26 - PIED journal

Hello fellow companions,

it was already two years ago since I discovered my first problems with ED starting my fight with this addiction. In these two years my brain tricked me dozens of times into porn and porn related activities. Reviewing these two years I see progress in the right direction however I'm sure a proper reboot won't take you nearly as long as me with all the inconsistency I allowed myself. Let me tell you my story and I hope by reading it you can identify one or another trick of your brain and act smarter than I did. I plan to make updates on my status regularly from now on. Hopefully I can live up to that promise considering my history of being a quitter
I started with high speed internet porn at the age of around 14 and retroperspectively I always had the problem of objectifying women, however my first sexual problems (PIED) weren't present until two years ago. During my teens and early twenties I always wanted all women and I had phases where I had multiple girls constantly lying to seduce them, even though I felt disgusted of my own behavior. I'm sure now that porn was a problem all my life long but that realization I could have only had with developing ED. So bless my erectile disfunction I guess? Haha, no seriously this is the most horrible feeling I ever had in my life. Never have I ever felt so little as a man as when I was not getting it up for a beautiful girl and I cannot wish this feeling to anyone. I promise to work hard on myself, fix my brain and become a better man both to other people and myself.

From the beginning. First countermeasures:
After realizing that I had a problem with porn I was clearly underestimating this addiction. I decided first only to allow myself to watch porn every third day. Afterall there where hundreds of guys watching porn not having PIED and also I watched porn my whole life only now encountering a problem, right? All I had to do, so I thought, was going back to a healthy frequency and also not escalating into weird shit. Guess what? It didn't work. Once on my cheat day I would heavily escalate and go for multiple rounds making up to all the missed out orgasms. The problem was when my brain was once on fire there's no way of stopping it. Give an alcoholic access to an unlimited beer tab every third day and tell him to only have one beer. That?s like the meanest thing you can do to an abstinent alcoholic and it is the meanest thing I could have done to myself! There is no way I could have rebooted like this. Soon I found myself back into more frequent more tabs, longer and more extreme use of porn.

First girl after ED-fiasco:
It was a few months later when a girl unexpectedly took me home with her. As soon as we were at her place I knew I couldn't get it up. FUCK, again in this situation. I told her I didn't want to go all the way today. I felt like shit but luckily she agreed to meet another time. I bought some time with excuses and so we weren't meeting up until one week. One week of figuring out how to get it up. I bought some pills and stayed away from all kind of sexual arousal for all week (I guess you can call it Monk mode). And guess what it was totally working, I didn?t even need the pills (however I did later). We had sex once and I performed rather okayish, no PE no PIED. Good enough for another date at least. But then BOUM hits the chaser. It was an immense amount harder to stay away from sexual arousal afterwards. And soon enough I found myself looking at girls body?s trying to get a feeling in my P followed by binging and also PMO. We met some more times but I more and more often had to force erections and suffered from PE or PIED and I lost interest. However I thought I found out that within a week I could get it up properly and thereby solve all my problems and basically be rebooted. So why quit porn for good when I can basically always reboot within a week, I told myself.

Going 10000 kilometers away:
It couldn't go on like this and when my semester abroad was around the corner it was the perfect chance to quit with a new environment, building new habits meeting lots of new people, far away from the porn dungeon at home. I then managed the longest streak so far of ridiculously hard 14 days without O. But I also aggressively searched for a girl because I couldn't bear it and yet another time I found myself buying pills and forcing erections with the girl I found soon after. I did the same mistakes with this girl than with the first one I described. I again didn?t open up to her and tried to keep up with her and her desires. Junior didn?t stand a chance. Cravings where huge after a night with her and I constantly felt hung over and depressed. I told her about my porn addiction the day before I left towards home and we stayed in a long distance for a while afterwards. I think she never knew how much of an impact this addiction had on me and on us and I was too afraid of talking about it. Afterall the relationship didn?t make any sense anymore. She did took it hard when I broke up, even though I think this was the cleanest and most honest breakup I ever managed. I had porn to flee from all my emotions, and so I did.

