1. Welcome to NoFap! We have disabled new forum accounts from being registered for the time being. In the meantime, you can join our weekly accountability groups.
    Dismiss Notice

Simple Question

Discussion in 'Porn Addiction' started by TheProdigalSon, Jan 12, 2020.

  1. TheProdigalSon

    TheProdigalSon Fapstronaut

    161
    270
    63
    What are a list of ways to channel sexual desires into another outlet? I have heard:
    - Exercising (apparently works for some and not others)
    - Being in the presence of ppl (this doesn’t work when going to sleep or say doing homework)
    - Journaling (personally I don’t want physical evidence of those thoughts and sometimes posting one here won’t even work)
    -Meditation (don’t know how to do, tips?)
    -Cold shower (Can’t be taking a cold shower 10+ times a day. I’m exaggerating, but it isn’t a one fix all)
    -be busy (to be real hw can be boring which lead me to think of PMO and joining organizations can backfire with being in the proximity of girls who left half their clothes at home...I get it’s their choice, but it doesn’t help all the same)
    -Accountability partner (I usually stop responding either by forgetting or on purpose to fall to PMO)
    -Lower testosterone (I heard this can have a negative impact on the body as a whole)
    -SAA meetings (not aware of any in my area)
    -Any more?

    I know it looks like I’m making excuses, but I’m just trying to state the facts towards why these haven’t worked for me.
     
    better human likes this.
  2. helpinghand4all

    helpinghand4all Fapstronaut

    247
    210
    43
    Keep calm and be happy till you achieve high levels of energy. As days pass by on nofap you value happiness more than porn or sex so don't be too hard upon yourself, do your stuff and then lighten up your mood by socializing or watching a comedy video.
     
    TheProdigalSon likes this.
  3. CTRL + DEL

    CTRL + DEL Fapstronaut

    1,607
    30,784
    143
    You don't even sound like you've tried it.
    If it's not working, you're just not doing it hard enough. Do cardio and there isn't a force on this planet that can keep your boner up.

    You can't sleep anyway if you have urges. If you have homework to do, just focus on it. It's a distraction, after all.

    You don't need to discuss PMO in your journal. You can type anything you like in it; there isn't a single rule that says otherwise. Journaling is just a distraction during urges for many.

    YouTube.
    Google.
    WikiHow, even.

    Take one before going to work or when you come home. It'll keep you covered for at least an hour. Make sure that hour falls into time you're most likely to relapse.

    Persue or develop hobbies. You don't need to join any organizations to keep your hands off your dick.

    I agree. They aren't for everyone.

    It will. Leave your balls intact.


    Good luck.
     
    TheProdigalSon likes this.
  4. Do something important to you, like really. Set a serious goal, especially if young. I'm almost 20 and now just started playing guitar. Now I suck at it, but I know if I will keep going on like this - after a year or more I will kick some ass. So you do the same! Pick up something you like, train a lot, spend a lots of time on it, invest your time let's say so and you will forget about PMO. After time it will fade away. To me, with 130+ day streak it's important, cause I was so bored I could relapse. Now I don't think of porn at all.
     
    TheProdigalSon and Compiler like this.
  5. Randy Andy

    Randy Andy Fapstronaut

    382
    426
    63
    I didnt hear those as excuses but rather (potentially, no one can know much less decide besides you) evidence for addiction if you've tried most or all if these things and they haven't gotten you off pm+ I've heard that a lot of people get relief from one or more of these but I seen to be different from them so it doesn't really help me. It makes sense to try what's worked for them but when I didn't know I had action rather than just a lot of sexual energy or a habit or whatever I ended up spending a lot of time on these things not getting what I was looking for and feeling very depressed about "why didn't that work like it was supposed to?". I used to run five miles then act out, I used to exercise and take a cold shower then a few hours later act out. I used to have accountability partners and just like you I would forget or deliberately not contact them in order to "do what I wanted" but most common was I would forget or lose my commitment to no pm+ the pressure and temptation and blahdiblah would get to much for me" and I'd give in then I wouldn't contact my ap until much later out of shame. Now I have it switched around there are people free of pm+ willing to help each other that I call before pm+ and I keep calling and doing what they tell me to do until I don't want to any more, temporarily :). I mean rinse and repeat, and that is only part of the solution for me, one of the many things they tell me to do is meditate and there's a really good book that describes one form of meditation right next to the nature of addiction. I'm happy to Converse with anyone about these details I just don't like how on a thread it sounds like "just do this one thing and you'll be fixed" the solution in my experience is so broad and deep that it is very easy to misunderstand like a blind man describing an elephant. I know I was eager to find a magic bullet a decade and a half ago that's why I tried the next level up from this list, and I didn't know I was an addict that's why this list and the next list didn't "fix" me. In fact that book I mentioned has a beautiful piece about just that, let me write a little of it:


    One day my mind said, “What is wrong with me?” “Why doesnt happiness stay put?” “Where are the answers?” “Have I gone crazy or has the whole world gone mad?”

