Vicious cycle

Hey Fapstronauts,

I want to share with you what I've learned so far and I hope to get a few good tips or insights to help us cope.

Introduction

Here is a brief summary of the vicious cycle in which I've been trapped ever since I started tackling my porn problem and I can't seem to shake it off:

1) Decide to stop watching porn and/or masturbating.
2) Set up a routine, schedule, challenges, goals, plans etc in order to fill my time to succeed.
3) My goals become too big, I overwork, I strive too much which in itself is tiresome.
4) Being tired weakens my resolve and my drive resulting in PMO.

Anyone else struggling with the same cycle?

I think personally, that this is a typical problem a perfectionist like me struggles with. Where good enough is simply not good enough. Let me shed some further light onto each point above.

Deep dive

1) Decide to stop watching porn and/or masturbating.

I don't think there is anything wrong with watching porn once a week. Or say masturbating twice a week. Especially if you are single. Yet the extremes that build me and are inside me and a part of who I am take this too far, to binging on porn several times a day. So the excess has to be balanced with another excess - i.e. no PMO at all. When you are prone to extremes, it's almost impossible to stand in the middle. It's all or nothing. Win or lose. There is no other way.
Yet life is not like this. In fact, it's never like this. There is a famous Chinese story about a man who lost his horse.

To sum up, nothing is just good or bad. Yet we tend to see it this way and we are only bouncing from one extreme to another. It's either porn every day or never again. And this is exhausting.

2) Set up a routine, schedule, challenges, goals, plans etc in order to fill my time to succeed.

Once we decide to stray away from the extreme, we start to wonder how. We realise watching porn is most likely a habit, so we delve for hours at a time, watching YouTube instructional videos on breaking habits, we read every book on the subject that we find and we may even print out motivational pictures and hang them on our walls and doors.

We feel optimistic. We feel that the whole world is open for us. Once we decide to stop with PMO we feel we have so much spare time and energy. We don't want to waste it. Instead we want to use every bit we can to the fullest. We don't pay any attention that humans generally can't change overnight. We don't allow ourselves to think we are the same old 'me' or that we are not really reborn. In fact we won't be reborn for many years if this addiction has been here for years as well. It's not a miraculous rebirth but instead it's a fight and we can only win one day at the time. Even if we realise this, this inevitably makes us even more prone to overplanning, overstriving and overworking which brings us to point number 3.

3) My goals become too big, I overwork, I strive too much which in itself is tiresome.

We, directed by our internal tendency for extremes, take this too far. One day we are smoking weed and masturbating and the next day we want to compete with Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. And not just compete, we want to be better. We feel we ought to be better, that we are capable of being better. It might that we were very successful as a kid, not realising that those years are long gone.

All of a sudden, our lives are full. Too full, in fact. We know that deep down we are weak - which is to what we might assign the blame for succumbing to PMO in the first place - so we become more and more rigid with our plans in order to avoid facing our internal weakness. Our days have to be planned from the minute we wake up to the minute we fall asleep. Waking up too late or not going to bed at a set time is already a failure. And if a small thing like this is already a failure, don't even get me started on bigger things. Say we don't finish our project, we don't invest when planned, our home renovation gets too expensive and we have to stop.

This becomes tiring for two reasons. One is the sheer excess of plans. Whoever plans every minute of the day with productivity will inevitably get tired sooner or later. However, the second reason reason why this becomes tiring is probably more subtle, but in my case even more damaging. Failure in itself is tiring. When you waste what you thought was an opportunity, you lose something. Might be your self esteem. And losing things is tiring. On a more serious level, I've known many people who lost their relatives or even pets and couldn't get out of bed for days. They were too tired. The loss took a toll. So the more we lose, the more tired we feel.

And this is the vicious cycle. We are weak. We strive more and more to avoid our weakness, to avoid facing our weakness and while this might work for a while, the more we work, the more we push, the closer to the weakness we get. And when the pressure is too much, we end up
at the beginning.

4) Being tired weakens my resolve and my drive resulting in PMO = RELAPSE.

When we have tried every possibility, when we followed every advice and ultimately failed, when our plans, goals and strives for perfection became too much too handle, our weakness becomes exposes and we relapse. We are not strong enough to face the world, but even more accurately, we are not strong enough to fill our goals of perfection.

This is a painful moment. And it might take days, weeks or even months to get back on track. We worked so hard for so long and failed and we can't get ourselves to start again, because we know how painful this is.

However, if our internal drive is strong enough we start again. Steps 1, 2, 3 and then 4. A vicious cycle repeats itself. And it gets more and more painful the every time we get here.

A possible solution

It is a depressing scenario indeed if we forget to acknowledge one thing. Time has passed. We have changed. We have learned. Although we might be back at stage one, "we" are not the same. It is a different person, standing here. And hopefully this person has learned something about themselves everytime they made the lap. And this in itself is the solution.

We should not be too hard on ourselves. We should know that perfection is only achievable by Gods, and we are only human, imperfect by definition. We should not be too hard on ourselves to begin with.

In fact, we should love ourselves more with everything we learn about ourselves. Who am I? What makes me "me?" Any answer we get on this way should bring us closer to accepting ourselves for who we are. Deep down we know that we are not a total failure. Deep down we know that we haven't wasted our time. And deep down we know, I hope, that what makes us really feel alive is being kind and good to others. So why not try being good and kind to ourselves as well?

Here we are, back at stage one. It might not be for the last time. But here we are. And we should be happy and grateful to have this opportunity.

So be good and kind, to you and to others, and stop being a perfectionist. Instead, just be.

 

@Nicko Stretch
I see your point of view, however, what I tried to emphasize is that there is probably not a single person here on NoFap who joined because they were watching porn infrequently. It was always the excess, the extreme (either in amount or type) that made it the problem.
When I say I don't think watching porn once a week is a problem, I mean it. Obviously this isn't set in stone, i.e. I highly doubt there is a single person in this world who has their Sunday nights reserved for their weekly fap, getting all ready and excited for the whole week. But even if there was such a person, what is wrong with that? They clearly have the situation under control and it is not extreme nor excessive in any way. And being this way, why would they even want to join NoFap when they've got it under control?
The point is that it is the lack of control which got us here. Me, you, Alex, everyone. And the lack of control is what is the key of any addiction, whether porn, drugs, food, video games As long as control is there, it isn't a problem. Once the control is gone, it becomes a problem. And we are all here purely because we lost the control somewhere along the way.

@Asgardian36 thanks for your kind comment. Best of thoughts and wishes to you too