hooked on monkey fonics
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hooked on monkey fonics said:Being able to stop yourself from escalating at the height of a dopamine response, right before an anticipatory reward, is a very empowering feeling. But I know the next few days will be substantially harder. I don't think I've ever peaked this much and not relapsed after. I will have to be extremely careful.
hooked on monkey fonics said:6. MOing to physical sensations only - may set you back 1-2 days, though this may vary wildly and some people obviously prefer not to do it.
hooked on monkey fonics said:DoneAtLast said:Yeah, I wasn't implying that you don't know your triggers - you've clearly done a lot of work to know them. I'm just saying your particular set of triggers is likely really hard to avoid... so I guess it is the "what now" part after you know the triggers. The hardest ones to avoid are the ones that you can encounter in a G rated or PG rated world. Women's clothing exists all over the place. My weird fetish was pregnant women... by no means is seeing that limited to porn. I could see it at church or the grocery store, and often did.
The one thought I have on the suicide stuff is that I've often heard that suicide planning has an OCD nature to it. A person rehearses it in their heads over and over, and it becomes a massive fixation. Perhaps that is the alternate antagonist in your life that you're suspicious of, and OCD tendency on suicide? Maybe it is interactive - the fixation and repetitious envisioning and planning very well may have similar dopamine hits as porn. I'm guessing, so take it with a grain of salt. It seems plausible that withdrawal symptoms mean that other underlying issues end up taking on that neediness for novelty, dopamine hits and sense of release. Maybe suicide content is a new sort of "porn". Again, just guessing and thinking out loud.
I sometimes wonder how much I'd have to give up to get the "full rewire". Yeah, I'm more or less rebooted, but my concentration and emotional health could certainly be better. Maybe there is no upper limit on how many of these bad activities we eliminate. Who knows.
Interesting perspective...that suicide research was right after PMOing 4 times in the span of 2 hours and then trying to wind down to go to bed. It's like all the dopamine in my brain was depleted so I had to turn to something like that to maintain my sanity.
In the past few months I've noticed such a strong parallel between porn and other supranormal stimuli (junk food/sweets, reddit, social media, dating apps, video games, etc) that I've basically eliminated all of it sans video games. All the current literature i've read indicates that internet addiction is in the same league as porn addiction, which is crazy. I mean, unlike porn there is not a dedicated brain circuit (sexual arousal) for the general novelty/information seeking dopamine response you get from places like news feeds, so how can be as harmful? Who knows.
Perhaps I've been struggling so much recently because i wasn't as willing to substitute porn with reddit/youtube/etc, or perhaps the relationship I've had with electronic media in general has gradually been getting worse and the damage has already been done. Trying to quit it all cold turkey is very hard. My mind doesn't even work anymore. All I can do with myself is reread old books, re watch old shows, and replay old games - almost everything else is feels far too cognitively demanding.