Day 26 Despite I am extremely pissed of from some incidents relative to exams etc, I manage to remain devoted to my streak. Good luck guys!! Stay strong!!
Day 53 No M Day 158 No P Hi guys! Awesome video for today! We have all felt like the victims in order to get to this situation that we are getting out of now! Don't allow yourself to be a victim of yourself, your actions or anyone or anything else for that matter! Stay strong!
19/90. I had a dream I relapsed last night and was so relieved when I woke up realizing it was just a dream. Stay strong!
Day no. 2 - "For the righteous one may fall seven times, and he will get up again, But the wicked will be made to stumble by calamity" (Proverbs 24:16) What counts in the end is, not how many times we fall, but how many times we get up again.
Hey guys, I am on day 22/90- no PM day 18/90- no alcohol Thanks for all you do, especially @Puretim , @testwarz , @Lamboskovich
16/90 I continue the challenge. I thought for a short time about P yesterday but I didn't count on M at all!
0/90 Hey guys, I had a relapse last night. I found some erotic story content (in text form) and masturbated twice, back-to-back. I count that as a solid relapse. I could definitely use some encouragement today. It's hard to not feel the sting of losing a 51-day streak. I will choose to see my success here (51 days without any P or M!). If I were to stay at this level, I could go a whole year and only hit PMO about 7 times. That's actually really good! Still, I am fighting with some shame and some damage to my ego. Writing on here is already helping. I'm working on replaying the game tape to see where I went wrong. As I look back I see this was one of those relapses that built up over the course of several days (more like a week, actually). By two days ago I could really tell something was off, and at some point yesterday I crossed that threshold where I lose complete sight of why I don't want porn in my life. I'm going to write out some of the things I see that went wrong and see if it brings any clarity: I noticed that I started being too lenient with myself when it came to compromising my goals for the sake of comfort. I am currently working through a Dopamine Detox because I believe all these things are connected. These compromises started with things totally unrelated to porn, like TV, video games, and coffee. I specifically noticed my mind giving me that old lie of "You deserve some comfort right now" to excuse choosing those habits. The truth? Well, I DO deserve comfort, but that doesn't mean I should break my commitments, it means I should find better and healthier ways to comfort myself that aren't connected to my addictive behaviors. One of the biggest ones there is COFFEE (and caffeine). I was getting off track with this and then this week it got really bad. This is sort of a sub point of the point I made above, but it's a really significant one. I notice that coffee is a very powerful stimulant for me, and it can really upset my chemical balance in my brain. I notice it having effects similar to porn, especially lack of motivation. Over time it also makes my BODY feel very uncomfortable because my sleep quality declines. This discomfort often drives me to choose more "quick-fix" comforts and makes me more vulnerable to porn. I have a plan in place today for dealing with that. I lost sight of my goal, the dopamine detox, and got loose with my PLAN. I started getting greedy by changing things too fast, starting new habits, not giving myself enough time to adjust. I lost sight of the vision I had earlier of the man I want to be. That's what was strongly motivating me at the earlier stages of my streak and making it almost EASY to keep myself from porn. I had some very difficult and significant emotional situations this week that I didn't really work through on any deep level. I didn't journal or talk them through with anyone. That's a big problem! Leaving that stuff un-addressed was probably one of the major factors driving me to make all those compromises. Perhaps adopting a system of self-check-ins each day and using healthy outlets like journaling and talking with friends with regularity would help me here. I have some major life direction/decisions I think I've been avoiding. Things have really been shifting quite a bit for me in many areas. This process of dopamine detox has ignited a reinventing of myself, seeing myself in a new light and significantly changing what I value in life. This has far-reaching implications and I think I haven't quite worked how it affects some big picture things in my life, like my job and my marriage. Not having clarity on who I am in those contexts is a great source of mental stress for me. Any thoughts you guys have would be welcome. Thanks for listening and thanks for being part of this journey with me. I'm incredibly thankful to have this place to come to after relapsing to help get back on track.
