Trying to do the right thing

Hi everyone,

My name is Matias and I?m 27 years old, and I?m here to seek support and feel more committed to this path towards the end of addiction. I have tried to leave this too many times but the truth was always quite difficult not to get carried away by impulses and temptations, but for almost a year, I have been feeling what I would call warning signs which tell me that it is no longer okay to continue perpetuating this addiction, so in this I?m trying to make efforts to overcome this habit and thus be able to do what which is correct. What has given me the determination to make this decision has been the integration into my life of the beauty (although not easy) philosophy of leading a righteous life, which has a Hindu approach and is about doing only what is of according to your conscience or inner voice (as one wants to call it); which is to think, say and do the right thing, in order to create good karma and thus reduce the account of bad karma that must be settled in life , basically it is a process of "purification" (yes, it may sound exotic) that is necessary to achieve peace and happiness. All this has a purely theoretical and religious approach, but at least it makes sense to me and that's why I want to put it into practice, so I will keep a record to share my process and be able to receive help from this great community

Thank you!

PD: Sorry if what I write is not well understood, since I am using Google Translate for translation, but I will try to make it as clear as possible.

Hello and welcome here.

Writting down here your daily progress has been a great help and encouragement for me so far, and the amount of knowledge and insight found here is amazing !

And you will see that sharing your thoughts and progress with others here, along with reading other people's experiences will help you to understand the mechanisms of your addiction, and thus fight it better.

It will also help you improve your english skill ! (I am myself not english first language).

Update here daily, even if it is a little thing that you want to say.

And know that urges are inevitably gonna come, and that they are part of the recovery process. Urges are the withdrawals that are needed in order to reboot.

You have to resist them.

Be prepared and know that they are coming and that it will be tough to resist them.

Be strong. Lolking forward to see you making breakthrough.

I have found good advice on Lero' s journal because he has analyzed a lot is thoughts and sensations.

Thank you Arthur! Ok, I will try to write daily my progress or the days that the impulses are stronger and also share my thoughts and observations that comes about the mechanism of addiction.

My last relapse was last sunday, so I'm just in my day two of reboot .. for now there ins?t pshysical impulses but there is almost everithing thoughts about sexual fantasies and relates with porn, so let me get carried away by those thoughts ago That is more prone to fall into urgency when the impulses appear, but for now I feel stable and without much trouble. I also wanted to share that I have been addicted for more than 15 years, without long periods of withdrawal, causing me ED and unfortunately I found out when I started having sex. For now I will share that, have a nice day,

Matias

Thank you Mathias. have a nice day too.

I also suggest you to write your number of days first thing on your post, to help others quickly see : "ok, he is at such or such level."

Although the exact number of days doesn't matter that much but the general mindset is what really matters.
Because everybody can slip at some time and relapse back to day 0 but if they go into despair and quit, they lose, but if they get back on track right away, the relapse is therefore not that big of a deal.

It is all about having the badass mentality of if i fall, then i get back on track right away.
I started to have that mindset since i write here because even if i have relapsed, i don't want to quit altogether and let down the people that are reading me.
We need to rely on each other. Not to be perfect but to fight.
Like a boxer that gets punched and falls but he can get back up.
The real badass is not the one who never suffers loss, but the one who learns from his failures and gets back up and fights again.

Because know this :

I don' t know if you have ever been on a serious and long streak but some urges are strong as hell, even as early as day 4, or 7. So you are very likely to relapse.
Of course it is possible that you don't and i hope you don't because that is what we want to do, but i want you to know that if you relapse, don't treat yourself as a loser because we have all been there relapsing. Don't quit. Just write : Day 0, and learn what you can from it.
Tell us what you learned and how not to relapse in the same way next time.
And every relapse should be an opportunity to learn and have more "weaponry" to fight the addiction.
You will learn so much about yourself if you are consistent at writting here and doing nofap.


