Hey man, I know that situation well. For a long time I used this app off and on to no avail, and the stress from my school was overwhelming, making the urges unbeatable.
It was harder still, because I had to study, so I couldn’t do my typical urge-resisting activities.
But I’ll tell you what worked for me. The first thing I did was get really involved in this community. Before I used to only come on here to say whether I made it or I didn’t, a couple of words here and there and that was it.
This was a mistake. We have to really dedicate ourselves to becoming a part of the community here to keep ourselves clean. Once I joined one of the journaling challenges on here, I became so much more aware of myself, my needs, and what caused my urges.
And that’s where I discovered a truly liberating strategy for beating this, a strategy that can always be used, even when you are busy and stressed. And that strategy is mindfulness.
The essential structure of mindfulness is that we learn to be present with our thoughts. I’m not talking about mindfulness meditation, which is what mindfulness is usually associated with. Instead I’m talking about merely learning to understand what is going on inside your head at all times.
I have found that in this journey, one of the biggest reasons why we relapse, why we lack such a handle on our lives is because we do not understand ourselves, what drives our addiction. We have for so long neglected our needs as human beings (i.e. feeling lonely, stressed, anxiety, etc.) becaude we have filled those places with the addiction.
But once we start to learn what our body is saying, and realize that an urge is merely our body saying that something is wrong and needs to be fixed, then we can learn to rewire the urge and bring on healthy ways of dealing with our problems.
It’s gotten me to where I am now at 113 days clean from PMO.
If you’re interested in some of my strategies, I wrote a detailed post about what I do specifically to stay mindful in my 90 days clean update. I’ll post a link to it here: 90 Days PMO Clean After 5.5 Years of Addiction
Good luck man! I know you can break free from this and complete your goal of staying clean for the rest of 2019.
If you have any questions or need help or just need someone to talk to, don’t hesitate to message me 