Hey man, Sad to hear that you relapsed. But I really admire you for even having a 52 days streak! The effort you must have made to even get there is already immense and definitely worth being proud of. You were weak for one day but strong for 52 days! Focus on your achievements nit your failures. From my experience it's much easier to just change one habit at a time instead of having to focus on multiple hard decisions every day. For me no PMO is my #1 priority and diet, learning portuguese, sport and other stuff comes way back. And it really helps to give yourself some slack once in a while. For me thats having a cheat day at the weekends when I can finally eat cake with ice and cream as an award for sticking to my diet. You already achieved the 1 week milestone and the 1 month milestone. You will reach the 90 days soon enough!
Thank you friend!! Definitely agree, too many hard decisions each day is overwhelming. Cheat days are also a great idea! Thanks for your thoughts and encouragement.
Hey @Timothy_James, I'm with you. Just had a 45 minute session of looking at sexy scenes in old movies on Youtube. For me, it was a combination of having low energy, a depressed girlfriend, worry about world news, stressed about work, etc., etc. - all lame excuses for me making a shitty decision to distract myself from reality. I'm gonna have to go back to 0 as well. I've been trying since November now, and to tell the truth, I've been trying since 2014 to quit this habit, but I'm not managing. I get a little better, but that's not enough. I'm at a low point as well and a bit of at a loss on what to do, because it feels I have tried every technique but my addiction is just stronger every time. I know I'll get out of this at some point, but right now I don't know when or how.
Rereading @Timothy_James' post, I realized that my real cause for my relapse - and a lot of them in the past - was not having a good way to deal with my emotions, especially when I feel like I'm not capable of solving my problems, of facing the world, where everything feels overwhelming and I'm not up to the task of dealing with the situation. These are very often the moments where I want to grab my phone, grab my dick, numb myself. Building an array of techniques to keep myself from doing that is good, and I should continue doing that, but I should also face that feeling and analyse it. So, back on the saddle and expanding/adjusting my list of focuses for the next 3 months: - Do research on healthy ways to deal with the emotions of being overwhelmed, helplessness. - Be kind to myself and give myself a break to acknowledge my feelings when I need to - don't suppress them or tell myself I shouldn't have these feelings. - Keep writing every urge and my response to it in my Urges Journal and in that way researching the underlying emotions and ways of responding positively. - Keep taking breaks every hour and force myself to do so especially when it feels like I can't or shouldn't. Still, I'm so fucking depressed and I hate myself so much for putting myself in this situation again and again and again. So any additional advice or encouragement is welcome.
I hear ya! I think I attempted my 1st streak in 2015....5 years ago. It is easy sometimes to think we're getting nowhere...and sometimes scary to think we'll never really get out. I've had several really good streaks over the past 5 years (and several seasons where I couldn't even make it to one week!) but I always seem to get sucked back in. Trouble is (I believe) that you can't just quit porn! As bad as porn is, it's not even the deepest root of our problem. And, if you can't dismantle the underlying habits, mindsets, established routines, establish responses, established precedents then porn will always "fit" your life and continue to present itself as the only *real* solution to your pain. You hit the nail on the head though: "...[porn is] a shitty decision to distract myself from reality." And therein lies the ultimate structural issue of our lives. When your entire life is built around escape and distraction, porn invariably becomes the most valuable thing to you because it provides the most powerful escape. I spent 30 years of my life building those mindsets and behaviors. I was born into a family that had built their entire existence on escapism and denial. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that it's taking years to unlearn all that and teach myself to become a completely different person. One final note: I'm finding that underneath the desire to escape the pain and distract myself from reality is a fundamental belief that I am ugly. I'm not sure if this is universal to everyone, but I would be willing to bet that most of us feel something LIKE that. You might use different words, like "I'm not enough" or "I'm not valuable" or "I'm not worthy" but it all points to an extremely deep dissatisfaction with who I am at my core. I do believe that some of my early success in this last streak was due to catching a glimpse of the man my outward life could be and truly believing internally that *I* am that man. I believe this is at least one of the fundamental keys to truely breaking the porn addiction cycle. Love your thoughts. I'm with you in this.
