All right, here goes. I'm 27 years old now, a student, and I discovered internet porn about 15 years ago. I was hooked instantly. It must have been ten years ago that I realized PMO was a problem for me, as I would just spend hours and hours masturbating to porn. The post-porn low would then leave me completely unmotivated to get up and do anything really. That is still the case today. Over the years I tried a couple of times to get away from porn, but never managed to go without porn for more than two or three weeks I think. Then over the last two years or so I have given up. I chose the path of least resistance and accepted porn as a part of my life. That was so much easier! Throwing away about every other day to porn became something normal. I became more and more desensitized to the porn I was watching and started searching out ever more extreme stuff. It's gotten to a point where I'm genuinely scared by what I use to get off nowadays. My interests have strayed far, far away from normal sex, I feel that not only with vanilla porn but also when I'm intimate with my girlfried.
My girlfriend and I have been together for almost four years now. We were never particularly active sexually but recently sex has completely stopped. Neither of the two of us intiates sex these days. She doesn't out of a couple of different reasons, I don't because I don't feel the urge and am not getting aroused. Today I understand that our relationship suffers greatly from that - apart from some cuddling, we just aren't intimate with each other. She does know I occasionally look at porn, the topic came up when we had to spend a couple of months living apart in the past, but she in no way knows about the scale of my porn consumption and my addiction. And I can't bring myself to tell her.
Looking for my triggers is difficult for me. PMO has almost become a reflex for me. When I'm home alone - well, that's the time I look at porn. It's just a habit I developed. Apart from that for me PMO is closely interlinked with procrastination. That was actually a reason for me to trivialize my porn consumption in the past. I just told myself, procrastination is the problem, porn is just my outlet for that. While that's certainly true, I understand now that it goes both ways. After reading about pa and what it does to the brain I now believe that my reward system is just utterly messed up. I have no drive to do whatsoever. If I have a task for work or for my studies I feel no motivation to do it. I keep putting it off, procrastinating, browsing reddit, playing video games, watching porn, untill the very last minute. Then I hurriedly do what I had to and instead of being proud for having done it, I'm mad at myself for having done it badly.
So looking at all that today it is clear to me that I need to change. My plan is to first bust that procrastination/PMO complex. At the moment I have a lot of free time on my hands because university hasn't started yet and I don't work a lot. It's that free time that's deadly at the moment. I just hang around procrastinating and PMO'ing. So my first step now is to get up and leave the house. Today for example I plan to do some long overdue shopping and then I'll drop by my university to do some work. Like that I won't hang around at home, might get something done and stay away from porn. I'll try to have some kind of similar plan set up for every day. I'll check in here in the morning to report on the day before and to write down the plan. That way I hope I'll stay committed to it.
All right. Thanks to everyone who read this post! I hope I didn't ramble on for too long. It felt good writing all that down however. I see a bit clearer now, I think. Well, off I go into my first day without PMO then!
My girlfriend and I have been together for almost four years now. We were never particularly active sexually but recently sex has completely stopped. Neither of the two of us intiates sex these days. She doesn't out of a couple of different reasons, I don't because I don't feel the urge and am not getting aroused. Today I understand that our relationship suffers greatly from that - apart from some cuddling, we just aren't intimate with each other. She does know I occasionally look at porn, the topic came up when we had to spend a couple of months living apart in the past, but she in no way knows about the scale of my porn consumption and my addiction. And I can't bring myself to tell her.
Looking for my triggers is difficult for me. PMO has almost become a reflex for me. When I'm home alone - well, that's the time I look at porn. It's just a habit I developed. Apart from that for me PMO is closely interlinked with procrastination. That was actually a reason for me to trivialize my porn consumption in the past. I just told myself, procrastination is the problem, porn is just my outlet for that. While that's certainly true, I understand now that it goes both ways. After reading about pa and what it does to the brain I now believe that my reward system is just utterly messed up. I have no drive to do whatsoever. If I have a task for work or for my studies I feel no motivation to do it. I keep putting it off, procrastinating, browsing reddit, playing video games, watching porn, untill the very last minute. Then I hurriedly do what I had to and instead of being proud for having done it, I'm mad at myself for having done it badly.
So looking at all that today it is clear to me that I need to change. My plan is to first bust that procrastination/PMO complex. At the moment I have a lot of free time on my hands because university hasn't started yet and I don't work a lot. It's that free time that's deadly at the moment. I just hang around procrastinating and PMO'ing. So my first step now is to get up and leave the house. Today for example I plan to do some long overdue shopping and then I'll drop by my university to do some work. Like that I won't hang around at home, might get something done and stay away from porn. I'll try to have some kind of similar plan set up for every day. I'll check in here in the morning to report on the day before and to write down the plan. That way I hope I'll stay committed to it.
All right. Thanks to everyone who read this post! I hope I didn't ramble on for too long. It felt good writing all that down however. I see a bit clearer now, I think. Well, off I go into my first day without PMO then!
