"He began playing WOW during beta testing (he played various other games before it came out) and I played a bit myself and got addicted as well until I had a similar wakeup call to what you described ..., and I dropped down to playing maybe 1-3 hours a week and sometimes a couple of weeks will go by when I don't play at all. (It is so hard to resist sometimes, but I know what is most important in my life)

One thing that really opened my eyes to how much time I was wasting was to use the "/played" command in the game. It will tell you exactly how may hours the character has been played down to the seconds. I have checked my husband's ... and it says about 24 days of game time has been spent on that specific character. That's 24
days of 24 hours each, so in about a three month period he has spent 576 hours of that time on that one character. That's not counting his level 20 ... or his level 15 ... or his level 16 ... or and of the other various leveled characters he has. Also it doesn't count all the time he spends on reading the web pages and message boards about the game. I know that many people here have addicts that play even more than this and my heart truly goes out to you.

It really makes me sick to think of all the time wasted on this. My husband does not have a job and we have been struggling our whole marriage with finances. I am a freelance ... and the majority of our income has been from my efforts. We have a ... girl and a ... boy, and I feel like I am raising them on my own most of the time.

I just try to survive emotionally and physically from day to day the best I can and be there for my kids."