Hi all, been on nofap for around 2 years now, and recently have finally found what caused me to fail so many times before. I didn't fully understand why, but now I've actually felt it and got it figured, so I thought I'd share. The reason you can't quit porn with ease is Fear. Either fear of failure, or fear you're losing something. The reason I know this is I have reliably stopped watching porn. I stopped caring so much about nofap and got leverage over myself which allowed me to get three month-long streaks with only one PMO inbetween and now I have a month and a half and have no intention of returning. I had no urges, no thoughts of porn, and no doubts. However, in the past week, I asked a girl out and she said yes. I've fully fallen for her- but here comes the problem. My fears about porn, what it could do to this relationship, have returned. Now I feel back at square 1, even though I haven't done anything at all, because porn has this power over me again that I thought I had kicked. To be honest, it feels absolutely terrible. Last night I had my first porn dream in over a month and woke up this morning dreading another day- just like in my past. let me tell you what this feels like. PMO is constantly on your mind. You live with dread, with very little hapiness and long to escape consciousness. Porn eats at your mind until you cannot take it anymore and give into the very thing you wouldn't need without the fear. without the fear, PMO addiction feels like nothing. You get over a few urges and forget about it. Life goes on and its fantastic. I thought this fear was the PMO addiction (or a symptom of), but it is actually the very thing that keeps you using porn. That feeling of fear is much much worse than the addiction itself in my experience. I have gotten over this fear before but now I have a new situation to articulate in my mind and reset myself. I'd imagine I'll be talking to a lot of people to do this, but here are some tips: 1. PMO addiction will not fix your life alone. Don't put nofap on a pedestal. If you hate your life now, regardless of whether you achieve some arbitrary goal of no PMO, you'll still hate your life then. You have to completely re-design your life. You need to care less about PMO, not more. 2. Get leverage. I swore on my mothers life I would pay my friend £100 if i PMO'd. I did, and i stuck to my promise. after that lets say I used that to get through the urges and after a small amount of time I learned to accept the urges rather than resist them. 3. talk to people. Don't bottle it up- I've done this before and it gave me the worst depression of my life- i remember balling my eyes out in front of my family. It was terrible. Let me tell you I've always been a happy, sociable guy with no mental health issues, no trauma or abuse. But this fear, that somehow my hapiness hinges on nofap and that if i relapse or can't quit that I am doomed to a miserable existence, that has put me in dark places I didn't even know existed. That, is what you need to focus on.
This is a unique view on nofap, but I think it makes sense i.e. inadvertently putting pmo on a pedestal even though the goal is to get rid of it. The mentality that 'if I get rid of pmo my life will improve', but in that way we only increase the focus on pmo and panic both when we relapse and when we succeed but don't see benefits. It's like setting up for failure basically. I think the solution is to focus on building a better life, increasing goals (education, work) to work on, building the social life, self improvement. This mentality makes pmo an unnecessary part of life because you want to continue with the positive habits. Also makes it easier to move on after successful reboot because your focus has changed from pmo. This sort of got me to think, thanks for sharing.
