180+ DAYS REBOOT (ONGOING): Progress, Insights and Thoughts

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~ FOREWORDS ~

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Try to picture a man who lived his whole life chained to the wall of a dark cave, watching shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind him, and giving names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality.

One day, the prisoner has finally enough of his miserable condition. He breaks free from his chain and gets out of the cave. Once outside, he is blinded by the overwhelming light of the Sun in the vast blue sky.

As his vision progressively comes back, he comes to understand that the shadows on the wall inside the cave were not reality at all, for he can now perceive the true form of reality. He comes to realize that all this time, he didn’t desire to leave his prison, for he knew no better life. As he now sees clearly, he discovers that reality was not what he thought it was.

That freed prisoner is me. I think I’m finally out of my mental prison.

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~ INTRODUCTION ~

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I just came back from a cabin retreat. It feels like a good time to write my very first thread in the Success Stories Section. Never ever would I have thought I would one day write my own story here. So to anybody who believes they can’t turn the table around, you also can do it!

In this thread, I will not talk about my “PMO Recovery” but my “Mental Health Recovery” and “How I am Changing my Life”.

My goal was always to “Change my Life”. For the last 6 years, I mistakenly believed that if I simply stopped PMOing, my life would fix itself on its own. I was lying to my self:

One does not simply change their whole life by stopping a bad habit. One can only transform their lives by taking a deep dive in the deepest depth of their Self, face their darkest fears and forgive themselves.

It takes a lot of courage to do this. You have to be 400% ready to stop the self-loathing, take full responsibility for your life circumstances and do whatever it takes to transform yourself. If you want to overcome your ordeal, you have to be in the same state of mind as this guy:

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Once you’ve fixed your shit, the world starts to look radically different.

Your unhealthy, destructive habits (porn, compulsive masturbation, weed, video game addiction, social media addiction and whatnot) keep you enslaved to your thoughts and emotions. They act like heavy anchors that keep you stuck at the bottom of the ocean.

NoFap helped me freeing myself from one of my heaviest anchors. It gave me the clarity and enough momentum to understand that I was living in a state of very acute mental pain, and that the only way for real freedom was to heal that mental pain and rebuild an erroneous belief system from the ground up.

I realized that I had unconsciously been “self-medicating” (in reality, aggravating) my mental anguish with extremely destructive and unhealthy habits including PMO and weed. And along the way, I realized that it is only by taking care of my mental health that I was going to be able to truly change your life for good.

Most of what you will read below are realizations I was able to have over the course of the last six months, thanks to a heavy psychological work on my self. Six months ago, I was deep down the Abyss of Despair and all I could see was absolute Darkness.

I am not 100% recovered but I want to share my progress, thoughts and insights after 6 months into my current reboot. I estimate that it will take 1.5-3 years for me to completely move on from my past.

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~ BACKGROUND ~

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I’m a 31 year-old male. I have been heavily addicted to PMO for about 15-16 years. I was a heavy user. I was PMOing anywhere between 1-3 sometimes 4-5 times a day, almost every day, for 15 years. I have known about PMO addiction and tried to break this cycle of Hell for 6 years.

On top of PMO, I was also addicted to cannabis. I had been using PMO and weed together on an almost daily basis for the last 3 years. I also had a coffee addiction and a tobacco addiction. I stopped all of that together with PMO 6 months ago.

I grew up in a dysfunctional family, but I never realized or accepted that fact until very recently. I developed chronic anxiety and stress from a young age. Unbeknownst to me, I also developed a people-pleasing behavior and learned to be a “good kid”, always seeking to defuse familial conflict, repressing all my emotions and internalizing an insane amount of toxic shame.

As a preteen/teen, the way I found to release all the pressure was masturbation, and then PMO. I quickly became a compulsive masturbator and once I got my own computer with high-speed Internet, that was the end of me.

I was also introduced to tobacco, and then weed, which made me ashamed of myself even more and generated additional anxiety.

I ended up in a very vicious and ever deepening circle: coffee > tobacco > stress > weed + PMO > paranoia, OCD, anxiety, shame, regret, anger, resentment, codependency> repeat.

One day, I realized if I kept living that way, escaping reality through PMO and weed, I would ultimately wake up at 60 in the same room, with the same job, alone, doing the same destructive things. I would have missed what Life is all about.

It really freaked me out. For a long time, I thought that weed was giving me those scary thoughts, until I realized they weren’t “thoughts”. They were my reality. I was like a heroin addict, literally running back home after work, shutting all the curtains, completely isolating myself from the world and smoking and PMOing like a complete junky from 9PM til 2AM every day.

