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.

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:

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 […]

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? 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.

So, should you watch gaming streams? 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.

What are the seven things you should expect after you quit gaming? Find out:

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 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:

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?

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.

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.

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:

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.

Remember 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.

So how do you stop mindlessly browsing the internet?

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. How do you deal with gaming nostalgia?

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.

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:

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.

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.

How do you improve your willpower? Find out five key steps you can take to do just that:

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. 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:

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.

One of the things I’ve learned is that there is a specific framework you can use and steps you can take to break out of these funks, become happier and live with more peace every single day.

Find out what you can do:

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. So in order to make that decision there are a few things you need to be aware of.

Find out what they are:

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? Find out:

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.

Find out where my life was before I quit and what I’ve managed to accomplish since then:

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?

There are a few simple steps you can take to do it. Find out what they are:

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.

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.

Here’s what you need to know:

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:

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 to break through it:

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 what to do:

One of the main reasons we game is to escape from the stress in our life. So if you want to be successful moving on from games you will need to learn how to deal with stress without using gaming as your outlet.

The good news is, you are capable of learning how to do this. Find out how:

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.

So how do you do it? Find out:

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?

Find out:

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.

But relapse doesn’t have to be a bad thing if you do this one thing afterwards:

You wake up in a panic thinking you’ve relapsed back into gaming only to realize it was just a dream.

You’re relieved but is this normal? What steps can you do to stop them?

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 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:

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 and there are a few specific strategies you want to implement in order to avoid feeling lonely after you quit.

Find out what they are:

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 if gaming is the only thing that you’re good at?

Find out:

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?

Find out:

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

In my experience I quit cold turkey and was successful in that for 11 months before I relapsed. So what happened and what do I recommend for you?

Find out:

I believe there’s a fundamental a difference between abstinence from games and true recovery and that’s because quitting games isn’t just about quitting games, it’s about starting to live your life to the fullest.

I don’t just want you to survive not playing games, I want you to thrive. And in order to do that there are a few specific mindsets and actions you need to be taking.

Find out what they are:

Motivation is 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So what are the triggers you need to watch out for? Find out:

This is a question I get frequently and it makes sense: after you quit gaming you may experience cravings. And these cravings can be intense, encouraging you to relapse and start playing games again… even though you don’t want to.

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.

Find out the steps you can take to deal with them here:

This is a great question and it’s 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.

This is a problem I personally relate to and after I quit gaming I needed to learn how to deal with all of this and still have to work on it every day.

Find out what I recommend you do here:

This is a question I get all the time and it comes from 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.

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 there are a few dynamics to understand when you think about this question.

Find out what they are:

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.

So how do you develop better relationships? Find out:

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

This isn’t even really about games.