Tired of relapsing cycles

Go hardmode and find strength and control. avoid all distractions, go for a meditation retreat or a trip just to give the mind some space other than continuously thinking PMO.

 

Being alone to contemplate sounds good and can be helpful. It can also be very triggering. We are made for community and it is in community that we find out who we are and what we need.
I know I can come up with all kinds of grand ideas and plans and thoughts of how I am doing when I'm alone and then find that my perceptions are not the reality others in my world have experienced as a result of my addiction.
I would encourage finding ways to connect with other in healthy ways. Ideally look to build a couple safe relationships that you can be open and honest with. This is where you will begin to practice honesty with others and yourself. That is a learned skill, not one we are born with and we tend to run the other direction when facing the truth.

 

It's been damn hard to come back on track for me as well I can even get a 2 weeks streak, but the urge to have sex is killing me, I don't have a girlfriend, so I have no one to relieve the urge to get physical with someone. I work, workout and have goals in life, nevertheless, I'm still being dragged away by relapses.

 

Why not masturbate to your fantasies?

I'm not a fan of "hardmode", "hard reboot" or what it's all called. To me that always sounds like biting off more than one can chew. Maybe out of a 100 addicts who try it, 2 people will succeed and not relapse anymore, but I seriously doubt that it's an efficient approach. If porn is the biggest problem, solve that first.
Getting rid of porn takes, as @The Peak already mentioned, a lot of self-analysis. I would go further, that you don't just look at the physiological side of your PMO impulse, but also understand the psychological side of it. Why do you still want porn, what kind of value does it have to you, etc. Once you figure that out you can start to change the value porn has to you through truth and logic. Quitting porn becomes easy at that point. But a lot of time may pass before you reach it.

However if you're not just trying to get rid of porn, but also want to stop masturbating (and you probably didn't even specify a timeframe, which makes it even worse from your biological reward system's point of view), well then you're trying to climb Everest with a backpack full of bricks. Seriously, mentally understanding your porn addiction is a task that takes a long time and only once you understand can you truly change. When you deny yourself your natural urges for sex as well you're setting yourself up for failure.

Relapses are bad. Not because you failed or "lost your streak", but because you made yourself believe that you have the capacity to reach a self defined goal. And then you watch yourself fail. That's s low-blow to your confidence, increases stress-hormone production, decreases your productivity in life and worst of all, makes you afraid to fail again because you distrust yourself more and more with each relapse.
Define a proper goal. Make it achievable! In my book that means don't try to be a fucking monk when you've never been one before.

 

Great video, thank you for recomending it.

 

I totally agree with you . If porn consumption causes the vast majority if not all of the problems , why fight against our human nature and not masturbate at all? people need to identify what causes their problem and tackle it, in most cases porn is what really has to be removed from our lives , not masturbation .

 

I don't agree entirely. Compulsive sexual behaviors were well known before porn era. It's true, porn can lead one to become binge compulsive masturbator, but there are quite a lot of people here that had problems with binge compulsive MO behavior before being introduced to porn (myself included). For them porn just worsened compulsiveness but didn't start it. Their main problem is binge MO (craving prolonged "natural" dopamine fix achieved by binge MB and multiple orgasms in a row) not porn. Removing porn will not solve their problem. They need to learn how to cope with underlying psych issues and stress in healthier way. That's probably even harder task than to abandon porn.

 

Good luck! Hope you can continue NoFap!

 

Removing porn will certainly better things. Whether you can then be classified as a sexually absolutely healthy human being by some arbitrary standard is questionable. I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying, but when it comes to MO and to using MO as a means to cope with stress, it's more of a grey area of what can be constituted as healthy. PMO can quickly get out of hands, especially once you find yourself at that point where you PMO even you don't really feel like it or have fun doing it, but do it just because you're used to and feel compulsed. That's clearly pathological.
But if you have stress in your life and use MO to alleviate some of it doesn't have to be bad. Sex is a great way of blowing off steam in a relationship for example. Of course when you start to fuck as soon as you have an argument and never talk things through it becomes a problem. Same with MO on your own. So the devil's in the detail I think.
I'm just saying it's much easier to draw the line with porn and say that's clearly bad than it is with MO.