a mistake. Improving your style is much more about how it will improve the way you feel yourself. It will improve your sense of confidence. And the best part is, it doesn’t even have to cost a lot of money.

To improve your style, there are three easy steps you can take right away:

1. Focus on fit.

If it doesn’t fit, you’re not going to look good. Fit is the most important thing. Think about whether your clothes are flattering your body. Go for “comfortably close.” It doesn’t have to be a skinny jean, but you don’t want any boot cuts either!

At first fitting clothing can feel a bit weird but trust me it will feel way better. If you’re ever at a store simply ask a staff member if your clothes are fitting properly and they will be able to help.

2. Keep it simple.

Go with a neutral wardrobe – blacks, grays, whites, and khaki. That way your outfits will always go together. Keep it basic and go with timeless looks.

3. Always plan ahead.

Lay out your outfit the night before and spend an extra five minutes making sure it looks slick. That way if you’re rushed in the morning you won’t neglect your style game.

With a little bit more effort on the three steps listed above your style will improve and you’ll begin to notice not only how people treat you differently but also how much more confident you feel yourself.

Just look at the difference in Sunjeev himself:

You can find Sunjeev on his Website, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

How do you improve your willpower? Find out five key steps you can take to do just that in today’s video:

From all the gaming that you’ve done, your willpower tends to be pretty weak. This happens for specific reasons, such as the willpower erosion your brain can experience due to it’s overexposure to gaming. (Watch this video to learn more about that.)

When we are stuck continuing to game we tend to be justifying our behavior in some way or another, and one of the ways we like to do it is by claiming that we wouldn’t have the willpower to quit anyways, so we might as well just continue gaming.

But this isn’t entirely true and you need to distinguish between the actual amount of willpower you have (more than you think), your ability to develop it (I’ll show you some ways how), and how much you’re actually being influenced by willpower erosion.

Improving your willpower begins by you recognizing that you are not a victim of your lack of willpower. You’re not someone who’s just not “motivated,” you’re not someone who just “lacks willpower.”

Your lack of motivation and lack of willpower are happening for specific reasons, so by understanding what these reasons are you now have the power to change them. You now have the power to shift your behavior.

Your Willpower Is A Muscle

If you work on your willpower, it will improve. If you don’t, it won’t. And if you overwork it, it will get tired, and we call that decision fatigue.

The quality of your life comes down to the decisions that you make every single day. These small choices that we make compound over time and impact the amount of momentum we experience.

To improve your willpower there are five key steps you want to take:

1. Be aware of your energy levels.

If your energy is low it’s hard to make a good decision, and I definitely relate to this a lot so I try to make sure I’m eating well and eating on time. This helps me maintain a good amount of energy, allowing me to make better decisions more often.

2. Make decisions the night before.

Think of your willpower as a fuel tank. Every time you make a decision, it uses a bit of fuel, so every day you want to try and minimize the amount of decisions you have to make. Anytime you can make a decision the night before, that will save you tomorrow.

Decisions like what are you going to wear tomorrow, what are you going to eat for breakfast, etc are good ones to make the night before.

3. Do the important things first.

Every time you make a decision you lose a bit of willpower, so you want to make sure you take care of the important things first while your willpower is strong, instead of waiting until the end of the day when it’s weak.

4. Make commitments, not decisions.

Decisions are optional, whereas commitments you will find a way to get them done. Identify what your commitments are and schedule them throughout your week, that way you have made the time for them and you’ll have one less excuse to not make it happen.

5. Let go of guilt and shame.

As much as we like to be perfect sometimes we fail to follow through. In these moments it’s easy to be hard on ourselves and experience a lot of guilt and shame about it. But this doesn’t help us.

You need to separate between holding yourself accountable (good to do) and being hard on yourself (bad to do.)

Gaming is an outlet when you experience stress, so the harder you are on yourself, the more guilt and shame you feel, the more stress you experience, the more you’ll want to game to get away. See how it works?

In my life I’ve found a lot more motivation when I’m focused on encouragement and celebrating the good things I’m doing instead of punishing myself for the ones I struggle to follow through on. Remember, this doesn’t mean you don’t hold yourself accountable, just that it comes from a place of genuine intention instead of from a fear of punishment.

I hope that helps. If willpower is an area of your life that you want to work on, check out the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

Have you ever met someone who made an incredible impression on you?

I bet you have and this is all about what charisma is about. So on today’s episode we talk with Myke Macapinlac who helps guys improve their social skills. I brought him on to teach us about how to develop charisma:

Myke is a good friend of mine who’s been on a similar mission to me to improve our social skills and become more attractive to women.

Charisma is all about how you can leave people better than you found them. Charisma is the way you make people feel about themselves. Charisma is a learned skill, it’s not something you were just born with.

Charisma isn’t about you, it’s about other people, and if you’re meeting someone for the first time you want to be mindful of a few things:

Be present.

It’s easy in an interaction to lose your focus and even though you might be looking at them, you’re hardly listening to what they are saying. Bill Clinton, known to many as having an incredible ability to connect with people has shared before that one of his tricks is to not look over the shoulder of the person he’s talking to, and instead, focus on them with everything he’s got.

Make eye contact.

There’s a big difference between genuine eye contact and being creepy, so the exercise Myke suggests for us is to hold eye contact just long enough to find their eye color.

Be genuinely curious.

Ask open ended questions. You don’t always have to talk the whole time and instead you can allow others to share about their passions, and by being genuine and being curious you will allow people to feel understood.

At the end of the day, people don’t remember what you did for them, they remember how you made them feel. If you can takeaway anything from this post to be more charismatic, focus on leaving people better than you found them.

I hope that helps and if you want to develop better social skills, take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

Growing up I’ve experienced a lot of depression, anxiety and feelings of not being good enough. I’ve experienced a lot of funks! So for me to truly live a remarkable life I’ve had to learn how to get out of a funk.

If you want to be prepared to get out of a funk you need to start learning how to master your emotions. So today I want to share with you a framework I learned last year at a Tony Robbins event that has really helped me master my emotions and understand more about what these funks are and how to get out of them.

Similar to my post on how to deal with stress, this all starts with your mindsets.

When it comes to your emotions it’s easy to feel like they are an experience that happens to you, instead of an experience you have control over.

Your emotions are a state that you’re in and because of this you can shift this state to be anything you want, as long as you know the secret behind how to shift these states.

So whether you’re feeling like you’re in a rut or you’re feeling happy, these are both a state you’re in and there are factors that contribute to each one.

In fact, there are three different factors that make up your state:

1. Your Physiology
2. Your Focus
3. Your Language & Meaning

Your Physiology:

How you physically feel affects how you feel. #duh

Now even though this seems like common sense, it’s powerful because when you’re feeling depressed, you’re doing certain things with your body that contribute to that. You’re likely laying down, energy is low, you’re not breathing, etc and because of this, it contributes to your state.

Whereas if you’re feeling happy, there are certain things you’re doing with your body as well. You’re likely moving around, smiling, taking deeper breaths, etc.

So if you’re feeling in a funk and you want to get out of it, you can make a change to your physiology and that will contribute to shifting your state. It all starts with baby steps, move your fingers, go for a walk, do some jumping jacks. Even taking time to engage in a new activity, like exploring beste online casinos ohne 5 sekunden regel, can introduce excitement and change the energy in your body, helping to break the mental cycle. Anything that can help you change the energy in your body will get you closer to a positive shift.

Your Focus:

If there’s anything I’d want you to take away from this post or really anything I ever share, it’s the power of your focus, because it has a major impact on your life.

When you’re feeling in a funk you’re probably focusing on the things you don’t have instead of on where you want to go. You’re probably focused on how bad you feel instead of on the action you can take right now to feel how you want to feel.

Your Language & Meaning:

Language is proven to influence our behavior and the meaning you give to the experience will impact the sense of purpose you have around it.

When you’re in a funk, it’s easy to fall into asking yourself: “Why is this happening to me?” which shifts responsibility away from yourself and encourages you to blame something outside of yourself.

Whereas if you ask yourself “How can this be for my benefit?” you are taking responsibility and using the funk, regardless of how bad it feels in the moment, as an opportunity to learn and make you stronger.

There’s a big difference in how you are going to feel if you ask yourself one of these questions.

After my last breakup I was in a major funk and this lasted for over four months. The turning point for me happened when I started to see it as a turning point for me, and even though I felt horrible at the time, I was going to use it as an opportunity to learn how to be happy.

And I knew I would look back on this time in my life and be thankful for it because it taught me a lot of valuable skills. Because of this, I started to read about positive psychology, I learned meditation, etc. I focused on what was scientifically proven to make me happier, and voila, it worked!

Even though it was hard at the time, it gave me an opportunity to learn and now I can write this post and help you because I went through it myself.

To recap:

Anytime you’re in a funk, think about these three areas and start making changes in them. Move your body, fix your posture, breathe. Next, start focusing on where you’re trying to go and what you can do, right now, to get your momentum started in that direction. Finally, be aware of the language you’re using and what this experience is ultimately going to mean to you.

