I've always had an addictive personality. I don't know about you, but when something hooks me...it hooks me.

There have been many addictions in my life - poker (I actually did well there), video games, bad food, and all sorts of other hobbies.

I'm not sure that the addictive tendencies within me will ever go away. Maybe it's just a part of my brain?

I was reading a post by @acidyo about a simple walk through the neighborhood, and he mentioned how little he thought about smoking. I thought to myself, "Thank God I'm not addicted to smoking." But what I didn't realize is that we're all addicted to something, we just lie to ourselves and say we're not.

Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash

Then I realized something...

All of my addictions had a few things in common:

1. Instant gratification
2. Instant feedback
3. A sense of progress

Sound familiar?

That's called a game.

Then I stepped one level above that thinking and said to myself, "Why don't you just turn your life into a game?"

This isn't a novel thought - people have done this before. In fact, there are apps like HabitRPG that help you "gamify your life."

But for me, I wanted a custom solution. I wanted to write the rules to my own game of life and play it.

Here are a few things I've done:

1. Defined what constitutes "winning the game" - for me, that's improving myself in all areas of life to the best of my ability
2. Figured out my "starting stats" - what am I good at naturally? What am I bad at?
3. Determined what actions to take to make progress in "the game" and how to value them

So for example, I start to see ordering a pizza as losing me points in the game, because it's hurting the fitness progress of my character.

Or if I'm not getting enough sleep, I might say that my "energy bar is low" and prioritize my sleep so I can get more stuff done in the day - thereby making progress in the game.

Use Your Addictions To Help You

Not everyone is a game addict like me. But everyone has SOMETHING they gravitate towards. Food, alcohol, relationships...you name it.

Try to find the underlying thing that attracts you to your particular addiction, and then reverse engineer it so it works FOR you and not AGAINST you.

Good luck in the game.

Photo by Mark Cruz on Unsplash

---

Thanks For Reading!

If this is your first time reading my writing, thank you!

My name is Kevin and I run a website called Epic Gardening, where it is my goal to teach 1,000,000 people how to garden. Now that I've found Steemit, I'm going all in on this community and sharing as much as I can here. You'll find me writing about gardening, business, health, and philosophy - I can't seem to stick to one topic :P

Thanks and happy Steeming,

Kevin