Just sharing my experience with pmo and the pros and cons "pros" 1. pleasure 2. temporary stress relief 3. makes you feel in control cons 1. pleasure is temporary 2. stress after pleasure wears off 3. social isolation 4. pied 5. major anxiety problems 6. major depression problems 7. no morning wood 8. brain fog 9. extreme guilt/shame 10. less life force from sperm ejaculation 11. little to none aesthetic chills or frisson 12. no motivation 13. loss of gray matter 14. screwed up dopamine 15. warped view of women 16. can make you suicidal 17. worse sleep quality 18. worse looking skin 19. nothing excites you but porn 20. bad attention span 21. no self worth 22. victim mentality 23. extreme laziness 24. no confidence 25. no people skills 26. cant hold a conversation 27. no social life 28. warpes your morals 29. takes you away from God 30. takes you away from other worth while things in your life. So thats my list i came up with, i am sure there are dozens more side effects i did not even think of or even know about, so look at this list if you think about relapsing, personally i am at a very good place in my life and have no desire to go back, temptation will always be there but whether you give into it or not is up to you.
That list is very extensive and I agree with every one of your points. The fact of the matter is when you PMO, you become mentally weak. This world belongs to the strongest and survival of the fittest. So if you make yourself weak, you got no one to blame except yourself.
There are no "pros" to PMO. You yourself denied them in cons. Moreover recently it was debunked that masturbation helps with prostate cancer. It's quite the opposite. Frequent PMO actually increases risk of prostate cancer. Someone even linked an article here on the forums. Can't find it right now, tho.
Great list. The only thing I would add as that #3 on the Pros list is from the ritual and not the PMO itself. I think a lot of us, regardless of the substance, are addicted to the ritual. The feeling of complete control is its own high, especially when everything feels beyond your control. Oddly enough within our rituals we remove anxiety, self doubt, fear, etc. In that moment we feel indestructible. Now if only we took that attitude and applied it towards recovery and health.
Thank you for doing this, I was actually going to post something similar today but you really nailed it beautifully. And what you've done is also a strategy they taught up me in rehab called a cost-benefit analysis. It might seem counterproductive to some to think about the pros of an addiction, but that is b*******. Obviously there's good things about every addiction, otherwise I wouldn't be addicted to it. By rationally laying out the cost and the benefits low it's very easy to see that even though the addiction is pleasurable, the costs are way too high
i completely agree, i personally think saying there is no pros is just a lie, its denial and not realistic, its ok to acknowledge the pros of something bad, its just reality, and by making a list like this it really helps you realize just how unworth it pmo is.