P.A.W.S. - what are they, cure, duration

It does my heart good to bring hope to others because I know how much it sucks when you are in the thick of it.

Regarding your question obviously I am not some authority on the subject, all I can do is share my experience. During the first year of my journey I definitely noticed negative side effects from pretty much anything that would cause a rush of dopamine. Eating sweets or ice cream would mess me up pretty bad, and I'm pretty good about moderating my sugar intake. When the covid restrictions first started to loosen I booked a Vegas vacation to take advantage of ridiculously cheap rates (I'll never get another opportunity to hang out at the Wynn for a week for low prices ever again). Playing video poker for more than a half hour would give me a crippling headache and make me lose my concentration to the point where I would have to stop playing.

The one that shocked me though was music. In the first year I would get bad headaches even from listening to music for an extended period of time. Therefore my conclusion is that dopamine inducing activities will give you side effects in the beginning. However I don't believe they set me back in my recovery in any way.

I was an end stage alcoholic so drinking is out of the question for me. For normal drinkers like yourself, my educated guess would be that it might cause unpleasant side effects but it should not derail your journey. Hope this helps.

 

Cheers mate, I appreciate it hugely!
I hear you with the ice cream ahah, always feel off after having even a small portion.
How about your acne which I remember you mentioning, has that seen any improvement recently?

 

No change but actually upon closer inspection I realized I'm growing patches of hair on parts of my back where before there had been none. Whether or not this is because of retention or just part of the aging process I can not say. I suspect it is part of the aging process.

 

I literally got goosebumps reading your words. I just feel so happy for you and wish you all the best. It's really refreshing to hear that people come out of this shit and actually start living a happy life. Just stay on the course and don't fall for silly temptations that might grant you short term pleasure. A recovered brain always opens the possibilities of forgetting how bad one felt while being in an addiction or in recovery. Just hold up your current lifestyle and let it manifest into brain pathways before old things start to creep up again. But enough of that, go out there and live life, we all will follow!

 

Today 3 days semen retection. After my 6 years flatline with orgasm every day I'm ready for 3-4years semen retection. I'll post every months here if I see some progress. No excuse now. Someone 3ho know how to stop wet dreams (i don't have wet dreams but I'm scared by every form of eiaculation now)

 

I have a question for you, how about your mental state, I mean are you depressed or anxious?

Go for the 3-4 years man, you will only like it.

 

Depressed for having ignored flatline for 6 years with multiple orgasm everyday in this flatline. And anedonhia.. I can't feel joy in nothing.. I think it's correlate to libido /dopamine. I have no choice.. Hardmode 3 + years

 

Did anyone here get vaccinated? If yes have there been any symptoms after vaccination?

 

Yes, I got vaccinated and I was fine. I was worried about revving up PAWS and actually posted the same question here a while back, but nothing happened aside from the mild reaction they tell everybody to expect (feeling sort of achy and tired, worse headache than my usual, etc.).

 

Are those symptoms still there, the headache and all.

 

Baseline headache that I have most of the time because of PAWS or just my generally weird health, yes. But no, vaccine side effects faded quickly. Get vaccinated, you don’t want Long Covid on top of PAWS!

 

Hey @Grateful Retainer

Congratulations once again on making it out.

A question from me on your flatline scenario if that's ok. On the home stretch of your recovery (the last 6 months) did you experience any flatline symptoms? Or did you have the infamous peaks and troughs, for example, 5 days of feeling good and then 10 days of not feeling as good? Sorry if this has been spoken on previously, this thread is now so long that it is becoming difficult to navigate.

You are also the third person who has spoken about enemas helping along their reboot. The two theories that I have heard around enemas are that 1) a large number of neurotransmitters actually exist within our gut, playing a key role in the regulation of our mood. 2) there is also a dormant energy that lies at the base of our spine which you mentioned. How often did you use enema while recovering?

Thanks

 

@Don Quixote I hope you've been able to recover from COVID? Taste back?

 

I'm also having some questions. How much do you contribute to the practices of doing an enema or meditation? Do you feel like they helped you recovering in a sense of you wouldn't have recovered if you didn't have done them or do you think that they just helped speeding up the final lap and thus coming out sooner of PAWS. I completed 22 full months and I sometimes wonder if there is something that is blocking me from leaving PAWS which causes quite some anxiety to be honest. I'm still experiencing a lot of symptoms and couldn't keep up with all my good habits that I performed the first 20 months. I'm especially having troubles to keep up my meditation practice although I know how beneficial it is for me. There is such a strong resistance to sit down and just focus on my breath. It doesn't help that I'm in the midst of university stuff, a lot of existential responsibilities in life and just so much stuff on my mind that it just takes 20 minutes until my mind came down a little before I'm actually able to focus on the breath for more then 2-3 seconds. Feels like I'm making steps back every month considering my meditation practice.

