My journey of self-improvement

Greetings to all of you warriors out there!

My (nick)name is Coolbreeze and I joined this community a few years ago. I have been addicted to porn since early teenage years, although I have successfully done the NoFap 90days and I am here to present to you my over all self-improvement that obviously includes expirementing with NoFap.

Two years ago I started feeling less energetic and I slowly went into a deep and long depression that would last more than an entire year (and I am 23 right now). I have learnt many things and am still learning. I want to write about this to create some more self-awareness and shed light on the important aspects of improvements in lifestyle. Essentially, focussing on what is most effective and what is not too. Of course I also want to share this because I know it might help you out.

At this moment I am on the rise to becoming a true fearless and happy viking. I say viking because my gym gains are getting really visible and I have been growing a big beard with a viking haircut. I feel generally happy, fearless and confident.

-Meditation
-> I started meditation about 3 months ago. I started with 5 minutes per day and I liked it so much I gradually upgraded it to 20 minutes today. The first minutes of a meditation session I feel my eyes moving all over the place as if this is a stress / overload response from thinking of too many things and simply not knowing how to deal with the quiet around be. After a few minutes I settle in and my mind gets more quiet. This is where is gets really beneficial because it becomes easier not to think of anything. I just sit there and enjoy my natural breathing rhythm. Sometimes thoughts come into my head and after long sessions they are mostly positive or negative thoughts are transformed into realistic thoughts. I generally feel that sometimes when the thoughts come, I can easily decide to ignore them, but if I do engage with them; they are a lot slower. It feels a lot more calm and my mind can more easily deal with whatever comes up in my head.

-Healthy diet
-> I started drinking a lot of water, and aroudn 2 to 3 coffee per day. Sometimes I replace the coffee with Matcha tea (more concentrated version of the healthiest tea out there, green tea). This really benefits me because I really feel like I can pee out all of the stress sometimes. It sounds weird but its true for me. Anyone experiences this?
I also drink a smoothie with great variety every morning and take 2 pills (supplement) for omega 3 fish oil because we rarely eat fish.

Sleeping:
-> Sleeping has always been no problem for me. However, since I started meditation I had many times that I woke up randomly in the night and I was 200% ready for the next day. I felt energetic and like I didnt need more sleep. Another interesting thing is that I can almost feel and re think what I was dreaming about and this wasnt possible before. I can much better recall dreams in general


Workout
-> Workout around 5 times a week. Heavy lifting. benefits are great.

NoFap
-> NoFap for extended periods of time is still challenging but I feel like meditation is helping a lot. It is proven that meditation helps beat addictions so this would make sense. I will hang a paper in my room and aim to go for 2 weeks now. I dont know what I will do after the 2 weeks but for now this seems a challenging enough goal for me.

I will continue to post here with updates and all.

Cheers!

 

Hello @SirWanksalot, thank you for your reply to the post. In this post I will give an update on the situation and also provide some more details on the specific subjects you mentioned in your second reply.

All in all, things have been pretty great for me. I have had bouts of true happiness and some moments of minor/moderate anxiety. I believe that depression is not really the case but the anxiety is there in specific moments.

For myself, and for all of you, it is of course interesting to know what my lifestyle looks like and how which factors influence in what way on my general mindset and happiness.
The things I mentioned that I am doing on a daily base, like meditation, healthy eating, supplements, workout are still going strong.

Let me start with the positive aspects:
I hit the gym still like 5 days a week and every session is a blast and thus I am making real progress (honestly I am impressed by the gains). It is a fact that this motivates me and gives me energy. The gym is also a place where I can practice my social skills because I know many people , as I am there 5 times a week

Another positive aspect is that the heathy diet and supplementing is still going strong. I do occasionaly snack some unhealthy things but I really limited them to a few per week.

Now, the things that I believe need improvement.

The moments of true happiness are found when I am really relaxed and in the so called relaxation response. This is basically when I feel calm and relaxed in my head/mind and body. These moments are usually very much present when I meditate around 40 minutes per day. (20 in morning and 20 in afternoon). However, as I started feeling better I noticed that I started slacking more. I started spending my wake up moments on the phone, checking instagram feed or even play videogames on the phone. It felt like an OK thing to do because I was feeling happy and totally confident. However, it is really true that slacking off results in new episodes of anxiety and just simply more stress sensitivity. I really need to and want to focus more on sticking to these 40 minutes per day because they are worth A LOT!! And by a lot I mean like I would pay 1000 euros to always have these benefits that I experience from meditation. If youre interesting, the form of meditation I am doing is TM. Transcendental meditation.

Now we are going on to the NoFap part. I will immediatly say it and I have not been very disciplined with sticking to NoFap periods of around 2 weeks at least. It was constantly around 4 days and I especially notice that watching a lot of porn, like 3 times a day makes me extremely anxious. It makes me feel guilty and somehow I really avoid eyecontact on days when I watch porn. It is like it takes the confidence I get from my ballsack away. Yes indeed, I believe that a lot of our confidence comes from our ballsack. Sorry for the language, just being straight to the point here

So, from now on; I have made a list in my room to cross days and I will focus on meditation and NoFap the coming weeks. Workouts and diet are going really well!

This thursday I have a job interview which can potentially provide me with a job and later an internship to is also related to education. When it comes to social, I meet with friends, socialize in the gym and have great time with family. I even approached some women and gave them compliments without being creepy or demanding their number. All in all, I say this is a nice challenge to continue and lets see how it goes the coming weeks!

Coolbreeze

 

Just wanted to make a post that I have figured that on thing is doing great for me when it comes to getting energy and staying out of depression.

Walking they say that it is really good for 30 minutes per day so I tried this for extended periods of time. I wasn't feeling it as much as I wanted to.

BUT

These days I am walking on the threadmill in the gym and I put it on 10% walking up and it actually feels amazing: I Recommend this to everyone for 30 minutes every day or as much as possible