How to Make the Coronavirus Quarantine the Best Thing to Happen to You

I've seen many posts here about how the coronavirus pandemic has made it more difficult to prevent relapse. I see this as a fundamental misunderstanding in regard to what NoFap is really all about. We are not merely here to abstain from pornography and/or masturbation. If that is your only goal you are significantly selling yourself short, and the consequences that will have on your streak and more importantly your recovery, will become very obvious.

To begin my explanation, we must first discuss what the cause of addiction is. Many people have posted about this before so I won't go too much into detail about this, but essentially, addiction is an attempt to escape from emotional trauma. John Bradshaw goes into detail about how the following process works in his book, "Healing the Shame that Binds You."

1. The addict uses their substance to self-medicate, to distract themselves from the emotional trauma
2. The addict feels ashamed of themselves for having used the substance
3. The shame of use compounds with the original emotional trauma
4. They seek out the addictive substance to self-medicate
5. They feel more ashamed, compounding more with their original trauma
6. Over time their mental health begins to deteriorate further, further compounding the emotional trauma and shame

Remember, that this is only one process. There are also neurological changes that work bottom-up (from neurotransmitters to cognition). As well as innumerable other factors, working bottom-up and top-down, that contribute to the addictive cycle. However, it still stands that one of the primary things that an addict can do to not only improve abstinence, but to also improve quality of life (which will also improve abstinence), is to work on releasing and healing emotional trauma.

How does one actually do this? Well there are many things that a person can do:

1. Meditation
2. Expressive Journalling (Directed or Stream of Consciousness)
3. Psychotherapy(especially for severe mental health issues such as clinical depression, bipolar disorder, etc)
4. Life Coaching
5. Goal Achievement

What all of these have in common is the amount of time and effort required to actually get the most out of them. And finally we come to how you can make the most out of quarantine. The fact of the matter is that during quarantine you will have an incredible amount of free time. If you are not using this time to get to the root of your emotional trauma and to begin resolving it, you are wasting a monumental opportunity.

In a single week of daily journalling for even 30 minutes, you can make more progress on your emotional than you could in 90 days of NoFap alone. The reason for this is that while you can make it long streaks without solving emotional trauma, you are more than likely simply replacing your addiction with something else. Maybe it's another person, maybe it's video games, food, even the gym can become an addiction. The issue with making even healthy things an addiction is not that you have a relationship with these things, but that the way you use that thing is unhealthy.

For example, let's say you've finally been clean for 90 days and you credit your success with going to the gym. You workout 6 days a week, 2 hours each time. You push yourself into the ground. You become obsessive, constantly researching diet and exercise, becoming the best athlete you can be. On the surface this looks like you've found something you can be passionate about and your abstinence is evidence that you've left your addiction behind you. Don't mistake passion for obsession. They look extremely similar, but are dissimilar in a very key way.

Obsession results from negative motivation, or, the drive to escape some negative reality. You become obsessed with the object of your devotion because the more time you invest in that thing the more relief you get from the negative emotions. Think of the yo-yo dieter who constantly loses 10lb and then gains twice as much back, loses 20lb and then gains twice as much back. The reason for this is because they are running from the negative emotions they feel about being fat. Once they are no longer fat they no longer have that fire lit under their ass and they fall back on the previous habits.

Passion on the other hand, results from positive motivation, or the drive to achieve some positive reality. If you make your goal to be healthy rather than simply to lose weight, no matter how far you go you are still motivated to continue moving forward because being healthy is a lifestyle, not merely a one time goal you get to and forget about out. And, because being healthy is, you guessed it, healthy, you don't run the risk of developing eating disorders or pushing yourself to self-damaging extremes. Self-harm is motivated by the negative. You cannot self-harm if you are drawn toward the positive.

Now you may be wondering, how does that apply to the example of going to the gym. Isn't that a healthy lifestyle? Well the thing is that negative motivation can push people to achieve extraordinary things. It absolutely can. The issue is that it usually happens at the expense of everything else. Your family, friends, your community, the environment, and even your own mental health. Having an obsessive relationship with the gym is not healthy because you begin to exclude all other things. Again, it is the only thing relieving you from feeling those negative emotions. All else becomes meaningless to you because it cannot relieve your pain. Unfortunately, because you aren't engaging with the original addictive substance anymore, you trick yourself into thinking you've made progress.

NoFap is not an end in and of itself, it is the means by which we heal ourselves. The streak is not the goal. Emotional well-being is the goal. The streak is just a potential way to measure our journal to emotional well-being. This is why many fapstronauts have found measuring their total usage month to month as a better form of progress tracking. A month with 5 relapses is better than a month with 10 relapses, and would suggest an improvement in emotional well-being. This may be the case, but again, without taking the time to release negative motivation you are limiting the extent to which you can even be emotionally well.

To release this negative motivation and free up mental capital to invest in positive motivation, you must heal your emotional trauma. You must take the time quarantine has blessed you with, and work on yourself and your mental health. It doesn't have to be everything at once, but here is a sample program you could begin doing, each number represents a day:

1. Meditate 10 minutes
2. Journal at least 10 minutes after your meditation
3. Try meditating for a bit longer, or reviewing your journals and see if anything stands out that you should work on
4. Do 3 sets of pushups, and 3 sets of bodyweight squats

Do this over the course of a 2 week quarantine and you will be amazed by the amount of progress you will make in regard to understanding yourself, and thus, the root cause of your addictive behaviour. Do this first thing and then you can play video games the rest of the day if you want. The key is that you're doing some work on yourself during this time.

I cannot encourage this enough. Really. If you are the type of person who can't seem to make it much passed a few days, and you haven't tried doing this stuff, what the fuck are you doing? Like dude, seriously? You think you'll make it passed a few days and you haven't tried meditating? You haven't journalled? What the fuck are you doing. You're a fake. You're faking yourself, you're faking everyone else, and you'll never fucking succeed. Does that sound harsh? Good. It should sound harsh. Stop wasting your potential. You're better than this. If abstaining is too difficult for you for where you currently are, then just start taking action in other ways. There is no shame in that. You are where you are. Make improvement any way you can and the rest will come. You are more than capable of succeeding. You are more than capable of leaving this addiction, and the emotional trauma it is borne of, behind. Use the time you have been given to start making positive change.