"If I didn't play, I didn't know what to do"

Deep down, I knew that I was behaving excessively when it came to video games, but I didn't want to admit it. My parents already saw that I might have an addiction and, although I didn't see it so clearly, there were little things that made me think so: I didn't want to go to dinner even though I was hungry, I stopped doing other things, I wanted to play more and more. In fact, before I entered the Adolescent Addictive Behavior Unit (UCAD) at the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona , ​​my weekends were basically about staying up late, playing, eating and playing again . And many weekends I didn't leave the house.

But these behaviors are signs that are gradually increasing and you don't realize it. The game absorbs you and you just want to play for hours and hours until there comes a time when you don't feel like doing anything else. And even though you suspect that you may have a problem, you don't want to do anything to solve it. But there came a time when I saw that my parents were very worried and I knew that they were looking for some kind of help. That's when I started talking to them to find a solution to my problem. And that's where the whole recovery process began.

To recover, I had to change a lot of habits , but the most important thing is to stay busy, try to do other things that fill your time so that you can reduce the hours in front of the screen. Being a trainer was good for me, for example. And it's also important to go out and socialize, to be with people. The truth is that, although I started to set limits for myself before asking for help, it has been essential to go to UCAD, where I work, to reinforce these limits, to have tools to know what you have to do and how to do it. Surely, if I hadn't gone there, my parents wouldn't know what to do with me, and I wouldn't know either .

The game absorbs you and you just want to play for hours and hours until there comes a time when you don't feel like doing anything else. And even though you suspect you may have a problem, you don't want to do anything to fix it.

Now, looking at it with a little perspective, I see that I played out of boredom, because if I didn't play I didn't know what to do. Now I have the feeling of a waste of time, of two years in which I wasted my time. I don't know, like when you get older and you look at the trading cards you bought every day when you were little and you think about the money spent on this, on a "crap", and on everything you could have done with that money.

Warning signs of video game addiction

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Playing is not bad, the problem is when it becomes your daily routine. Sometimes people ask me: "What did you get out of playing so much?" Well, with games you have a good time, but you also have a bad time. But, whether you win or lose, you keep playing , because you always find a reward: if you win, you feel satisfaction and the reward is greater, but if you lose, the small reward is reaching your goal, and that is extra motivation. The point is that there comes a time when you ask yourself: "what do I do if I don't play?" And you keep playing. What is clear is that, if you see yourself like this, you have to act as soon as possible , because you are losing more and more things along the way and more opportunities.

If you have a video game addiction and you say you're fine, it's because you don't know what it means to be fine.

Now, after this process I'm in, I feel good, I think I'm almost recovered. I continue to play, because I like video games, but two games and that's it. And I no longer play the games that led me to addiction, I uninstalled them, so as not to run the risk of getting hooked again, of relapsing, as happened to a friend of mine. If you have a video game addiction and you say you're fine, you don't know what it's like to be fine. In fact, I have friends who continue to play and this has led to increasingly serious consequences for them: they don't talk to their parents, they don't go out, they don't interact with anyone, they've dropped out of school... I don't want that to happen to me.

What I have learned and what I am sure of is that the problem is not in video games, but in people, in the lack of confidence and self-esteem , in the lack of communication... That is why I believe that this problem must be treated from the person's perspective, not by banning video games, because if it is not a video game, it could be a drug, a slot machine or anything else.