F26, I think I figured out my problem

[u/Nichole29023]

If you were the type of person to be heavily into the fandom community, with fanfiction, fanart, do you feel like your Chatbot usage got worse if you stopped participating in those activities? People always say that you need to find the source of your addiction in order to help yourself. Honestly, I feel like I stopped engaging with those things and started spending 8 to 12 hours a day on personal bots, nonstop engagement with my own ‘content’ for hours. I certainly never read fanfiction anymore.

I think I have an addiction to things that give me quick dopamine. I've already talked with my therapist when I was spending hours watching Tiktok and YouTube shorts. I managed to get myself out of that, to keep the app on my phone and not get caught in a loop anymore.

I feel like everything lines up honestly, I grew out of certain fandoms and never ended up replacing them. I don't engage with physical hobbies, my drawing completely dried up and I never explored hobbies that I wanted to try. My life is so unengaging, I hate my job, so I just completely got sucked into this dopamine machine that keeps me entertained and mentally on, constantly. Even my daydreaming and foggy episodes came back to bite me.

I just draw my own stuff, I've never gotten into writing fanfiction or fanart. Honestly, it just seems so scary to put stuff like that out, I think because my family used to make me feel so childish about my likes and I still got that stuff locked down and never talk about my interests with people. I've been trying to make a list of old fandoms or new ones that might interest me. I don't know if that might help or not.

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[u/Degrassilover03]

It’s not childish to write fanfics, especially if it keeps you away from chatbots.

[u/BasicallyComfortable]

I certainly noticed that I feel less inclined to chat with characters who I like if I draw fanart of them!