BrassBalls707
Active Member
I'm a 22 year-old college student that first started watching explicit content when I was less than 10 years old. My introduction to porn was strange from what I can remember. It started when I was introduced to a website with videogames by a kid next door who was a few years older. The same website had games and puzzles that featured sexual images, drawings and acts. As a curious kid I was drawn to it, and revisited it frequently until my parents began monitoring my computer usage and blocked similar sites. At that point I had also seen pornographic content and voluntarily browsed it.
I forgot about it until I turned 11 and got my own laptop, on which I had free reign to browse whatever I felt like. This was also the start of an internet and videogame addiction which I now - a decade later - still struggle to deal with. I have fond memories of that time, but it was largely downhill from there.
Throughout my youth I would alternate between browsing, playing games and PMO. I saw no issue with it until I felt suicidal at 18, surprised by how miserable and empty I felt. I now know through reading some literature on PMO, videogame and internet addiction that failing to controlling these urges was what had lead to my steady decline. I had to feel the bottom of the pit to realize how far I'd fallen down. I lacked meaningful relationships with friends and family who I ignored at every turn. I lacked a healthy self-image, a result of neglecting my physical and mental health for years. I lacked satisfactory hobbies, chances to pull me out of my comfort zone and learn to love life. It is only after spending several years searching, finding and making these things my own that I realized that I was still miserable. Less so, yet enough to push me in other directions such as this forum. I also began visiting a therapist in the summer of 2019 and stopped when I enrolled again. We spoke about poor academic decisions and how ashamed and depressed I felt. I felt hopeless, the more I introspected, the more it felt like a war on all fronts. A war that was doomed to fail.
I felt myself making poor decisions again in the winter of 2021, so I started visiting a psychologist again - which I still visit to this day -. PMO hasn't been discussed and I'm glad I can do it here because I have been dreading bringing it up personally.
I am still a young adult that is encumbered by the choices I have to make. I have let myself fail out of college once before and after enrolling again I want to do everything I can to prevent it from happening again. After reading more I realized PMO and the poor impulse control it wires into your brain was part of the problem. I first figured PMO was a problem after recognizing Performance Anxiety when I lost my virginity in spring of 2019. It was the second most embarrassing situation in my life and for a while I lost my confidence as a man, something I had been working on for months from scratch. I continued to struggle with dating, working out, supporting healthy habits for a few more years. It is only through picking up "Your Brain on Porn" again that I realized. Every step of the way I underestimated the chokehold that PMO held me in. Now I firmly believe that kicking these urges to the curb should receive more attention than other things I'm trying to adjust in my life. That's why I'm here writing about my experience at length, and I vow to continue doing so daily. I might fail, falter or break my streak and I accept that as a possibility. But I won't accept that as the end. Not anymore. I want control over my life.
My goals are to stop PMO, remove PA, build confidence and support healthy sleeping and fitness habits. Alongside nurturing a place and moment of reflection in my life which I have been consistently distracting myself from.
A lot of big words for sure, so I will now back those up with results starting today. I'll do my best to provide triggers and thoughts, what I thought went well and what could been done better.
Here's some quotes that have helped me keep focus in the past:
"Every determination is a negation."
"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there." - Yogi Berra
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." - William Blake
I forgot about it until I turned 11 and got my own laptop, on which I had free reign to browse whatever I felt like. This was also the start of an internet and videogame addiction which I now - a decade later - still struggle to deal with. I have fond memories of that time, but it was largely downhill from there.
Throughout my youth I would alternate between browsing, playing games and PMO. I saw no issue with it until I felt suicidal at 18, surprised by how miserable and empty I felt. I now know through reading some literature on PMO, videogame and internet addiction that failing to controlling these urges was what had lead to my steady decline. I had to feel the bottom of the pit to realize how far I'd fallen down. I lacked meaningful relationships with friends and family who I ignored at every turn. I lacked a healthy self-image, a result of neglecting my physical and mental health for years. I lacked satisfactory hobbies, chances to pull me out of my comfort zone and learn to love life. It is only after spending several years searching, finding and making these things my own that I realized that I was still miserable. Less so, yet enough to push me in other directions such as this forum. I also began visiting a therapist in the summer of 2019 and stopped when I enrolled again. We spoke about poor academic decisions and how ashamed and depressed I felt. I felt hopeless, the more I introspected, the more it felt like a war on all fronts. A war that was doomed to fail.
I felt myself making poor decisions again in the winter of 2021, so I started visiting a psychologist again - which I still visit to this day -. PMO hasn't been discussed and I'm glad I can do it here because I have been dreading bringing it up personally.
I am still a young adult that is encumbered by the choices I have to make. I have let myself fail out of college once before and after enrolling again I want to do everything I can to prevent it from happening again. After reading more I realized PMO and the poor impulse control it wires into your brain was part of the problem. I first figured PMO was a problem after recognizing Performance Anxiety when I lost my virginity in spring of 2019. It was the second most embarrassing situation in my life and for a while I lost my confidence as a man, something I had been working on for months from scratch. I continued to struggle with dating, working out, supporting healthy habits for a few more years. It is only through picking up "Your Brain on Porn" again that I realized. Every step of the way I underestimated the chokehold that PMO held me in. Now I firmly believe that kicking these urges to the curb should receive more attention than other things I'm trying to adjust in my life. That's why I'm here writing about my experience at length, and I vow to continue doing so daily. I might fail, falter or break my streak and I accept that as a possibility. But I won't accept that as the end. Not anymore. I want control over my life.
My goals are to stop PMO, remove PA, build confidence and support healthy sleeping and fitness habits. Alongside nurturing a place and moment of reflection in my life which I have been consistently distracting myself from.
A lot of big words for sure, so I will now back those up with results starting today. I'll do my best to provide triggers and thoughts, what I thought went well and what could been done better.
Here's some quotes that have helped me keep focus in the past:
"Every determination is a negation."
"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there." - Yogi Berra
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." - William Blake
