LONG POST AHEAD
Well another small step, I cancelled my crunchyroll subscription (if you don't know what it is it's basically Netflix but for anime). I actually have barely watched anything since my reboot except for DBZ -- great show. But I was browsing recently to look for new shows and realized there were quite a few triggers. To be honest there isn't really anything I was dying to watch on there either so it was an easy decision all said. I realized that since at least Covid began when I started watching a lot more anime my tastes shifted towards some risqué (and frankly weeby) material where I'd watch and show and immediately find some kind of anime porn behind it. Smh how unhealthy was that....
Cravings are minimal today though I did MO last night when I couldn't get to sleep. The great thing is that even when the cravings were stronger it was much easier to resist vs. easier this year. I remember when I was testing the waters with the reboot I couldn't even last a week or more at a time back then! Inevitably some porn video / scene would get stuck in my mind and even while I was at work I'd go the bathroom & rub one out while watching the video. Truly addiction in action
The other thing I guess I've noticed was that one of the things on YBOP that recovering porn users see is a peeling back of the onion with their porn -- that is, they remember earlier & earlier scenes in their porn journey. When I was a porn user, I had saved a lot of earlier videos that I really liked. Yet after a while I remember trying to go back to those videos but they didn't excite me anymore! I didn't realize why back then but my porn has morphed my tastes into more and more extreme material to the point where while I could get hard to the earlier stuff, it was both more challenging and less satisfying to my brain.
Reason I bring up the above is because I'm finally starting to see that. Last night had a video stuck in my head that was actually the first porn video I ever watched & I found it way more appealing (vs. right before the reboot that wouldn't have interested me at all). Sadly, that video was an anime porn video which I realize kind of doomed me from the start with regards to avoiding PIED. That said, while I can't change the past I sure as hell can (and am!) changing my future even as we speak by committing to no porn for the rest of my days. Regardless, exciting to see this evolution happening which many other successful rebooters have experienced as it means I'm really making progress
Some other stuff to add -- even beyond anime I remember my porn tastes had morphed into some genres that I now cringe while thinking about. Back in the day I remember I wouldn't even have to see penetration but I'd already have blown my load before that scene! That's how sensitive it was. Body type / shape / etc didn't even matter much, just using vanilla videos at random from the main pages would get my dong going totally fine. I remember going back to those videos in the past few years and I no longer found them interesting, even though it had been years since I had even seen them last.
Remember talking to a buddy about porn back in college (he was very open to talking about it) and I asked him if when he fapped he could use any video or whether he would need to find a specific video in a specific genre. He said it was the former which puzzled me even back then because I always tried to find something that fit my mood at the time depending on what triggered me (saw a hot girl outside, watched anime, etc). Only now I realize, it was because I had conditioned myself to novelty in unearthly ways. That guy has been beating it for 12-13yrs (vs. my 8) by this point & still often goes 2x a day to porn, yet interestingly he's never seemed to have issues with PIED. Obviously our brains are all different so I'm not trying to force a comparison; that said, even if his frequency was higher or even equal, I had a lot of bad habits / material that made my issue worse (using anime porn, spending 30min to sometimes hours searching for the right video, using multiple tabs, etc).
All just rambles & musings here. All to say I just wanted to journal & document this stuff because they're important observations. I really, really crave those feelings of when I had just started using P (but of course this time, only with people and NEVER with porn) where my brain felt fresh & innocent & the regular things would get me excited. I don't know how long exactly that will take & I'm certainly seeing progress so just gotta keep chugging after it