Escapeandnevercomeback
Respected Member
Day 5
My memory is playing tricks with me, I thought I was on day 4.
I can do more than what I've displayed in the last month. I don't need to relapse anymore. 3 years of relapsing on Reboot Nation but I have more years than this, I go way back. I've been trying to quit porn and masturbation (in various degrees of knowledge about the problem) since 10 years ago. Enough relapsing. I don't want to turn this into a "Relapse/Restart" treadmill for the next 10 years or even more. It can happen, it's very possible, time flies. I've spent my 20s with this porn addiction I could easily spent my 30s.
The problem is actually simple: We get a dopamine high in response to a stimulus (porn). The solution then becomes clear: No more stimulus in all its shapes and forms because porn is not only video, it's subs, it's hypersexual thoughts, porn flashbacks and porn-related fantasies (that I'm crazy about). We must not only avoid watching/looking at anything, we need to avoid engaging with the hypersexual porn thoughts. They can't be completely stopped to invade our mind, that's what they do when you are a porn addict, but they can be dismissed, ignored, cut short in the first second.
The massive urges create a feeling of urgency (I need to act now and get the pleasure!) but we always can wait, not act right away, avoid paying attention to the porn in our head, breath deep, get up and change the place where we are, focus on doing what we are doing (if we are working on something), focus on thinking about something else (like visualizing yourself doing something, playing basketball in the park, play piano, whatever things we actually like to do). Repeating this kind of disrupting behavior is the key. This porn habit is repetitive in itself, we end up doing the same things, building up a relapse in the same way. For many of us, a relapse starts in the mind long before it actually happens and this is tricky. If in the beginning we act on auto-pilot, in time we start noticing when it happens but we might end up building up the relapse instead, hours or days before we actually do it by thinking about porn, by rationalizing why it's not a big deal if we relapse once because we will keep it short and it won't affect the rebooting too much. No, every relapse feeds the addiction. The addiction can be starved to death (given no dopamine) but it can't be starved to death if we feed it even a little. We need to develop the "no porn at all" mentality. A little bit is too much.
My memory is playing tricks with me, I thought I was on day 4.
I can do more than what I've displayed in the last month. I don't need to relapse anymore. 3 years of relapsing on Reboot Nation but I have more years than this, I go way back. I've been trying to quit porn and masturbation (in various degrees of knowledge about the problem) since 10 years ago. Enough relapsing. I don't want to turn this into a "Relapse/Restart" treadmill for the next 10 years or even more. It can happen, it's very possible, time flies. I've spent my 20s with this porn addiction I could easily spent my 30s.
The problem is actually simple: We get a dopamine high in response to a stimulus (porn). The solution then becomes clear: No more stimulus in all its shapes and forms because porn is not only video, it's subs, it's hypersexual thoughts, porn flashbacks and porn-related fantasies (that I'm crazy about). We must not only avoid watching/looking at anything, we need to avoid engaging with the hypersexual porn thoughts. They can't be completely stopped to invade our mind, that's what they do when you are a porn addict, but they can be dismissed, ignored, cut short in the first second.
The massive urges create a feeling of urgency (I need to act now and get the pleasure!) but we always can wait, not act right away, avoid paying attention to the porn in our head, breath deep, get up and change the place where we are, focus on doing what we are doing (if we are working on something), focus on thinking about something else (like visualizing yourself doing something, playing basketball in the park, play piano, whatever things we actually like to do). Repeating this kind of disrupting behavior is the key. This porn habit is repetitive in itself, we end up doing the same things, building up a relapse in the same way. For many of us, a relapse starts in the mind long before it actually happens and this is tricky. If in the beginning we act on auto-pilot, in time we start noticing when it happens but we might end up building up the relapse instead, hours or days before we actually do it by thinking about porn, by rationalizing why it's not a big deal if we relapse once because we will keep it short and it won't affect the rebooting too much. No, every relapse feeds the addiction. The addiction can be starved to death (given no dopamine) but it can't be starved to death if we feed it even a little. We need to develop the "no porn at all" mentality. A little bit is too much.