Some of the things that relapses have taught people here are :

_When you relapse, usually a binge occurs or it is very difficult to not binge, and you binge a number of times equal to your previous streak days (at least for me). For example if you had a 7 days streak and you relapse, you fap 7 times in one or two days. So basically you are back to bottom zero.
So don't relapse.

_In case of an urge, you will first start to have a little thought in your head like :"hey i would just look at some pictures just to feel good but i won' t fap."
It happened to me countless times and i always fapped after if i obeyed those thoughts and watched the pictures, and it always escalates into binge.
Because it is just a way that you brain has to make you relapse and get your dose.
You just want to watch a little thing, just to "feel good". NO. You need to embrace the suffering.

_The withdrawals (urges) are gonna be painful and uncomfortable but they are the only way to heal. When they come, tell yourself that they are normal and that you CANNOT get past this addiction if you don't go through them patiently. It is the only way to succed. So be prepared and willing to suffer. The only way to heal is to go through the withdrawals. Don't tell yourself that you are just gonna fap this last time because really it is too painfull, too tempting. And tht is how people stay addicted for years, because they tell themselves that they are just gonna do it one last time, and that one last time turns into hundreds of one last time.

_Eliminate triggers in your life. If you Watch any nude or even arrousing images, they will often stay in your brain for a long time because your brain is gonna want to fap to these until you do it. So don't watch images ever. And above all don't edge, because edging without fapping is gonna make those images carved in your brain. I experienced that at my last relapse.

_Edging is the worst.

_Every relapse starts with a tiny thought of just looking at something mild. You have to learn to recognize when thoses thoughts arise in your brain and resist that thought and kill it "in the egg" as soon as you spot it. Before it becomes a monster.

_Lero and i are on hard mode. No masturbation at all. Some people say that just MO is not that bad but MO will lead you to crave PMO and it will be much harder to resist the urge to PMO. Lero called that the "chaser effect".

Good luck Buddy, and remember : update here daily, and try to analyze your feelings and what is going on in you. Also report the benefits because you are going to start seeing benefits.

Thanks for the advice @ Arthur2, I have reached a similar conclusion on some points so I am happy because it validates the lessons of addiction, I will read them again in the future to try to stay out of relapses.

Good luck Buddy, and remember : update here daily, and try to analyze your feelings and what is going on in you. Also report the benefits because you are going to start seeing benefits.

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Yes, I feel it will help a lot. Sharing my progress will constantly help me feel more committed to my recovery and with yours, now to try to be strong and be patient.

M

Yes, and if you fap, tell us and don' t go into despair and quit.

Just start over and use that to analyze your errors and why you relapsed.

Ok Arthur, I will do that.

Day 3:
For now there are no major problems with temptation, which if I have felt that this week has gone slower than normal, there has also been a slight irratibility, but it may not only be due to abstinence but also to a problem that has been stressed me for a long time, and this problem has been one of the main triggers of my relapses, the good thing is that the situation has calmed down a bit and doesn?t affect me as much as before, so I feel that I can handle addiction better.

Cool. Keep going strong.

For me, the first week is usually calm as well and the urges come at around day 6 or 7.
Expect a storm coming your way.

but it may not only be due to abstinence but also to a problem that has been stressed me for a long time, and this problem has been one of the main triggers of my relapses,

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Cool, apparently your are starting to pinpoint an issue in your life that you have been avoiding to face because porn was numbing you.
Nofap will allow you and force you to face it and solve it. It will be hard because we are used to numb ourselves with this comfortable anchor of porn, but as men we need to do it and it is worth it.

Nofap is just the key to help you unlock and face your issues in life. If you fap then you can never really face life like a real man.

Yes, clearly Fap is a mechanism to avoid difficult and painful experiences. So it?s part of the process to confront and resolve in a good way the situations that we reject with addiction.