Remember, this doesn’t have to be when you’re experiencing a big funk, but even when you have little ones. Anytime you’re feeling a bit off you can go to this exercise and start shifting your state.

I hope that helps and if you want to develop more of these kind of skills in your life, I want you to take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

I received a comment on YouTube asking me about why you should quit gaming, and although this question is a bit silly, as you’ll see in the video I believe there are specific reasons why you would be asking it:

If you’re at the point where you’re honestly considering whether or not you should quit gaming, I believe it’s valuable for you to go through the 90 day detox, which is enough time for you to experience life without games and be able to make this decision with more clarity.

Now when you’re thinking about quitting games you want to understand that it’s a big decision in your life, and because of that there will be different emotions involved, especially ones that involve fear.

This doesn’t only happen when you go to quit gaming though, it happens anytime you’re about to make a big decision.

One example from my life is a story I shared in my second TEDx talk. The story takes place in September 2012 when I thought about moving to Boulder, Colorado.

At the time I was a bit confused about my life and thought getting a change of scenery in Colorado would be the right move. So I got in my car and went on a road trip to go check the city out.

When I got there I knew it was exactly where I wanted to be, but instead of being courageous to move, I got scared, especially about what would happen if I did long distance with my girlfriend.

So I decided to stay home and kept telling everyone I would move after Christmas, and then when Christmas came I would move in “six months.” But really I was just afraid and instead of being courageous I gave in to fear.

Long story short, when I came home from my trip my life blew up with my girlfriend breaking up with me, my business crumbling and coming to the realization that I was broke.

I felt depressed and decided to put everything in my life on hold until I could determine what I really wanted to do, and this included whether or not I wanted to move to Colorado.

Over the course of four months I thought about this move a lot, and tried to pay attention to how my energy felt when I thought about moving. Did I feel energized and inspired? Or did I feel apathetic? Something in between?

So what happened was progressively I found myself thinking more and more about moving to Colorado and feeling inspired whenever I did, except shortly after feeling inspired I would begin to feel afraid.

This was my fear coming up. It became apparent to me that my core desire was to move, and the doubt I would have was fear I was experiencing and not what I actually wanted – a key distinction to make. So I got in my car and moved to Colorado, and it’s been one of the best decisions of my life.

To make a big move in your life:

1. Identify your core desire. What do you really want to do?
2. Separate your desire from your fear.

To identify your core desire, pay attention to how you feel when you think about doing what you want to do. Do you feel more inspired? If yes, that’s a good sign it’s what you want.

If you then start to feel afraid, that’s your fear coming up, and now you just want to identify what your fears actually are and fight them with logic.

For instance, my main fear moving to Colorado was what would happen if it failed? Well, nothing would happen, I’d come back home and move on with my life. So I didn’t need to worry about that as much as I originally thought.

Remember, nobody can make these decisions for you, only you can make them for yourself, so you need to hold yourself accountable to doing so. Yes things can be scary but life is only short once.

Why you should quit gaming:

The reason I quit gaming was because it was having a negative impact on my life. Even though I had fun playing games, I was burned out, I wasn’t necessarily happy, and honestly I just came to a point in my life where I realized my happiness was too important for me to continue to procrastinate on.

I just had different priorities. I wanted to focus on other goals. Just because I could continue to play games didn’t mean I had to. And I knew if I was really going to start going after these other goals I had, I would have to remove my crutch – gaming – from my life.

Back to you:

So now I want you to think about this for yourself. If you’ve quit gaming, what are you doing now? Are you pursuing new goals or are you sitting on reddit all day? You know I love our reddit community but the point of quitting gaming isn’t to just browse the internet all day long.

If you haven’t quit gaming, why not? How is gaming impacting your life? Is it a positive or are you just justifying it? It’s common when we want to quit gaming to spend a few weeks, months or even years continuing to play before we finally have the courage to take that final step. Is this you? What’s holding you back? Comment below.

If you want to quit gaming, do it for yourself and do it because you actually want to and you have other goals and dreams you want to pursue. Do it because you are ready to step up for yourself and start living your life to the fullest. Do it because you want to earn your confidence by the actions you take, instead of sitting around wondering why you aren’t confident… when you aren’t doing anything to be confident about.

Do it because you want to learn how to make new friends and breakthrough your comfort zone. Use this as an opportunity to learn more about yourself. I’ve got your back and I believe in you.

So what’s the big decision you’re trying to make? Is it about gaming? Is it about something else? Leave your answer in the comments below.

I hope that helps and if you want to develop more courage in your life, I want you to take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

After you quit gaming one of the struggles you can run into is how to start building momentum in your life. Removing games is like pressing the stop button., it feels like your entire world has frozen, and during this time it’s easy to feel paralyzed to take action.

So how do you start building momentum and start living your life again?

Since I’ve quit gaming one of the aspects of my life I’ve focused on the most has been improving my social circle. Specifically I’ve wanted to learn how to surround myself by people who inspire me and make me better.

So I’ve decided to launch a new video series where I’ll introduce you to some of my awesome friends and have them share insights into how they’ve taken their lives to the next level, and help you do the same.

In the first segment I introduce you to my buddy Josh Barad who’s the founder of In The Middle Seat. Josh and I met earlier this year at an event in California called Archangel Academy, and since then we’ve hung out in three countries! Bali, Thailand, and now here in Canada.

Josh has a cool story that began when he was working a typical corporate job when he realized it wasn’t really for him anymore, he wasn’t happy anymore, so he decided to quit and start playing poker professionally.

But then something else happened. He realized all he did was play poker and he felt isolated and not really fulfilled in his relationships. Although poker was better than the corporate job, it still wasn’t what he wanted for himself.

So he started to explore what the next stage in his life would look like, and during this introspection he committed to stop playing poker and instead focus on improving his social skills.

In our interview Josh shared how when he had a lot of free time it was easy to justify procrastination because he would have enough time to come back to it later, when really this was just an excuse to avoid doing what he knew he needed to do.

So he committed to start going out, to push his comfort zone and to start living life in the middle seat, he found this was where all his growth lies.

When it comes to leaning into your edges Josh believes it’s important to go slow and be diligent, while also being patient and playful. Growth is a process and you should have fun with it. You should make it a game.

Now even though you may want to grow, being able to actually start taking action to do so (which is how it happens) can be difficult when you don’t have momentum.

Here are a few insights Josh had into how you can start building momentum in your life:

First, Josh believes that momentum is something we fluctuate in and out of, it’s more of an ebb and flow than a linear equation.

Next, when we feel isolated or have a lack of momentum it’s easy for us to get too focused on ourselves, self-focused, which, when we feel anxious or different emotions it’s easy to make it mean something about ourselves, it’s easy to make it into a story of who we are, instead just the experience and things that are happening.

To counter this we want to become other-focused, to see how we can get involved in other people’s worlds, to get outside of ourselves to see a bigger perspective.

One way to do this is by asking people questions. Josh likes this because it takes the pressure off himself, and instead he can focus on his curiosity about someone else to inspire a conversation. Josh believes in having a list of back-pocket questions, questions that you like asking people to inspire these kind of conversations.

The example he used was asking me about my childhood, or asking someone what they are currently excited about, or asking what they are proud of, questions that elicit more of a positive response and allow you to go a bit deeper to really connect.

Lastly, to help you build more momentum Josh believes it’s important to be more playful and treat life like a game, don’t take it too seriously and find more ways to have fun.

In the moment if you don’t know what’s fun for you, Josh recommends that you take out a piece of paper and create a list of 25 different things you could do that would be fun, even if they seem a bit silly, keep it simple.

When you come from a fun and playful place this generates more energy and will help you build more momentum. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you will become social when __________, or you will have more fun when _________, or you will make more money when __________, and instead start finding ways to experience what you want to experience today.

So now that you have your list, what you want to do is choose one of them and challenge yourself to do it in the next seven days and then share what you’ve chosen in the comments below.

I hope that helps and if you’re serious about taking your life to the next level, I want you to take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

Samuel asked me this morning on YouTube how my life has changed since I’ve quit playing video games. Well, needless to say, it was the best decision of my life. Watch the video for the specifics:

Before I share with you how my life has changed since I’ve quit playing video games, first I want you to know that before I quit, my life was a complete mess:

I spent years battling depression, had low self-esteem, and struggled with feeling good enough. I was bullied at school and on my hockey teams so I didn’t have every many friends, the ones I did have held me back and I certainly didn’t know how to make new ones.

I lacked confidence, especially with women, was constantly in the “friend zone” and didn’t know how to become a “man.” I had dropped out of high school (twice) and never wanted to go to college. Don’t even get me started on my unstable job situation (which included pretending to have jobs to my parents…)

The one highlight in my life at the time was gaming, and although it wasn’t the problem, it was the bandaid. It’s what allowed me to numb myself and pretend my situation wasn’t as bad as it really was.

