Day 32
Feeling like I need to sort my thoughts, so this will probably result in a longer post.
Urges are there, but somehow they are now quickly overrun by the thought of my streak, and I've also trained to transfer my thoughts to sports the second I begin fantasizing about women. I notice that one of the hardest moments is when my gf is about to leave home for hours, it's crazy how I can feel the urges exploding. I guess my brains are accustomed to the thought of PMO after gf leaves. Something that came into mind while writing this was "The tool" technique, which I discovered from youtube. I think this is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk6iwf7VkVA (I can't be sure because I've blocked Youtube currently).
32 days is my longest successful streak so far. It's hard to put in words the benefits so far, maybe I'll save that for later. Overall the impact is absolutely positive. I'm very happy with my rebooting performance thus far. There are some things in my life that need pondering on. After graduating I now have aspiring dreams of working abroad. I'm also not sure if I'm happy in my current relationship, and it's hard to bring this up with my girlfriend, as it's more about being unsure about future together, rather than being sure I don't want to be together. And it's hard to recognize what is due to end of honeymoon phase in relationship and what part is just feelings dying. I almost feel like I'm too old to start over searching and building a new relationship, when my absolute goal is to have a family with more than one children in the future. Maybe someone older than me finds this ridiculous, but it's definitely a thought that I have.
Productivity-wise there have been good glimpses during this reboot, but this still needs to be improved. I thought I will present my current system now, maybe to see if I can improve some aspects of it.
1. Upon waking up, I do a sequence of yoga moves, to wake up the body. If I have time and solitude, I will meditate after this for 10-15 minutes. This I usually manage to do around 3-4 times per week.
2. I write my plan for the day in bullet journal, which constitutes a daily calendar, to do -list and list of non-zero activities. I talked about non-zero activities before, the idea is to form a habit by creating a chain of daily contacts to said habit, even for a brief time. These include reading a book, yoga&meditation, online course I'm currently studying, practicing Duolingo and writing on my bullet journal. Also, posting here daily is one of the non-zero activities.
3. I have removed youtube, instagram and facebook apps from my phone and I also blocked youtube and instagram in my laptop. I also use blockers for porn sites, even though now I'm thinking that it's a bit too late defence against PMO, as at that point the brain has usually already made the decision to watch porn and it will always find a way somehow. The social media block has proven surprisingly useful, as I now have time to do much more things than before. I have spent most of my life as a heavy user of internet and I'm without question also addicted to internet. I also won't find myself ogling on girls' pictures on instagram, which I think will help in developing my self-image and self respect in future.
The biggest goal right now is to continue this system and rebooting up until day 60, and all the way to day 90. I suspect that the pendulum swings of urges, motivation and flatlines will become less intense and longer lasting, so I think it will now take extra effort to keep this up. The initial burst of motivation of beginning has somewhat worn out and this phase is critical in embedding these routines in my brain. That is how true change is made.
This probably wasn't the most organized and neatest post I expected, but it seems that simply typing up my current situation makes a lot of things seem clearer to me. Only by defining our problems clearly do we have any chance of solving them.
I think I'll go for a run now, getting out of the apartment could be refreshing.
See you tomorrow
Dantes