I'm also wondering how difficult or easy it is to perform a proper enema without having the risk of actually causing some damage. I'm quite open to the idea of doing them and I always notice that in times where I feel good my digestion works way better and the other way around. There is a lot of connection between the brain and the gut.

 

I will probably have to make a separate post about enemas when I have more time. What I can say briefly is that it has improved my quality of life by a large order of magnitude.

My experience with PAWS/flatline was similar to a stock market chart; peaks and troughs but overall trending upward. Last week I knew I was out of PAWS because I wasn't merely having a good day. I was on a level much higher compared to any of my previous days and that is where I'm currently at.

Having been through PAWS twice I truly don't believe there is any substitute for time. Meditation and enemas have improved my overall holistic health and added to my QOL, especially now that I have exited PAWS. Although I will say that meditation is harder now simply because I have so much damn energy all the time.

 

@mentorr @DerJogge this is not going to be pretty so just a word of caution.

I've been trying as much as possible to keep my body running like a well oiled machine. Yet despite the fact that I was practicing intermittent fasting, eating a balanced diet, and drinking lots of water one morning the light bulb went over my head while I was taking a shit: why is it that I'm regular (every morning after workout and before shower) but I'm always struggling while dropping a deuce? My only conclusion was that my bowels were blocked which meant there was a problem with my exhaust system. If there is a problem with my exhaust system then my body is not functioning efficiently. If my body is not functioning efficiently then it will manifest as problems with my physical health.

I bought one of those rubber syringes and allocated a Saturday to clean myself out. It took several fumbles but I finally got the hang of it. Yet after giving myself the enema it only took a few days before I was struggling with my morning shits once again. Tried the enema again with the same result. I started looking online for answers and my heart sank once I realized what I would need to do.

***You have been warned***

I went into the shower, used liquid soap for lube, and started searching for obstructions with my fingers. Immediately I felt a hard mass which was impacted feces that had been clinging to my rectal walls for who knows how long. It had been there for so long that I didn't even realize it was there. I dug it out...and then felt another...and another...etc.

Here is the thing about impacted feces: it is dead shit. It is completely solid with no moisture whatsoever, and it doesn't even stink. That was the craziest revelation of all to me. To say I was digging shit out of my ass would not entirely be accurate, they were almost like stones. The enema could not even dislodge them. I finally got them all out and the difference was night and day. Now I'm finished with my morning shit in a minute. I don't get bloated and I fart WAY less. My stomach got even flatter as well.

This is what years of abusing one's body with alcohol and a horrible diet for many years gets you. Having to dig dead shit out of your ass.

I was still flatlining a bit after I did this but I could just sense the energy moving freely down there. Now that my libido is back I feel horny in my anus as well as my genitals when I'm aroused. Yesterday I got an erection while meditating and I could feel pleasant sensations in my ass. Now part of my morning shower ritual is to quickly clean the inside of my ass with soapy fingers as preventive measures so that I never have to experience that again.

Yes this is all TMI and I didn't enjoy sharing it but it changed my life immensely. Maybe this can help somebody else, who knows.

Now that song by Faith No More is stuck in my head...Oh it's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it

 

@Don Quixote I was a child of the 80s so thankfully high speed internet porn was not available during my formative years. Actually I started masturbating at the age of four (probably earlier but that's as far back as I remember) as a coping mechanism due to growing up in an abusive household. It was a pure dopamine rush, this was before I even knew what sex was. I was addicted to prone masturbation and then a sex addict as an adult although oddly I never got hooked on porn. I would watch it for sure but I never had the compulsion to watch it. As stated earlier I attribute it to the fact that it was unavailable to me as a child so I grew up without it.

I'm still not 100% sure what edging means. Every time I jerked off or had sex I would certainly try to delay orgasm as long as possible. But I never jerked purposefully to try to get near the point of no return and then stop only to repeat the process over and over.