Eventually I came to a point where I realized I had an opportunity to try again, I had a chance to start a new life for myself, and with the help of a counselor I started doing just that.

I didn’t like not knowing how to make friends so I focused on learning how to improve my social skills.

It certainly hasn’t been easy but it’s been worth it, and the improvements in my life have come from little changes I’ve made.

Here are a few highlights of how my life has improved since I’ve quit playing video games:

I don’t share this to brag or to impress you, I share it to show you what’s possible. Life beyond video games can be remarkable if you commit to making it happen and follow the steps we outline at Game Quitters.

• I started my own business.
• I travel around the world (20+ countries to date.)
• I’ve spoken at TEDx not once but twice.
• I found a new passion (DJing).
• I have a world class social circle.

Most importantly, I’m happier than I’ve ever been, I’m able to live life in the present moment, I’m proud of who I am and how I show up every day, and I wake up every day excited to be alive and to live my life to the fullest.

But all of this didn’t just magically happen. It happened because I made a commitment and then took action to learn what I needed to learn to live the type of life I wanted to live. And I refused to settle for anything less.

Quitting video games is the start of a new journey, it’s the beginning of a new chapter in your life where you get to decide exactly what you want it to be. Step one is taking responsibility for it yourself.

I hope that helps and if you’re serious about taking your life to the next level, I want you to take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

After you quit you start to realize all of your friends are gamers, and you don’t have much in common with them anymore, but how do you grow and expand your social circle outside of gamers? Find out:

In my last article I shared a key mindset you need to have in order to make new friends and improve your social skills. Today what I want to share how you can shape your environment with intention and how this will contribute to empowering you forward.

One of the biggest differences in my life since I’ve quit gaming is surrounding myself by people who inspire me and push me to be better. When I first quit this wasn’t something I knew how to do and I’ve spent the last seven years learning how to do exactly that.

Who you surround yourself with is super important if you’re serious about starting to live your life to the fullest.

When you were gaming you were doing this, you found other likeminded players to hang out with and learn from and you separated yourself from those that didn’t. So now that you’ve quit, you want to apply this same mindset your life. Find those who are likeminded and help you be better, and distance yourself from those that don’t.

Over the years I’ve done a bunch of different things to try and improve my environment and I’ll share those in a minute but the most important thing I’ve learned is that before you do anything else you need to decide who you want to be. You have to decide what your values are, and who you want to surround yourself with.

Write down three values you want in your environment. For me, that’s people who are into personal development, making themselves better, I want to be around people who are kind and compassionate to others, and I want to be around people who are taking ownership of creating the life they want, so that groups would be like entrepreneurs.

Now that I know this, I can start finding the kind of environments where these type of people hang out. Things like events, seminars, conferences, meetups, etc.

If you don’t know who you’re looking for you’ll never find them, so if you want to surround yourself by people who will help you be more successful, you need to identify who they are and where they hang out.

Some of the conferences I’ve been to are The Higher Purpose Project, Burning Man, StartingBloc, Tony Robbins Unleash The Power Within, MB Adventures and many more.

The best part is that when you’re in a room full of people that you share things in common with it’s super easy to start conversations because you already have things in common.

So what you want to do is find at least one event each week that you can go to, and then go each week because it will help people begin to recognize you as a regular and that makes it easier to meet people.

Finally there’s one last step you want to take, and it’s hosting your own events. This is a big lesson I’ve learned a few times, but the reason it works is because there are so many people that have a desire to hang out with other likeminded people but they don’t have the courage to organize it themselves.

So when you take responsibility to bring people together you’ll be blown away at how easy it is to meet other likeminded people, because not only can you invite people you’re meeting on a daily basis to come, but they will also bring friends and the event will grow over time.

Surrounding myself by people that inspire me and make me better has been something I’ve taken so seriously that I’ve even moved to a new country to live in a community full of likeminded people.

So remember, be intentional to choose who you want to be around, next find one event each week you can go to to meet these kind of people and make sure you go each week. Finally, start hosting your own events and bring people together.

I hope that helps and if you’re serious about working on these skills in your life, I want you to take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

Today’s question is one of the two most popular ones I get, and it’s about how to make new friends and improve your social skills after you quit gaming. Here’s how you do it:

When you first quit most of your friends are gamers, so you need to put an effort into finding new ones that have other interests and hobbies. Not only that but feeling insecure about your social skills is likely one of the factors that led to you gaming in the first place.

I totally relate to this because when I was younger I experienced a lot of bullying which caused me to isolate myself away and avoid social interactions.

So when I quit playing games learning how to improve my social skills was one of my top motivations, and just to be honest, quitting video games was one of the best decisions I ever made to improve this area of my life.

Now in order to make new friends there are a few different factors to consider, and today I want to talk about you, and how you show up in every interaction you have, and how that leads to you making friends or not.

The key to making new friends is having a mindset shift that social skills is a skill, it’s something you, personally, can get better at, if you decide to put some focus and intention into it.

To do this you want to start approaching every interaction you have as an opportunity to practice connecting more meaningfully with others. Every single day we are talking to people, our friends, family, the cashier at the grocery store, the barista at Starbucks, and even just people we’re randomly standing next to.

Over time all of this practice compounds and you can start seeing some major improvements. Growth happens through focus and intention so focus on every interaction you have with the intention to have a more meaningful conversation.

The way I do this is by genuinely wanting to get to know them, even in a small way by actually wanting to know how their day is going, instead of just going through the typical autopilot conversation.

As your conversations improve you’ll become more confident in yourself and if you focused on meeting one new person every day, that’s over 365 people a year! And some you’ll just naturally connect with.

If you want to improve your social skills and make new friends is something you choose to do. It’s something you can do by just interacting with the people around you on a daily basis. It’s something I used to struggle with a lot and now I feel much more confident in, but it happened every single day by my decision to engage the people around me.

And I know the same can happen for you too.

If social skills is an area you’re serious about working on, I want you to take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

Games are designed to give you instant gratification, to give you feedback of your progress and that you are doing well. Over time your brain gets used to this so when you go to quit one of the issues you run into is that life doesn’t tend to give feedback so quickly.

So how do you deal with instant gratification without gaming? Find out:

In games you’re leveling up, you’re beating quests, you’re beating bosses and every time you do one of these things your brain gives you a dopamine release, which is the chemical in your brain designed to make you feel good.

And games are designed to make you experience as much dopamine as possible and what happens is when you go to quit you’re used to having these good emotions, instantly, especially because gaming is so accessible now. So anytime you wanted to feel good about yourself you could log on your game and get a dopamine hit.

But because this is happening through a game instead of through your life, it’s more of an artificial level of gratification, but, the dopamine you experience is real. So you feel good but that doesn’t necessarily mean it raises your self-esteem.

This has to do with the difference between instant gratification and delayed gratification. Gratification is the emotional response of pleasure to you fulfilling a goal or desire you have.

So when you go after gratification in a way that’s instant, you might feel good in an instant but it also disappears in the same timeframe. So anytime you want to feel this way you try and find a way to get a hit, and this behavior can lead to unhealthy addictions.

Whereas delayed gratification takes time, and because of that, the feel good emotions also last a long time too. The choice is always yours but there’s a lot of interesting research done in this area.

Over the last 40 years Stanford has been researching the affects of instant vs. delayed gratification and it all points to one direction: that one of the qualities in people that leads to success in every single area of your life comes down to your ability to delay gratification.

The research all started with Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiment where he would put a kid in a room and give him one marshmallow, which he/she could eat right away, or if he waited (15 minutes) they would earn a second one.

Of course some kids had the marshmallow now and some waited, but what was most interesting about the study was that over the years they followed these kids and every single time they followed up, the kids who were willing to wait and delay gratification were significantly more successful than the ones who didn’t, including having:

• Higher SAT scores.
• Lower levels of substance abuse.
• Lower likelihood of obesity.
• Better response to stress.
• Better social skills, etc.

So if you care about being successful in any (or every) area of your life, which you do because you’re reading this right now, being able to delay gratification is something you want to start to develop.

What you want to know is that this is a muscle. This is a skill you can develop like any other skill. Two skills that will contribute to your ability to delay gratification are your skills in discipline and patience.

Here are two keys to focus on:

1. Choose a new habit and make it so easy you can’t fail. And make sure you track it for consistency.
2. Celebrate the small wins. Most of the time when we do things we say we’re going to do, we don’t actually recognize ourselves for it. And this is really important for positive encouragement.

Delayed gratification is a muscle like anything else, it’s a skill like anything else. Regardless of how good you are at it right now, you need to start from where you are and focus on moving forward.

If you’re reading this you’ve likely invested thousands of hours into gaming and that can make it hard to give it up. What will that mean for all the time and effort you’ve put in? This is the sunk cost fallacy at play.

Here’s how the sunk cost fallacy keeps you playing games, even though you don’t want to:

I first learned about this principle in a book called You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney (highly recommended.)

