Dear Tak:

I will paraphrase what you shared (it helps me understand better when I do that): You’ve been browsing the internet a lot, obsessing over a lot of details that are not useful to your life, fantasizing and overall wasting a lot of your time in these ways. You feel that you are not present for your life, disconnected from people, and addicted to… wasting your time, escaping the present, escaping a life you could otherwise have. When you stopped escaping being present, what happened is that you felt “deep feelings of sadness, anger, or anxiety”.

When that happened, you took some positive mental and practical actions:  you moved your attention away from these emotions and toward the bodily sensations that you experienced and you attended meetups, dated more, worked more effectively in your full time job, etc.

After that, you unfortunately “fall back into addictive escapism and the cycle repeats” when something good happens in your life and you feel better as a result. You then want to feel even better but real life doesn’t provide you the opportunity to feel better, so you start browsing the internet, fantasizing and so  forth. Or when something great happens in your life, such as going on a couple of dates with a “hot friendly girl”- you then get anxious and you then browse the internet, fantasize and escape the present opportunity to get an exciting relationship happen in real life.

My input- I see your problem as the same problem so many, if not all of us humans suffer from: anxiety. The emotional experience of anxiety is very unpleasant and we don’t want to experience it. So we escape it any which way. When something good happens in your life, a small thing, it feels good, and you want more of that good feeling- the easiest and fastest way is to browse the internet, this is your habit, and we do keep doing what we are in the habit of doing. If something big happens, you get excited and then fear is added to that excitement. So  you escape both.

Living a better life has to involve being able to endure excitement without being overwhelmed by it. It takes a whole lot of work and time to be able to do that, and the experience is of a very gradual increase of such endurance. You already read and practiced shifting your attention to bodily sensations so to ground yourself in the present time and place.

But there is more to do. Did you ever attend psychotherapy or otherwise examined your childhood experience, the origin of your anxeity?

anita

Dear Tak:

You are welcome.

“I have forgiven my parents and am good with them now”-

– success in psychotherapy is about healing from the damage we experienced in childhood and being good with ourselves ( way less anxious, more content, more functional), vs being “good with them”.

anita