The 10 habits that will help you to succeed in rebooting

Everyone struggles with the reboot. And many if not everyone will relapse. Usually because of habits we knew that would make us relapse but just did it anyway. I myself am trying to quit porn since november 2015 and trying to not masturbate from time to time since then. I kept relapsing and at the beginning I just restarted and tried again but kept relapsing after the same amount of time and felt powerless in how to break these relapse pattern.

But then I started writing down the things that caused me to relapse. Since then I started to improve: I went from relapsing every two to three days to relapsing once a week and now I relapse once every four to five weeks. I have improved on other bad habits and feel confident that I will continue improving my time between relapses and eventually will totally free myself.

These are the 10 habits that has helped me a lot in making my reboots more successful:

1. Avoid any website that even has a slight chance of showing erotic content: Don't go to websites where there is (even a slight) possibility that you would see trigger material (vids/pics of hot girls in bikini or whatever). Without consciously knowing you have doubled your chance to relapse. It is the same with a balloon: only a tiny hole will make the entire balloon burst.
2. Don't 'only Google' for hot porn movies or hot girls and then click it away: Although it seems innocent since you haven't actually seen anything yet. It will only make your journey a lot tougher. You've already crossed the line and increased the difficulty to not relapse. The action and thought alone is enough to trigger the same reward circuits that needs to be tamed and healed. It's the excitement that you feel prior the actual act that has a big part in the 'damage' of it all.
3. Don't 'play around' with your private parts: Although technically you still didn't masturbate or anything, you also get the same response in your brain as described in 2. Just use it to go to the bathroom with it and clean it when taking a shower, but that's it! Be strict with yourself and don't let yourself testing the boundaries. It will only make it tougher and will give no sense of relief whatsoever.
4. Don't read (even slight) erotic texts on websites / magazines: During reboot you will feel that you have a flatline but at the same time you will be very very sensitive to your old habits. Even reading the text in books / magazines or websites will just make it unnecessary difficult to succeed.
5. Never 'peek', not even for one second: One of my biggest pitfalls... how often that I thought it was OK to just have one little peek for 2 seconds. But every time I saw only one picture of anything, I was hooked and just collapsed immediately. Don't confuse this with when you accidentally see a naked picture via a pop-up or anything. That is OK as long as you just click it away and don't pursue anything because of it. But that should be avoided too! See point 1 about this.
6. Turn off automatic download of videos and pictures on Whatsapp: These days everyone has multiple groups on Whatsapp (or Telegram) and everyone likes a laugh. Sex is always a good subject to laugh about that that's what's so easy to share with your friends online. But my advice is: turn off automatic download and just ignore the erotic 'funny' content your groups are sending. It's just better to not watch, you don't miss anything. Trust me
7. (Re)read blogs / (re)watch videos about nofap benefits and stories: Our brain plays tricks on ourselves and tries to 'make us forget' certain things for its own benefit. So never stop with reading and listening to others about what they have been going through regarding ED / relationship problems due to porn use. This will massively strengthen your motivation why you are doing this. I recommend to follow Gary Wilson and Gabe Deem on Twitter and watch their YouTube videos!
8. Turn off your computer in difficult moments and do something else: take a walk, do groceries, read a book, do sports, call a friend, whatever. Break the bad habit moments. For me those are usually the weekends: When I am home alone on Saturday evenings or Sundays during the day and feel lonely and depressed, I just went to watch porn multiple times for almost 15 years. Now I catch myself doing the same things as what I used to do just before watching porn: browse through boring (news) websites and click around feeling annoyed. I recognize this pattern now and as soon as I do this, I turn off the pc and do something else: read, write, shower, walk, cook, clean, meditate... whatever! Just break the pattern! We're habitual beings and in order to change our (bad) habits we must change the patterns that lead to those habits.
9. Allow yourself some slack: don't overuse your self control 'muscles': It can be strengthened but it can also can exhausted. So don't force yourself on improving on all aspects at the same time next to quitting porn. I allow myself to not be productive on some parts of the week and just watch some series or just be on the computer or play some games. The times when I relapsed the most is when I tried to do everything at the same time: no porn, no gaming, no junkfood, meditate 2x30 min a day, study 8 hours a week, play my guitar, go to the gym 4 times a week, go to bed at 10 pm every day, read educational books, stop biting my nails, etc. it's just too much to do all that at once. Just start with one big thing (porn) and one smaller thing (meditate twice week) and cut yourself some slack on the other things. Move to the next level by adding more items after you feel more in control after a few weeks / months.
10. Never forget to reward yourself: What do you do when your children behave? You reward them with appraisal to stimulate the good behaviour. We, as adults, are still like that: We need the positive feedback for our efforts. We get that from our peers (via this forum) but you can reward yourself as well. Set goals and be sure to place something nice at that point of time to reward yourself. I have put an item in my agenda to treat myself on some real nice sushi from this great restaurant as soon as I hit the 1 month mark of no porn. I will buy myself some really great shoes when I break my two week no masturbation mark. This way you have a negative push ánd a positive pull to hold on!

I hope this will be of any use to you guys. Good luck with this incredible interesting and tough battle we're facing!

 

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