Day 4:
Luckily today there hasn?t been so much trouble, except at a time when I was on YouTube and I got a recommendation from a bikini actress with a tempting camera approach (so to speak), which almost instinctively ended up in the search engine Google images in search of more photos of this girl but luckily I had a low libido and didn?t end in the worst way,
I think that from now on I will start writing about my emotions and how I feel about my current situation,  which are the triggers of my addiction, and I would also like to share something really important in my life, but I wouldn?t know how it can understand if I try to explain it in this context, but What I can say is that it is a process that is being decisive in my recovery, although in a more organic or non-linear way,
well I think tomorrow will begin the difficult way so I will walk carefully, I hope it?s one more day of streak!

Day 1:

Sorry for not writing before, I'm restarting again because I had a relapse on Friday night and today morning, I really thought it would last longer when I felt committed to writing in the forum, but it wasn't like that, and that's why good Part of the day I felt something sad and vulnerable. Today in the morning I felt really bad because something degrading happened to me last night, I went out with a  friend to party and when we left the club we felt really bad, maybe it was because we drank fed up, but we think it was not justifiable to have felt That way, in fact we thought they threw us some drugs in the drink, after spending two hours in that deplorable state, I had to call my mother to pick up us and ended up taking me to the hospital, thanks to her nothing worse happened to us . It has been one of the most unpleasant nights of my life, so when I got home, I felt the need to see P to relieve my helplessness and anger. For the next time I will be more careful with what I drink, I will also limit myself more with alcohol consumption because it is one of the triggers for an easy relapse without resistance.

Day 3:
I will try to resume this thread again, I?m restarting again because I had a relapse last Thursday, but I hope to remain committed to my recovery and try to overcome the temptations, for now I have nothing more interesting to tell but I will see that I can share more Go ahead, maybe sharing my impressions of addiction would be a good place to start, in the week I will write about that, we'll see what comes up...

Motivation and commitment is not going to save you in the long run.

You need a long term vision and a strategy.

For the long term vision, i suggest this article :

https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/tools-for-change-recovery-from-porn-addiction/rebooting-advice-observations-from-successful-rebooters/my-thoughts-on-rebooting-extremely-long-post/

For more strategical advice i suggest you watch the tamed course by "improvement pill" on YouTube.


You also need practical and precise weapons to fight the monster.

For example, in case of an urge, what i have found was a good help is for me to go out shopping.
It gets me out of the house and provides an other reward to my brain, because i like shopping for food, i get to choose what i will be enjoyig eating.

This is what i will be doing right now as i speak.

Stay strong.

Commitment to a vision of the future is very important and will have dramatic positive results for you.  What a commitment means though, is that you have yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals.  The goals are nice but you need a plan to reach them.  In your plan use strategies and techniques like the one Arthur mentioned.  When you follow your plan to reach your small goal and you reach it.  It feels good, you get dopamine. 

Motivation is awesome but it's like bathing, you need to do it every day.  It's not permanent, so find it every day. 

Day 4:
Thank you very much for your advice.
This week I have been busy, but now I will take the time to review the suggested content. You are right, at the moment I haven?t considered creating a long-term strategy, I have only considered some tips to avoid falling into the trap. I don't know how to start for now, so I'll see the links to build my plan, to continue with this then.

M

Day 1:
Yesterday I had a damn relapse, I had 6 days of streak but on Sunday night I decided to surf the internet lying in my bed because I felt pain in the spine (due to a chronic injury), and in a moment of distraction, I got carried away by the impulses .. It was like an almost automatic act that did not give me time to observe the impulses, so it left me a little surprised later (apart from the depressed after relapse).

@Arthur2 regarding the article you recommended, I read it a little more than half and found that it has some interesting points, but I do not quite agree with what is raised, mainly because I think that addiction will not necessarily disappear when we solve some problems of our life, since I think it works rather as a mechanism of resistance to what is happening in the present moment. I believe that regardless of whether we improve our lives, problems will always exist, therefore, this avoidance mechanism can continue to operate as a way to relieve the pain caused by difficult situations. What I find very useful is to observe how addiction operates in our experience both at the level of thought and in the sensations and emotions (I took it from an author's article), but you are right that it is important to propose a vision and goals while trying to find the Root of this problem.