That was the breaking point. The next day, I smashed my tablet onto the ground. I threw all my weed and tobacco away. I cleaned my apartment, cleaned my room, decided to go see a therapist and doctors. I came back on NoFap. I faced my fears.

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~ CURRENT RECOVERY PROGRESS ~

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I am (1) 185 days P free, (2) 134 days PM free, (3) 23 days PMO free. My best no PMO streak during this reboot is 75 days. Over the last 6 years, I was only able to abstain twice for 40ish days, and once for 52 days.

I always had severe performance anxiety, PIED and, when my dick worked, desensitization and DE.

I think my PIED is cured. I still have PA and DE but I have reached the conclusion that they are psychologically induced and not porn-induced. They are caused by my chronic anxiety and internalized shame. I am working heavily on my anxiety and shame these days, and made good progress on that front.

I don’t feel the urge to watch porn anymore. It does not seem to affect me anymore. I think about it less and less. I almost don’t have any intrusive thoughts anymore. I know however that I will never be “safe” from my addictive personality.

I don’t feel the urge to masturbate anymore. I occasionally have sexual urges, but I don’t feel any compulsion to act out.

85% of my anxiety is gone. I released 90% of my shame. I almost don’t feel stressed anymore. I now see life and accept life for what it is. I don’t want to control what I could not control anymore. The only thing that I can control, and the only thing I am responsible for, is my self. This is liberating.

Yesterday, I saw a friend who hadn’t seen me in over a year. He couldn’t believe my transformation. He even asked me if I was in a cult (I am not). He must have thought I was too grounded and at peace to really be myself. But I AM my whole, true self. The version of my self that my friend knew in the past was a fundamentally incomplete version of my self. The version of my self he met yesterday was a version of my self that was so much closer from my complete, whole, true self. I had been incomplete my entire life.

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~ THE FOUR STAGES OF MY RECOVERY ~

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So far, I have gone through the following stages.

1. Breaking the Addictions
2. Identifying the Mental Pain
3. Facing the Fears, Searching the Root Causes of the Mental Pain, Accepting What Is and ForgivingYourself.
4. Live And Perceive Life Through A New Mindset and Belief System.

STAGE 1: BREAKING THE ADDICTIONS

If, like me, you want to transform your life, I believe the fist step you will have to undertake is abstaining from your bad habits.

You need to stay away from your unhealthy habits in order to create enough mental space and clarity to be able to identify your real problems. They might be super obvious, but your addictions keep you completely blind and numb, so you can’t see them.

You consciously or unconsciously use your addictions to numb yourself and escape from reality. Only by feeling the unfiltered reality will you be able to identify the mental pain you so desperately try to avoid. It will be unpleasant, but hang in there.

Here is a list of things that worked for me in order to break the addiction/compulsion cycle (especially weed and PMO), in order of effectiveness:

• Getting help from a therapist

It is expensive. But are you ready to do what it takes to transform your life?​

• Meditating

I didn’t know what meditation was. I thought it was stupid. Meditation is the KEY to coping with painful emotions and intrusive, thoughts and compulsive thinking.​

• Educating Yourself

You need to face your fears. Learn about addiction. Learn about yourself. Understand who you are. Understand why you became addicted to bad habits and behavior. Only then will you be able to forgive yourself and move forward in life.​

• Exercising

This is self-explanatory.​

• Picking up new, analog hobbies

This is of utter importance. You need to replace your bad habits with good habits and interests. You need to use your time doing healthy activities.​

Here is a useful list: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/hobbies-for-men/​

What helped me personally: work out, work on my recovery (reading books, being on the NoFap forums, doing model kit building, Jigsaw puzzles, meditation).​

• Getting Rid of Toxic Relationships

Distance yourself from toxic relationships.​

• Being at home alone as little as possible

Self-explanatory.​

• Using an accountability app (Ever Accountable)

This is the ultimate tool to stay away from porn. I don’t want my IRL accountability partners to know what kind of fucked up stuff I was watching.​

• Terminating Internet Plan

Buy a dumbphone that doesn’t have the Internet on it ($20). Terminate your Internet at home. It will force you to access the Internet at a library, coffee shop or other public place. That will ensure you don’t do anything stupid.​

• Using filters, forced safe search and DNS filters

I recommend using those in order to shield yourself from unwanted triggers. They won’t prevent you from accessing porn if you really want to find it.​

• Using time and app restriction apps

Use ColdTurkey, Offtime or any other time management apps and software on all your devices. Ensure that you can’t access the Internet after 10PM or whenever you know you will be alone and able to PMO.​

STAGE 2: IDENTIFYING THE MENTAL PAIN

The farthest you are into your reboot, the more apparent and obvious your underlying psychological issues become.

