Online communication strips emotional cues from conversation: tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language amongst others. This creates anonymity which hastens intimacy. People become bonded in mailing lists. The regular contact creates a sense of a relationship. Real time chats increase rate of information exchange and software architecture allows for transposing event into a book form to be read and digested at a later time.

The virtual neighborhood Virtual contact promotes support, encouragement, and sharing thus overcomes isolation. The Group becomes neighborhood, a community, coffee shop, Saturday night drag down main street to “see and be seen“. In groups at first there is honeymoon period where all is wine and roses, then comes disenchantment period where boundaries are tested, and finally there is cohesiveness. Early provocateurs challenge group leader and then depart to form, sometimes, hostile communities that thrive on “fight and flight”.

I am a reformed alcoholic. I am a reformed chain smoker. I am an ex fat person. I am also not selling anything. My only wish now is to help people by passing on my knowledge, I guess this sounds too good to be true. When you have really nearly died a few times, money takes on a sort of reduced role in your thinking. Make no mistake about it, we are all going to die, even you will die one day. When you are young this seems a long long way away, I'm fifty now, and it sure seems a little closer to hand than it did. So it makes sense to make time I have left quality time, free of drink smoking and obesity, after all it is easier to get older if you feel fitter, than if you are ruining your body daily. I wish I had started earlier in life, YOU CAN.

You may think I have superhuman will power to quit drinking and smoking, and gambling and all other excesses. To a certain extent that is true, I have a great deal of will power, but I also have a method, a way of thinking, which helps.

For some reason, and it may have been a good  one at time, you have a craving, an overpowering addiction. You love something more than you love yourself at present time.

Think myself or my health.

In this New Labour Tony Blair type world, certainly in Britain, everything is explainable in terms of something else more convenient. It doesn't detract from plain fact that Emperor really hasn't got any clothes on at all. In short, it's not stretching truth, it's really a very big lie.

This is what you are currently doing to yourself, you are living out a lie in order to placate yourself, in order to make what you are doing palatable. What you are really doing is killing yourself a lot quicker, and a lot more painfully than is really necessary, and by and large no one gives a damn whether you do or you don't, they are too busy with themselves to really and truly bother about YOU. By and large this is correct. The few people that possibly do care either haven't a clue how to help, or are simply hampered by realisation that it is only YOU who can cure it.

There are really no excuses If you are drinking too much you are a pain of a drunk. If you are smoking too much you are a pain of a smoker. If you are gambling too much you are a liability, just as you are if you are on drugs. You probably nodded to all these, and felt agreement, so why don't you realise that you are putting an intolerable  strain on people around you, to say nothing of strain on Health Professionals.

WHY?

Because you are too self indulgent to stop for a minute enjoying yourselves to see if you are bothering other people, too wrapped up in yourselves to care about others. There is no magic formula to giving up an addiction, You stop doing what it is that is costing you, and every  one around you a fortune. You stop paying out what you haven't got on things YOU DON'T REALLY NEED.

To break that down further, in order to do this you will need to change your whole way of life, permanently. Make no mistake, if you are really and truly HAPPY with what you are doing, then fine, go ahead and do it, but acknowledge that most things you really enjoy overdoing kill you slowly, and painfully, and most things  done to excess bring attendant guilt. Stop reading now if you don't want to quit for good and all or else you are wasting someone else's bandwidth who has what it takes when you have not got moral fibre.

What it takes is a modicum of will power combined with a hell of a lot of common sense. I have had a lot of addictions, I am an excessive natured person. I find first step in losing any of them is to look at them as a phase I have grown out of. I have matured to such an extent I no longer need their crutch to carry me onwards.