    The solution to any problem seems to bring only brief relief, because it is the basis of the next problem. The mind just kept chattering along, “Does anybody have the secret?”

    Don’t worry, everybody’s desperate. Some seem very cool about it “I can’t see what the fuss is about” they say. “Life seems simple to me.”...they can’t even look at it!

    The confusion of the experts is more sophisticated, wrapped in jargon and impressive mental construction. They have predetermined belief systems into which they try to squeeze you. It seems to work for a while and then it’s just back to ones original state again. Same with social institutions.

    “Well, “ you say, there have to be some experts who have the answers.” When upset you

    Go to a psychiatrist or analyst, take up religion, get philosophy. You try astrology, you get your chakras balanced, you try EST and EFT.

    You meditate, chant a mantra, drink green tea. You get centered, try actualizations, study psychology, join a Jungian group. You get Rolfed, try psychedelics, jog, jazzercise, get into nutrition and aerobics.

    Try macrobiotics, become vegetarian, go organic, no GMO. You go to India, find a guru, take off your clothes, swim in the Ganges, shave your head, shower in cold water.

    Sing tribal chants. Try hypnotic regression. Relive past lives. Scream a primal scream. Punch pillows. Join a marriage encounter group. Write affirmations, Cast the I-Ching. Do the Tarot cards. Study Eastern religion. Read lots of books. Do yoga. Go on a retreat. Try fasting. Listen to subliminal tapes. Hunt up holy men. Hold hands in a circle, get high. Renounce sex and going to the movies. Join a cult.

    Take wonder drugs. Eat only grapefruit. Go for sex therapy. Try Tantric sex. Get blessed by Baba Somebody. Join an anonymous group. Travel to Lourdes and the great Pyramids. Speak in tongues and try Gestalt therapy.

    You and your friends have tried all those things, you say? Oh, the human! You wonderful creature! Tragic, comic and yet so noble! Such courage to keep on searching!
    God I relate to that. Like I said there's another list after the one you gave and one before that and another after that. Like he says in that book, every single one either I tried myself or I know someone who did. And again, it doesn't help me if one of those things seems to fix someone else. It seems we need to try most options because otherwise we might miss one that is the magic bullet (for instance one in your list and his is key to what I found as the solution for me and I do it regularly still at 2497 days not having to pm+). Plus if we are addicts which is defined as we tried everything and nothing worked on this guy then to diagnose ourselves we would need to try a lot of things. We can never know for sure that the next thing on the list wouldn't have worked but after a certain more and more failures we can be more adn more confident that we are real addicts, that that concept of addiction explains our inability to stop.

     
    TheProdigalSon likes this.
  6. TheProdigalSon

    TheProdigalSon Fapstronaut

    161
    270
    63
    May I ask which book this is, friend?
    Maybe I am overlooking the point you made, so correct me if I am wrong. To address the realization of addiction, I can say this applies greatly. I have been stuck on this process for nine years. I never felt addicted because I wouldn’t be so compulsive that I had to didn’t have to do it at school, work, or in public. I deemed my problem a bad habit that I needed to kick. Yet, after many many tries, I’m still struggling with this. I don’t watch anything extreme or illegal, don’t even like it if I were going to. On average, I watch 3 times a week with once per day. Again, it seems that it isn’t taking over my life. However, I still am shackled by it. Maybe it is time to say I am addicted. Looking over the very interesting post, however, I did not see a solution among it for addicts. It looks like that no matter what I try, I will not be able to break free. Was the message to do what works for me by looking of what can help? Plus, have the mindset that I’m not looking for the silver bullet, rather it’s only research to discover what is best for me?
     
