I recently bought an amazing book. It is about wonders and the influence of our mindset on our health. I think this is a very important point.
The book itself is written by a medical doctor who criticizes the work of the doctors now a days. It talks about experiments where patients got all the side effects of a drug when they are told what side effects there are, but they don’t get them, if they don’t know it. Or about the success rate of surgeries depending on if the patients were told that the survival rate is 95 % or the mortality rate is 5%.
It is astonishing how huge the influence of our mindset is. If we think that we should get sick, we will get sick for sure. It goes so far that people get mutism (which is a state where you are physically able to speak but your mind blocks it and you are not able to say a single word. )
I see that effect way too often in this forum. People talking about how they feel after a relapse. That they start to stutter, they feel sick, can’t concentrate, can’t talk to girls anymore. The important part in the book is that these effects are not only imaginary. If I truly belief that I won’t be able to talk after a relapse, then I will really lose this ability.
I think it is particularly dangerous when people start to talk about how bad they feel after a relapse. If you write that you relapsed and now you are again on 0, you have all these negative effects back and so on. We can see a trend in certain groups were one starts to write, that he feels bad after a relapse, the next states that he get trouble thinking clearly, the next that he can’t talk to girls afterwards. It’s exactly this vicious cycle. You hear of a side effect. You think that, as soon as you relapse you need to feel like this and bang, you have the side effect too.
But this also works the other way around. A positive attitude increases your mood. We don’t have to suffer as much as we do. Focus on the half full glass and not the half empty. Look at the success you have. Each day of nofap counts toward your rewiring. You feel better after every day you experienced in this journey and not only the days of your current streak.
I think that we should stop talking so much about how terrible we feel. Sure, it can be used as a motivation if you say how porn influenced your life and you take that as a reason to get rid of it. But it doesn’t make sense to just compete about who feels worse.
Start to have a happy life and you will see that everything works out better
i looked it up but unfortunately the book is only available in German