Internet addiction

[Jake123]

Has anyone here been addicted to the internet which caused their social anxiety?
At some points in my life (mostly middle-school) I looked heroin chic, like an addict who did drugs every day, never slept. Huge black circles under eyes, freakishly skinny with clothes literally just hanging from my skeleton, basically just dead-looking and zombielike. People actually constantly asked me if I was a heroin/crack addict. It's because I lived on the internet and was too busy to sleep or eat.
My life WAS the internet, and real-life social situations were alien to me.
On the internet I was social, happy, outgoing, having the time of my life (as far as one could have on the early internet on dialup)

I wasn't actually anxious at all until I "recovered" from my internet addiction and ventured into the real world as a participant. Before I would just go through the motions of living and not care what anyone thought, said, or did because it didn't matter to me at all and I did what I wanted without worrying, because online was my life, the real world wasn't. I had no social anxiety because I didn't see myself as a part of it.

But once that breakthrough happened, it pretty much all came at once. Self-consciousness, anxiety, worrying about what other people think, low self-esteem, constantly analyzing myself, etc...

Anyone have something similar happen, or been addicted to the internet and have it affect their lives? What about a pivotal moment in your life that began your social anxiety? Or how the internet has hurt/helped your life.

 

[danstelter]

I don't feel that it caused my social anxiety, but Internet addiction has played a large role in my anxiety. At times in my life, particularly when I had few friends and felt the most anxious, I found myself spending many hours on the Internet, primarily playing games. I would play for eight or more hours per day at times, and this was the worst when I was a teenager. I still use it a lot, but not as a social outlet. I have many friends in real life and am able to do all the things I need to socially. I use it now for working on my anxiety recovery website, class, researching stocks, and playing an occasional game or two. I do enjoy being wired, and I feel much better when I have the Internet in a healthy place in life.

It sounds like you have a really good understanding of how it affected your life, and I am sure that there are many, many people who have also had social anxiety cause their Internet addiction.

I guess my question for you is how do you use it now that you realize the effects it has had on your life? Do you use it all the time, but to do good things? Do you use it some of the time, or not at all?