I didn’t know you had been through all this. Kudos to you brother. You proved that only we can change our situation and no one else.
I too struggle with becoming more self-disciplined and have came a long way from what I used to be. I came across this 5 Second Rule given by Mel Robbins, its a short trick, look it up on YouTube. Further, Gym helps me a lot in training my mind and controlling my emotions plus when my body becomes better day be day it is an additional boost of confidence for me. I am not even 5% of what I aim to be but I am moving towards it everyday.
You have came this far and you still have hunger to better yourself, you will obviously move past this hurdle of PMO. Keep motivating brother.
You pointed out multi-tasking, I was in that trap till December, I was studying for three degrees at once and also trying my hands on entrepreneurship. Sense dawned upon me when I failed miserably in two of the degrees and had to postpone one of them as well as the startup. I was making a fool out of myself. Now I am focusing completely on my major. Hopefully I will be able to complete what I have left in my hand.
I LOVE MYSELF TOO MUCH to let porn ever again be a part of my life
I LOVE MYSELF TOO MUCH to see how this addiction replaces all my good traits with bad ones
I LOVE MYSELF TOO MUCH to keep wasting time, doing what I don’t like instead of doing what I love
I LOVE MYSELF TOO MUCH to watch how I get dictated by this
I LOVE MYSELF TOO MUCH to continue watching how I don’t reach my goals
I was finally able to change my mindset to a very important topic.
Currently my motto is: I am productive as long as I know what I’m doing and I’m focusing on this single thing.
previously I felt like I am unproductive and lazy as soon as I stand up from my desk because that is where you get your work done… So, I had to try to keep myself in front of my desk as long as possible -> I watched porn to remove all tiredness, hunger or any other feeling that made me stand up from my desk. and without knowing I got less and less productive
I was able to transform this wrong believe of productivity. To be productive means to strive towards your goal. What are my goals? One is my career, the second is getting a healthy life back.
That means, that I am productive as long as I do something for one of these two goals.
Hence I am productive as long as I focus on doing ONE thing at a time.
That includes studying but also things like mowing my lawn or sitting outside and enjoying the sun and even going out for a hike is productive time since it helps reaching my healthy life.
What it doesn’t include is multitasking things because this prevents me from reaching either of these two main goals. Multitasking gives you the feeling of productivity because you think you can do two things in the same time as you would do one of the things. But this was the huge lie I told myself for the past 5ish years. Multitasking needs more time than single-tasking, it makes you feel bad because at the end of the day you did neither of the two things properly
This is a 180° mind shift and I feel so much better now. I don’t need porn to stay focused and “productive”.
I feel like I am ready to try another push on staying completely abstinent of porn. The last 5 weeks I watched porn every other day (at least). But during the last 5 days I had maybe 3-4 very minor urges but nothing that really made me relapse. Let’s see how far it goes.
At least my brain feels as if I’m close to finishing stage 1 or the reboot.
Counter is on day 5 and it feels as if I can go pretty far this time
I’m very determined to go far this time. I feel strong and I know my problems. It’s an amazing strength when you feel an urge and you know exactly why you have it right now and how you can answer it.
With one single sentence or an action I was able to remove all urges i had this week easily.
quick update: just hit day 12, still going strong.
Really happy how it goes so far.
Especially since these two weeks had everything in it which typically made me relapse.
I had days where I was bored as hell, days where i had so many things to do that I didn’t know how i should do it, I started taking tango lessons again which typically made me freak out and so on.
But despite all these things, I had maybe one major urge and only a few occasions where my brain said something like: “c’mon, I didn’t have a porn in so long. Please give me one.” but the voice sounds very frustrated and without energy behind it.
I will write again, probably when I hit 30 days or something like that.
Until then, stay strong guys!!
Porn-highway:
It seems like I feel the neuronal pathways. Since I think less and less about porn and sex in general (there are days where I don’t think about porn the whole day. Not just pushing the thoughts away but really no thoughts are coming up.) I feel that there are different paths.
In the everyday life, everything feels normal and healthy. I can concentrate and thoughts are coming up decently fast. While learning for university, i can feel that I need to develop or create new pathways. Studying was always coupled to porn since I never learned without fapping (sounds weird but I go really productive at studying while fapping). Now that I don’t use this connection again, I have to learn how I can focus on studies without porn. it is slow and feels very awkward but i will set small goals and strengthen these new paths.
