Struggling with anxiety and addiction

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I recently quit my addiction to a popular story-making/role-playing site called Character AI. On the site, you can create characters and also makeup stories. I was on it for 7 months and quit cold turkey last week. I'm feeling weird "withdrawal" effects such as boredom, the need to make up more stories, and less interest in activities I used to like. I mean this isn't like some drug addiction. The site is highly addictive though. Not only that, I had 3 anxiety attacks in the past week and a half. The first 2 were very subtle and not very intense. There was only slight discomfort when it came to physical sensations. I don't know what caused them, but they were over some minor things. The third one was a little more intense. I had completed a midterm exam for my college microeconomics class and two days ago the scores came out. I saw that my score was 37 out of a possible 100 points. It dropped my overall grade from an A to an F. I got extremely anxious and I felt a slight tightness in my chest and well I kind of felt my heart race. I felt scared and thought bad things might happen to me. These days I am having a hard time focusing on my college work, even though I've been studying for 5 hrs per day. Even though I try my best, I have a hard time focusing on the lectures in my college classes as well. I don't know if it's because of "withdrawal" from character AI or if it's something else, or if it's all in my head.

If gambling can be an addiction so can other behaviors. Other names for it are escapism and obsessive thinking and/or compulsive behavior. I have some problems with these things too. The Internet is often designed explicitly to hook these behaviors- I worked for a dot-com and when someone hits a page on your site and then clicks through to another page on your site they “stick to” the site. This is called “stickiness”. There is a lot of thought and discussion on how to make sites with a lot of stickiness. The term “addictive” is even used. Ad dollars and investment dollars are related to stickiness. Stickiness is a sellable thing so sites are designed for stickiness. If you were creating content for the site that was something else they can sell. “Data is the new oil”. One thing to realize is that someone is making money off that site but it wasn’t you. You were losing time and energy. You lost study time and brain power to focus. So it is like gambling or drug addiction- someone is benefiting but not you.
And like drug addiction you can loose the ability to enjoy things other than the “drug”.
12 step groups rely on personal connections to help you change behavior- one of my issues is being on the spectrum- personal connections are stressful and very hard- so when I am down I don’t want to connect. Autism and Social Anxiety always go together and Social Anxiety makes group work harder. So for me 12 step groups only help so much.
CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and DBT (Dialectic Behavioral Therapy) can help. Finding a therapist I can trust or a few people in support groups who don’t trigger my social anxiety can help - but it is hard. SMART recovery is a non-12-step recovery program but it has been hard for me to get connected with.
I have also tried DBT intensive outpatient groups. I attend a church based support group a few times a month and I take meds (SSRI and Strattera) for anxiety and ADHD. Autism has “special interests” and “perseveration” and ADHD has “hyperfocus” and “impulsivity” and for me these overlap with addictive behaviors.
One thing to do is remember “if nothing changes, nothing changes”. Keep looking things to change that could help.

Hi Skrish, here's my 2c...

Definitely sounds like withdrawal. Websites like that are designed to activate the same reward pathways in your brain that are activated by gambling, drug and alcohol or any other addiction. Unfortunately it can take a while for your brain to trim those neural connections, so you will likely experience anxiety and conscious and/or unconscious urges to return to the behaviour among other things. My guess would be you already had a decent amount of anxiety prior to finding this site?

Try to bear in mind that any addiction is a maladaptive coping strategy; as such when you stop the behaviour it makes coping more difficult. Exploring more constructive coping methods will help your brain rewire faster and give you other strategies to manage yourself.

It's not easy though. be gentle and patient with yourself, and get get some support from friends/family if you can.

Good luck!

It's pretty normal and healthy to have that fear, it means you strongly value the things that this has cost you, and that you have a good grasp of how tempting these sites are. Fear can be a great motivator, use it to your advantage!

here are some things I'd put to you to consider:

Come up with a plan for what you will do to avoid these sites and what you will do if you do happen to relapse. If you google 'relapse prevention plan' you should find some useful templates and advice.

It could be worth seeing a counsellor/therapist if possible; addiction is very often linked to trauma and other underlying issues, so while addressing the ultimate behaviours is important it's also really important to identify any underlying issues that may be at the root of it and address those too.

I imagine from what you've said that you are creative, do you have other options for creative outlets that you could try?

Relapse is part of the process of recovery, if you do slip up go easy on yourself. Dust yourself off and keep trying.

You can do it!

As a recovered alcoholic, I don't know that the difference between physical addiction and dependence is always that important, especially if something is having a negative impact on somebody's life.

I wouldn't personally go cold turkey as that rarely works. (Admittedly that did work for me with pot and alcohol, but I'm really an exception there) It's probably better off to just set a timer whenever you want to go for some amount of time that you think is reasonable. If at the end of the time you still want to spend a few minutes, then do so without any guilt. Over time you should find that you're opting to continue abstaining more often and that you can set a longer delay.

Giving something up forever is a lot easier than giving it up for a minute or two. I can't think of anything, including breathing, that I couldn't give up for that long.

Have you had issues with compulsions or obsessions before you found these sites?

Websites and social media can be very addictive. I Know I waste an enormous amount of time on Facebook and really Need to get back to work and other things and not scroll that stuff watching time just disappear. Sometimes hard to do, so good for you for making a change.

When I took micro and macro economics they were so frustrating because while I understood the basics, the instructor we had was pretty terrible at actually teaching anything about how calculations and formulas worked so we could actually do the work and figure out solutions to problems. It wasn’t just me Or just the people on my class/program - it was almost everyone who took those classes. Maybe some people did well regardless, but for Many people it was their lowest grade or two and we all basically just decided that we weren’t going to lose sleep over it because all we had to do was Pass and then hopefully it didn’t bring down overall gap’s enough to really make a big difference in the grand scheme of things for anyone who’s gpa mattered to their future careers or studies.

Are you doing well in other things and just tanked on your econ class? Maybe others did terribly as well and it’s just a class people aren’t going to get high grades in.. maybe just need to try to Pass it and do well with everything else so you don’t let it bring you down in other subjects. Worst case you might redo it with another teacher if there’s a different one available.

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