In the book David talks about the sunk cost fallacy, which states that we think we make rational decisions based on the future values of objects, investments and experiences, when the truth is our decisions are tainted by emotional investments we accumulate, and the more we invest in something the harder it is to move on from it.

This directly applies to each of us as gamers.

Not only have we invested a ton of time and energy playing different games, building characters and developing our skills, in many cases we’ve also bought many different games too, especially now when they are so cheap and come in bundles.

So when we go to quit we worry about what that’s going to mean about our characters, what’s that going to mean about our skills, what about all of these games I haven’t played yet?!

This also has to do with Loss Aversion, which is the tendency to avoid losses instead of acquiring gains – we’d rather continue to play games and avoid losing all of our characters and the skills we’ve developed instead of acquiring this really amazing life, which is what we really want.

It’s so valuable for us to understand things like the sunk cost fallacy and loss aversion is because we need to understand that the reason we do things is for specific reasons, and the way we justify playing isn’t always based on logic, and usually there’s some sort of emotional investment behind it.

As humans we’re designed to avoid feeling pain. To breakthrough, we need to take a step back and recognize that we’re in an emotional state and create the opportunity to look at it from a different perspective.

Simply by being aware of this is powerful. By understanding why you do the things you do you can leverage it to do the things you actually want to do.

One way to get into a more logical state is to write out a pros and cons list. I find writing things down really helps and when you have a pros and cons list you can see more clearly why you’re doing what you’re doing.

If the only reason you want to continue to play the games is to feel better about the money you spent on it, you need to reevaluate your goals and what you’re really trying to accomplish here.

Remember it’s not just about quitting games, it’s about closing a chapter in your life. And in closing that chapter it doesn’t take away from what games meant to you, games meant something to you and the quicker you recognize that the sooner you’ll stop justifying the reason you want to play – just because you have a bunch of games you haven’t finished yet.

Another way to breakthrough the sunk cost fallacy is to delete your games and characters. This is a great way to get rid of the things you’re holding onto, and this goes a really far way so if you haven’t done this already, do it now.

In doing so you’re recognizing that what you want now is different than what you wanted previously, and that’s ok, you’re allowed to make this decision for yourself. Take a step back, get into a logical headspace and acknowledge that continuing to play games isn’t going to make it mean something more, it’s just going to make you look back on this in a few months and wonder what the fuck you’re doing. 😉

When you have a gaming addiction it’s common to feel frustrated when you talk to normal people, your friends, family or just people you run into on a daily basis because it’s hard to communicate what’s really going on for you.

When you do this, there are a few important things to keep in mind. Here’s how to talk about gaming addiction with normal people:

Understanding how to share our story is really important for our movement going forward. It’s important to remember that our community is at the beginning, and if we want to be taken seriously we need to take responsibility to share our message with the world in an effective way.

This gaming addiction problem is only going to continue and grow, it’s only going to continue to get bigger, so by us taking the time to share our message properly it will help many others find us who are currently going through all of this alone.

Every single day when people ask me what I do they start asking me questions about this issue, and it forces me to be effective in how I share our message to get their buy-in, otherwise the conversation around gaming addiction will just continue to be looked at as a silly thing – when we all know that’s not true at all.

The key principle you want to keep in mind is that it’s all about how you shape the conversation, and this ultimately dictates the results that you get.

How you shape the conversation is really important to keep people from becoming defensive and to bypass their defensives. For instance if you talk to a gamer but you come across as being against gaming, and now that he’s defensive he’s not going to be open to hearing your perspective.

Or if you’re talking to a parent, they’re going to have a bias that gaming is violent, so I try and avoid having that kind of conversation, because it doesn’t really apply to what we’re talking about, which is that there is a segment of gamers who want to quit and struggle to. That’s it.

So when you’re shaping the conversation you really want to focus on this segment of gamers who play that don’t want to. So it’s not that games are good or bad or that you should play or you shouldn’t. It’s simply that there are some people who want to quit and can’t.

And this happens for very specific reasons. Not only is this the truth but now we can talk about how to help these gamers and what kind of tools and resources would help. In my experience, when you get to this point people tend to be pretty interested.

This is the perfect time to personalize it, to share your story and how this has affected you and what has helped you quit. Which is that there are specific reasons why you were playing and by identifying them and finding solutions to those you’ve been able to start living your life.

To help them understand some of these reasons you can share the two main struggles gamers have when they go to quit:

• Finding new activities.

Now whenever I talk about this issue I always share the story my parents (and I bet your parents) always said which is that when they were younger they got kicked out of the house and had to go outside and play.

Now there’s an element of this story that we forget sometimes and it’s that when they had to be outside they had to find ways to entertain themselves, they had to be spontaneous, to be creative and to be social. And in doing so they developed skills in all of these.

But nowadays, because of the way kids are raised, we don’t have to go outside to play we don’t develop these skills in the same way, so it’s not that we aren’t capable, it’s not that we don’t want to, it’s simply that we just have never developed the skill, and we’ve always had gaming.

• Making new friends.

To quit gaming it’s a bit more complex than simply uninstalling your games and finding new activities to fill your time, because one of the main reasons we play is because it’s the way we interact with all of our friends, it’s where our community is.

So to move on from games means to move on from all of our friends, and it’s not that we can’t do that, it’s just that it’s hard and we need support.

By being intentional about how you shape the conversation you allow others to come on our side and become advocates for our community. It allows them spread the word and help others who are struggling with this issue to find out they are not alone.

Remember it’s really important for every single one of us that we each contribute to shaping this message in a positive way. That means you reading this.

Right now there are just over 4000 people on the StopGaming subreddit, when research would show 1/11 kids playing games in the U.S. are addicted under classic criteria. That’s over 5 million kids!!

Our community right now is at the beginning and because of that it’s up to each of us to shape the conversation in a productive way and to help spread the word. Communicating our message is crucial to get all the support we can get.

If you’ve read this far, I want you to leave a comment below, share this article and share the TEDx talk.

One of the main reasons we game is to escape from the stress in our life. So how do you deal with stress without using gaming as your outlet? Press play:

Using gaming as a way to deal with stress is definitely something I relate to, especially during all of the bullying I experienced growing up. Anytime I needed a break, gaming was there for me.

Now there are two really important things to understand about stress:

• There’s a difference between feeling stress and feeling different emotions.

After we quit gaming we tend to become a lot more aware of our emotions, and this is a good thing. When we’re gaming we’re numb to the emotions we’re experiencing, but when it comes to dealing with our emotions it’s important to identify what the specific emotion is, which will allow us to deal with it in a specific way.

• Stress is a perspective.

Most of us are a lot more stressed out than we really need to be, and that’s just because we have a narrow mindset. Stress tends to come when we have a perceived lack of control and when we don’t know what to do about whatever situation we’re in.

One of the reasons why I love to travel so much is because there’s no way to avoid situations where you have no control. Now this can be frustrating sometimes but the benefit is that it forces you to learn to take the things you need to take seriously, seriously, and to let go of the things you can’t control.

With the things we can’t control it’s easy to get stressed out about them… but we have no control so what’s the point of being stressed out or frustrated? It’s not like having those emotions is going to change the situation, so being stressed is really just going to drain your energy and hurt your ability to focus. Many times when we feel stressed there are easy solutions to start dealing with the situation.

Stress can happen and it is what it is, and you can’t always control things but you can control how you respond.

One of the reasons why people feel stressed is because it makes you feel alive, and this comes from your human need of significance – to feel powerful, in control and to feel like we matter. In our life we will fulfill this need in healthy or unhealthy ways, in conscious or unconscious ways, and stress is an easy way to fulfill it… even though this doesn’t really serve us.

So instead of just living life on autopilot like this, we want to conscious choose how we want to feel. I want to feel amazing every day because feeling good feels good. So now that I’ve made this decision, it’s up to me to take responsibility to create an experience in the world to feel this way.

So when things do happen, these are the three steps you want to take:

1. Take a breath.
2. Shift back into gratitude.
3. Create an action plan.

Next, you want to complete the following two exercises:

1. Set a timer for five minutes and journal on how would you feel in an ideal day.
2. Take out two pieces of paper. One one piece, write down everything you’ve done in the last two weeks. On the next piece, separate it into two columns, Positive and Negative. Now take the things you’ve done and filter them based on what’s contributed (+) to you feeling the way you want to feel and what hasn’t (-). Now in the negative column, start eliminating them or shifting them into the positive.

Life is too short to not feel amazing all the time. It’s up to each of us to design our life in a way that serves us feeling that way and to cut out the shit in our life that doesn’t.

use your In my last article I shared about what to do during your summer break instead of gaming, so in this one I wanted to follow-up and shared some insight about how to make your summer break awesome.

How do you do it? Find out:

To make your summer break awesome you need to have the right mindsets, and that involves seeing your summer as a time period to invest in becoming the type of person you want to be instead of just wasting it playing games.

Now mindsets are important but you also need practical steps to take advantage of this time you have, because your summer is a good amount of time, and if you invest it wisely in yourself you can really make incredible progress.

