Quit All Addictions at once or one at a time?

One at a time has been the only way I have managed to do it.

 

I'm with you on the link between junk food and PMO, they will have to be concurrently addressed, or indulging in one will encourage the others. Also another oddity, even though I had PIED, I could manage an 80% erection while on my back for sex with wife. Though PIED has become less of an issue, we can no longer have girl on top sex. After we are done I want to PMO. Very weird....these flawed brains of ours.

 

I feel like you play whack-a-mole with addictions but I would go for the worst first, let all your addictions flair up around that one, then move onto the next. So like if you're an alcoholic, smoker, and fapper, I'd quit alcohol, smoke a shit ton of cigarettes, make the decision to quit those, wank off a ton to deal with the smoking withdrawals, etc.

Worked for me, at least to tackle addictions this way. I'm actually a mild fapper but it's out of control, and all my other addictions have been handled. Addiction sucks all the best pieces of life away no matter how big or how small, but once you find out how to beat one you start chasing them down like a wolf

 

I`d say focus on decreasing your porn addiction, without increasing other addiction.. because porn is the hardest one to quit in my opinion.

 

Hey, for me it worked quite well to do some simultaniously. But I didn't do 'streaks' where as soon as you failed one time you spiral down pretty bad. For me the key was to slowly and steady reduce it. Get from 3times PMO to MO once every second day - huge improvement! Try a 90 days streak and fail after 10 days? - You will feel bad that you didn't made it.
Go from 1 pack of cigarrettes to 3 cigarrettes a day? Huge improvement, but if you set your goal to 'No smoking for the rest of your life' you will fail.

With being not idealistic I managed to reduce the bad stuff greatly. And I noticed that I wouldn't get so demotivated by a relapse. I used to indulge in my addictions everytime after I failed for a few weeks, now I fail sometimes aswell but I get on track immediately after

So I would say try a few (maybe not all, but the most damaging ones) but don't be too hard on yourself

 

It's not about how much, including 0.

Whether you quit all things simultaneously there's a question of whether you ADDRESS all issues simultaneously. After all, you can't completely quit things like food anyway. You can't even do a period of abstinence like with M, you have to eat everyday - it's just a question of whether you eat too much or the right things.

This should be where people recognize recovery is not a simple matter of black and white thinking, binary logic. It's not even just about amount, if you eat a moderate amount of junk food it's still junk food.

Quitting is the bottom line, but only ever looking at the bottom line doesn't tell you how to get there. That's the goal and ideal, NOT how. When you only look at that then you get into black and white thinking of will it be too hard or not, you're locked into the box of difficulty or projected difficulty.

Instead of asking whether you should try to quit everything at once, you may ask whether how you CAN quit them or have a healthy lifestyle that isn't affected by these things. So what I'm saying isn't a matter of a laundry list of things you quit, but everything you do. Start at the beginning of the day. If you eat crap for breakfast or don't eat at all that'll influence how your day goes, heck go back further if you didn't get enough sleep and you NEVER get enough sleep that'll take its toll. Because ideally you'd eat a decent quality breakfast and maybe get some amount of exercise even if it's small just to start the day. Just those three things there which doesn't deal with any of the heavy duty things like PMO or drugs will make a difference if we really look at how we use our time not in terms of amount of time spend, but what you actually do with just a part of a day, and you can work up to looking at the unit of a day as a whole - then repeat and rinse. Since addiction is something you do repeatedly, if you just address one day you will probably have addressed it along with everything else. (even if you didn't PMO that day you probably thought about it and did stuff that influences that)

Look at it like money. If you only track how much you spend and how much you earn that's better than nothing, but you have to have a job and some way of making money in the first place, and you should have some clue as to how to shop for the best value for what you want and need to buy. Essentially traditional recovery thinking that only focuses on abstinence never looks at this kind of detail or with any level of enough sophistication. But the truth is this detail of the process is happening all the time because process = life - and life isn't a simplistic matter of how much you do X or Y. The entire reason why there is excess in the first place is there is a natural balance and that balance is a matter of the normal process, but only looking at abstinence is to only take the first step and never looking to understand the process. Like an ex-con who goes straight but doesn't have any job skills and never looked into how they will be able to make that happen, pretty soon survival instincts will kick in and they will resort to what they know.

Don't get stuck on the first step.

 

I didn’t know about the withdrawal and flatlining and anxiety and severe depression and brain rewiring and all that. I only accidentally discovered what 20 years of heavy masterbation did to my brain. I always thought I was just socially anxious and highs and lows and I thought masterbating was healthy for prostate or something. Anyway I thought I was withdrawing ONLY from. 20 year smoking habit but turns out to be a lot more. I went to the ER for brain fog and physical symptoms. I thought I was having a stroke and all kinds of stuff. So I guess I’m getting hit with double withdrawal cold turkey symptoms and I didt even know I was in for a ride like this. I never ever recommend quitting to heavy habits at the same time. It’s too much on your brain and body imo