Unhealthy special interests that you were glad to be rid of

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I've had few unhealthy special interests that I was very glad to see the back of. My experience of obsessions is like being a lone captive passenger handcuffed to a high speed runaway train being driven by a deranged madman. Only that I'm held 100% responsible for the actions of the driver. Terrifying.

Gaming. Honestly, hands down the worst one in my opinion, when you get to that point of the interest that you're so clued up on the intricate details of game lore it's not right.

It's ok in very small doses, maybe a couple of hours a day. Other than that I feel it's wasted a hell of a lot of my life and in that time I could have achieved a lot more instead of wasting 10 years on MMOs.

If you're playing 12+ hours a day you clearly have some kind of obsession which can lead to an array of complicated mental health problems and bad habits like smoking/drinking.

A lot of people tend to get addicted to the game drama as well, this is an unhealthy obsession imo.

I binned gaming off for the better. I miss it but it's not worth it. That s**t will still be around while you're retired so make the most of life now while you have youth.

I haven't seen you in three years. Welcome back!

I hope the same for you.

I’m doing all right.

Yeah. Ive had it happen that an interest becomes so intense that other aspects of my life suffer in my pursuit of the interest. Not fun. And I never realize it while I'm in the middle of it. I neglect life, people, responsibilities, sometimes it hurts me money wise. Meh. As much as I love special interests, they mess me up sometimes.

I can't recall much that I've really got rid of, except maybe my interest in the Beatles. Not that I'm disinterested in them now, just that got pretty extreme once and I'm glad to be over that. Every record I heard, I'd just think "well it's OK but it's not the Beatles," which didn't help my social life much. But I kind of miss the days when I knew the words of every song and the track listing of every album etc. in astonishing detail.

I don't have very sharply-demarked special interests these days - I have fairly broad tastes in pastimes and although I can get sucked into one for a worrying amount of time, I always surface again eventually. I think I began to learn that complete obsession with a particular interest wasn't entirely healthy, that while I was so focussed on one thing, important things were getting neglected.

So these days the pattern is that I get stuck on an interest for a while - sometimes as little as an hour or two, as my "interests" are often about some or other small detail of a subject which doesn't take forever to track down. I'm nearly always aware of the danger of letting myself go, and so I have a constantly nagging idea that says "you should be getting unstuck from this by now," which tends to keep me from the extremes of obsession. There's also a strong feeling of "but I can't distract myself now, that would be quite wrong," and it often takes quite a bit of conscious will to escape from whatever it is that has hold of my attention, and I often escape rather later than I was hoping to, but it's usually better when I do escape, at least after a few minutes. My fears that I'll never be able to resume the matter often prove to be unfounded, in fact I often find a break helps me to approach the thing better the next time I look at it, and that some of the things I get stuck on really aren't anything like as important as I felt they were at the time, though sometimes when I resume I find a mess of loose ends, and I feel upset at the waste of time in having to sort it all out again, and while I'm trying to sort it out I sometimes feel that I can't manage to recapture the state of good focus that I'd had before the interruption. I can think of one rather complicated audio processing project I was working enthusiastically on some time ago, and I dread going back to it after all this time, because it bears the hallmarks of the kind of project that I might not be able to resume properly at all.

But I think overall the best thing is to live a balanced life in which all the most important matters get their share of my attention in a timely manner. I still spend a lot more time messing about on the Web than I feel is healthy, but so far I've only made minor inroads into disciplining myself to limit that activity so that I can get on with other things, and I don't like myself for not fixing it sooner.

