otanerferguson
Active Member
Day 49
No porn. No masturbation.
Another good day at work. More and more I am able to engage with my work consistently by daisy-chaining habits. It's amazing that only a few weeks ago, this was inconceivable to me. If the body juices aren't there, no habit will motivate you to act. You will even sabotage your habits on purpose, not to engage. Nothing related to sex today. I did have morning wood, although fleeting after waking up.
Journaling has been so helpful in this journey, not just for rebooting but for life in general, that I've started a "work journal" just to keep track and find ways to improve at work. I'm on a 10-day streak in that one. That will give continuity to this transformative habit once the 90 days of the reboot are up.
Exercise, box-breathing, hydration, 15 minute meditation, cold shower, no YouTube, first blood, 45 min afternoon meditation, phoenix tactic, and good nutrition, ok.
See ya tomorrow!
Heey Phineas 808, thanks for stopping by again and the encouragement. I see your journey has been going great in your new streak. Power to you my friend. Yes, you are right, set it and forget it is the way. I think that my initial obsession with the reboot was that I just wasn't sure if it would work for my ED and was scared that all this was in vain. In the past, I had tried to lose weight, increase my testosterone, do kegels, improve my prostate health, you name it. All in the hopes that that would take care of my ED and after trying each of those avenues (some for long stretches of time) and seeing no results I was just frustrated. It felt like trying to turn on the lights by turning the faucet on. You know, pulling the wrong levers. I guess I feared the reboot would be the same. But even at this early-to-mid stage I was able to see massive improvements in that area, so now that I know it's working I'm just following through and don't need to check everyday if the symptoms of the day are similar to those of guys who recovered. I've now become very protective of my mindset too and, perhaps selfishly, I'm just focusing on my own progress. I feel like stumbling upon stories about relapsing brings my mood down so I now actively avoid that from happening, just by not reading any journals. I don't even listen to depressing music, since I found out that music goes into your brain without having to be interpreted by the brain like sight or the other senses, for example. Just raw information coming in and making it through to your skull 100% unaltered. Grunge in - shotgun shell out.
I never linked porn to ED; it's just unintuitive, and I masturbated to it more out of habit than anything else. Just knowing that that's my dick's kryptonite led me to easily abandoning it and I haven't craved it once. Knock on wood; pun intended.
ED (even if into the future, for those who haven't developed it) is just too high a cost of porn to even be tempted. I wouldn't wish ED on my worst enemy. It's like a curse.
I don't want to jinx it, but this time it seems like the curse is lifting. But that doesn't mean I can let go. On the contrary, now is the time to double down and continue getting better.
Yes, well more or less, box-breathing is just one of many of the pranayama breathing techniques from ashtanga yoga and it's just something navy seals do to reset their heart rate, change their physiology, and trigger a flow state before engaging during a mission (I'm not a seal). It's conveniently packaged in an app for both iPhone and Android. I was taught about this a few years ago and doing it consistently every day has been one of the most transformative things in my life. No exaggeration.
I came up with the following techniques when I started to come out of my first flatline to be able to engage. I had deadlines coming and needed to get back to work (I work from home), so...
First Blood: Are you familiar with the pomodoro technique of chunking work tasks in 25 or whatever minute intervals? Well, First Blood is just doing one pomodoro of work right at the end of my daisy-chain of habits in the morning (hydration, 10 minute HIIT, box-breathing, 15 minute meditation with the Brain.FM app, and cold shower, Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song to prime myself), before checking e-mail. The name comes from being able to inflict the first blow of damage in my daily battle against the procrastination monster. After each pomodoro completed I move a paper clip from one side of my desk to the other, and so, doing that first one on Auto encourages me to go for a second clip, and hopefully another one, and another one, etc. But if that doesn't happen (which luckily it has) at least I will have put in 30 minutes that day, regardless.
The Phoenix Tactic: The first blood technique has been quite effective. However, working so diligently in the morning left me exhausted by lunch time, and I found myself just taking a nap that later turned into a little bit of TV, and then a whole movie, and before I realized it, it was dinner time and I would not engage again. So I thought, "I need an afternoon system like First Blood". And so I came up with the Phoenix Tactic, named after the mythological bird that rises from its ashes, as a metaphor for my dead morning self rising to work again. Since my juices really get depleted from working all morning on intellectual tasks diligently, I did need the rest, but now after lunch, I do box-breathing, and do a 45 minute Dr. Joe Dispenza meditation during which I fall in deep trance or sometimes I just fall asleep for long stretches of it, but sitting down on an armchair, not lying in bed. The result is that I come out of it fully rested. I make a cup of tea, put on Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song, and then get another pomodoro in, just like with first blood. I've seen that more often than not, it will result in several pomodoros in the afternoon/early evening before dinner.
That now means that regardless of my mood, I will still get 1 hour of work done just because it's part of my habit stack. Both techniques came after reading time and time again in this journal that I hadn't been able to engage. That's why I've been humbled by the power of journaling.
