How to Enjoy life again...

I have had some phases in my life where I wasn't feeling so good. I don't want to say that I was depressed, I want to be very careful with using that word, but I've definitely felt like s*** a lot of the time. And it got to the point where I just isolated myself and I didn't really even want to hang out with my friends that much anymore. I didn't really feel like talking to girls, even though somewhere deep down I kind of wanted to get some action with the girls, I didn't really feel like talking to them at all. It was way out of my comfort zone. And all I really did was just stay at home mostly, try to entertain myself, maybe play some video games, watch some YouTube videos, just get some instant gratification. But the fun things in my life weren't even fun anymore. I wasn't actually having fun doing the fun things and at the same time I had zero motivation to actually work towards my goals and try to improve my life. It was like I was stuck for some reason. I was stuck in a somewhat crappy existence, a somewhat crappy life that I just wasn't enjoying anymore. Now I started to notice something a little bit weird over time and that is the fact that every time that I came back from a vacation, and keep in mind that this is like 15, 20 years ago, so we're talking about like an age roughly before smartphones here, right? So a vacation meant that you had no phone or no computer at all, but you would just spend like two weeks in nature, in a tent or at the beach or wherever, right? You would just spend two weeks without any form of technology in real life with real people. That's what a vacation was back then. I noticed that whenever I came back from the vacation that I felt ******* hyped on life. Things were fun. I could start up a video game and it kind of felt like I was playing that video game for the first time ever as if I was a kid again. It was totally different from before I went on a vacation. I remember a time, and I kid you not, I remember a time when I turned on the tv and I was watching commercials and the commercials were keeping me entertained. This is not a joke. I was just staring at the commercials like an idiot and for some reason that was fun enough to keep me interested. And I felt motivated to do things. Now most of this time I was very young and I didn't like solid business plans or anything, but I do distinctly remember that I always felt like I wanted something out of life. I did think yeah I want to get rich and yeah I want to get a girlfriend and I want to get a better body and I just wanted things, right? I was hyped on life. I felt like hanging out with my friends more. I felt like doing a whole bunch of things. And I also noticed that usually, well not usually, every time after a matter of days, maybe a week, usually days, that this feeling disappeared again and I fell right back into my old way of feeling where I just felt like ---- again. I had no motivation to do things and even the fun things weren't fun anymore. Now I initially didn't know about a thing called dopamine because back then self-improvement videos really weren't a thing. At least they weren't mainstream and they weren't really talking about dopamine as far as I was aware of. So I had never heard about dopamine yet. But I was smart enough to sort of connect the dots and think hey maybe the reason why watching porn feels so good after two weeks is the fact that I haven't done it in two weeks, right? And maybe the reason why I'm starting up this video game and having so much fun is the fact that I haven't played it in two weeks. And maybe the reason why I am normally not really having so much fun with these things is because I do them too much and I have somehow numbed or overstimulated my brain. I did sort of start to realize that and so I got to a point in my life where I wanted to change and I decided to do these things a little bit less. I started to experiment with it. Now one of the first things that I did is that I started to watch less porn. I'm gonna be honest with you guys, at first initially I mainly cared about just having as much pleasure as possible and having as much fun as possible. And I noticed that when I came back after a vacation and I went to that first fap with porn that it was like a mind-blowing experience. And I told myself I want to have this every time that I fap to porn. So I made a decision to not fap to porn for like a week or two weeks and then do it like once a week or once every two weeks. I also cut down the video games that I played by a lot because I played them all the time. I've had phases where I didn't even have a job and I'd literally play 24-7. But then even when I had a job then I just played them whenever I came home every hour of my free time. So now this was in a phase where I believe I just started to play online poker. So this is something that I did myself on my own computer. So I actually had like a reason to not play video games all the time and I could just grind hard on poker. So I'd play poker most of the week and I drastically cut down on video games and I just played them in like the weekend or something. You know like on Saturday evening my friends would be playing a game and then I'd join them for the game. But most of the week during the weekdays on like Monday evening, Tuesday evening, I'd just play poker. And even if I wouldn't be playing poker then I just went out for a walk and I chose not to play video games because I wanted video games to be something that I did less so that it actually became fun, right? I also started to watch a lot less YouTube videos and browse 4chan less because that's also something that I do a lot. Everything so that I would like sort of cut down on the overstimulation of my brain in hopes that my life would actually become fun again and it ******* worked. It is true. I sort of had that same feeling that I had whenever I came back from my vacation but now I had this feeling all the time. Every single week on like Friday or Saturday evening when I started up that porn my body would literally tingle. It would literally tingle and I had an amazing fapping