We’ve all been there, i promise you. That new game that you’ve been waiting for has finally been released. You’ve reserved your copy and picked it up straight after work, only to be playing it into the early hours of the morning and finally heading to bed when you realize you have work in 3 hours time.

This sort of behavior can be normal when you first buy a game, and may continue for a few days to a few weeks after. However it can reach a point where it is no longer enjoyable in the way that it should be. You think about it all day at work or school and find that you are sacrificing all your spare time to play this online game. Your relationships with friends and family start to weaken as you spend less and less time with them, and you don’t even realize and in some cases, don’t even care.

Excessive online gaming can easily lead to an addiction. It can have the same psychological effects as a drug, and has all the tell tale signs of an addiction such as withdrawal symptoms emotional attachment. The thing that separates online gaming from conventional gaming is that online gaming ultimately has no ending point. A conventional game can be completed by finishing levels and challenges, online games however are very repetitive, and usually have no official end point, leading the gamer to spend much time playing but making no progress and thus they continue to play.

3 simple steps towards breaking an online gaming addiction.

1) Take it one day at a time. Realize that the first few days will be the hardest, you will constantly be thinking about your game, wanting to go on it for just a little while, resist the urge! After a few days I assure it gets easier, your mind becomes clear and it becomes a distant thought, rather than a dominating presence.

2) Write yourself a contract. Seriously, get a piece of paper and write an agreement to yourself that you will not play your game for a whole week, sign it and date it and you now have an agreement with yourself. For many of us it would be too hard to go against our own word, and for those who do there is a crippling sense of failure that should motivate you to never do it again.

3) Delete the game off your hard drive, get a friend to hide the CD’s for you and you will have no means to play your game, regardless of how much you want to. Within a few days the urge to play will subside and most people will be a lot more relaxed about it.

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