Amazingly I was still able to function sexually without problems up to the point when I quit drinking. I should point out that quitting cold turkey nearly killed me, this is how bad of an alcoholic I was while active in addiction. First I went through a good two weeks of withdrawal where I would be lucid in between horrible hallucinations and wonder if this was how I was going to die. After I had passed through the storm I was too weak and shellshocked to do much of anything. Quitting cold turkey was the first time in my life that I had taken a break from masturbation for a length of time and I had started flatline for the first time back then.

At some point I noticed my dick wasn't working and feverishly burned through a ton of cash going to massage parlors and barely even getting hard, if I was able to get hard at all. This was when I connected the dots and started looking online for answers.

As for your questions as it relates to brain function I must admit I've never given it that much thought. I'll try to explain as best as I can.

The overarching symptom during PAWS was a specific type of headache which I call the dopamine headache. It is something I have only felt while going two rounds with PAWS. The way I describe it is that it feels like there is acid slowly eating away at whichever part of my brain is affected on a particular day. Sometimes it's a sharp pain through the top of the crown, other times a dull ache behind the eyes, sometimes a vicelike pressure on the third eye, sometimes left hemisphere, sometimes right hemisphere, sometimes the base, etc.

I don't know if there is a correlation between subsequent symptoms and the particular part of the brain is aching (should have kept a detailed journal). But my theory is that whatever symptoms I would have on a particular day would be directly caused by the part of the brain that was aching. A big one was fatigue but it wasn't the type of fatigue one would normally have. My body itself never felt tired or restless. Rather at some point in the early afternoon my brain would start to shut down. Having covid as a cover during this whole ordeal helped me big time. While "working from home" I would have lunch and soon after hit the bed once I felt my brain shutting down. I'd wake up two or three hours later feeling completely drained as if I had just had the most intense physical workout ever.

The easiest way to describe the effects of brain fog were my attempts at reading. I'd try to read something and it was almost like the words themselves were blurry. This wasn't an eyesight issue (although some days my eyes did have problems). My eyes could read the words legibly but my brain was registering them as being blurry. Which was a moot point anyways because I could only retain two sentences in my short term memory at a time. Therefore reading was pretty much a lost cause on days where I had brain fog.

Thankfully I didn't suffer from anxiety/depression during this round of PAWS. Some days I was a little down but that is it. When I got sober from alcohol I was damn near suicidal until month 21 when it all passed. It's funny how I exited PAWS this time at month 20. For some reason this is how long my body seems to need. Both times I could tell beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was over, it was that sudden for me.

If I were to describe the difference between how my brain feels structurally between then and now the best word I could come up with is that my brain feels calibrated again. Before the dopamine headaches would throw off the center of my brain's internal compass and it didn't feel like thoughts were passing through correctly. Now the headaches are gone, I've recalibrated, and thoughts are passing through my brain like clockwork. My brain feels CLEAN.

Regarding your comment about the "thinking nubs" I can't really compare because I never put too much thought into this stuff before I dealt with PAWS. But I will say that when I meditate I can feel a tendril connecting from the backs of my eyes directly to my third eye. With certainty I can tell you that this is something I've never experienced before.

I tried to type this out as fast I could so hopefully it's not too scatterbrained. Thank you for all of the contributions you have made to this community and I hope you recover quickly from covid.

 

Don, did you ever take any supplements like vitamin d or anything?

 

Hi,

I've had 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine. Felt rough for 24 hours after the first and that was it, but had zero problems after the second. Of course there could be some lingering problems that are covered up by the symptoms of PAWS, but I really don't think so, and I've been on the lookout. As @UWSDave says, you don't want to risk Long Covid on top of PAWS. That's something that I'm wary of because I'm so physically broken down by PAWS already, I'm not sure I'd survive!

 

Thanks for sharing. Man, there are so many parallels between our two stories it's spooky. I started MO'ing at the age of 4, and that's just for starters... although I haven't had any serious problems with alcohol, I do have problems with prescription drugs, which I am also currently trying to quit!

Anyway, I got in to edging with porn big time at 11, and I would describe it as getting as close to orgasm as possible, then holding back for as long as possible, before the final release. During my teens I got in to the habit of going 30-40 minutes at a time, and carried on doing that, with or without porn, pretty much every day, multiple times a day until the age of 36, when the penny finally dropped. I am convinced that edging (or edging as I describe it here) is the reason I've been so badly affected. I know other people IRL who are probably as frequent in their use of porn as me who don't have any obvious health problems (unless you include depression), and I think edging explains the discrepancy. For me porn has only been a part of the problem - really, I've been addicted to orgasm.