How do I stop relapses?

How do I stop many relapses?
for example: fall one day and the other and the other

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The best way I have found to stop yourself from relapsing over and over again (binging) is to get serious about discipline in your life.

This is extremely important for those early-in-the-streak binges. They usually always happen after a big fall from a long streak or when your life is feeling super crappy.

And that’s why the important thing is to apply discipline in your life immediately. This comes with two benefits:

  1. You start to force yourself out of your comfort zone, developing that willpower to fight the urges in the short-term and break the cycle of binging.

  2. It builds your self-esteem and feelings of accomplishment. A lot of times we binge when we feel terrible, or worthless, or feel unaccomplished, like after a huge relapse. Creating discipline in your life will build up those good feelings and self-esteem and help you to say no when the urges come around.

I usually set up a hard and fast strategy for myself when I’m dealing with binges. Here’s the steps I take:

Step 1: Get your motivation straight. Why are you doing noFap. Why are you here? Write down 10 good reasons why you want to do this. Then write down 20 consequences of your actions (10 consequences of staying clean, and 10 consequences of relapsing). Compare them, which kind of person do you want to be? And actually write these things down, that’s important for you to really feel the weight of them and solidify them in your mind.

Step 2: Before you go to bed tonight, write out your entire schedule for tomorrow and the week ahead. I’m going to give you a list of possible discipline-building activities you can do for the next day and week to force you out of binging. But know that you have to push yourself to do your very best, to not stop just because you are tired or don’t feel like it. You have to truly want this, otherwise you will fall back into the binge. So here is the list below, I’d suggest you take on as much as you can fit into your schedule or whatever works best (and of course, feel free to add your own in there, these are just what work for me):

  • Running/Jogging. Download a timer app (or better yet a running app, I suggest MapMyRun by Under Armour), and run for as long as you can. Increase your running time by quarter chunks each day or whatever you can do. But make progress. If you haven’t run before, this can be hard, but it is by far the most effective discipline strategy I have found.

  • Cold Showers for every shower. These can be brutal, but they seriously help. Make sure to keep on your typical shower schedule, don’t let yourself sneak by by not taking a shower.

  • Breathing Meditation. This one can be very helpful for working on controlling your thoughts. Breath in and out while focusing on the sensation of the air going through your nostrils. At the same time, do not let any thoughts into your head except the focus on the feeling of the air. At first you might think it is easy, but trust me this takes a ton of practice. Often times you will think you are doing good but then realize you were thinking about something, even thinking about how good you were doing haha.

  • Pull ups/Push ups. Pretty straight forward.

Step 3: Actually do it, and stick with the plan the entire week. It will be hard, but if you follow through and don’t cheat yourself, you’ll find it is much easier to resist the urges already.

Step 4: In one week’s time, if you haven’t relapsed (if you have, restart the steps), write a new schedule out for the coming week and month. Here you can be more relaxed as you have to consider that events may come up that may hinder your plan. Make something flexible, yet still productive. In this, you’ll also want to start considering new, long-term strategies that you can implement. Things that, even when faced with urges in difficult situations, you can still beat them. My recommendation here is mindfulness. And at this point, I’m really going beyond the scope of your question, as what I wrote above is how I have gotten free from binging in my past streaks. But if you are curious about my methods of mindfulness, I’ll post a link to another post I made that describes my long-term strategies for beating this.

I hope that helps man! Good luck with shaking that cycle, it’s not easy, but you can do it!

If you have any questions, or if you would like me to explain something more in-depth, feel free to ask me!

Good luck :+1:

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