What is your depression like? How did you know of the problem in the 1st place?

I realized on January 16th of this year that I had a problem.  This is my first post since "joining the nofap movement"... because I made it to 90 days then "relapsed" a few days later.  I knew I didn't want to go back, but I was really sore and I had to spend the day with my in-laws and felt I couldn't hide the soreness all day.  I stayed off all the sites, because I did not want to open up the bag of "instant access to an infinite number of mates", so I used a video my wife and I made.

Since then, I find myself wondering if I'm more depressed and unsure of myself, and if my hypofrontality (What I call "high executive function" as the tendency to make decisions quickly) have returned. 

I'm back on track with my reboot, and my desire to quit is still WAY higher than my desire to do it thankfully. 

Perhaps it would be useful if we could share some things, which I guess is the point of this website. It would help me a lot if you could respond to the following:

(1) How would you describe your depression and self-doubt from the bad habit... to others who have not lived through it?
(2) What is your story of how you knew you had a problem?

My answer to (1) is unfortunately that I can't pinpoint it all the time so I don't know how much is from a habit and how much is from real life issues.  I do know that dealing with life issues has driven me into the bad habit, however.  My wife has been depressed since we got married, because when we moved she took a job she doesn't want to have and has not been willing and able to walk away from it in spite of my encouragement and support. My father also told our family a month after we got married, that he had been cheating for the last 3 years and was going to move out and had set up my wife and I to live with my now jaded mother.  My wife and I never got to "be newlyweds" and we started our marriage in a poisoned environment.  I still haven't achieved closure with my father, and I find it hard to believe that anyone can love me sometimes. (Including my wife) 

I took a break from writing this for a half-hour and came back to it just now, and talked with my wife a little also.  I realize that it was more difficult for me to manage a large group of people this week when this is something I normally do, and my self-doubt is in fact worse this week also.  It's probably safe to say this is from "using" again. I've also noticed a problem that I developed with my eyesight this past year, which I would describe as "floating horizontal lines" that appear briefly whenever I look at something new.  This problem cleared during the last three months when I was not "using".

(2) has a much more simple answer, because there is no place where I wouldn't engage in the habit.  I would rationalize it for ANY reason.  (I'm alone or I can't get time to be alone, I work too much or I have extra free time, I'm rewarding myself for accomplishing something or doing it because I wasn't able to accomplish anything, I'm tired and need a pick-me-up or I'm too amped up and need to sedate myself... I even listened to JOI through my car stereo while driving home at the end of the day to preview what I would watch later.

Thanks for considering sharing your answers to these questions - just looking for perspective to help me get through!
- Darius Dragonslayer

1, i didn't see it for years
2, I just new there was something wrong for years but i didn't know what it was
    same as porn was wrong but i didn't know how to get out.
3, its a slow process when you recognise its fear then you can recover very slowly.

Well i never own it now ! i recognise what it is. it it is something that has joined me or tries to join me like porn its not me a cloud a fog and i gave  it permission to stay.


I went to the doctors once and said Dr is Worry stress and Anxiety all fear undercover and said yes.
He said if all my patients would understand that my surgery would but not so busy.
I also looked up the word stress which most people use every day which i found has only been around for 44 years or so.

So if your thinking your wife does not love you  you will eventually believe it no matter what she says. I am learning this to remove porn if i think porn is good for me ill eventually do it so we understand the reward programming I've not overcome this yet I'm still on a mission.
So depression is a mind set what has trained you just like porn does
So most of us has had bad  experiences and self pity will keep us in the past. Do a google search on self pity but please nobody do this if
you are sensitive to being triggered 

#1 i dont know if you can precisely say what gets you anxious because of porn and what not. only way to find out is to quit and after a year or two compare the results  8)

#2 i felt like i had a problem but with masturbation. i searched google many times and nobody really said anything too bad about it. only after PIED i found out that porn is addictive and everything.

dont think that if you watch a video of you and your wife, its somehow okay. it is still porn, addictive and it is directly pushing you back to more novelty. delete all porn you have and dont create some, that is also part of the reboot. yeah im talking about pictures and sexting too! no sex cam, no fantasy, no erotic stories.. dump it all and restart your brain  8)

