I haven't posted in my journal for ages, so I presume most of you won't know my journal, but I wouldn't worry about reading the older entries to be honest, just stick with the here and now. So, the summary is I had three problems - PMO, binging and gambling. I didn't know how to approach these problems to start with but now I think I have a good method and i'm sharing it here.
The gambling wasn't really an addiction. I had significant cravings, but I was never out of control and quitting went without relapse. Binging I have recently started to see progress with and PMO has always been tricky. My plan originally was to focus on PMO because it was most important to me, but I now think I had that backward. Unfortunately, there's little good advice I have found on how to deal with multiple addictions, but here's my take.
Each addiction shares the same neural pathways, so they all contribute to hypofrontality and unhealthy dopamine response. Therefore, quitting PMO when you have three problems is harder because you're more hypofrontal and you have a less healthy dopamine response compared to someone dealing with PMO only, because the other addictions heighten the effect. Therefore, my current plan is to quit the easiest first, which was gambling. The next easiest is likely my eating disorder because PMO is said to be really hard to quit compared to other addictions. This is why my counters are for gambling and binging and not PMO. At the moment I am allowing PMO.
The idea is that by quitting gambling, I will improve my frontal control and my dopamine response, making it easier to quit binging. Then, by quitting binging, the same thing happens, making it easier to quit PMO. This is my current plan to quit PMO and clearly it's going to take a while but i'm doing well right now.
The other thing I would say is that I think anyone with multiple addictions is more likely to have an underlying problem, so I've done a lot of psychological work and I saw a therapist toward the end of last year, though the focus wasn't exclusively on quitting compulsive behaviours.
I probably won't update this journal that regularly, but I would appreciate support and encouragement for my progress with gambling and binging and also the hard work I've put in between 1st Jan 2015 when I started trying to quit these things and now when i'm making at least some progress.