Please help me I’m desperate to stop forever!!

Hi @ross630 , I understand what you’re going through as I have been trying to overcome fantasizing and masturbation myself. It can be very discouraging and difficult to overcome, but it isn’t impossible. Your desire to change must be greater than your desire to masturbate, which is hard to do since it feels good and is easily accessible. The first and most important thing you must do is to learn to discipline your thoughts. You ultimately can control what you think about. It might be hard or feel impossible to do when your body craves those chemicals that our brain releases each time we M. Your mind races and finds ways to start fantasizing.
The key to overcoming masturbation is the ability to control your thoughts. This is because thoughts always eventually lead to actions. So when a thought comes into your mind, if you think about it too much your body will respond and then it is impossible to resist. So you have a small window of opportunity to dismiss those inappropriate thoughts and think of something else. You need to come up with a plan. What will you do when those thoughts come? Will you lay in bed and grit your teeth and tell yourself that you’re not going to masturbate this time? If you do that, all you’re thinking about is not masturbating and guess what? You’ll end up eventually masturbating again because the topic is still in your mind. So you must get up out of tour bed and go distract yourself. Go do push-ups or call a friend or talk to your parents, read a book, play a video game, do something that you have been putting off (like unfinished homework or cleaning your room). Whenever I do something productive it kills those urges. Do something to short circuit or derail those thoughts or eventually you are going to be lead down that path of least resistance to eventually succumb to the behavior that you are trying to avoid. And it needs to become a habit to do this.

Think of it this way: over the past 5 years, your brain has been building a neurological pathway from the area of your brain that thinks, to the area of tour brain that feels pleasure. This pathway is reinforced and solidified each time we end up releasing those feel good chemicals into our pleasure center. Eventually that pathway, over time, becomes a well established train track that, once started Down that track, we easily end up at that destination. It sort of becomes our default destination. So in order to overcome masturbation, when you are able to recognize that you are starting down that train track, you must derail and create a new pathway that leads somewhere else. At the beginning this is very hard to do, but with time it becomes easier and easier. You must reprogram your brain so that the automatic response switches from masturbation to some other healthier outlet. Once that new replacement activity becomes a new habit and replaces your desire to masturbate, you will be able to overcome the issue. But the key is to fill the void with something else or you will fall back into the same old problems that you’ve been trying to overcome for so long.

I hope this all makes sense. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need any more advice. You’re young and now is the perfect opportunity to kick this habit so that you don’t have to keep dealing with it for the rest of your life. Take care of it now because if you don’t, it will only get worse. Those fantasies will become worse and you will go farther and farther down the rabbit hole of PMO. It’s an ugly place and it all starts out innocently with fantasy and masturbation.

Best of luck to you! You can do it! Set small achievable goals for yourself. Try to go a few days, then set another goal to go longer, etc. Your brain is a muscle. The more you work at overcoming this problem, the stronger your brain becomes and the easier it will become to resist. It’s just like lifting weights. Over time, you get stronger and are able to lift more and more weight.

 

You may be going to sleep too early. You need to be tired when you go to bed. Try exercising for 30 minutes right before bed. Also, stay away from Caffeine if possible. Try reading until you’re tired enough to fall asleep. Keep your bedroom door open.