Attempt number one thousand? A 22 year old's latest attempt at rebooting

[MapleSyrup]

Day 36

PMO/Urges
This week was smooth sailing, until a few days ago. I had a random wet dream, even though I don't remember having a sexual dream. It kick started a mini series of urges over the past few days, and I once caught myself starting to fantasize and I wanted to browse risky sites. To resist the urge, I had to go wash dishes, and by the time I was done, the urge had passed. Freaky to realize how finicky my brain is, that intense urges can just come and go, and how it can even mess with my sense of reason.

At any rate, I'm hanging on and weathering the storm. The next few days I've got a lot of outings with friends in the evenings, so things should be smooth for a while.

Life/Benefits
Been feeling pretty down the last week. Research progress in grad school has not been good, and my supervisor mentioned that I might not be able to graduate on time. I also got my hopes up a bit regarding a girl I met a couple months ago, but the conversations would just go dry and the vibes didn't seem to be there.

I found that while my mood was down, I also slipped back into social withdrawal, not wanting to start conversations with people, especially strangers, and I also couldn't work up the courage to go to a couple social outings and missed out on them. Not sure if it's coincidental that these feelings also coincide with my PMO urges acting up.

At any rate, I absolutely refuse to let my urges and poor mood beat me. I've come too far to give up after one bad week, and I know that the urges will pass if I refuse to entertain them.

 

[MapleSyrup]

Day 2

PMO/Urges
Another frustrating update - Slipped up with another MO on Monday morning. Just woke up with urges out of nowhere, and made the mistake of doomscrolling first thing in the morning on Reddit/Insta. Didn't see anything overtly pornographic, but saw a few posts that were stimulating enough that it got me fantasizing about old porn-related memories and losing my higher reason. Ended up MOing. Felt kinda crappy for the rest of the day.

But once again, there's nothing I can do but get back up and keep going.

On the bright side, it's been 165 days since my last full PMO relapse, or about 5 and a half months. In that time, I've also only had 3 MOs, the last of which was 41 days ago. Compared to my previous years of reboot attempts, I'm still doing fantastic.

Life/Benefits
My mood was a lot better this week - Had a bunch of fun social outings, and the weather is finally starting to warm up around Toronto.

I've gotten so used to my current lifestyle - having a healthy social life, multiple friend circles, not doing weed or playing video games, not PMOing - that it's hard to imagine that 5 months ago, I was a bit of a loner, and struggled to make friends, and was anxious all the time. While it's still frustrating sometimes when I have a bad week, or mess up chances with girls I'm interested in, I just have to remember how much progress that I've made.

I refuse to fall back into porn addiction, or weed/alcohol addiction for that matter.

Just need to dust myself off and keep going.

 

[TryingHarder]

Didn't see anything overtly pornographic, but saw a few posts that were stimulating enough that it got me fantasizing about old porn-related memories and losing my higher reason.

These momentary lapses of reason are bound to happen in the early days, Maple. In time, things will get better. I've always thought that an important part of rebooting from a porn addiction is to also seriously limit your time on the internet. The whole world spends way too much time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling...looking for what, exactly?

 

[MapleSyrup]

Day 1

Full blown PMO relapse yesterday, twice. First time looking up actual porn in 6 months : (

Not much to say right now, I'll write a proper post once I gather my thoughts.