Are these extreme ups and downs normal?

I've been doing NoFap for 20 months now. Had a few sporadic relapses here and there, but nothing that I would consider too severe. I've heard stories about people who relapse and go on edging binges three times a day for a week, but I never did anything like that; my relapses were always pretty tame compared to some that I've read about around here.

About a week ago, I felt like I had a major breakthrough. I was waking up in good moods, my attention span was great, hardly any brain fog, lots of energy to do things, and generally feeling more optimistic than usual. That only lasted for about five days before the pendulum swung the other way and everything came crashing down. Now I'm feeling a lot of sadness, sorrow, anxiety, and I'm having a lot of random flashbacks of old memories for some reason. (I don't mean porn flashbacks; I mean just general life memories.) These flashbacks come out of nowhere and are pretty vivid. When I have them, I feel a lot of old emotions surfacing that I haven't felt in years. It's almost like certain parts of my brain are gradually coming back online.

Aside from that, I noticed about a week ago that my fetishes are practically nonexistent now; it's gotten to the point where I don't even think about them or care about them anymore. I'm also experiencing a lot of the physical flu-like withdrawal symptoms that I had when I first started NoFap: headaches, sinus pain, body pains, chills, and a general yucky malaise that's hard to put into words.

Are these all signs that my brain is going through a phase of intense rewiring and healing? I have this weird feeling of emotional rawness and vulnerability that I've never experienced before during my reboot. I'm thinking that maybe the really big changes are starting now after 20 months. Is it normal to be on this roller coaster of sharp ups and downs when major changes are occurring?

 

It took quite a while. I first noticed them diminishing a little once I got to about a year. When they first began to diminish, a weird thing would happen where it was like one part of my brain would be fighting those changes by forcing me to think about the fetishes and trying to get me turned on by them, but another part of my brain would be trying to reinforce the fact that the fetish was indeed diminishing. It was as though I had two different entities in my mind, and both were struggling to be in the driver's seat. But once I got past the one-year mark, the fetishes began to fade away much faster than before. They will still pop up occasionally, but they get much easier to push away as time goes by. It's kind of an exponential process that will be considerably difficult at first, but it gets easier and easier the more you persevere through it.

Yeah, don't do that. The thing with any addiction is, it never completely heals; it just gets easier to ignore with time. We've all heard those stories about recovering alcoholics who were clean for 20 or 30 years and thought that it would be no big deal to have one glass of champagne at a wedding, and they ended up practically raiding the bar by the end of the night. Porn addiction is no different. That's exactly what would happen to a recovering porn addict who thinks that watching a few minutes of a vanilla video wouldn't be a big deal. I've seen a lot of people around here say that addiction pathways in the brain do diminish over time, but they can return with a vengeance once they get stimulated again. Abstinence from whatever it is you were addicted to is a lifelong commitment; you will always have to remain vigilant.

 

I've been going through PAWS since around October 2019, and I started NoFap in June 2019. I doubt my PAWS is just starting now. I vaguely recall reading some posts on here in the past about how the road can get really bumpy right when major changes begin to take place. I can't remember any of the specifics, but it was something to do with the rewiring process causing a lot of cognitive side effects. I notice that I'm always tired and hungry lately too, which is also out of the ordinary.

As for the history of my PMO addiction, I first got addicted at around 14 or 15 years old; I'm 33 now. The severity of my addiction did lessen about 6 years before I started NoFap though. From ages 14 to 25, I was PMOing two or three times a day on average. But between 25 and 31 (when I started NoFap), it was only once a day.

 

Some people do have fetishes that developed as the result of some unusual childhood experience. In that instance, I think the person would most likely be stuck with the fetish for life unless they underwent some kind of intense cognitive behavioral therapy. Things that get hardwired into the brain during childhood are extremely difficult to reverse. But most of us here have porn-induced fetishes that developed in the teens or early adult years, so they should be easier to unravel with abstinence.