(1) How would you describe your depression and self-doubt from the bad habit... to others who have not lived through it?
Mood and motivation wise... well put it this way I don't really feel anything? I don't know whether I'm making a big deal out of nothing or if I am really depressed. But stuff i really enjoyed and would give me that dopamine/butterfly feeling in my chest as i was playing video games or doing something I enjoyed... now those things most of the time (not always) keeps me somewhat content ... or in other words stopping me from just lying in my bed and sleeping trying to imagine stuff that would make me happy/ feeling really angry and restless. Self doubt? I'm not really sure to be honest. I have doubted whether i was depressed and still do to an extent.
*The above is now. Actually back before I went on a AD drug ''wellbutrin'' which stabilized my mood as described above... things were a bit worse. I felt sad yes.. but most of the time i just felt very Irritable and restlessness which i suppose was due to unhappiness/boredom. Video games and even porn stopped giving me any kind of buzz. I use to have a awful time at school in my earlier years but i still was happy because i would be very relieved when i got him and i would play video games with mates and really feel like i was enjoying myself. That's why I think I likely am depressed... unless everyone is a lot happier in their youth and adult hood is just a dull affair in general... I don't know. But i just don't have the drive to do things i know i'm interested in the most.


(2) What is your story of how you knew you had a problem?
Well i seem to be a severe case ED wise compared to others. But i panicked and realized there was a problem when i started up my porn as usual and I was almost fully flaccid and i could barely get an erection to porn. Later that day I tried getting erection using hard strokes and thinking really hard about sexual stuff and yep... could barely get an erection. I started googling and I became relived when i found out about porn addiction and it all made sense. It didn't take me long to find out what was wrong (I've become quite good at investigating online). At school around this time I was still having a hard time and had terrible anxiety... i was honestly too worried about things (various big operations i had going on at the time) to realize that i wasn't enjoying life in the same way... it was sort of a gradual change... it wasn't anything overnight. But i can tell you that when a healthy young mans dick stops working it doesn't matter WHAT is going on in your life... you are going to question things ASAP.

So, I'm not totally sure depression is my main issue.  There's also probably some attention deficit as well, and I'm kinda thinking maybe ADD is what I should be treating instead of depression.  But here are my story and explanation.

My depression isn't like what I've heard a lot of other people describe.  While I do occasionally get pretty frustrated with myself I don't have low self-esteem or self-hatred or anything like that.  What I have is mostly incredibly low motivation to ever do anything.  When I wasn't at work I'd pretty much just sit in my recliner and stare at my iPad and watch reruns of shows I'd seen a million times before.  I'd sit there thinking of all the things I'd like to be doing, but wasn't.  I'd even think of shows I'd rather be watching on Netflix but wouldn't bother changing the channel.  I was driving home from work one day and was wondering if that was all I'd ever do.  Then I started wondering why I should bother going on if that's all I was going to do.  I also decided at that moment that I wouldn't kill myself until after my parents died.  Oddly I never really felt sad about any of that.  When I got home I messaged an exGF of mine that I was still in touch with and told her that I thought maybe I was more depressed than I'd realized in the past.  See in the past I knew that every once in awhile I'd get mopey if i hadn't gone outside in awhile or something like that.  Anyway, then she told me "No, you're severely depressed and have been for a long time."  That was kind of a revelation to me and I immediately started crying.  I was crying from relief though.  There are treatments for depression and now that I was aware of what my problem was I could start fixing it. 

I told my friend that I wanted her to pressure me into making me make an appointment to see a professional.  I made an appointment with a counselor and she immediately recommended seeing someone about medication, so i made that appointment too.  A couple months after I started on the first medication things started to change.  I was able to make myself go out to a local kink club and started going to nearby munches (lunch or dinner so kinky folks can meet in a safe environment).  Then all of the sudden I had a community that I belonged to, and friends, and things to look forward to every week.  Things were looking good, so I stopped taking my medicine since I hated those side effects.  Here's the thing though, when I wasnt at parties or munches, i was right back in that damn recliner, staring my ipad (usually porn) with those same damn reruns on the television.  I was at one party and i was talking to someone and i mentioned taking an antidepressant and he mentioned that he'd tried a few before realizing that his real problem was ADD and just started treating that and that really worked for him.  So I had that idea in my head for awhile and eventually made another appointment to see another psychiatrist (the first one pissed me off by saying things and then doing different things).  I mentioned that I wasnt sure if it was depression or ADD that was my problem and after talking to him for awhile he agreed it was likely both.  Then he told me that if you're depressed ADD meds can often make the depression worse, so we should treat the depression first.  I started taking Wellbutrin and am still waiting to see if it helps or not before moving on to the next phase. 

'' What I have is mostly incredibly low motivation to ever do anything''
I'm this 100%. I think my depression is probably based off just not wanting to do anything but browse the internet watching videos/films. I'm on my second gap year and I haven't been out travelling... I've been at home hoping to quit porn and doing nothing else.