On the opposite side, I feel that the porn path (the highway in my brain) is closed. I don’t use it anymore. Most of my actions are using other paths. I feel this in the moments when a porn-thought slips through and gets onto the highway. The thoughts are damn fast, strong and present everywhere in my brain.
my goal now is to build a new “study highway” and hope that my brain will continue neglecting the “porn highway” until it gets crumbled, damaged and unusable.
Sorry this topic gets more and more non-nofap related. But since it is a diary I can write about everything I want . I hope that this will help me sorting out one of my main issues.
There are so many things that I would love to do but I just fear doing them and, as always, I run away without having them done (going to tango lessons, playing the piano at the train station where I have to wait 45min every week (there is a public piano), asking my friends if they could help me moving to a new apartment and so on)
The problem is again the bulling when I was younger. They teased and hurt me not because of the things I did but just because they wanted to tease someone, and I was the easiest pray.
The problem now is, that it is wired in my brain, that as soon as something extraordinary happens, I will get hurt. It doesn’t matter if I did something wrong or bad. I fear anything that is different than what is expected to happen. So, if I try to dare to play the piano at the train station my brain immediately tells me that they will all laugh at me, they will beat me or damage me in any other way just because I did something extraordinary.
This sounds so weird and absurd, but this is how it happened every day for so many years when I was younger that this link got extremely strong.
■■■■ again, is one way of dealing with all these feelings. Either I feel depressed because I don’t dare to do what I love, or I watch ■■■■ so that I don’t have to start doing the things. I can tell myself I will fill in the application for the tango lesson but first I will watch a ■■■■. I will do it afterwards. You guess it, I will never do it.
We might be in different countries but our story is pretty similar. I too was bullied and I wasn’t even small, I was already in high school. And all of the bullying was just because I was fat and used to be quiet in the class. It is like there is a dent on my psyche due to all that happened.
But today I thank them for what they did to me, If not for them I would have never worked for my personal growth and development. I thank them for fat shaming me because I am in the best shape of my life. I thank them for calling me names and slandering me because now I have developed speaking skills and I participate in moot courts and debates and I am just a semester away from becoming a lawyer.
But somewhere in my heart I know that something inside me died during that time when all of this used to happen and I had to go through that all alone with no one to reach out to…
Sometimes I just wished that there would have been an easier way to learn all these lessons.
They almost broke me. Almost they would have destroyed a human life but luckily I had the strength to continue. Which now, as you said, gives me the change to accomplish things they aren’t able to do.
may was my first month ever with only 3 relpases.
no binging after relapse and pretty good streaks in between.
feels like this month will be the first without any relapses
This will probably be the hardest thing for me to write about. I always told myself that it doesn’t exist and I pushed it deep down so that I don’t have to handle these thoughts. But that’s not how recovery works. So, lets unfold what is hidden:
I met my girlfriend something like 8 years ago. I was 18ish back then and she was my first and only girlfriend. She is the most amazing person and i really love her and never ever wanna have another girl but porn induced a thought into my brain:
In a normal porn day you can “meet” dozens of girls. You see different body types, different characters, different settings and I’m wondering how would another girl be in bed. I walk through the streets and the only thing I can think of is: How good would she be, would she be dominant or not, what would she do, where would we do it and so on. Or things like “yea, she would definitely be like the girl there in this particular clip, that would be amazing”.
I’m really desperate and don’t know what to do about it. That’s why I thought that I have to let out my thoughts here.
I don’t know if the problem is the one I previously mentioned or if I’m just a kind of person who is never happy with what he has and always searched for something even better. But I don’t think that this is true. When I’m together with her, I’m the most happy person on the world. The problem arises as soon as she is not near me. I do feel that I miss her even when we are apart for only a week.
Somehow I have to learn to bath in my luck, having my girl and I have to stop seeing the other things as important. It doesn’t matter what other couples do in bed, doesn’t matter how it would feel to kiss someone else, how someone else would behave. I already found my perfect match.
It annoys me, since the first two weeks were so easy and I felt so good. But the last three days were like hell. I think I couldn’t have been (and still be) closer to a relapse but I don’t wanna. In porn, I see what I don’t have. I don’t have 200 different women, I can’t have a different kind of sex every day, I can’t choose the look and style according to my daily mood and it also doesn’t make sense to have that. But like a child, I always wanna have what I can’t have.
. I hope that this will help me sorting out one of my main issues.