Smoker:
I haven’t smoked a cigarette in 6 months. Yesterday, I bought my favourite brand of cigarettes, pulled 20 cigarettes out of the pack, rubbed them on my skin, smelt them and stuck them in my mouth, but I didn’t smoke them. Do you think I caused any damage to myself?
Alcoholic:
I’ve had 180 days of sobriety. This evening I walked past the bar I used to drink at. I bought four shots of my favourite vodka and lime. I swished each shot around in my mouth, and spit it out into a bowl, then I ate the limes. Do you think that caused me any setbacks?
What would you say to these people?
Imran, watching pornography is a relapse. It is the worst thing we can do on this journey. You have gone 180 days without engaging in this DRUG ADDICTION and then you went back to it for two hours. Pornography isn’t a movie that you load up, get some popcorn and watch for 2 hours. The whole point is to make you masturbate. If you don’t want to do that, why are you watching it?
Watching pornography is a relapse on every mode - easy, normal and hard mode. The bare minimum is no pornography. That is for a very good reason. Pornography fries your brain. There is zero benefit to watching pornography. Think about your life during these past 6 months, the clarity of thought, the energy, the confidence, the self-respect and increased happiness. Pornography robs us of our joy. After that 2 hour session, you will feel like doing it again, because you have re-activated the addiction after it had died. You could see that you didn’t enjoy it this time, but in the next few days your brain will be hungry for another session.
Take my advice, I went 250 days without watching pornography and 295 days without masturbating. I was in a similar position to you, and then I went back and peeked at my ex-favourite videos. In my case, I watched them for less than 10 minutes and that did enough damage that I had a full PMO relapse 45 days later. If less than 10 minutes of pornography did that to me after 8 months of not watching it, what do you think 2 HOURS would have done?
My best advice to you, read the EasyPeasy book now and understand its lessons. Reread it and take notes if you have to. You don’t want to go back to being an addict again. It could take weeks to heal from the damage you’ve done, but you can do it. It would be so painful to go back to full-blown pornography and masturbation after so long, and it would be very difficult to get back to this level again.
Keep a separate counter, one for NoPorn and another for NoPMO. This way you won’t feel like destroying this streak completely and starting again. Trust me, it could take you years to get back to this level if you did something like that.
There is no joy in pornography bro. Joy is what you had for the past 6 months before you loaded up those videos.
I wish you the very best of success. Take my words wisely and don’t make the same mistakes I did.
Read easypeasymethod.org.