Here are the three practical steps you want to take to make your summer break awesome:

• Schedule your day.

I’ll be honest, I used to hate scheduling my day, but over the years I’ve found there’s a lot of value in adding a bit of structure to your life that can help you focus and take advantage of the time you have.

It also helps you save mental energy by not having to make so many decisions and instead allow you to get into the flow of your day and take massive action. By scheduling you bypass the feelings of boredom that can trigger a relapse, and help you maintain more consistency.

• Have a morning routine.

This is just a way to start your day every day, and is a great time to do your keystone habits that are your foundation of success. These are habits like meditation, your gratitude journal, exercise and reading. By having a morning routine you start your day strong and this builds a lot of momentum.

• Plan epic experiences.

Quickly I want you to write down three epic experiences you’d love to have this summer. These are adventures that you will look back on as the highlights of your summer. A few examples of mine: I’ve gone bungee jumping a few times, cliff jumping with friends, skydiving, road trips or other travel experiences.

Make sure you try those things out, and of course these don’t only apply to your summer but all other parts of the year too.

Now if you’re looking to have the best year yet, take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

With summer here it’s common for us to spend all of our time gaming. But now that we’ve quit we realize we don’t want to continue to live this way, but what do we do during the summer instead of gaming?

Press play and find out:

I totally relate to this because this is exactly what I used to do. During the school year I would go to school and then come home to game at night and on the weekends. But during the summers I would be so excited because now I had all day to game for months.

And I felt totally justified to do this because I had just finished school for the year, so all year I had been told that I had to go to school to fulfill my obligations, so now that I had done that I had full control over my summer. It was my time.

And I think this is a really important insight because this really speaks to why we justify gaming during the summer but gaming in general. And it has to do with specific mindsets we have as they relate to how we see our obligations and how we see our free time.

We all have obligations we have to take care of and these obligations we may not enjoy all that much, we never choose to go to school or choose to have to work a 9-5 job to pay our bills. These are just things we have to do.

So what happens is when we see our life from a lens of our obligations and our free time, we start to feel trapped within our obligations, so we do them from a place of resentment and that causes us to feel that much more freedom and power to do whatever the fuck we want during the free time we have.

And because of this perspective you have, you can easily justify spending your entire summer gaming.

So if you don’t want this to happen you need to have a mindset shift. And the mindset shift you need to have is the value of your time. Your time and energy are your two non-renewable resources, they are things you never get back.

You need to start seeing your life from a lens of how can you invest your time, instead of how you can kill your time.

One of the ways we justify gaming is because it’s a good way to kill our time, but this is a flawed mindset because your time is not something to be killed, it’s something to be lived.

Now when you start thinking about investing your time it’s natural to start thinking about doing something more productive. And that’s totally right, but I bet when I said “do something more productive” it may have triggered you because you associate it with negative experiences.

When I was younger and someone told me to do things that were more productive I found them to be super annoying, and there are two mains reasons why this happened:

• Shaming

When your parents or friends tell you to do things that are more productive, it’s coming from a place of shame and guilt. They think you’re wasting your time playing games and this just makes you feel bad about yourself. Ironically you use gaming as an escape from these kind of emotions so it only makes you want to play more.

• You don’t even know what you would do.

You don’t have other hobbies or passions, so even if you wanted to do something more productive, you have no idea what you would do. So you do what you know, you game, especially because it’s something you’re really good at.

So here’s the truth:

Up until now, you’ve been living a life designed for you, not something you’ve designed for yourself or had much of a choice in. So you’ve just been going through the motions, going to school, going to work and fulfilling your obligations, and then doing whatever you want during your free time: gaming.

So even though you’ve been living your life based on something someone else has designed for you, it’s only up to you to change that, and start designing your own life.

Games give you a mission and a sense of purpose, so now that you are on your summer break you need to apply the same concept, and a great way to do this is to launch a project, and design it in a way to become the type of person you want to be.

Here are a few good examples:

Say in the future you want to become your own boss, you could use your summer to start developing a skill in making money online or entrepreneurship. An example is from 30 Days to X where he learned how to sell t-shirts online.

Another example is if you wanted to learn a new instrument. You could commit to performing at an open mic night in the next 30 days. Or if you are into programming, what is something you are going to ship in the next 30 days.

The most important thing is to design this project around becoming the type of person you want to be, because it’s not just about launching a project, but about becoming the type of person capable of living the type of life you want to live.

If you want to spend your summer becoming the type of person you want to be, take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.

It’s very common when you quit playing video games to experience a relapse at some point. It even happened to me. 11 months after I quit cold turkey I relapsed and played games 16 hours a day for five months straight.

So what do you do if you relapse and start gaming again? Press play:

Relapse doesn’t have to be a bad thing. That doesn’t mean it’s good or that you should just relapse on purpose (#duh), but it doesn’t mean you need to shame yourself for it either.

There’s a lot we can learn from our relapse experience to help us be more successful in the future.

For instance when I relapsed there were a few different factors that led to it. One of them was that at the time I was feeling a bit depressed, and I thought the solution was to move to a new city to get a change of scenery – which really I was just running away from my problems.

So I packed everything up and moved to Victoria, B.C. Within the first week of being in the new city I was overwhelmed not knowing anyone and I decided to start playing video games again.

But looking back I’m actually grateful for it because I learned a lot from it that I used to write my article on How to Quit Playing Video Games FOREVER and that I’m teaching you now.

There are four main reasons why we relapse:

• We’re bored.

When you quit playing games it’s really important that you choose new activities, and for the first few days you tend to be good at doing that. But over time maybe you lack the consistency, so if you’re not being intentional with how you spend your time, you’ll end up relapsing.

• We’re stressed.

This can also mean you are anxious. Now this can happen for a variety of reasons, but gaming has always been your escape so you end up relapsing.

• We’re feeling good.

So you’ve quit gaming and you’re actually doing great! Now of course this is happening because you’re not playing games, but it’s easy to forget that. So you justify playing because obviously gaming didn’t have that big of a pull on you, it’s something you enjoy and you’re passionate about, so you end up playing.

• We use it as a reward.

Traditionally we’ve used gaming as a way to reward ourselves for the various things we’ve done, and because we haven’t chosen a new way to reward ourselves, we end up going back to what we know, which is gaming.

So what do you do if you do happen to relapse?

When you find yourself in this situation there’s a framework I like to use and it’s actually about turning it into a game. It’s about beating your high score. And this comes in two ways:

• # of days without games.

You want to create this score to be as big as possible, and you want to do it by tracking your days. To do this you can join us on StopGaming or use an app like Coach.me.

Seeing this number grow is incredible motivating. Make this score as big as possible.

• # of relapse days.

You want to create this score to be as low as possible. So if you do happen to relapse, how quickly do you get yourself back on track. For me when I relapsed, it took five months before I quit again, so if I relapsed again in the future I’d want to make this score as low as possible.

Relapse happens and it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but that doesn’t mean you should take relapse any less seriously. It just means you want to learn what you can from it and get back on track and focused on moving your life forward once again.

If you find yourself relapsing or you haven’t quit yet, make sure you grab a copy of Respawn and start today.

“Reading Respawn was the best decision I have made in my life, honestly.” – David

Today I’m in Bali, Indonesia!! Today’s question is a popular one I’ve been seeing recently and it’s about whether or not it’s normal to have dreams or nightmares about gaming after you quit.

So what do I think? Find out:

I remember when I quit gaming I had this same experience, having dreams or nightmares about me playing video games, and I would feel really silly and wonder if I was going crazy.

So yes, this is totally normal and I haven’t only had this experience with games but also during breakups where I would have dreams or nightmares about my ex-girlfriend and things like that.

What I want to share with you today is an exercise I’ve learned over the years that helps me shift how I physically feel, especially if I’m feeling anxious, to feel better both before I go to bed (which can have an impact on the type of experience you have) and just in general throughout my day.

And that exercise is a gratitude journal.

Now I get it, that sounds like some weird hippy shit and I relate to that, but just hear me out. But what I want you to know is there is a ton of scientific research now that shows practicing gratitude to have incredible benefits. Here are some of them:

• To feel happier
• To have a better immune system
• To feel less stressed
• To feel less lonely

So if those are any of the types of things you’re interested in than doing a gratitude journal is something worth doing. The best part is that it takes about one minute to do, so it’s not even something that will take up a lot of your time or energy.

The reason it works so well is because it shifts what you’re focusing on, which is the cause of our stress and anxiety in the first place.

For instance, if we have a negative expectation of a future result, no wonder we feel anxious! Our perspective has an affect on how we feel.

How It Works:

It’s really simply: write down 10 things you’re grateful for.

I tend to do this first thing in the morning when I wake up. Don’t overthink it too much, just write down the first 10 things that come to your mind. If you need ideas, just look around you and recognize the amazing things in your life that you do have.

I recommend doing this first thing in the morning, especially if you’ve had a dream or nightmare about gaming. By doing this first thing in the morning you can set the tone for your day – appreciating the things in your life that you do have instead of focusing on the things you don’t.