session. Every time that I started up that video game and I played a game with my friends I was having fun. I was actually having fun instead of that state that I normally had before where I would just play the game but just you know sit there with a straight face not actually having fun but not actually being able to quit the game either, right? A lot of you guys probably know exactly what I'm talking about. You do something because you're trying to have fun but you're not actually having fun and you just keep doing it and keep doing it until you eventually wonder what you're doing and why you're doing it. And I also noticed and this is perhaps the best part that I started to become more motivated to do other things in life. Now I did not initially care about this. Like I said I just wanted to have more fun and have better faps to point. But after a while I started to notice that I actually became more motivated to work towards my goals and I started to actually become hyped on life again. I started to actually feel happy. I started to actually feel hyped to see my friends more often. I didn't want to isolate myself all the time anymore and I even got hyped to start to talk to girls. I actually wanted to go out and like talk to girls and have sex and maybe get a girlfriend. Whereas before that was just completely unimaginable to me. I mean yeah sure somewhere deep down I wanted to have sex and I wanted to have a girlfriend but the idea of actually going out and talking to girls and possibly getting rejected that was just so far away from me. But now I actually felt this hype where I thought yeah I'm ready to get rejected. Let's get rejected and let's learn from rejection and failure and let's finally get a girlfriend and let's hang out with my friends. I was hyped on life again. And so after a while the self-improvement videos started to become a thing on YouTube and I saw some videos of people talking about dopamine and dopamine detoxes and how overstimulation is bad for you. And I thought that is me. That is exactly what has happened to me. The reason why I have felt so bad and I felt so stuck in life for such a long time is because I always had this lifestyle where I overstimulated my brain with too much entertainment. And the reason why I felt so good after coming back from vacation or after making these lifestyle changes that I did is because I had sort of without knowing or trying it I had sort of done a dopamine detox or a dopamine reset. Because usually when people talk about the dopamine detox they talk about like a week where you just meditate and do absolutely nothing right. That's not what I did. I actually made like a sustainable lifestyle. But it's because I had done a dopamine reset without knowing it. And so all this time that I was feeling so bad, that I was feeling so semi-depressed, the key to changing my life, the key to being able to enjoy life again was to stop this overstimulating lifestyle and to reset my dopamine system. That was the key. That was the one big underlying thing that made the difference between the bad life that I used to have and the good life that I have created for myself right now. Being able to actually be happy and feel good again all boiled down to unnumbing my dopamine system. And now some people are probably going to think oh a dopamine detox that sounds like hell. Because then you're never allowed to do fun things again right. I don't want to do that. No that's not worth it. I just want to continue to play my video games. But it's not like that at all. I mean yeah sure you're probably going to play video games a little bit less and you're probably going to spend less time scrolling through the tiktok videos. But that's not really a problem if the fun things aren't even fun anymore right. If you've gotten to the point in your life where the fun things aren't actually that fun anymore then it's not really going to be a problem if you have to do them a little bit less. Because by doing them less the times that you do still do them actually become more fun. The net amount of fun that you have in your life will actually go up because of it. It sounds a bit ironic yes but by doing less fun things you will actually end up having more fun in life. And that's not all that you get because you will also get motivation to work towards your goals and you will get that hype to stop isolating yourself all the time. To actually hang out with your friends again. Spend time with friends and family. Maybe even talk to some girls and just go out and live a better life. It will unlock the potential for you to actually enjoy life again. All right boys for those of you that don't know it yet i have a community now called the reclaim your life community. It's hosted on a platform called school. It's a free community you can just go there and sign up and you can get that little bit of extra help if you want it to. There's a bunch of free courses. There's a dopamine reset course. There's a quitting poor mini course and i'm going to add a bunch of more courses in the near future. So you can go there and you can watch these courses all that you want. Learn a lot more about dopamine and how to actually reset your dopamine system. There's a community section where you can post everything you want and ask for advice on any topic including dopamine of course. And i'm probably even going to respond to your question myself at least for now. Now that the community isn't extremely crowded yet. So if you want more help and you just want to be part of my community and get more life advice then definitely check out the link below this video. Sign up for the free community. There's no catch. It's all free. There's only positives to your life. Okay so you're more than welcome to join your community and i hope that i can add great value to your life that way. So i'll see you there and whether or not you join the community i hope that i also see you in the next video because i'm going to be creating a lot of videos in the near future and the far future as well. Okay we're not going to stop. We're going to do this together. See you in the next video boys.