Back home
I wrote my master thesis during that time and I found myself to weak to fight my addiction with full power since the thesis was extremely stressful on me. I again allowed myself one porn, no skipping, no multiple tabs, just the first video which was on my No 1 website, I just couldn?t help myself. Even though I didn?t have too much problems concerning depression, motivation or brain fog I withdrew more and more out of my social life focusing only on one project, my thesis. This is something I have to attack now since an intact social life is a huge help in counteracting boredom, which is one of the worst enemies. Also my PIED problem was definetely not getting any better with still watching porn.
Ready to succeed
I recently finished my master thesis, moved to a new home and started working full time since 2.5 months. Since then I stayed away from porn and I am currently on my longest orgasm free streak of 23 days. I have to say it?s getting more and more easy, what a relief! Maybe it?s the feeling not to constantly fail myself again and again. It?s still tough though and my brain still tries to trick me with ideas like it?s might be okay to go to a hooker or mindlessly loosing myself into fantasy. Most trouble I have is with abstaining from testing though. This is a huge mental struggle. Seeing him just hanging there feeling lifeless and I would touch him and slightly fantasies to calm myself that he can still be woken up.
To tackle this fight against my addiction right this time I created a chart from the beginning of that 23 days streak. I always found the available charts quite helpful in terms of what to expect and as a summery of how other reboots went. I also found it very helpful for myself to have an overview about my progress and liking misbehavior to increased withdrawal symptoms. I highly recommend to do your own. I started to make comments at the end of every day and grading it towards cravings and mood on a scale from 1 to 10, which I'm going to make public in this journal form now on. I'm also planing to introduce a rating of how I performed over the day in terms of abstinence form sexual stimuli looking somehow like this:
10 Heavy relapse with multiple videos and skipping
9 Relapse with one video and skipping
8 Relapse with one video without skipping
7 Binging at porn videos
6 Relapse with pictures
5 Binging at pictures
4 Relapse with fantasy
3 Fantasize
2 Looking at girls aggressively
1 Testing
0 Arousal free day

Good luck y?all

Ps: the chart will follow shortly. Currently I'm getting an error when I'm attatching a file (13 kb) saying: "The upload folder is full. Please try a smaller file and/or contact an administrator."

I had a long weekend over eastern which was a huge risk for boredom but it also gave me the opportunity to think a lot about my situation. It was really nice weather so I drove my bicycle to the nearest lake and just laid in the grass by myself twice. Best decision I could have made. My mind was very restless and jumpy at first and creeped after every passing girl but soon settled. Other than at home alone I didn?t had to constantly fight myself against the urge to masturbate.
I thought about why I think this time I?m better prepared than ever before to finally get a lasting reboot over with.
Since I had really good sex (at least for the girls) frequently before (probably due to DE) I used to tell myself it must be easy for me to get back to that point. Even though I of cause also knew back in my head fastest and observably best way to reboot successfully was to abstain form all sexual stimuli. I now came to the actual realization that not my ED is the main problem even though it is the only symptom I cared about for a long time. I can?t go back to the pre-ED less sick version of my addiction. I tried really hard to go back to a healthy porn use as I thought I had before. And even though my porn use got a lot healthier over the two years it just doesn?t cut it. I still have problems to perform, I have mood swings, lifeless penis and all kinds of shit to make life hard on myself. By constantly remining myself to have this addiction by dealing with it on paper not only in my head has cleared my mind in a way. It?s relieving and encouraging to read the thoughts of a moment of clarity in a moment of weakness and depression.
I find it equally important to note the feelings I have when my brain terrorizes and how I was able to overcome the huge urges.
Since I?m fighting this since quite a while now, never with enough effort though to fully beat the addiction I still constantly prepared to make quitting easier and at least slow down the damage. With my porn use I think there were the following problems:
-frequency I masturbated (short sessions but multiple times per day)
-amount of stimuli desired (multiple tabs + skipping)
-escalating into weird shit