No porn. No masturbation.
Another good day at work. More and more I am able to engage with my work consistently by daisy-chaining habits. It's amazing that only a few weeks ago, this was inconceivable to me. If the body juices aren't there, no habit will motivate you to act. You will even sabotage your habits on purpose, not to engage. Nothing related to sex today. I did have morning wood, although fleeting after waking up.
Journaling has been so helpful in this journey, not just for rebooting but for life in general, that I've started a "work journal" just to keep track and find ways to improve at work. I'm on a 10-day streak in that one. That will give continuity to this transformative habit once the 90 days of the reboot are up.
Exercise, box-breathing, hydration, 15 minute meditation, cold shower, no YouTube, first blood, 45 min afternoon meditation, phoenix tactic, and good nutrition, ok.
See ya tomorrow!
Phineas 808 said:
Heey Phineas 808, thanks for stopping by again and the encouragement. I see your journey has been going great in your new streak. Power to you my friend. Yes, you are right, set it and forget it is the way. I think that my initial obsession with the reboot was that I just wasn't sure if it would work for my ED and was scared that all this was in vain. In the past, I had tried to lose weight, increase my testosterone, do kegels, improve my prostate health, you name it. All in the hopes that that would take care of my ED and after trying each of those avenues (some for long stretches of time) and seeing no results I was just frustrated. It felt like trying to turn on the lights by turning the faucet on. You know, pulling the wrong levers. I guess I feared the reboot would be the same. But even at this early-to-mid stage I was able to see massive improvements in that area, so now that I know it's working I'm just following through and don't need to check everyday if the symptoms of the day are similar to those of guys who recovered. I've now become very protective of my mindset too and, perhaps selfishly, I'm just focusing on my own progress. I feel like stumbling upon stories about relapsing brings my mood down so I now actively avoid that from happening, just by not reading any journals. I don't even listen to depressing music, since I found out that music goes into your brain without having to be interpreted by the brain like sight or the other senses, for example. Just raw information coming in and making it through to your skull 100% unaltered. Grunge in - shotgun shell out.
I never linked porn to ED; it's just unintuitive, and I masturbated to it more out of habit than anything else. Just knowing that that's my dick's kryptonite led me to easily abandoning it and I haven't craved it once. Knock on wood; pun intended.
ED (even if into the future, for those who haven't developed it) is just too high a cost of porn to even be tempted. I wouldn't wish ED on my worst enemy. It's like a curse.
I don't want to jinx it, but this time it seems like the curse is lifting. But that doesn't mean I can let go. On the contrary, now is the time to double down and continue getting better.
Phineas 808 said:
Yes, well more or less, box-breathing is just one of many of the pranayama breathing techniques from ashtanga yoga and it's just something navy seals do to reset their heart rate, change their physiology, and trigger a flow state before engaging during a mission (I'm not a seal). It's conveniently packaged in an app for both iPhone and Android. I was taught about this a few years ago and doing it consistently every day has been one of the most transformative things in my life. No exaggeration.
I came up with the following techniques when I started to come out of my first flatline to be able to engage. I had deadlines coming and needed to get back to work (I work from home), so...
First Blood: Are you familiar with the pomodoro technique of chunking work tasks in 25 or whatever minute intervals? Well, First Blood is just doing one pomodoro of work right at the end of my daisy-chain of habits in the morning (hydration, 10 minute HIIT, box-breathing, 15 minute meditation with the Brain.FM app, and cold shower, Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song to prime myself), before checking e-mail. The name comes from being able to inflict the first blow of damage in my daily battle against the procrastination monster. After each pomodoro completed I move a paper clip from one side of my desk to the other, and so, doing that first one on Auto encourages me to go for a second clip, and hopefully another one, and another one, etc. But if that doesn't happen (which luckily it has) at least I will have put in 30 minutes that day, regardless.
The Phoenix Tactic: The first blood technique has been quite effective. However, working so diligently in the morning left me exhausted by lunch time, and I found myself just taking a nap that later turned into a little bit of TV, and then a whole movie, and before I realized it, it was dinner time and I would not engage again. So I thought, "I need an afternoon system like First Blood". And so I came up with the Phoenix Tactic, named after the mythological bird that rises from its ashes, as a metaphor for my dead morning self rising to work again. Since my juices really get depleted from working all morning on intellectual tasks diligently, I did need the rest, but now after lunch, I do box-breathing, and do a 45 minute Dr. Joe Dispenza meditation during which I fall in deep trance or sometimes I just fall asleep for long stretches of it, but sitting down on an armchair, not lying in bed. The result is that I come out of it fully rested. I make a cup of tea, put on Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song, and then get another pomodoro in, just like with first blood. I've seen that more often than not, it will result in several pomodoros in the afternoon/early evening before dinner.
That now means that regardless of my mood, I will still get 1 hour of work done just because it's part of my habit stack. Both techniques came after reading time and time again in this journal that I hadn't been able to engage. That's why I've been humbled by the power of journaling.
