I can only give you my opinion. I went back and read through some of your earlier posts. Your first post was July 7. Today is August 1. 21 days give or take. You acknowledge you are addicted to porn. You are posting in a porn addiction forum. Your post here talks about going through the pain. "The pain" I believe is withdrawals. You would not be experiencing that pain unless you are addicted, are cutting porn out of your life, and are withdrawing. At one post you wrote about "porn neurons" which is amusing, and not too far from the truth. Ask yourself: Why do I like porn? What is so interesting about it, why does it interest me? What good does it do me? There is a reason we can sit in front of a computer screen for hours fascinated by the pornographic images we see in front of us, and that is because, to the porn addict, those hypersexualized images result in a huge dopamine release. Porn is, to our brain's reward center, like sex on steroids. Let's compare watching porn to sitting in the front yard watching a tree. The tree may be beautiful, but it will never be as interesting to us as porn because watching trees do not cause dopamine to be released.
So, let's start with the premise that you are actually addicted. If you addicted the best way to become un-addicted is to reboot and rewire. It took you years to get to this point, five years I think you said. It will take you approximately 90 days to get clean. That is not science but what a lot of guys have said. You need to plan on feeling that pain during this time, even though it sucks, and you need to abstain from all of it in that time period. A lot of guys ask about whether MO is OK in that rebooting time. They start to look for ways to get a dopamine rush. They tell themselves MO is not so bad as long as it is not PMO. But both porn and MO are, to an addict, just buttons we push to get a dopamine release. I ask them what they think about when they MO, and I tell them that unless they are thinking about making a peanut and butter sandwich while MOing, they are using it to get a dopamine spike. What I hear you saying I have heard others say before--"I won't watch porn when I do it, I won't fantasize when I do it"--but having sex in your head when you are not having sex is the definition of fantasy, and fantasy is just a porn substitute.
You asked for an opinion, and I am going to give you one. Do the 90 day reboot. Get clean now, while you still have your best years ahead of you, get porn out of your life so it can never effect you sexually and never make the woman you will one day be with feel she is less than enough for you sexually. What good does porn do for you? None. What good does getting rid of it completely do for you? A lot. Check out my thread if you wish for some pointers on how to quit. I created it just to help newbies who want to quit. You need to quit asking for an easy way to get to quit, accept the pain of quitting, and just get to quit. Once you are un-addicted, the pain goes away.
http://legacy.rebootnation.org/index.php?topic=1256.0
Peace.