Getting rid of the weird shit was rather easy. I told myself that this must be the main cause of my problem since that was the very last direction my porn addiction took more and more frequently. I probably just compensated it with more tabs and skipping to compensate for the reduces stimuli. I found this habit to be way harder to eliminate and I always had to fight it when allowing myself to watch porn. But also reducing this was probably at least slowing down the damage when I yet again couldn?t resist I was at least not completely giving in.
When I started my new job and moved to a new room I wasn?t abstaining from orgasm at first. But I think in this one and a half months I delinked MO from the screen. If I would come across a trigger on the screen I would close it, fantasize about a real girl and keep it going this way. Fired up it would constantly try to think about other girls in order to be able to keep it up.
Since 24 days though I have been off orgasms. When I stumble upon a trigger now I would close it and try to think about nothing. With no feeling in my ding dong either not going up at all or going flat quickly, I would soon loose interest and withstanding is a lot easier.
Being aware of that and repeatedly rememorizing it is making fighting the ?testing problem? a lot. Yesterday was testing free even though I had lots of time for myself.

I had two really good days an the 22nd and 23rd. Then came yesterday evening I watched the latest Game of Thrones episode. For everyone who doesn't know that show: It's great but it also has some nude scenes involved. I was planing on looking away when theres a nude scene but I took a glimpse which was enough to fire up my brain. I didn't relapse but it was difficult of not thinking about all the beautiful women of the show when I wanted to go to sleep. I could fall asleep after meditating for a while. I think it was because of this  little fire in my brain that my day today was not so good. I was feeling stressed for no reason. The urges were not even that difficult to handle but I was mentally exhausted, nervous and unbalanced. Multiple co-worker told me that I look like shit. I blamed it on bad sleep and some allergic reaction because of the pollen. It got better during the day, but I'm surprised on how extreme my brains and bodys reaction on that small glimpse had.
Have a good one

Still can't upload files so I uploaded the mood chart here:
https://workupload.com/file/9AXJ2h7s

best regards

I signed up for a meditation class and the first lesson was today. I had experimented with meditation before but my session usually wouldn?t exceed 10 minutes until I thought I had achieved a certain calmness I stopped and if I couldn?t I would distract myself with science or engineering videos on youtube.
However meditation in a group I found was a very different experience. I think it was the pressure arising from trying not to distract the others that made me feel mentally and physically stressed. My hands were sweaty my heart and breath were fast, so I had to pay attention not to breath too loud. Also water kept running in my mouth making me having to swallow the spit and my body was so hot it felt like glowing. I tried to forget that I?m not alone but no matter how hard I tried to think about nothing I couldn?t relax in this unfamiliar environment. I constantly had the feeling of sucking at what I was doing, it was clearly not working for me. At some point I was so frustrated I would have liked to just get up and walk away. No way I would have made it to this point meditating alone, but causing such an awkward social situation would wasn?t an option.
The guy leading the meditation group explained me afterwards that it is totally normal to have completely different experiences during meditation, sometimes really relaxing and easy, sometimes a lot more difficult and frustrating, because also I would always be a different person. To be honest I thought he had to say that to make me feel a bit better, so that I wouldn?t give up.
On the way home though I was really surprisingly relaxed. In public I?m usually very driven and with a lot of strangers around me in a train a bit uncomeatable, always glimpsing at attractive women hoping to get a smile but also always afraid that they feel creeped out.
An old couple sat next to me and the women even pointed out that she thought I was very calm. She was super annoying being a total cunt towards her husband and she would have needed this meditation class probably way more than me. However it still was very pleased when she said that even though she guess my zodiac sign wrong afterwards, And after I told her my actual zodiac sign she said would have been the second possibility? Sure. Not crazy at all. Anyhow I think now this first meditation session was not a total fail after all like I thought during the session.