I had an unhealthy interest in a young couple (both in their 20s) when I was a teenager. I got a sexual crush on the man, and an obsession with the woman. I was so obsessed, that it took over my mind, interfered with my school life (I lost friends over it), talked about them literally in about 99% of any conversation I had, and I even ended up getting myself into trouble because of harassment. I'd hang about outside their house, I knew their car license plates off by heart, I drew countless pictures of them and their cars, and I was constantly looking up any information I could find about them whenever I got my hands on a computer at school (thank God Facebook wasn't invented back then). I got all my younger cousins involved in the obsession, my friends fell out with me because of the intensity of the obsession, and I just had this constant nagging urge to talk about the obsession and hang about near their house. My parents even had a visit from the police.
But thankfully I started to lose interest in the obsession when I was 17, because I had left school and was branching out, so the obsession started fading away - AND I WAS RELIEVED!

Yep, that is what you call an unhealthy obsession.

Online gaming for me was a problem when I was younger. I finally had to decide I couldn't do the online gaming thing anymore, too addictive. Then most recently, taking high range IQ tests I think became too much for a few years. It got to where I was always working on solving a test, and obsessing over what the score would be. I got more and more ambitious about how I expected to do on the tests, and kept raising the bar for myself, often to unrealistic heights. Then whatever the score came back as would make or break my day. Often it'd come back at a really weird time because many of these people are in different time zones, so I'd be checking my email in the middle of the night. A high score actually made me feel pretty manic, which isn't a good thing. I remember many, many days where I was let down by a score report, and then spent the rest of the day obsessively working on another submission or new test to help bring myself back up. Then when I'd get a score I was hoping for, I'd want to do it again and again, and the cycle would continue. I'd quickly lose the high and feel empty inside, or I'd realize I made some silly mistakes and feel regret that I hadn't done even better. I'm glad to have been on a break from it for several months now. I still have a bunch of tests in mind if I want to re-enter that hobby, like I know there's at least one contest going on that I could get into and do well on, but...I'm just trying to resist it, at least for a while. If it was all fun and games I'd be ok with it, but there were a lot of disappointments, frustrations, and less healthy aspects to it. Sometimes I'd spend all day and still feel a bit disappointed. I think a good way to weigh if something is worth it is to consider how much time you're putting in, and how much satisfaction it's giving you, when all is said and done.

Thank you very much all the members who shared their stories of special interests that took over your lives for a while. I recognised the thrill of the immersion, but also the regret over the time wasted and the embarrassment.

I've had many obsessions with people, but my "king"of obsessions was when I was younger where I had a serous obsession with chemistry and making explosives. This was before the internet and before Al-Qaeda made every teen explosive making experimenter a terrorist suspect. I got really deeply into it for a long time. It really did take over most of my waking moments and I thought that I was incredibly clever and special at the time. But looking back it was stupidly dangerous and a waste. Whatever skills and knowledge I accumulated from the interest have no practice application in the real world. Maybe if a zombie apocalypse occurs it might come in handy, but outside of fantasy scenarios there is no use for a civilian to have those skills. It was just as big a waste of time as had I got obsessed with an online computer game for a few years, but more dangerous. Luckily a part of the obsession was complete paranoia about safety and making sure no one knew what I was doing. That's why I still have all my fingers and my eyesight and no criminal record. But I'm still terrified by what might have happened. I was an amateur who believed I was an expert and only half knew what I was doing and I've read too many stories of tragic injury. If I had that kind of obsession now, I’d be facing serious gaol time if I was caught. I’m a lot older and wiser, but I have a fear of something like that gripping me again and ruining my life.

^
I can relate to that fear, even though I've never let myself get as immersed as you have, for such a long time and on anything so dangerous. It always seems to me that I have 3 options - indulge myself completely and wreck my life in the long term, forsake special interests completely and live my life out like a bored, hearbroken zombie, or strike a balance and feel the anxiety of always being on that knife-edge between the two, like a drug addict who keeps tantalising himself with limited doses. I've chosen the third option. It's a lousy option but the other two are even worse. Yet I wouldn't call myself unhappy overall.

Probably MMORPGs. Really nasty addiction when I was a teenager. I don't blame myself but the desire to waste so much money on pixels was strong.

Same with these dressup games that were part gacha....wasted so much dumb cash on them, idk why....

I don’t even know what those acronyms mean......