I need to up my game.

Phineas 808

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
Awesome, Escape! I like everything you said in the previous two posts above…!

How I think of it if I’m finishing the year with struggles, is, like you said, start right away. That way you go into the next year already abstaining. Then you can leave porn behind as ‘last years news’. This helps me to start right away, and to look forward to the new year…

Before rejoining Reboot Nation, September of 2020, I did the same thing you’re doing now, I made a list of all my previous streaks, which at the time averaged every 6-8 days or so I’d lapse. But sometimes it’d be shorter or longer… But I scaled these days from smallest to longest and used them as mini-abstinence challenges…

It’s always good to step back and assess the bigger picture like you’re doing, because that helps us to tailor make a plan that’s going to work for us…

Wishing you the best!
 

Escapeandnevercomeback

Respected Member
Awesome, Escape! I like everything you said in the previous two posts above…!

How I think of it if I’m finishing the year with struggles, is, like you said, start right away. That way you go into the next year already abstaining. Then you can leave porn behind as ‘last years news’. This helps me to start right away, and to look forward to the new year…

Before rejoining Reboot Nation, September of 2020, I did the same thing you’re doing now, I made a list of all my previous streaks, which at the time averaged every 6-8 days or so I’d lapse. But sometimes it’d be shorter or longer… But I scaled these days from smallest to longest and used them as mini-abstinence challenges…

It’s always good to step back and assess the bigger picture like you’re doing, because that helps us to tailor make a plan that’s going to work for us…

Wishing you the best!
Thanks man.
 

Escapeandnevercomeback

Respected Member
Doesn't mean you'll lapse unless you forget why you're doing this and make the choice to. You're in control, those temptations can't stop you.

Keep going Escape, it's day 4 for me too. We can do this!
That's correct, man. The brain has this tendency to "forget" why we are doing this in the first place, the misery becomes a distant memory, the hypofrontality does it's job in choosing temporary empty pleasure instead of the big picture but we must not forget that we have the last word, we make the final decision no matter if it doesn't feel like this. We really are the last ones who choose between "Let's do it" and "No." We have more control than we think, we just need to focus. We need to disrupt the repetitive nature of this habit and remember that the urges create a feeling of urgency (I need to act now and get the pleasure) but we always need to wait and re-evaluate, not jump right in. Urge surfing is a powerful tool. I am not completely successful with this but I see why it works. Doing urge surfing while (very important) not paying attention to the porn thoughts because visualizing porn gets the dopamine wild, it's fuel for the fire, when we get urges we must ignore the flashbacks. They show up in our memory but we need to cut them short in the first second. Nothing creates more urges than (hyper)sexual porn-induced thoughts and porn-related fantasies.
 

Escapeandnevercomeback

Respected Member
Day 5

My memory is playing tricks with me, I thought I was on day 4.

I can do more than what I've displayed in the last month. I don't need to relapse anymore. 3 years of relapsing on Reboot Nation but I have more years than this, I go way back. I've been trying to quit porn and masturbation (in various degrees of knowledge about the problem) since 10 years ago. Enough relapsing. I don't want to turn this into a "Relapse/Restart" treadmill for the next 10 years or even more. It can happen, it's very possible, time flies. I've spent my 20s with this porn addiction I could easily spent my 30s.

The problem is actually simple: We get a dopamine high in response to a stimulus (porn). The solution then becomes clear: No more stimulus in all its shapes and forms because porn is not only video, it's subs, it's hypersexual thoughts, porn flashbacks and porn-related fantasies (that I'm crazy about). We must not only avoid watching/looking at anything, we need to avoid engaging with the hypersexual porn thoughts. They can't be completely stopped to invade our mind, that's what they do when you are a porn addict, but they can be dismissed, ignored, cut short in the first second.

The massive urges create a feeling of urgency (I need to act now and get the pleasure!) but we always can wait, not act right away, avoid paying attention to the porn in our head, breath deep, get up and change the place where we are, focus on doing what we are doing (if we are working on something), focus on thinking about something else (like visualizing yourself doing something, playing basketball in the park, play piano, whatever things we actually like to do). Repeating this kind of disrupting behavior is the key. This porn habit is repetitive in itself, we end up doing the same things, building up a relapse in the same way. For many of us, a relapse starts in the mind long before it actually happens and this is tricky. If in the beginning we act on auto-pilot, in time we start noticing when it happens but we might end up building up the relapse instead, hours or days before we actually do it by thinking about porn, by rationalizing why it's not a big deal if we relapse once because we will keep it short and it won't affect the rebooting too much. No, every relapse feeds the addiction. The addiction can be starved to death (given no dopamine) but it can't be starved to death if we feed it even a little. We need to develop the "no porn at all" mentality. A little bit is too much.
 
