Getting rid of a chess addiction

Question

How do I get rid of achess addiction? Both winning and losing just make me play more, and in the end, after many hours of play, I feel miserable.

Answer 1

You are probably referring to online chess and I know this problem, because I've suffered from online chess adiction at least a year or so. It helped me to realise that those imaginary rating points online are not worth anything and that playing at fast time controls does not improve your chess (too much bullet might even harm it).

Therefore, I suggest, you approach chess a bit more seriously over the board, so you have successes you can be proud of. This means that you don't need the kick of online chess anymore, or at least that was the case for me.

Try finding something that makes you happy when you do it. For me, it is, at least sometimes, to be productive in any kind of way (choose an area of your liking) or to simply relax or hang out with friends. Generally speaking, playing lots of online chess is one of the LEAST PRODUCTIVE things you can do and nothing that will propel your skill in any area. Hanging out with your friends for instance, is a much better way of spending your time. I mean, I could go on about this, but those are my initial thoughts. If you have any specific questions about how I got rid of my online chess addiction, you may as well shoot me a message.

Answer 2

A suggestion would be to delete your account on the website you are playing. It's hard to click "delete", losing all your statistics and games, but after it's done you might feel like going back to the point you were before would take too much time, so you decide to do something else instead.

I had this issue with a particular video game, I decided to delete my character and never played the game again. I had urges, but I felt like it would take too much time to get back where I was and I didn't want to redo the same things I did before. I mean, you can easily rank up in chess with a new account, but the idea is that you might not want to do it.

Answer 3

"How do I get rid of chess addiction? Both winning and losing just make me play more, and in the end, after many hours of play, I feel miserable."

You have a very solvable problem. 'many hours of play' is the real culprit.

Limit yourself to a set timeframe. I won't play more than an hour or so in a day, which for me, would be 2 games at a time control of G15 (15 minutes per side for entire game). I find it gives me enough time to play reasonably, and the games are enjoyable.

With the following time controls, in 1 hour you can play:

G3 - 10 games

G5 - 6 games

G10 - 3 games

G15 - 2 games

G30 - 1 game

An important aspect of this is that with G10 and slower, you should always review your games. Spend any additional time after playing on this and learn something.

Chess is to be played and enjoyed.

Answer 4

If you are playing online, one thing you can do is to make a password like "dontplaytoomuch" or something. It sounds silly, but having this sort of password (I mix it up with numbers, for any hackers watching) is a small but nice nudge. There are studies showing these small things can add up, which is fortunate, because so often small things can send us into a time wasting spiral.

Addictive behavior in general is tricky to deal with, and it's important to recognize when you are just playing out of inertia. Often this becomes obvious if you make a really dumb mistake. There's a double benefit to this: you save rating points. Maybe you can even step back and look to improve your game.

But regardless of how your addictive behavior invades your life, there are ways around it. For instance, I caught myself playing FreeCell to put off things I needed to do, so I

• deleted the Windows Freecell.exe app
• installed a SiteBlock extension for my various web browsers to avoid a certain freecell site. I googled "add-on to restrict time on a website" and found some nice ones. Now, you can use a password to re-enter a site, but the point is, it's deliberately intrusive and difficult.
• Finally, I wrote a FreeCell game in Python, to learn something. You may not want to take the drastic step of writing a chess engine, but I know I played chess out of inertia a lot, forgetting the main reason I played it was that I could learn and enjoy trying new things. So maybe you need to evaluate something you really want to learn that might give you the same happiness you used to get from chess.

Other points: - this may seem paradoxical, but set aside a half-hour per day for playing games. If you can stick to it, this will help you feel you aren't totally missing out. - I don't know if you have options to set up a profile, but even typing "I like to play chess, but sometimes I lose track of time play too much. If I've been on for an hour, and I challenge you, can you poke me to get back to work?" may help. This is true without beating yourself up, and maybe it will help other people get back to stuff you need to do. - Write a program to kick yourself out after an hour, or you might even ask on various channels if someone has written a time-management program that allows you an hour per day. You probably aren't the first to ask about this!

There are many tools out there to help you. But as @postnubilaphoebus says, and @Habbo commented, it's important to recognize there are better ways to spend your time. Playing chess has definite diminishing returns to scale.

Having goals outside chess helps. Maybe it is just getting through a book before it is due at the library, or working out, or connecting with old friends, or making new ones. If you're worried you might not be good at it, well, you're not alone in getting sucked into online life.

The main thing I've found with addictive behaviors is framing it as "I want to give myself a reason to do something cooler" works a lot better than "I have to stop doing this."

Good luck! I think all of us chess players can be prone to going into a chess-playing shell, so don't be too ashamed of getting in a rut even if it's lasted a while. I hope you get lots of other suggestions on this topic, because moving on from habits that aren't quite as fun any more isn't as easy as it seems it should be. And some things work much better for some people than for others.

Answer 5

I gave the password of my online chess account to a best friend. She controls when I can have access to my online chess app. I can create a new account, however, I don't because I want to play with my existing account, which has a long history. It worked. I ask her for it during the weekend and in the evening. It was the last measure I had to do after everything else failed. Online chess can be very addictive.

Answer 6

Here's a search engine trick that may help. You can block and unblock websites, so maybe you can block the chess site you're on, take a rest for a few days, and then unblock and start playing again. You don't have to delete your account.