Hi Movonnow. There are 3 things you must do to get clean. 1) Get educated, study your problem, understand it. 2) Get tools, find things to help you, don't rely on will power alone. 3) Embrace withdrawals. You won't get clean without feeling them, so, don't try to avoid them.
Gary Wilson says this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_RIm9ZMN1I
Watch it. Watch it again. If you have already watched it, watch it again.
Take time to understand what is happening in there, and understand that porn addiction is above the belt, in the brain, and not below it.
Also, over on yourbrainonporn.com , the site Gary Wilson runs, I came across another great video which hits the same points as Gary's Ted Talk, but in a quicker, and a bit lighter way. It is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ya67...ature=youtu.be
And don't forget to read a success story by a nofap hero, Gabe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JReh...8T-Ef2tuADCZOA
I actually originally posted a post directly by Gabe, whereas recently, on 3-30-14, Dogwood posted the story about Gabe here, and this story is so compelling for younger guys with ED issues. Watch it, learn. You CAN overcome this.
Understand that overcoming porn addiction takes preparation, advance planning, and an understanding that between here and there is a marathon you will have to run. You don't have to win that marathon, but you do have to run it, to complete the race, and that involves effort and some suffering.
Above is the education. Getting educated about the addiction was the biggest step for me in quitting it. I thought I had a problem below the belt, when in fact it was always in my brain, above the belt. We talk about being PMO addicts or even porn addicts, but in reality we are dopamine addicts, it's the greatest drug in the universe, and we carry it around in our brains. Dopamine, is released in response to porn, and our brains come to love it. Your PMO cycle will never be broken so long as you've got porn on the brain, literally running around inside it. A lot of guys slow down when starting to try to quit, but they will never be quit if they keep porn in their head. You have to completely eliminate porn from your existence.
Tools: Porn blockers. Don't just quit, don't just passively stop and sit there, take affirmative action to change your online habits by making it difficult to access the problem. This will help you in various ways. Stopping your ability to access porn will help you stop accessing porn, and accessing porn is the underlying problem here. Maybe blockers won't stop you, but for me, they slowed me down and acted almost like a reminder that I was stopping. Like a tap on the shoulder. Also, taking these steps means you are taking steps to control your situation, which is a bit empowering. K9 is a great blocker. I suggest you get it NOW. I also post here, it helps, and there are other tools out there from accountability partners to therapy to 12 step programs.
Withdrawals suck. We don't talk enough about them here. They are why we fail. They are our brain's dopamine drenched chemical reward center begging us, threatening us, punishing us, pleading with us, rationalizing with us why we need to PMO. Withdrawals are painful, they are physical, mental, and emotional pain. They are the jitters, the shakes, the sweats, odd pains in odd places, the brain fog we feel when quitting, and our brain's way of telling us all that unpleasantness can go away with just a little harmless fix. When going through withdrawal I felt I had a sinus infection and my teeth actually hurt. I did not have a sinus infection and my teeth were fine, but my brain, at some level, had to make me feel bad to try and make me feel good through a porn induced dopamine release. The good thing is, if you are having withdrawals, it means your brain's dopamine levels are on their way back to normal. Once you get back to normal those things stop, but you can't get back to normal until your brain re-balances, and that takes, depending on who you speak to, between 11 and 90 days. I usually guestimate between 11 and 40. Newbies must be told this will not be easy, it will be hard, and they have to expect this pain, endure it, embrace it and even want it to accomplish our task, getting dopamine production back to normal.
In my opinion, there are two type of guys here. Most of us don't know that, nor do we necessarily think we are in one category or the other. On the one hand are guys who are trying to control their porn use, don't want it out of their lives, but want to find methods where they control porn and porn does not control them. In my opinion they are addicts in denial. That is not meant as anything negative toward those guys, but for me three words were necessary: I am addicted. On the other hand, there are the guys who know they are addicted. I am in this group. We came to understand porn controlled us, that we cannot play with it or learn how to pick it up and put it down whenever we wanted, and that, consequently, to be free, we had to get porn completely out of the brain. We are addicts in recovery. Might help if you figure out which side of that you are on. I suppose, statistically speaking, there is a third group, being guys who watch porn all the time but can quit at will, or maybe a fourth, guys who have never seen porn in the first place, but I don't think guys in those last two categories are here.
Lastly, porn is not just porn, it is any sexual imagery that sets off dopamine release. Porn is seeing it, watching it, perceiving it, hearing it, thinking of it, imagining it, remembering it. It is having an orgasm while thinking of it, whether with a partner or during MO. It is edging. It is PMOing. It is using porn substitutes like chat rooms or soft core imagery that triggers a dopamine release.
Moveonnow, it is time to move on.
Peace.