  7. Randy Andy

    Randy Andy Fapstronaut

    382
    426
    63
    Wow I'm so glad you asked. I am usually careful to not say "do this" because of exactly what you and I are talking about here: it can become just one more thing that didn't work. In my case one of the things that is in your original list in the thread opener and in the list the book gave (which is titled "Letting Go: the Pathway of surrender" by David R Hawkins) worked for me like a magic bullet. It is paradoxical, just like how I to cannot stop using pm+ still today and yet that has been my experience for 2498 days today. And it's also a mystery to me how something that many others try without success works for me still today, I don't know if I do it differently but I do know for sure there's nothing special about me that makes it work other than I am teachable (ie when people who know what to do tell me to do x y and z then report back for more instructions I do them, of course a big trick is finding people who not just think they know but actually know :) ) . One such person told me a few years ago when he had been free from pm+ for 21 years (he stillhasn't used pm+) that "if that jackass can do it anybody can do it" referring to himself :) .
    So I guess it's ok to look for a silver bullet, since there probably is one for each person, and luckily that's not opposite to discovering what's best for ones self. It's kind of like openmindedness: "This might be the thing for me, even if it seems not to be working I'm going to pay attention to all the data and see my experiement through for ____ days and even then I will practice openmindedness of 'it didn't work AT THAT TIME' " or something like that. But I've heard that what worked for me is working for a lot of people.
    Some of it seems to be where we're at in the journey, for simplicity I often talk about "how addicted someone is." I think of it like a spectrum, and I hold this like most ideas loosely, that I can be more or less addicted. Early in my story I was just looking at non-pornographic materials and using them as if they were porn, and masturbating sometimes without porn. Over the years the porn got more and more shaf=meful, and also never got close to illegal porn and thank goodness that fact never came close to "it's not that bad" for me at least not consciously I think I probably had it unconsciously (I don't mean subconsciously that's different :) ). ACtually I know I did because as the porn got "worse" my behaviors were also getting more extreme and my thinking was what was really already out of control early in life. I had started thinking about sex long before even encountering porn, much less going from a recreational user of pm+ to an addict. And one of those extreme behaviors that I did could have gotten me in big embarassing trouble with my job and all that night as I ran from and suffered from the consequences I kept thinking "I'll do anything, I'll never do this again adn I'm going to prove it I'll do this and this and this" And in the mornign I got lucky and the consequences lifted and all of a sudden my problem didn't seem that bad.
    It's kind of like alcohol. I don't have to be a gutter drunk with one shoe and an arrest record as long as my arm to be a drunk, and many people in that situation don't believe they are alcohol addicts. here are people who are addicted to all kinds of things in mansions, and at my company, and in high level stable government positions and on and on. It gets harder to rationalize ias consequences accrue but that just means a person has a little more mental gymnastics to do. Happens all the time. A friend of mine knew someone who drove drunk and killed three kids and didn't think he was an alcoholic. I think the court system thought he was.
    But I never had anything big like that either. I just hated myself and felt controlled by it and noticed that I would draw a line honestly intending to stay beind it and then all of a sudden would find myself over it! So I'd have to redraw it, and I would stay behind it...until I didn't. It was like waking up TO a nightmare rather than from it. Because most of those lines were pretty minor if I'm looking to consequences to scare me straight, but it was the fact that I couldn't make my decisions about pm+, I thought "am I not a man, with the ability to choose for myself?"
    I know from my own story that it is possible to stop indefinitely without having to do the really bad stuff or have really bad stuff happen, and I don't do most things on most lists. Part of why is cause most of them I never gave a second thought to as fixes for my pm+ use, I did them as part of regular life but it was as I could see physically that they were to the side of that, like the relevance bubble gum has to the building of a house. Even things you'd think would be super relevant: my wife thought it was because we didn't have sex enough and I chuckled ruefully. No hesitation, I knew for sure it wasn't that. No amount or kind of sex will ever satisfy this addict, not possible. But there is a way to live free even with that obsession and craving still singing the siren song, it involves not fighting. Nothing satisfies me, that's a fact but I can in spite of that choose to practice being satisfied with what is, even loving what is.
    HOpefully this at least starts to answer your questions. I'm always eager to help, I know how infuriating just the day to day of being in the pm+ (I don't say in addiction because I don't know if you are one) and trying things and them not working and getting advice and on and on. I know what it's like. There is a solution and it's not impossible or even grandiose, you don't have to travel to other countries or pay a bunch of money or any of the things I tried, but there is one you might want to try the way I try it.
     

Share This Page