A couple of tricks

yesyes1234

Active Member
Hey everybody.

I hope your reboots are going well. I have a couple of ideas, I would like to share. I'm 14 months in and counting and I these things have helped me a lot. It's basically a way to condition ourselves to associate pmo'ing with all the negative emotions we are experiencing because of P.

The first challenge is to identify and understand what happens before and during a relapse:

By every relapse we experience craving it intensely in the beginning then quickly peaking and then return to a low level of excitement for the remainder of the pmo session where you keep chasing the initial high.

We keep relapsing because we "seem to forget" all the negative consequences in the moment.

Basically, the addiction rewires us to respond that way - it limits all our inhibiting signals including our memory while intensifying all our pleasure seeking signals. So we are literally wired to forget. If you are not already aware of this, I wan't to stress that the power of this effect should not be underestimated.

The highs and cravings we feel in the beginning are down to how our dopamine system is integrated in our "risk and reward" system which is there to identify possible rewards or rewarding activities in our surroundings. Once the brain engage the activity, the system goes back to normal, and we are left pretty dissatisfied, looking for another fix.

The solution and subsequent challenge is to reinforce this foresight into our brains so that it won't be shut out when we get cravings.

The way I did it was writing a journal everyday where I wrote down everything I was experiencing because of P - all the negative stuff I was feeling that day, possible changes, the effects I felt when I accidentally came across a bikinipicture, the effects if I deliberately clicked on one etc and if I relapsed, I would note the changes and my experience of it as well.

It takes a bit of work, but it steadily made it a lot easier to combat cravings since I would no longer forget. Eventually it also made my cravings seem a lot less enticing because I would always remember how it felt.

It made every decision about relapse seem like months of torture or seconds of cheap pleasure. The choice became a lot simpler.

Anyways, I hope you found it helpful.
 

yesyes1234

Active Member
So my basic proposition is this:

10-20 min of writing a day will make you 2x, 3x or infinite times more successful in your reboot attempts.
 

Big H

Active Member
That was very good never though of that. It's true during urges you tend to forget the negatives.
 
N

Numez

Guest
i experience exactly what you mentioned with limited memory during cravings. i even tried to remember all the bad stuff of relapse and good stuff of reboot and it proved to be hard to reach that part of the brain. i just become over consumed by the craving... thanks for the advice!!
 

yesyes1234

Active Member
Cheers guys.

I think it could be helpful to think of the reboot as a faulty system we need to retrain.

By only conceptualizing it as a habit we need to get rid of, we seem to think about only in terms of willpower like we would with a normal habit.

We fail to recognize that our willpower is based on the underlying neurochemical structures in our brains which governs our "experience" of willpower.

So even though willpower is fundamental, it is dependent on the underlying systems, and by doing conditioning "system-training" like writing, we can strengthen the system to give us more willpower. Like a loop.
 
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