Right now it looks like I'm back in a rut. Or have been, anyway. Often I do this thing where I get urges late at night, but I'm too tired to go through with it, but I start looking at porn so I've already "broken my streak" and then relapse when I wake up the next day. This morning, I still had porn on my phone from the night before, and had really NO desire to actually go through with it. But eventually my porn-brain won and I relapsed.
I hate this cycle. I can feel that maybe I'm getting a little better. I'm trying not to let myself off the hook ever again. But I know there's a very real risk of the shame/depression/relapse cycle getting worse, as I feel the "failure" if every time I relapse so much more. Maybe I really should get away from that word.
I just want to make some progress. I don't know how I can just keep making the same mistakes and not learning anything, for years. Sometimes I feel like I'm just not ready to quit. But I can also never go back to "comfortably" using porn without being aware of the harm it's causing me.
The worst thing I can do is feel down. I need energy to keep up good habits, and to be able to resist urges. Maybe I'm going about it wrong. All I can do is start back up and keep trying.
I know this cycle. I have a tendency to hit rock bottom so fast. But what I've found out since the beginning of the year is that you can shock the addiction by using a short-term tactic to get some momentum. It can help you get a streak going. After that, it's a different situation, it depends on how you react, in my case after 40 days I entered a different territory where it was not as simple, but this is a different discussion for a different day, you should not worry now about what phase you might encounter in 20-30 days or whatever, but try to find a way to get some momentum. Dealing with each phase as it comes. Anticipation and thinking about a difficult future creates fear. "It's the fear of future withdrawal that creates withdrawal" I am paraphrasing here but it's a line from Easy Peasy.
What worked for me was to go back to the basics. You know what people say that sometimes the basics are the best. Basics done to a high level. The way this addiction works at the core of everything is pretty simple: You experience a dopamine release as a reaction to porn. This big release of dopamine is the problem. It feeds the addiction, it activates the addicted brain, it makes resisting porn very very difficult, seemingly impossible sometimes. Then a tactic is formed: To save myself a big trouble I should keep this (porn) dopamine low. I started using this as a short-term tactic, done over and over again as many times as necessary, and it helped me get some good momentum. Done right, it can take you far away. I've used this twice and in both cases have achieved longer streaks: 50 days and 40 days.
What I've realized is that in most people's case a relapse starts in two ways:
1) They see something by mistake and get triggered;
2) They do a good job staying away from looking at anything but they think about porn, they interact with the porn images that show up in their head and this gets the dopamine wild and makes everything very hard to resist. Here we see things like: "A little bit will be too little to do much damage" which is a trick played by the addicted brain to say: "Okay, you responded by paying attention to the signals I sent your way, all the thinking, all the porn flashbacks and images, was my hand, but I want the cream, not just this, I want you to abuse porn but as I see you don't want to go straight there, I will try to trick you into give an inch take a mile."
So now the question is what would you do to keep dopamine low in those 2 scenarios? You see something by mistake, what do you do? What do you do when you catch yourself thinking about porn or "watching" the images and videos that show up in your head?
What do I do? I call it "Avoiding to interact with the porn thoughts in the first second".
1) A porn image shows up in my head, I try to ignore it in the first second by thinking about something else, focusing on something else, replacing the porn video in my head with another video of me doing something else, whatever works. The sooner, the better.
2) What do I do when I see something by mistake? Close that right away and do the same thing, avoid to interact with the image of that thing that remains in my memory and try to do what I said at point 1)
I don't know, try some of this, see how it works. You got this, man!