Once you see start to see what your issues are, you will feel more and more depressed and fucked up. Your mind will scream that you’re just completely fucked, that there is no no hope, there is no way you will be able to get out of your mental prison and change your self...

Brace Yourself​

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... for those thoughts are nothing else your Ego desperately trying to survive, because the ongoing change feels like imminent death to it. It knows a fundamental transformation of your Self is under way, and it’s going to play all the tricks it can to keep your life as it’s always been. It seeks security, and change is the utmost threat to that security.

If you want to accelerate this process, I encourage you to seek help from a mental health professional. I personally am helped by a licensed psychologist.

A therapist won’t fix your problems, but they will assist you in your own Quest. A therapist is a tool.

STAGE 3: FACING THE FEARS, SEARCHING THE ROOT CAUSES OF THE MENTAL PAIN, ACCEPTING WHAT IS AND FORGIVING YOURSELF.

Once you have identified your problems, you will have to take a deep dive inside of your self to understand where they come from. This is a phase of intense self-discovery, acceptance and forgiveness.

Only once you know, understand and accept your whole self will you be able to forgive your self.

Once you forgive yourself, you will be free from anxiety, guilt, shame, resentment, fear and whatever other unpleasant emotions you might have felt parts of or your entire life.

The OCD will gradually seize, intrusive thoughts and sexual fantasies will tarnish. Your optimism is going to go up, your confidence is going to go up, your happiness is going to go up.

The urges to cope from painful emotions through unhealthy habits and addictions such as PMO and weed will in turn progressively vanish, because (1) you will have dealt with the most painful ones at that stage, and (2) you will have learned to feel and listen to painful or unpleasant thoughts and emotions, and cope through healthy coping mechanisms.

One thing I had a very hard time understanding is accepting, as some members know, is that our thoughts do not define who we are. We are NOT our thoughts. If you do not understand this, you have to dig into it. It will help you with your OCD and shame issues.

STAGE 4: LIVE AND PERCEIVE LIFE THROUGH A NEW MINDSET AND BELIEF SYSTEM

Once you have dealt with Stage 3, you will have reached a high state of consciousness about yourself and Life in general. I believe I now just reached Stage 4. I’m the prisoner who has realized he was living in a mental prison, searched the key, found the key, opened the prison door, exited his cell and now stands outside, under a sunny blue sky, looking back at the grim dark building he had locked himself in for his whole life.

What I need to do now is explore the World, experience Life through my new, conscious mindset and acquired freedom, deeply grounded in Reality. I can now live an authentic and free life.

I was heartbroken. I never recovered from a very painful breakup. I feel finally ready to look for a long-term partner and build a healthy relationship! I hadn't felt this way in years. My whole life, I felt like I was unlovable and didn’t deserve happiness.

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~ FURTHER THOUGHTS AND INSIGHTS FOR A HAPPY LIFE ~

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After my cabin retreat, I have identified other things that are extremely toxic for my mental health and wellbeing. It is probably bad for you too.

DIGITAL MEDIA AND TEXTING APPS ARE POISONOUS FOR THE HUMAN MIND​

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Social media websites and apps are POISON. They are designed to hijack our reward system and keep you hooked with features such as endless scrolling feeds, "Like" buttons and notifications. They use the same psychological mechanisms than casino slot machines to keep you using them while you get nothing good from them.

Advice: Delete your social media accounts. STAY AWAY FROM SOCIAL MEDIA.

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Texting apps (Messenger, Whatsapp, Viber) are POISON. They will keep you stuck in a permanent state of distraction and fill your mental space with unnecessary chatter. Just like social media, they BOMBARD you constantly with notifications. You develop a compulsion to check your phone every five minutes and feel like you have to be available 24/7. It increases stress, anxiety.

Advice: Limit texting and communicating via texting apps to once or twice a day (noon and evening). It is a huge waste of time and takes an absolutely unreasonable mental space. If you need to communicate with someone, give them a call!

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News websites have become POISON. They have become completely entertainment based and function on similar principle as social media. Their design plays on your reward system to keep us hooked. They have become completely politicized and using click-bait titles and content has become the norm. They will feed your anger, fears and prejudices.

Advice: If you are a news junky like I was, STAY AWAY, or use with restraint.

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The Nofap Community undeniably helped me save my life. There are interesting forum threads here and there. I had tremendously insightful discussions with many members who helped me IMMENSELY.

