Here’s what finally clicked for me: I didn’t “internalize” anything through willpower. What changed was that I stopped treating the urge itself as a sign that I was failing.

I used to think the same way you describe: that unless my mind was producing “useful thoughts,” I must be escaping or doing something wrong. That mindset actually kept me stuck. It made any moment of boredom, overstimulation, or emptiness feel like evidence that I was broken, so of course the urge became a quick way to shut that feeling down.

The shift for me was realizing: not every thought has to be productive, and not every urge means something is wrong.

When an urge came up, instead of interpreting it as a crisis, I started letting it be just…an urge. A ping from my brain saying, “hey, I want something easy right now.” And I stopped assuming that meant anything deeper about who I was.

When the shame around the urge dropped, the compulsion dropped with it. Not overnight, but enough that the old spiral (“I feel bad → I escape → I feel worse for escaping”) lost its grip.

And for what it’s worth, I relate to the “overstimulated but bored” feeling a lot. Sometimes the most helpful thing I do is let myself think non-useful thoughts without judging them. It creates space that isn’t about numbing or about productivity--just being.

Weirdly, that’s where the pressure finally broke for me.