You can also do this exercise right before bed or at any point in your day you want to shift how you feel for the better.

So you’ve quit gaming and chosen new activities but compared to gaming you find them to be completely boring. What do you do? Are you just someone who doesn’t enjoy other things like some other people? Are you just meant to be a gamer? Find out:

I love this question because it’s easily one of the biggest struggles you go through when you quit gaming, and it’s common to create a story around it that you are just passionate about gaming and not other things, when this isn’t completely true.

In fact, there are real reasons why you find other activities to be boring that have nothing to do you you at all and have everything to do with the way your brain interacts with gaming.

So there are two main reasons why this is happening and it has to do with your environment and your physiology.

Your Environment

I started playing games when I was 11 years old so other than going to school and playing hockey, gaming was really the only other activity I ever put any focus or energy into. So it’s not that gaming was the only activity I was passionate about, it was simply the only activity I knew.

And passion takes time to develop, it’s not automatic, so with your new activities you need to give the more of a chance and make sure you challenge yourself with them. Apply the seven principles I shared in What If Gaming Is The Only Thing That You’re Good At? and that will help too.

Your Physiology

This comes from research that overexposure to gaming due to the dopamine overload you get causes structural changes to your brain. This is why we recommend the 90 day game quitters detox, to give your brain a chance to rewire back to normal dopamine sensitivity levels.

There are three main changes that happen to your brain from gaming:

• Numbed Pleasure Response: Every day pleasures no longer satisfy you.
• Hyper-reactivity to gaming: Gaming is awesome, everything else is boring.
• Willpower erosion: Due to changes to your prefrontal cortex.

When you take the first two it’s easy to see how this would affect how much you enjoy other activities, and potentially find them to be boring.

So what you need to do is commit to the 90 day game quitters challenge, which is simply not playing games for the next 90 days.

Next, you want to take the new activities you’ve chosen and start being more mindful about what you do enjoy about them. This is about bringing more awareness to what you value in things. What you focus on, expands.

So when I first started DJing I would ask myself what is it about DJing that I enjoy? Or when I go hiking, what is it about hiking that I enjoy?

Next, now that you’ve chosen new activities and started paying attention to what you enjoy about them, what you want to do is create more of a sense of purpose around each of them, and the easiest way I’ve found to do this is by creating a project around it.

When I started DJing I launched a podcast and this gave me a reason to be developing this skill, I had a reason to put effort into it each month, and this gave me much more motivation.

Finally, you can’t give up. You might find activities to be boring but commit to your 90 day detox and remember that passion is developed over time, so keep going.

After you quit playing video games you start to realize that most of your friends are gamers, and that’s actually kind of scary. What will happen if you quit? Will you lose all of your friends?

What I want you to know is that you don’t necessarily have to lose all of your friends, so check out the video:

Now what I want you to know is that there are two different strategies you want to implement in order to deal with this situation.

The first is how to stay friends with your gamer friends, and to do this what you want to do is find a new way to interact with them that is outside of games.

So you want to create more distance and that doesn’t mean disappearing it just means interacting with them on Facebook or Skype or something other than on Steam or in voice chat, where you can still maintain the friendships but they don’t trigger you.

You also want to have a conversation with them and let them know that you’re taking a break from games and to not invite you to play.

Now when you tell them this some of them will be triggered and get really defensive. This happens because gaming is something that means so much to them (and meant so much to you), that for you to quit that can cause them to feel threatened about why they play themselves.

Of course this isn’t fair, nor does your decision to quit have anything to do with them playing, but I just want you to be prepared for this because it’s very common. Unfortunately.

With the friends that get defensive and more or less aren’t very supportive of your decision to quit, you want to create a boundary. You can reiterate that you have decided to quit and you are asking them not to invite you to play.

Now not all of your friends will honor this, and I had this too, so just make sure you have a default answer anytime someone asks you to play. I would just say: “No, thank you and please don’t ask me to play.”

Again, some won’t honor this and for those you need to recognize that if they really were your friends they would be more supportive – who are they to tell you what to do? – so you want to create a stronger boundary and I would cut off contact with these friends.

Remember, you are deciding to quit because you are deciding to quit, and regardless of why you want to quit you are allowed to make that decision for yourself. Don’t ever let anybody else take that away from you.

Throughout life, your friends are going to come and go. That’s ok, it’s called the impermanence of life.

The second is starting to learn how to make new friends who aren’t gamers. If you just stay friends with your gamer friends eventually you’ll be tempted more and more to play because that is how you can connect with them.

To do this, you want to recognize that with gaming you found a sense of community, and you did this by exploring new games, getting involved in the areas people hung out (forums, streams, etc) and then you started to connect more with people.

So now that you’ve quit gaming you want to follow a similar path. Find some new activities and go hang out in areas where people who do those activities hang out. Watch this video for more on that.

By implementing both of these strategies, finding new ways to interact with your current gamer friends and being intentional to make new friends that aren’t gamers, you’ll be able to rebuild and grow your social circle and you won’t even notice the friends you have lost that weren’t supportive of you anyways.

When you go to quit it’s scary because you realize that you’re going to lose out on the one thing in your life that you’re really good at: gaming. And from gaming you get a lot of your confidence and self-esteem, so this presents an interesting challenge.

So what do you do? Press play:

One of these advantages is that you’ve gotten good at gaming. I mean, let’s be honest, the chance of you being a really good gamer if you’re reading this is pretty high.

Even if it’s simply because as someone who’s recognized that you’re spending more time gaming than you’d like… that gives you a better chance of being good at each game — you’re putting a lot of time into it.

So what I want to share with you is that gaming is a skill — and because it’s something you’ve gotten good at, there’s a lot you can learn from in how you achieved that and in doing so, then apply the same methods to become good at any other skill. Here’s the best part: Most everything in life is a skill. In fact Life is even a skill. It’s something you can get better at if you learn how the game works.

I’ll go more into this later but first I want to share with you the seven ways I got better at games, and I imagine you’ve used some if not all of these to do the same:

1. Quantity of time — you played a lot.
2. Quality of time — you played with a focus on how you could improve.
3. Mentors — you sought out other people who were good to learn from.
4. Community — you found likeminded peers to play with.
5. Education — you joined forums, watched streams and tutorials.
6. Review — you went over your replays.
7. Perseverance — you didn’t give up, you kept learning to improve.

Do any of those seem familiar? I bet they do, because they are just the different ways you can engage in gaming to improve your skill, and in doing so you do better at the game you’re playing. So now it’s a simple formula, follow the same steps we used to get good at gaming to get good at anything else we choose.

So now what are your new goals? What’s the new thing you want to get good at? Remember that passion is developed over time and it’s developed through challenge. Apply the same principles that you used to get good at gaming to get good at anything else you want.

Everything is going well, you’ve quit gaming and you’re starting to feel better about yourself.. but now you’re new favorite game is coming out. What do you do? Do you play?

Here’s how to deal with FOMO, the fear of missing out: Press play:

The fear of missing out is definitely something I personally related to. Growing up one of the games I played the most was Starcraft, and after a decade of waiting for Starcraft 2 it was finally coming out!

… two months after I decided to quit playing for good.

So that kind of sucked but I never ended up playing Starcraft 2 and the reason is because I had committed to quitting because I wanted to quit and to play SC2 would be to miss the entire point of why I was moving on in the first place.

The reason I was quitting games was because I wanted to close a chapter in my life and start a new one. I had new goals and dreams, so continuing to game, even if it was my new favorite game wasn’t really serving that mission.

Your new favorite game coming out is one of the triggers that can cause you to go back and game, so you need to be aware of how you will respond if this happens.

Remember, just because you’re quitting games doesn’t take away what they meant to you. They meant something to you and that’s ok. But you’re also allowed to move forward in your life to something new too.

One of the most popular questions I get is about whether you should quit playing video games cold turkey or whether you should just slowly reduce your time?

Find out what I think here:

So in my experience I quit playing games cold turkey and was successful for over 11 months before I relapsed, and ended up playing 16 hours a day for five months straight before I quit cold turkey once again for good.

The reason cold turkey worked so well for me was because I knew I wanted to move on from games, so continuing to play or reduce my time was merely a way for me to procrastinate what I really wanted to do.

If this is the case for you, sometimes you just need to step up and rip the bandaid off. Games for me were a crutch so it wasn’t going to benefit me at all to continue playing them when I already knew what I really wanted to do.

Since I knew I wanted to quit and move on, it made the most sense for me to give myself the best shot possible to be successful, and I took this notion of setting myself up for success seriously.

I chose new activities, I scheduled your day and I stayed out of the house as much as possible.

Now I know that’s not the case for everybody, so here’s what I recommend:

1. If you are someone who wants to quit, then you need to recognize that what you’re really debating isn’t whether you should quit cold turkey or not, and instead you’re debating whether you’re ready to commit to moving forward in your life.

