Spending my personal time on reddit and hackernews is a form of self-punishment

On Friday evening and Sunday evening I felt extremely nervous and anxious. For no clear reason. It was the generalized anxiety due to not doing walks as regularly, and skipping out on the meditation. Oh and no writing because of other things. So that meant I was not grounded. I felt gross, disgusted, and wanted to punish myself. Which meant...dun dun dun, I was on the internet! All the time, hours and hours on random reddits looking through crap that I never ever needed to know about, that only messes up my minds, and feeling awful about it. Getting into hackernews and enraging myself, feeling bad about that, getting away, coming back to it, and repeating the goddamn cycle. I kept doing it over and over again until my body was tired, my eyes were dry, my brain hurt and I had to go sleep.

In the big picture, that's not the worse things that could happen to somebody. But it's so innocuous, one barely sees it as an active self-harm, that it's easy to perceive it as normal behavior. It is not. It's a way to punish oneself. Reminding oneself how everybody else is doing well, telling one they are not doing as good, and wallowing in pity and other painful emotions. It's disgusting.

I need to stop. Going on reddit and hackernews is self-harm, it makes me unhappy, it makes me addicted, I don't get new information out of it. It interrupts my productive hours, at work and at personal time. I hate it. This is an admission, I have a problem, and the only way to solve it is to understand the pattern of behavior and offer myself ways to deal with it!