Its wild how something so small in our heads can impact us so much. How our body reacts to these urges. Suddenly your world is fogged over by these signals in the brain demanding its dopamine fix. You loose sight of loved ones, friends, family and even yourself.

My therapist said this path we walk of freedom from PMO is going to last for the rest of our lives but its not impossible. Stay the course!
I don't want to spend my 30s in addiction either.

Stop the cycle! Stay strong friend
 

Escapeandnevercomeback

Respected Member
Its wild how something so small in our heads can impact us so much. How our body reacts to these urges. Suddenly your world is fogged over by these signals in the brain demanding its dopamine fix. You loose sight of loved ones, friends, family and even yourself.

My therapist said this path we walk of freedom from PMO is going to last for the rest of our lives but its not impossible. Stay the course!
I don't want to spend my 30s in addiction either.

Stop the cycle! Stay strong friend
Thank you. Yes, it's true, when urges hit hard, you forget about everything, nothing matters anymore, it doesn't matter anymore if what you do is risky. We need to find that space where we can wait and think, even if it doesn't feel like we can, we do actually have the last decision, we have this choice to say yes or no. We must not forget this.
 

Robby82

Member
Thank you. Yes, it's true, when urges hit hard, you forget about everything, nothing matters anymore, it doesn't matter anymore if what you do is risky. We need to find that space where we can wait and think, even if it doesn't feel like we can, we do actually have the last decision, we have this choice to say yes or no. We
 

Robby82

Member
The real problem with this addiction is that it makes us become like addicts who need their dose, ruining our brains.I have noticed in relapses that I am much less lucid and lose a lot of memory concentration and ability to decide luckily it can be regained when you are clean and most importantly it ruins your social life and the relationship with loved ones making us feel inadequate .. this is why we think about what will happen before letting go of the impulses to us who suffer from this problem it destroys our life
 

Orbiter

Well-Known Member
It's okay, Escape. Use it to learn from it, pick yourself up, and go on wiser and stronger.

Don't beat yourself up about it, you will beat this thing instead.

And don't forget to post what you've learned from it too Escape! Not just for your sake, not just to make sure you're truly holding yourself accountable for the lapses but also to help others who may be struggling as well.

I'm with Phineas on this. Fight the addiction, not yourself.
 

Escapeandnevercomeback

Respected Member
Day 2

Thanks Phineas and Orbiter for support. I appreciate it.

I'm not declaring anything. I don't know how this streak is going to be. What's certain is that I can't stay sober and I can't stay porn-free. That's the only sure thing. Everything else is fog.
 

Escapeandnevercomeback

Respected Member
Pleasure and pain are the two faces of the same coin. I can't have pleasure without experiencing the pain of the absence of pleasure. But I feel that there are answers in this suffering. This suffering leads to something great and the only way to find out is through it. I need to stop running away from this suffering.
 

Escapeandnevercomeback

Respected Member
The reason why many of us can't replicate lost streaks is because they involved suffering, the grinding day by day through the pain. And the mind, once it gets comfortable after being uncomfortable, doesn't want to get back to the uncomfortable. Consider my case, I suffered a lot during that 50 days streak and then my mind refused to go through that again. Since then I haven't done shit. But I need to gather all the strength I have left and try one more time. After all those years, what I've learned is that I can't escape this without going all the way through the suffering, which I fuckin hate to do, but I will only escape after suffering. My addiction brings me suffering and the escaping from it will not involve pleasure. It's only by enduring the pain that I will become free. Or else this will never happen.
 

Phineas 808

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
That's true, that the only way out is through. It's also true that there will be times of suffering through the urges without giving in to them (or responding to them).

It makes sense that you dreading this suffering (experienced during your 50+ days) is what's keeping you from stretching farther. But could this all be a matter of perspective?

The short term suffering of denying or dismissing the urges is far better and preferable to the long term suffering brought about by an 'endless addiction' with all of its consequences like PIED, social anxiety, not growing as a person, not becoming stronger, etc... It seems that the rewards of abstinence and beating this addiction, with all its suffering, far outweigh the suffering of not trying or giving up.

As far as the suffering itself- just as urges are guaranteed to pass as they're dismissed (not reacted to, for or against), so too the degree and intensity of the pain or suffering signaled from our lower brain are guaranteed to lessen on being habitually and consistently dismissed.

In other words, this shite will get easier and easier as you consistently dismiss the urges. Monitor any and all behavior that leads to your particular rituals, learn your habits, hack into them, switch things up. Also keep an eye on your emotions- particularly the negative ones that don't serve you well. You'll start noticing, "Ah, whenever I start feeling that certain way, thinking those certain thoughts, that I soon start my ritual toward PMO...", then you can think of ways to outsmart your lower brain.

You got this, brother!
 
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