[Day 18]
I really don't feel like I'm going to be consuming porn any time soon. But it's best not to be overconfident about it so I'll keep checking in.
Long, random rant - I was thinking and reading about the nature of addiction. There's a biological component to it, with dopamine hits from porn/drugs/whatever creating neurological pathways, DeltafosB keeping you on the hook, etc. (the YBOP book summarises this well).
The other component is psychological. This is abstract, but what I currently understand is that addiction, whether it's porn, cigarettes, the internet, whatever fills some void in my life. It's as if there is a limited amount of energy/ emotion within a person. Ideally, one would spend this energy on things like human connection or pursuing the goals that he/she has. But pursuing relationships is complicated, takes effort and dealing with a certain amount of crap. Pursuing goals involves a lot of mentally straining, often boring, repetitive work. Addictive things are easy and accessible and give me convenient excuses for failures at relationships or goals.
Instead of being conditioned to push through the difficult bits to enrich my life, I was conditioned to adopt this hierarchy of behaviour:
- Be automatically good at everything in my life. If that doesn't work, pretend that everything in my life is fine and I'm completely happy.
- If being awesome at everything isn't working out, or if I can't pretend anymore, move to a cycle of addiction and self-loathing. Now I can blame porn or whatever else for sapping me of energy and spend my time criticizing myself even though that's getting me nowhere. When I'm not watching porn, smoking, wasting time on the internet or criticizing myself, I can alternatively waste time fantasizing about an ideal future where my problems are fixed and everything is awesome like in 1.
- 3. is truly putting in the mental effort to change on a day by day basis and improve the stuff I want to improve. 3 very rarely happens. I usually just alternate between 1 and 2.
But here's the thing: even if one stays with 1 and 2, it's not like that behaviour is relaxing, or that I'm doing less work or spending less energy. The total energy spent is the same, I'm just blowing it all on behaviours that are familiar but ultimately make me miserable and keep me in a shitty loop.
So the only way forward is to stay the fuck away from 1 and 2 and to attack 3, over and over again, until my brain reconditions itself. That would also help me stay away from any addictive behaviour.
Rant over. Back to 3, hopefully.