Hi, I made a reddit account just to give you some advice. I am approaching 30 and till last year I was dangerously obsessed with tf2. I started playing about 3.5 years ago and managed to rack up nearly 6000 hours on tf2. My addiction was at its peak about a year ago when there were days when I would play for 18 hours straight, with an average of about 9-10 hours / day on weekdays. Even at work, I would be watching tf2 streams or videos. I was always sleep deprived and my health and work suffered and I would probably have been canned from my job had it not been for a pretty lenient boss. Mentally I was depressed and extremely stressed (this was due to reasons beyond tf2 but fear of being fired from my job which I was neglecting due to tf2 was a big factor).

I was well aware of my addiction and tried to quit multiple times but failed. I completely deleted tf2 AND gave away my steam account, didn't help, in less than a week I had made a new account and was back to playing like a maniac. I tried going to the gym regularly and exercising to get rid of my depression, but that didn't help either. I tried quitting cold-turkey for a month, filling the void with binge-watching TV shows, and for some time I thought it worked because I stopped getting daily urges to play tf2, but I made the mistake of installing tf2 again just to play for "old times' sake", and bang, I was back on the addiction train.

In the end, what actually got me off tf2 was another obsession. Due to my unhealthy sedentary lifestyle, I was about 50lbs overweight. I started running in the morning daily to shed some weight, and slowly I got obsessed with the scale and in watching the numbers go down. I stuck to a sub-1200 calorie diet and in 4 months I lost 32 lbs. I also changed jobs around that time, and this time I made a firm decision to not allow tf2 to ruin my career. I forced myself to not play tf2 during weekdays and stuck to a regular sleeping schedule. I still played during weekends, but due to lack of practice, I was no longer as good at tf2. I slowly lost my "tf2 ego" (the need to be better than others) and this helped a lot in getting over tf2. Nowadays I no longer play tf2, instead I watch TV shows or cook (I love baking) or go running etc. I am still pleasantly surprised at how much free time I have now since I quit tf2.