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Comment by eat | Hacker News Reader

> My experience of HN screwing up my life isn't a whole lot different from intoxicants screwing up theirs.

Except the fact that you can just stop doing it at any time with literally zero physical side-effects.

There is a reason those who work in addiction medicine (and addicts themselves) call the 3-10 days of physical withdrawal the easy part. We can probably achieve 100% success with it. A few days of pain and discomfort and you're done with the physical part...forever. Real addiction, neurological addiction, is a totally different story. It's totally understandable that many people have such a difficult time wrapping their heads around this, because addiction is a bizarre brain disorder...like Oliver Sacks and VS Ramachandran case study bizarre. All your intuitive notions on the brain are forced to go out the window if you honestly investigate it acedemically.

Please though, blow your mind by reading about it...not experiencing it.

Immediately after college I quit drinking coffee. For fourteen years afterward I always had a feeling of incompleteness, something felt missing whenever I was in a relaxed state, like there was something I was missing/needed to do, but could not put my finger on the cause. I often considered the source of this phantom yearning and speculated whether I was exposed to crack in one of the roach apartments I afforded in college; perhaps my mom was more of a hippy while I was gestating than has been shared; perhaps I was a junky in a former life...

All of these thoughts were immediately vanquished when I was visiting Hawaii and somebody convinced me I had to try their delicious Kona coffee. Within a few seconds of the first sip I felt like I had been waiting for that sip my entire life. It felt as if an unfulfillable hole in my soul had been filled. T^hank god it's legal, I guess.

Don't even get me started on the 24 hours of absolute misery after giving up sugar AND caffeine on that fateful day in 1994...

Don't understand why you're being downvoted; that's exactly right. This is not like cocaine, heroin, or crystal. If anything, it's more like weed.

The psychological craving may be similar, sure. It's habit forming, not physically addictive.

Most drugs are not strongly physically addictive. Most drggs have short risk-free withdrawal times. Alcohol is rare in being a drug that has a risky withdrawal that needs medical supervision - and even that's for people who are on the very heavy end of the drinkijg spectrum. (A litre of spirits with an ABV of 40% per day is what you need to get a medically supervised withdrawal in England. That's about 33 US fluid ounces per day). People can be having serious problems with drink and mot reach that threshold.

Saying "you can just quit" ignores the severe trouble that a few people find themselves in with things that are not physically addicting.

Telling someone with a gambling addiction that they could just stop is an over-simplification. It's such an over-simplification that it's dumb, and thus it's not surprising a few people felt it needed a downvote.

Habit-forming things can definitely be harmful to one's life, and can be extremely hard to stop for some people without external aid. Just because it doesn't outright physically hurt you ("only" psychologically for a while) doesn't mean it is not an issue that requires attention.

HN, along with soylent news, kuro5hin, some mailing lists, reddit from time to time, all together are quite definitely physically hurting me.

It's not so much that I don't get enough sleep as that it is so irregular, and that I don't find sleep to be restful. Also I get persistent headaches; analgesics don't help, I just blew through a whole bottle.

My friend, if you seriously feel this way, try asking people in your direct surroundings for help. If you have family or close friends, you can let them know you need ("would like", "could use", "wanna try", "see if maybe it would work", ...) their help getting rid of an addiction. No shame, especially not with a drug as light as this one.

"What is it?" - "Internet forums, they take up all my time and I can't stop, " + the real life problems you're experiencing.

If you can't think of someone right now, feel free to shoot me an e-mail (in profile). I won't be able to make you do stuff, but we can talk.

I don't mean to make light of your personal issues, but I don't think the Hacker News comment section for this article is the appropriate place to be discussing them. I wish you luck in dealing with your affliction, and suggest that speaking to a mental health professional would be a better outlet for you. If you really needed to talk to people here about it, then I'd recommend making a new thread, perhaps linking to blog post or something of that matter you wrote describing your addiction, rather than hijacking the comments section here, which I think is being a bit disrespectful to the rest of the HN userbase.

I'd like to ask you to reconsider your approach to people who talk about psychological problems. I understand what you're saying, and from the looks of the upvotes, you're not alone.

However, a common thought for people who experience issues like these is that they bother other people. Their problem is not important, they are being a burden onto others, &c. This leads them to reach out only very late, sometimes not at all. That's why suicide hotlines (just an example, clearly not the case for op) are so adamant about their "we'll just listen, feel free to talk, we won't call the cops" policy.

So, to the OP, and to anyone else with similar issues reading this: feel free to reach out, please do, it's no burden.

To anyone else: yes, it's a hijack, but please consider ignoring it and just letting it sit naturally at the 1 point bottom of the thread. Downvoting and explicitly mentioning how these cries for help are "inappropriate" or otherwise negative, while conforming to the guidelines, can have a bad effect. Both on the poster, and other readers who identify. I'd posit it's worth it to just ignore, in this case.

Thanks.

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