I am so overwhelmed with being the singular caregiver for everyone in my home.

I work full time, cook, clean, laundry, do all the shopping, care for our 2 young children and dog.

My husband? He works 7 to 3 M-F and spends every single second at home gaming.

From 3 o'clock until 10 or 11 he games.

He ignores us.

He eats dinner at the computer.

I am a single mother with a man child ruining my life.

He gets mad when I need to ask him something.

He plays pubG with his friends (who, shocker ARE ALL SINGLE MEN).

He doesn't want to do anything else.

When I have broughten up the games before (we've been married 10 years) he gets extremely defensive.

I guess I didn't realize a hobby was supposed to be your entire life.

My partner stays up all night playing video games, until the morning when he goes to work sleep deprived. On the days when he doesn’t go to work, he stays up all day too but is too tired to engage in any activities together or do house chores.

We don’t see each other during the day because of our schedules, he gets home earlier than me and around 8-9 pm when I get home he’s still gaming and keeps on gaming until the next day. This doesn’t happen every day, only a few times a week.

It bothers me not only because I feel like we don’t have enough time together, but also because it messes up my sleep too. It’s hard for me to go one night together and one night alone, I get anxiety and wake up multiple times and stay awake when he’s not there.

It also worries me because he has a somewhat dangerous job and he needs to be rested and sharp for it. I watch him and see how he neglects sleep, food, and literally everything on the days when this happens.

I don’t know if it means he’s addicted since it doesn’t happen every day.

Hi. 25M, Final-semester student. In an effort to reduce gaming, I've started reading in the morning, instead of gaming first in the morning. I thought i needed to get my life together, and with depression and burnout kicking alongside breaking up with my ex and failing horribly at a big test, nothing in my life felt fun anymore.

Then I remembered that in my youth, I loved reading novels at the morning, sipping some coffee. Tried it again. Difficult to concentrate at first, but as the time goes on, I rediscovered the joy of reading. Now I don't bat an eye on my ps5, and my 3ds. Maybe I'll sell it, maybe not.

What were your methods that got you out of gaming and into a more healthy hobby? I'd like to know, and get some advice from where I can. Sorry if my english is a little all over the place. Non-native, so may not be perfect.

28 m. I was playing valheim, lost my gear to a bad run felt awful and something clicked. Idk exactly what it was but, everything has been pushed aside for games, I had nothing else to live for... I deleted my stuff but that doesn't really matter. My mind has changed, i feel there's been an internal shift. I've been running, hiding, avoiding, numbing pain for so long. I want to live. Games have stopped me from living for long enough. But I'm not angry, or cathartic, or desperate. I'm peaceful. It's strange. This is right tho. Maybe it had to take this long maybe it didn't but now this is right.

I don't know how active I'll be here, thinking about it may tempt me, I just wanna celebrate the here and now.

Since the person I wrote my answer to decided to remove either their whole profile or just all their posts and comments, weird how many of that kind we have on this sub, let me give this advice to everyone since so many seem to get stuck in this trap:

Yeah, you were wrong. Not your fault if you never learned sports and similar activities in a group from childhood and almost everyone on this sub is in same trap. And similar trap is for everyone who tries to lose weight or gain muscles or learn martial arts at home before they start "for real". Almost everyone fail.

Mostly because of multiple reasons:

- it is much more fun to do things together and meet new people and friends. But that also means that if a club is bad or boring, even a fun activity will become boring. So find your people so to say. I know the difference between my last club and the one before that. There is a very good reason why last club became last...

- we are really bad att setting up any kind of real deadlines and holding ourself to them without any good reason or pressure. Clubs are much better at that.

- we are also rather bad at creating good teaching plan for activities we never taught, much less have even done before. Clubs are not.

- there is a lot of ways to engage with both people and the club in most cases which is missed when doing things solo: helping out with regular training, with competitions, helping and teaching beginners, going to competitions or camps and so on.

This is why I could take chess and make it both the worst and the best activity a gamer could do instead of gaming. All depends on how it's done.

I came to a realization that, ever since I was an early teenager, I pretty much always had some game that I was working on. Always some chase that I was after. Always something I would occupy my mind with when under stress. After quitting, I am hit with a profound sense of anhedonia. It's as if nothing feels like anything anymore.

I have been successful with my education and job responsibilities. In fact, I just finished medical residency and am working as a physician now. Gaming didn't really interfere with that as my policy was always treating gaming time as a luxury when all work and household chores as well as studies are done (I practice Russian every day after work in addition to always learning medicine). However, I am single and don't have many friends. I spent the remainder of my free time gaming. I wanted to develop other aspects of myself like building more genuine relationships and going to the gym. I also wanted to find pleasure from other hobbies instead of gaming. I didn't really quit because it was dramatically affecting my career or anything, but wanted to find joy from other things in life.

The issue is that one month in to quitting, it's like my brain feels broken. I can't find pleasure in anything. I definitely meet criteria for major depression, but it's weird because I am still highly functional. I go to work every day, go to the gym five days per week, have worked on relationships, etc, but my main issue is that everything just feels completely grey, flat, and pointless. I realized through all the stressful times in my life that I depended on gaming to give me that constant dopamine hit. Without it, I just feel completely awful. I am to the point of caving and starting to play something like Hearthstone again just to give me that hit of pleasure to start feeling something again.

Anybody else like this? When did the anhedonia improve for you?