Its been months since i last posted my first ost here on this great forum, but i guess i took it for granted. I have relapsed more than 100 of times since then, and even now i can't seem to see any end of this. Alll i see is this is one last relapse, and then boom! Again, it repeats and repeats and repeats. I am just so sick of it. My mental health i degraded badly. I have tried so many ways, like i changed my DNS server, i deleted vpn's, switched to safe browsers, i blocked porn, but none of it worked for me, coz whenever i had an urge to see, i would simply change the DNS back to normal or download VPN, and then relapse. I cant stop using my smartphone, my laptop or internet, coz i need it daily for my study purposes amd college work. I have tried talking to friends, but that too didn't work. I started a journal, but it is all filled with my relapses date & time's. My interest in real women has completely disappeared, even though there's a girl who already loves me, i can't seem to feel anything about her. I know i care about her, but i care about my addiction more than anything. I took accountability for everything but it didn't work. I workout everyday, still i relapse, also i don't seem to make any gains from it. If I'm alive today or even making a little bit of progress in life, that is only coz i have this little voice in my head, that tells me, that i am not meant for this, i have a greater purpose in life.
Please if anyone can, then help me through this, i would be so grateful!
Also today i will read all those success stories here available on the forum, guess that will help me to restart again.
Beware, this reply could get long.
You situation (except the part with a girl loving me) is very similar to mine. I too do those things with the porn blockers and I also need my laptop for study. I also know very well that feeling of nothing working. But eventually I did find something that worked after reading William's thread available on the forum (I will put a link): I read his thread, the first 15 pages or so and it opened my eyes like nothing else. What I'm about to say is what I've understood from reading those pages.
Here is the thing: What we are actually dealing with is dopamine. At the core of everything, this porn addiction works like this: We have a (big) dopamine release as a reaction to porn. Then the solution becomes clear: We need to hold the dopamine from going wild.
But first, we need to understand what is porn. Porn has 2 forms: Visual and imagined.
The visual porn (that we actually look at/watch) includes everything that arouses us and we can masturbate to like scenes from regular movies, scenes from TV Series (unfortunately full of nudity these days), pictures from magazines like Playboy, pictures from social media (with girls 90% undressed), normal pictures of people with clothes on from social media that we masturbate to (for who does this, I've done it a lot and I'm not proud of it, but when you are addicted to porn, you can be pushed to all sorts of disgusting things), softcore porn, hardcore porn etc. we understand the idea.
The imagined porn is the porn "from our head". We watch stuff/look at stuff and it gets memorized in our head and can be recalled if we want to. Even if we don't want to, it will "recall" itself, these are what we call "flashbacks" and they are part of the withdrawal. When the addicted brain wants it's dopamine fix, it invades our mind with flashbacks of things that we've watched. We "look at" this porn "from our head" and get aroused (a.k.a we experience urges a.k.a (porn) dopamine runs wild).
If the visual porn is, let's say easier, to handle (staying away from deliberately looking at anything online or physical magazine) the imagined porn is more tricky. The question is: How do I keep that porn from my head from making my dopamine go completely wild?
This is "the rule of 2 seconds". That's how I like to call it. We have about 2 seconds to distract ourselves, focus on something else, think about something else etc. whatever we can do to avoid looking for too long at this porn that pops up in our memory. The more we focus on it, the more attention we give it, the more the dopamine will go wild and once this dopamine of porn goes wild, it becomes very very difficult to resist not indulging further. We need to keep this porn dopamine to the minimum possible. Flashbacks pop up in my head, I immediately refocus on something else, I don't focus on the porn thoughts. They are what William likes to call "Hypersexual thoughts", nothing creates hypersexual thoughts like porn, regular sexuality in real life doesn't create the hypersexual thoughts that porn does. It's a very strong artificial stimulus that pushes us to extremes. But it can be done, we can actually avoid giving attention to porn until it eventually dies. This addicted beast can be starved to death but it won't be starved to death if we feed it dopamine. Dopamine is the food we feed to our porn addiction. Don't give it dopamine and it will die. The idea here is to develop a habit, a conditioned response once porn shows up we immediately disengage from it fast. It might sound difficult but it's not. I've done it during my 50 days streak and I've been doing it since the beginning of my current 12 days streak. It works, I am proof. And even if it doesn't work right away, it can be trained and it will eventually work well. We can train ourselves to make it work well.
Another thing I want to address: "Alright, so I do this about the porn from my head but what if I see something by mistake?"
2 things: We need to make "finding porn by mistake" as hard as possible. And if it happens to see something by accident, we practice the same thing as the imagined porn, the rule of 2 seconds. Immediately closing it, maybe even leaving the room and avoiding to focus on the image that remains in our head after see it and avoiding to focus on other flashbacks that might show up in our head afterwards. Avoiding to escalate the dopamine. We will experience a big rush of urges but we need to wait until it calms down while practicing the 2 seconds rule.
Another thing: "Okay, but about the withdrawal, man? The higher anxiety, higher stress, the shakes, the insomnia, the suffocating urges etc?"
That's right, we will go through those things during the rebooting. There is a list somewhere around the Internet (or maybe Yourbrainonporn?) of symptoms that we might experience after abstaining from porn. Some people will experience more symptoms, others less, but all of us will experience a form of discomfort/suffering because you don't escape porn addiction easily, if you do, then you have a very light form of addiction or not at all, the typical porn addict will experience painful withdrawal. "Painful" can even be just urges, the forceful denial of pleasure, the forceful denial of self-medication or fun that we put ourselves through. I know this happens to me. I stay away longer from porn (like right now) and then I start feeling very frustrated, depressed and angry about forcefully on my own denying myself the pleasure of some porn right now because I'm going through pretty high urges.
Nevertheless, this withdrawal is supposed to happen, it is what it is, we need to accept it and move on. Bitching about it or relapsing to stop it won't save us. The only way out is through it.
I believe this is very crucial and it needs to become a part of the plan as soon as possible. Of course, we might need to do changes in our lives to eventually maximize the chance of keeping the porn outside of our lives but I believe at least in the first phase of rebooting (let's say 90 days cause it's passed around a lot) we can practice this "Keep the porn dopamine low" thing. After that, the problems in our lives should feel a lot more fixable. Because porn is the ultimate drive sucking vampire (no pun). At least in my case, when I'm in the middle of binges, I am so negative about my life and feel overwhelmed by everything that fixing my life seems impossible. But after 90 days, the mentality changes.
Anyway, here is the link to William's thread. Good luck, man.
My bona fides: over one year no relapses, no porn, no PMO, no MO. Gabe asked me to post here. I previously posted on NoFap, which I loved, and where my post had over 19,000 reads, when I left it, having achieved one year clean. Hello Gentlemen. First, let's figure out if this post is for...
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