long term goals`?

I can't recommend fapping. It only perpetuates the problem.

But honestly, if you have trouble with quitting PMO drastically, I think it's wiser to gradually slow down.

But having the discipline to actually set goals for yourself to decrease each week or day a little more.

I answered something similar to another member.

It's a tough question. But as I always say, it may be better to remove a habit in 3 months of gradual slow-down, than to relapse 5 times in 6 months.

Hope it helps, but I encourage fellow members to add to my (maybe) narrow view on this.

 

If you can do it, if it works for you, that's great. Doesn't work for me. Once I fap, I want to do it again and again. For me stopping altogether seems to have been the best solution. Whatever works!

 

You might want to keep track of it, if you want to use that way to try and minimise your use. Check out this spreadsheet http://www.yourbrainrebalanced.com/...0a218dac18b079f709ac742cf6d&topic=14584.0

Although, you want to he careful as to not end up planning for pmo sessions continuously or become something you look forward to.

It does sound like there may be merits in slowly removing it, to try and get used to it. I guess it depends on yourself, your history, experiences, etc.

You want to ask yourself what you want out of this. For me, I realise how difficult it is to have a fulfilling life when pmo is not there to obscure or numb the emptiness - the clarity of the truth is raw and sometimes frightening.

What I'm saying is that you want to have some ideas of what you want to do long, medium and short term. Add in something constructive and entertaining.

 

Hi mosd. I have read all 20 of your posts. I have to say that a 12 day start is excellent. I think it is time for you to study you problem, it will make fixing it a lot easier. You have, over the last 20 posts, struggled with viewing porn and fapping, but both miss the point. The point is you don't have a porn problem, you don't have a fapping problem. Those are symptoms of the problem, side effects if you will. Your problem, the problem everyone here has, is a dopamine problem. Dopamine is the best drug in the world, and though you probably don't understand it yet, it is a drug you give yourself every time you watch porn, PMO, and MO to hypersexualized thoughts. You are probably using hypersexualized, i.e., pornographic, thoughts when you MO, even if you are not in front of your computer downloading porn. Unless you are picturing yourself learning how to tie a bow tie when you MO, you are probably using hypersexualized thoughts. Why? Because that is a button all of us push to get a porn high, aka dopamine high. You need to understand what is going on between your ears. Understand that while it looks like a porn problem and feels like a porn problem, it isn't; it is a brain problem--and not one that cannot be fixed, albeit with some effort and some pain. High Speed Internet Porn has made the possibility of getting a dopamine high something that can be experienced every day, over and over, for years. That in turn leads to the addiction. Take 16 minutes to study the problem. Watch this vid, take notes, watch it again. You will find that your problem is cause and effect, stimulus and response, Pavlovian. If a dog smells food, it drools, if a porn addict thinks of porn, he gets a dopamine high. Thus the cycle, watch porn, get high, come down, feel withdrawals, self medicate with more porn, get high, come down, etc., etc., you get the idea. The only way you are going to get clean is to get off that ride. But first, understand what is going on in your brain's primitive reward center and why we love dopamine so much, as well as pushing whatever buttons we need to push to get it.

This is the Gary Wilson vid that many here have said saved their lives because it defines the problem in easily understood terms. Gary Wilson by the way is the founder of yourbrainonporn.com You need to visit that site and start getting educated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU

Next, don't quit passively. You ask if you can "cut back". You can, but you'll be addicted 10 years from now if that is your approach. There is only one way to beat porn addiction and that is hardcore. I recommend the hard 90. Don't think of it as "quitting", though for many of us, it leads to totally quitting. Think of it as a brief few months in your porn addicted lifestyle where you are dealing with the problem in an immediate and usually painful way so that you reach a point, a few months out, where you never have to deal with it again. Porn addiction, at its worst, is like a habit standing behind you, tapping you on the shoulder, saying "feed me" over and over and over and over. The point of the hard 90 is not merely to get to the place where you ignore the addiction, but, hopefully, get to the point where it is not competing for your interest. If you are lucky, and many are, if you successfully complete the hard 90, porn just won't occur to you anymore, and certainly not always, not daily, sometimes not for weeks or months, and you regain total control. I suggest you write here daily, read here daily, watch the vid daily, visit yourbrainonporn.com and study your problem. Understanding your problem will not eliminate withdrawals, but it will help you understand they won't last forever. You will have withdrawals, in fact, you already do. Every active porn addict has them, on a daily basis, in a small way. You know that tingling feeling that makes you want to PMO? That is a tiny withdrawals, that is why we relapse, that is why we continue to use, that is why we feel we are compelled to PMO, like we have no choice, like we cannot quit. You can quit, but for most, you cannot quit without withdrawals. Think of that tingling, which you quench with a hit of PMO, times one hundred and lasting as long as 60 days, day in, day out, night and day. Those are cold sweats, feelings of panic, feelings of anxiety. That is your brain soaked porn addicted brain begging you, threatening you, pleading with your, reasoning with you, trying to convince you to use. During the hard 90 you have to tell the addiction to go fuck itself. That idea that you have about cutting back, just using a little, that is your addiction trying to talk you into keeping it alive. The thing about porn addiction is, it can be staved to death, but feeding it just a little bit keeps it alive. You don't want to be the guy posting here in ten years lamenting how you cannot quit, you just can't, but proud of your latest 7 day run. Those guys are not overcoming the problem, they are telling themselves they are, but really they are just prolonging it. Study the hard 90 before you commit to it. It will be hard, you will suffer, but, for many of us who have successfully done it, once you get to this side of clean, the problem looks like a period on the end of a sentence in a book open on the other side of the room. If we look hard enough, this side of clean, we can still see the problem, we know it is there, but it is so distant and small it does not even annoy us any more.

If you have not done it already, get K9, perhaps other porn blockers. Yes I know, they will not stop you if you are committed to seeing porn and getting that dopamine high, but if you are committed to beating the addiction, they help. You see, many of us here are OCD and highly computer literate. For most of us there is no wall they have constructed we cannot get around to get to porn and the dopamine high it gives us, but blockers slow us down, gives us that split second reminder that we are changing our lives, that we are rejecting the porn lifestyle, that we are taking off the chains of porn we have put on ourselves. That is the way you have to think of it, as taking off your chains, as rejecting happiness in slavery. There is no middle ground when it comes to porn addiction, you are either free or you are using. Free gets pretty easy once you get to that point, once you become "rebooted", being a balance of your brain's reward center to a place where it was before porn addiction. But quitting, especially during the hard 90, is black and white, there is no middle ground, there is no gray. So, if you are going to quit it, quit it, and if you are going to keep using, keep using, but do not delude yourself into thinking that using just a little bit is anywhere near quitting, because it is not.

Good luck on your journey, mate.

P.O.

 

Hi mosd, again, I thing getting educated about your problem, our problem, the problem every guy with a PMO problem has, is essential. The Gary Wilson video is very straight forward. It identifies the problem as a dopamine spike, or high, as in essentially a drug high, in response to artificial sexual stimulation, i.e., porn. Porn is a button we push to get a dopamine high. I struggled to get clean for at least a year before I finally did because I came to what many of us here call "rationalizations", which I conceive of as a withdrawal symptom. Those are thoughts that pop into our heads telling us why we don't need to quit completely, or we can quit gradually. Quitting gradually is really just planning to relapse less frequently. It is not a good plan because like any other addiction the addiction is perpetuated by continued use, not matter how little. A heroin addict never gets clean if his plan is to use less and less; it simply never works. You are asking questions, which is a great beginning. The problem you face, the reality we all face, is that quitting sucks. You are removing a pleasure drug, and substituting it with withdrawals. It is not easy, it is hard, but on this side of clean it becomes quite manageable. I have weeks, even months, where PMOing simply does not occur to me.

Good luck on your journey.