In my experience, the moment you’re ready is the moment you just say fuck it and go for it. There’s no real way around it.

2. If you are someone who doesn’t want to quit but wants to reduce your time, I think it’s valuable to go through the 90 day game quitters detox, where you take 90 days off games and then re-evaluate whether you want to play again or not.

The reason for this is because games cause structural changes to your brain, and by giving yourself the 90 day detox you allow your brain the time it needs to re-calibrate and for your “gaming fog” to lessen.

Now that your gaming fog has lessened you will have more clarity to make the decision you genuinely want to make.

The other benefit of doing the 90 day detox is that it gives you a chance to experience what life looks like without games, which is something you may or may not have experienced in a long time (if ever.)

During this time you will learn a lot more about yourself and your relationship to gaming. Plus, if you can’t go 90 days without games you probably shouldn’t be playing anyways.

So those are some things to think about, hope that helps!

I believe there’s a fundamental difference between abstinence from games and true recovery.

Quitting games isn’t just about quitting games, it’s about starting to live your life to the fullest. Press play and find out more:

So it’s not just about finding ways to fill the void but stepping back to really think about what your new goals and dreams are.

When you quit games it’s about closing a chapter in your life – one where you played games – to start a new chapter – one where you don’t. So it’s not that games are good or bad or that you should play or you should not, and it’s more about just recognizing that you’re moving on to a new chapter in your life.

So yes, at first you’ll need to find new activities to fill your time, but the perspective you want to have is to choose new goals. Use these goals to fuel your motivation and give direction to how you spend your time.

I don’t just want you to survive not playing games, I want you to thrive.

After you quit it’s easy to just sit around resisting your temptation to play games, but I believe this is a flawed approach. It’s not that you won’t go through a period of time where this is the case, but just remember what your intention is.

So what are your new goals? What are you moving towards now that you’ve quit? Share in the comments below.

I’m back in my hometown today and thought I’d answer a question about how to get more motivated after quit playing video games. Press play:

Motivation is definitely one of the obstacles we run into whenever we want to make any big move in our life, and this is especially true when it comes to quitting video games.

When you quit it’s easy to feel lethargic and a lack of energy and this is completely normal, and one of the things to think about is that when you’re gaming, your lifestyle doesn’t really contribute to you having a ton of natural energy.

Just think about it: you’re likely staying up late (gaming), you’re sitting around a lot (gaming), you’re drinking a ton of energy drinks (caffeine) and your diet in general is likely poor (pizza, junk food.)

So when you quit gaming it’s not like you’re magically going to have all of this energy and in fact I think this journey of quitting is one of the biggest wake-up calls you can have about what the real state of your lifestyle really is.

And although it’s easy to feel down about this, it’s actually an incredible opportunity to begin learning more about what does motivate you, how you want your lifestyle to make you feel and even how your diet is serving you in your life.

If we want to be successful in being more motivated, first we need to understand what the components are that contribute to motivation.

One of the components of motivation is your sense of purpose—why are you doing what you’re doing. Now I’ll be honest, I used to struggle with feeling motivated (and still do sometimes). People would tell me to find my purpose and all that hippy hoopla, but it would only frustrate me because I could understand it logically, yes… finding your purpose sounds great! But how? It wasn’t until I stumbled upon UK betting sites not on Gamstop, while researching different options for staying focused, that I realized it wasn’t about finding one grand purpose, but rather aligning small actions with what makes you feel engaged and in control.

And feeling frustrated would cause me to feel paralyzed and, you guessed it… less motivated. But I had a breakthrough that changed the way I saw purpose and motivation forever, and it came in the form of a short story:

Imagine you are in the dessert and you have a forty pound bag to carry across to the other side.

… How motivated would you be?

Not very much, right?

Now imagine that forty pound bag is your son and he’s sick. … How motivated would you be?

It’s a silly question, right? You wouldn’t even question whether you were getting your son across the dessert or not. You would get it done. It’s just a primal reaction. You sure wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not you had motivation.

So what’s the difference? With your son, you have purpose. You have a reason to do what you need to do. And because of that your motivation is just, there. It’s not something you need to think about.

If you want to become more motivated you need to find a purpose, a reason to do what you want to do.

And what’s great is that in A Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl shares that the last human freedom we have is our ability to give meaning to our circumstances. The last human freedom we have is our ability to define what our purpose is. We get to choose why we are doing what we’re doing.

So often when we think about purpose we make these two mistakes:

1. We think purpose is a singular concept. “Find your purpose” makes us think it can only be one thing. But what if you have more than one thing you enjoy? What if it changes? When in fact purpose evolves. It can be one thing or it can be many things. It’s not a singular concept.
2. We think purpose magically comes to us. When we actually need to define it for ourselves. We get to decide what our purpose is. It’s a choice. If we spend our time waiting around to find our purpose it will not come.

I learned this lesson in Christmas 2012. At the time my entire world had just crumbled in front of me: My business failed, I was broke, most of my friends weren’t really the friends I wanted (or needed), my trip to Costa Rica turned out to be a disaster and to top it off, my girlfriend left me.

This all happened within weeks of each other. I felt like shit. Even though I had made so much progress over the years, it appeared as if I was back to square one. I was depressed and had a difficult time getting out of bed every day.

Why did it even matter?

So if you’re feeling a lack of motivation right now, you need to find a greater sense of purpose. Now when I say that I mean you need to find a reason why you are doing what you are doing.

So during Christmas when all this crazy shit was going down, I committed to this because a redemption story in my life. This was going to be a turning point for me to learn how to be happy, how to make new friends and how to have an impact on the world.

So what’s your redemption story? What’s your why?

Remember, motivation is more like a volume knob than a light switch. It’s something you have to turn up
over time. Hope that helps!

When you quit gaming you want to set yourself up for success, and one of the essential ways to do that is to be aware of any triggers that could cause you to relapse.

So what triggers should you watch out for? Press play and find out:

When I quit gaming I knew I had to take my triggers seriously, because they would be the main reason I would end up relapsing and going back to play.

To be successful to quit playing video games it’s really about setting yourself up for success.

I got rid of all of my games.

I didn’t watch any commercials. I didn’t watch any gaming streams. I didn’t check to see when my new favorite game is coming out. I didn’t do any of this.

Why would I? If I did any of that I would just want to play! And the whole point of moving on from games is to not play.

That doesn’t mean you won’t get cravings and as we’ve talked about before you want to have specific ways to deal with that, but triggers can also cause your cravings to get worse.

Here are two steps you want to take to avoid triggers:

1. Identify what your triggers are. What are the potential things coming up that could cause you to be vulnerable to give in and play?
2. Understand what your default actions are when you are feeling triggered. When I saw a commercial after I quit I immediately changed the channel.

And of course as we’ve talked about before, make sure you’re taking care of the basics: finding new activities, scheduling your day and not being on the computer all day.

Sometimes triggers happen, sometimes cravings happen, but by preparing for them beforehand you can set yourself up for success and continue to move on with your life.

What’s up from Vancouver! Today’s question is about how to deal with cravings and this is a question I’ve been get a lot lately, so press play and check out my answer:

When it comes to how to deal with cravings it’s important to understand that cravings are a matter of momentum. And when we use this mindset of momentum with cravings it allows us to become empowered about them instead of feeling like they have all the power over us themselves.

When we quit playing video games it’s easy for cravings to become difficult, they can come out of nowhere, and catch us by surprise. Cravings come in many different ways, we can feel nostalgic about games, we miss our gamer friends, we can feel bored with our new activities and many others.

When we feel cravings first we need to understand that they can come out of nowhere and understand what they are. When we are focused on the steps we need to take to move forward – filling our days with new activities and being organized with our time – our cravings will be less.

But still they can come out of nowhere so it’s important to prepare beforehand with different tools and practices to respond well when they do come in. One of these practices is one I love and it’s a 3-step process to change any emotion.

Step 1: Acknowledge It

What you resist, persists, so when you experience a craving you need to acknowledge it as something that is happening due to a chemical imbalance in your body and by taking the time to recognize it you give it less power. You don’t need to hide from it.

Step 2: Accept It

Say “Oh well.” By accepting it that doesn’t mean you’re blindly accepting it and being a victim, you’re just acknowledging that it’s happening and you’re recognizing that that is ok. A craving doesn’t have to be a big deal if you don’t make it a big deal. Just like it came in randomly it will go away randomly too.

Step 3: Take Action

Now that you’ve acknowledged it as a craving, accepted that it’s there and that’s ok, now you want to take a positive action step towards creating the new emotion you want. What’s a step you can take to start building your momentum in the direction you want. One small action starts your momentum again. Go for a walk, get out of the house, move your body, meditate, write in a journal, call a friend.

Lastly, cravings are very similar to a breakup, and when I’ve been through breakups I just thought about my ex all the time, but over time it went away and got easier. It took some time but it gets better. Cravings are similar. They will be more intense at the beginning but over time they get easier. They’ll still come in randomly here and there so just don’t make it a big deal.

