To Kill Off an Addiction, Embrace it with Open Arms and Be Bored by Its Repetitiveness

The simplest of addictions can crop up at any time. Whereas being hooked on drugs and gambling requires one to make an active effort to go to the nearby dealers or casinos, there are plenty of ways that one gets buried in an alternate reality for hours and days without having to spend a single dime. A vacant hour between meetings, a sudden urge to procrastinate from an inevitable task, a desire to kill off time without a concrete purpose...something more productive is definitely there, but it is not found. A few game downloads, watching videos, or even a session of casual banter with ChatGPT could all do fine.

But when it is all said and done, only regret remains. The hypotheticals of what those hours gone by could have been are only entrenched when turning on social media, where others seem to drive home that fear of missing out on posts about the latest travels and successful business ventures. It is a vicious cycle. The aimlessness drives one to a new time-waster, followed by a sense of self-loathing, with the resulting decline in self-confidence and motivation convincing one that one's time is not worthwhile anyway as such the easily distracted can never amount to much. A new cycle starts.

So the addictions refuse to go away. It is as if the distractions are beckoning those of us who are aimless, reminding us that despite all the tasks that need to be done and could be done for self-improvement, the alternatives of repetitive button clicking on mindless games, imagining ourselves in the shoes of someone doing something more eventful, or just running wild with purposeless daydreaming are more entertaining. My succumbing to such simple temptation, for little reason besides the thought of "well, I have nothing better to do anyways" seems to make a mockery of how a 35-year-old should actively plan and goal-set.

No, I am not, perhaps paradoxically, self-hating for the addictions. Multiple studies have come to the conclusion that a mind purposefully taken out of day-to-day thinking is a mind that can help generate out-of-box creativity. And what is more important as a base for self-reinvention than self-generated new ideas? But the addictions need to have a limit. A day after day of endless gaming is no less damaging than a regular shot of cocaine. Both, if uncontrolled and unmonitored, cause one to skip work meetings and family gatherings, destroying one's professional and social future.

How should one set that limit? After years of fighting small addictions of all sorts, I seemed to finally be able to verbalize an effective strategy. At the heart of it, surprising as it may be, is to fully indulge in the addiction when it does crop up, rather than trying to resist. By its very nature, addictive thoughts are immune to abstinence. The more one wants to stop, the more one thinks about and wants to engage in it. That desire eventually overwhelms the mind, making it impossible to concentrate on any unrelated tasks one tries to commit to.

Instead, let the addiction take place, but rapidly. For the greatest enemy of addiction is boredom: a game, a type of video, and even a conversation ultimately becomes bogged down in the nitty-gritty of repetition, causing that initial sense of stimulation to subside. To kill an addiction, the key is to get through that initial excitement quickly so that the recognition of repetition and the ensuing boredom swiftly set in. By shortening the cycle, the addiction that may normally take weeks and months to lapse can be gone in hours or days. 

But one might be skeptical of that cycle-shortening strategy. After all, games can be sophisticated enough to have hidden treasures even after the hundredth play, and YouTube has millions of videos to watch in each genre. Just like recognizing that people of different backgrounds are still united by shared values, thoughts, and desires, each step of a game and each video can be observed to share some common narratives and structures despite outward disparities. Focusing on those fundamental overlaps would quickly help boredom set in.

I concede that the threshold for boredom differs by the individual. As someone who constantly sees professional stability as a source of discontent, I might be on the low end of that threshold, enabling me to quickly get in and out of any addiction. But even for those who have the biological, mental, or worst of all, physiological need to cling to a new interest as a form of self-worth, it is worth repeatedly examining whether that clinging is as exciting as one originally thought it would be. One might find that the answer might be a yes, but an increasingly weak yes over time.