But I realize I reached a point where I get nothing good from the forums anymore. I mainly browse the forums aimlessly.

I reached a point where I want to spend my time either socializing or doing other things than browsing NoFap compulsively. In fact, I would rather do nothing at all, than browse the forums like a zombie. By the way, have you noticed that this site is built just like the other social media apps? It has a like feature, notifications and scores. These are all designed to hijack our reward system, and I wish they were not.

Lesson: When the cons start to outweigh the cons, reduce your NoFap forums usage. Otherwise, it will keep you obsessing about porn. You have to turn the page at some point.

I think from this post on, I will only check in once or twice a week to provide some support for those who require it from me personally, or to seek other people’s opinion on very specific issues that come my way.

SMARTPHONES AND TABLETS ARE POISONOUS FOR THE HUMAN MIND​

During my cabin retreat, I realized that whatever analog activity I was engaged in (cooking, reading, walking, listening to podcasts, taking care of my body, doing nothing), I always felt present in space and time. I was always aware of my environment and surroundings. I was feeling "here, now".

On the other hand, I realized that as soon as I would start using my smarphone, it would be as if my soul left Reality, as if my soul was being sucked in by my phone screen. I would momentarily lose all sense of time and space and leave reality. Occasionally, I would come back to my senses, look around me and think “What the fuck! This shit is crazy!”. I had momentarily forgot where I was and how long I had been “away".

I guess I had to be away in a forest without any kind of external stimuli to realize how insane this phenomenon is.

I have no idea what is going to happen to those kids who grew up with their heads in tablet and phone screens from a very young age. I realize how insane it is for me at 31 years old. I can't even imagine what it does to kids. They must not even really live in the real world most of their awakened time. And I'm not even talking about them being exposed to porn at an ever increasingly young age.

Honestly, after my retreat, I don't feel like compulsively checking my phone every 5 minutes. Just the mere thought of doing it sickens me. I would rather spend 5 minutes doing nothing and just feeling alive than having my life sucked out of me by a screen.

Advice: For your own wellbeing, try to critically reduce your smartphone and tablet use. Obviously you cannot do without them in today’s world, but try to see them and use them as tool. DON’T LET THEM RULE YOUR LIFE.

ANALOG ACTIVITIES AND REAL INTERACTIONS ARE THE REAL THING​

The digital world is a fake world. It provides nothing else than destructive dopamine. After my trip, I realize that I would rather read a book than read anything on a screen. I would rather write in a real hardcopy journal than on this forum. I just do it because after having taken from other Nofap members, it’s now my turn to give back.

Advice: Stay away from the fake digital world wide web. Privilege analog activities in the real world: don't text people - call them - or better, meet them, don't type a story - handwrite it, don't read a screen - read a book, don't play a dumb game - play a board game, solve a puzzle, pick up an analog hobby, whatever it is.

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~ USEFUL RESOURCES I’VE USED ~

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yourbrainonporn.com
Your Brain on Porn by Gary Wilson
I Want to Change my Life – How to Overcome Anxiety, Depression and Addiction by Steven Melenis
Not Nice by Dr. Aziz
The Solution to Social Anxiety by Dr. Aziz
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies by Michael J Badder
The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford
Meeting the Shadow by Connie Zweig
Headspace (app)
Medium.com
Psychology Today
Quora
NoFap Forums
The Art of Manliness website (positive masculinity)
Universal Man’s YT channel focusing on PMO addiction and positive masculinity
Mark Freeman’s YT channel focusing on OCD

~ THANK YOU ~​

To all the guys who have taught me how to overcome this ordeal and helped me challenge my warped reality and belief system. There are too many of you and I don’t want to list people by fear of leaving some of you out!

I’m not leaving​

I’m probably going to distance myself a little bit as my recovery goes on. If you want to read more about my struggle and circumstances, I invite you to check my Journal and forum threads.

Optimum Fortitude, OVER.​

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Thanks much Metis.

I'm glad to bring my own perspective to the recovery process, especially for guys like me who don't just have a PIED problem but suffer from things like chronic anxiety, huge toxic shame (in particular sexual shame) and overthinking/OCD problems.

There are a lot of areas I didn't talk about in details such as:
- penile health and how I regained my penile sensitivity (lost after years of death grip masturbation);
- how my view and relationship with sex and women changed;
- my past relationships;
- my current sex life;
- nofap super powers (there are none).

I did not focus on those topics because (ironically) as you noted, I think what truly matters is what I wrote in the OP. All areas of life will improve if people do what it takes.

If people have questions I'm happy to give my 2 cents though.