Focus one hour at a time all day long and definitely start meditating which will help you a lot.

I’m back in Canada and wanted to answer another question I received from my #AMA thread happening right now. The question is about how to stop using gaming as a way to procrastinate, especially when it comes to studying or working.

To find out my answer, press play:

So this is a great question and this is definitely one of the cornerstone issues of this gaming problem, which has to do with the way we use gaming to escape from our problems.

It’s important to remember that gaming is just an activity and when it becomes a problem it’s because we have underlying issues going on, so we want to start learning more about why we are trying to escape from whatever we’re trying to escape from.

Is it anxiety? Is it stress? Another emotion?

This is a problem I personally relate to and after I quit gaming I needed to learn how to deal with these emotions and still have to work on every day. Part of it is learning about how to focus better.

An example is from today, I spent the entire day doing my taxes, and that sucks, that is an activity that is incredibly boring, it’s not inspiring, so it’s easy to procrastinate. So what I did was focus on smaller blocks, 10-15 minutes at a time, take a quick break (without technology) and then sit back down and do another 10-15 minutes, rinse and repeat.

These short breaks help me release the anxious energy that can build up where you get a bit antsy and you want to move around but by taking a quick break over time (in my case today, 7 hours), I was able to release that energy during my break instead of going on Reddit or Facebook and then running into a ton of other distractions.

Another thing you want to do is learn how to focus for longer periods of time, and this is a skill like anything else. I’m a big advocate of learning meditation, because the science behind meditation is so clear that it’s a great way to improve your focus.

Lastly, when it comes to motivation, you need to remember why you are doing the things you want to do. So when you find you’re getting distracted, make sure you take a minute to remind yourself why pursuing what you’re trying to pursue is important to you.

Needing a temporary escape is natural, so it’s just about learning how to fulfill this need in a way that you don’t need gaming. Meditation, taking a short break (without technology), going for a walk, etc are all good ways to do that.

Hope that helps and if it does, make sure you share it with someone it can help!

Today’s question comes from the #AMA thread I have going on right now and it’s about whether or not you can play games in moderation.

This is a question I get all the time and I think it comes from a place of anxiety you’re experiencing when you think about what your life will really look like without games. It’s natural to feel this anxiety in your life because quitting games is a big moment in your life.

You can also feel anxiety when it comes to the uncertainty of whether or not you’ll ever be able to play again. Even though right now you know you want to quit, games mean something to you and the idea of giving them up forever is scary.

So in my opinion, there are a few dynamics to understand when you think about this question.

First I want to talk to those who recently quit and you’re feeling anxious about whether or not you’ll be able to play again.

For you, I think it’s important that before we make any decisions about whether or not you’re going to play again (in moderation), that you complete the 90 day game quitters detox. This is what research shows you need for your brain to recalibrate back to normal dopamine sensitivity levels.

In doing the 90 day detox you give yourself an opportunity to learn about what life is like without games, you get to learn more about yourself and the role gaming plays in your life, and you get to come back to this question with more clarity.

Plus, if you can’t go 90 days without playing games you probably shouldn’t be playing games in the first place. If you want to learn more about the structural changes that can happen to your brain from excessive gaming, watch this video.

Second, whether or not you can play in moderation is something only you will ultimately know, and after you complete the 90 day detox you can consider whether or not you want to try, but I personally don’t play in moderation (other than playing Chess a little bit here and there.)

Lastly, you want to remember that we play games for specific reasons (they fulfill certain needs we have), so this isn’t really about games but why we play them. The anxiety you’re experiencing when we think about whether or not we’ll be able to play again has more to do with finding new ways to fulfill the needs we have.

By finding those in other activities (if you need ideas, click here), I found I don’t really miss gaming and other than it feeling nostalgic here and there which is normal. But by having new activities and new goals, I find I’m not really drawn to games in the same way I used to be, and instead I’m excited about the new life I’ve created for myself.

So I hope that helps and if it does, share it with someone you know who’s also struggling with this stuff.

Today’s question is from Ella from /r/StopGaming and it’s about how to develop better relationships, which I definitely agree is a main focus we need to have after we quit gaming.

Press play and watch my answer from Long Beach, California:

One of the reasons why we play games is because they are where our community hangs out, it fulfills our social relationships. I believe gaming is really more of just the activity we are doing and it’s the needs it fulfills that causes us to continue to play, even if we don’t want to.

Feeling anxious about trying to improve our ability to have better relationships after we quit is normal. I relate to this because growing up I was bullied a lot, which caused me to isolate and stay in my room all day playing games.

But the thing is, I was still lonely, and it’s this loneliness you need to pay attention to. If you’re feeling lonely even though you’re playing games, you need to take a break and start working on feeling less lonely in your life.

And this is exactly what happened to me. So when I quit I decided to start learning how to make new friends and improve my social skills. I knew I couldn’t continue to live my life the way I was and even though I didn’t know how to improve my social skills, I was going to figure it out.

So how do you train yourself to develop better relationships?

At first I started going out every night, sober, to clubs. I did this for a couple years but then I realized I didn’t really like clubs or the types of people I was meeting, so I switched it up.

And I followed these two strategies:

1. Who do you want to meet?

For me, that was entrepreneurs, who like to travel, who are more conscious, who want to leave a positive difference in the world, who would be a good friend, people who are ambitious, people going after their dreams who inspire me, and people who can teach me.

Now you: Write down three qualities you want in your friends.

2. Where do these types of people hang out?

For me, that was going to different events like StartingBloc.

Now you: Clubs at school or events in your area. Find one you can go to this week and make it happen.

But what if you’re anxious? Use this mindset.

The biggest difference in my life now between when I played video games and where I am today is due to the people I’ve surrounded myself with, and I’ve done it very intentionally and from the ground up. I was bullied in school, I didn’t have any friends, people told me I’d be a 36 year old bum, and I’ve proved them wrong.

But I’ve done it by surrounding myself by people who believe in me, but first by believing in myself first. Thanks for the question.

When you quit gaming one of the biggest issues you run into is feeling bored. You want to quit because you want to start living your life, but can life really be fun without video games?

I personally struggled with this a lot, so I don’t know… you tell me… does it look fun? Press play:

When you quit gaming it can be scary. Gaming is how you have fun and it’s easy to find other activities to be boring, and even though this happens for specific reasons, it’s common to wonder if life without video games is really even fun.

But the truth is, life is as much fun as you decide to make it. Although we all come from different circumstances and each our our situation is unique, we get to choose how we respond to these challenges.

And one of them is learning how to have fun after we quit gaming. It’s not that life without video games isn’t fun, it’s that gaming has always been our go-to activity to have fun. So naturally when we remove it, we will need to learn new ways to have fun again, and that might take some time.

I know it did for me and that’s ok, it’s a process, but, most importantly, life can be fun without video games, you can have fun without them.

I thought I’d answer a question I got recently while I was in Malibu. The question is from Tobias and it’s about what other activities are good to do on the weekends, and whether or not he can play Hearthstone and Chess even though they are kind of video games. Press play:

So the thing is, when we quit playing video games, we need to think about what we’re going to do with all of this new time we have. This is a common obstacle to go through, because gaming is what we know. So when we quit, we tend to still gravitate towards them, when that’s kind of missing the point.

The point of quitting video games isn’t to continue playing games, it’s about putting ourselves in a position where we have no choice but to learn how to interact (and entertain) ourselves without using gaming as our crutch.

What helped me the most was focusing on setting new goals, and using these new goals as a compass to figure out how we should be spending our time. Remember, we play games for specific reasons, so you want to find activities and goals that fulfill those same needs.

For me, that was learning how to make new friends, so I started going out a lot. And then I wanted to learn how to DJ so I started doing that. And now, travel is a big goal of mine so I’m finding ways to do that too.

Gaming is where your comfort zone is, so now that you’ve quit, focus on setting new goals and using your new activities to move in that direction.

To help you guys out for new activities, I’ve put together a guide called 60+ New Hobby Ideasthat you can download for free here.

And just remember, the bigger idea is about new goals, it’s not just about killing your time. Hope that helps!

Driving down the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles today and stopped by a beach to share a few thoughts on quitting video games. Press play:

The thing is, a big mistake people make is that they focus too much on video games and forget that this is really about much more than that.

This isn’t even really about games. It’s about getting your life to a point where you don’t need to be stimulated all the time. Gaming gives us a lot of stimulation but it creates this false sense of expectation that you need to be that stimulated all the time, when this is something that happens because of games… instead of because life is really that way.

Games are an outlet for us whenever we feel bored. But to us we have a choice, we can use games to help us escape that boredom… or we can choose to be present in the moment and not need to escape from it.

So it’s not about whether gaming is good or bad, or whether you should play or not. It’s about getting your life back to a point where you could go to a beach and enjoy it, or have dinner with your family and enjoy it. You could do anything and enjoy it because you have the type of mindset and perspective that allows you to do so… instead of just expecting it to be that way – which can happen when you are gaming.

Hope that resonates with you!