35 and Older Accountability Group

Thanks will take a look

 

I know that feeling. You feel much lighter when your days are taken up with positive stuff rather than negative pursuits.

 

Working on day 8. I’m still in the middle of a hellish week, but the desire to “release the pressure” through PMO is subsiding considerably.

 

I'm past 24 hours and thought about PMO this morning but I'm not. Working on another good day and getting that counter to 2.

 

Putting the training wheels back on. Manual porn-only counter added. Looking to get to Belize.

 

yessss! There’s really no glamour in restarting, especially after a relapse following a kick-ass streak! Hopefully the “nofap muscle memory” will kick in quickly. I found I needed a week to convince myself not to wank! Hope you will visit Belize soon! And if you pace yourself, Bhutan is just around the corner, and I hear their yak butter tea is divine!

 

Day 9 starting for me and the last day of a brutal week at work... I’m too stressed out to keep the food down, let alone fap!

I can’t wait to sleep longer than 4 hours, actually relax my shoulders, and not check my work email for two days... but this won’t happen for the next 10 hours

 

If you’ve got kids @artifact , clean their bathroom, that will remove any urge . If not, maybe clean out recycling bins or something you’ve avoided because it’s kinda gross lol Stay strong buddy!

 

Thanks for the support Timber! Yes, you are absolutely right. It's tough finding the motivation. Stuck in limbo all day every day, streak gone... what's the point? Why not wait until life gets back to normal to start it up again? That's how its felt since the big streak ended. Back to the divide and conquer approach. And yes, I'm totally looking forward to Bhutan. Very pricey in real life terms for a visa (I think it's 100 bucks a day?) but somewhere I've always been interested in. I had yak butter tea in Tibet. Was extremely disgusting lol. But hey man, sorry to hear that your work situation is not letting up. Just hang in there. At least you don't have to deal with the commute anymore.

 

Oh. I was slightly off. Just 200-250 per day, add an extra 40 bucks if you're solo.
But, seems like it's worth it.
Or, you could see it for free through a certain NoFap challenge (shameless plug).

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/visiting-bhutan/index.html
https://www.lostwithpurpose.com/bhutan-tourist-fee/

 

Had a bit of a rough day yesterday but I got through it. Weather is nice today so I've got a little list of things outside to get done.

 

same boat. Tired of resetting the counter.

 

Just wanted to make an observation.

So far putting on the training wheels has been working. It has been 2 days and 4 hours since I've looked at porn. I have indeed M'd, but only to memories. Which is what I want to talk about.

Recently I made a post about the Yale University happiness course on Coursera (post #4042). I have been going through it, and one of the things they talk about that makes us unhappy is having shitty reference points and making harmful upward comparisons. For example, social media. You can look at the range of an average person's experiences, and see a bell curve. On the left are the really shitty times. In the middle, the bulk of a person's experiences, are the neutral times. And then going back low again on the far right are the best experiences. When you scroll through your Facebook feed for example, all you are seeing is that far right range for everyone else because that is what they are posting. They are not posting about neutral or shitty things (usually). And then you take this collection of far right experiences and compare them against your own real-life bell curve, which includes the left and center. So of course it makes you feel shitty whether you realize it or not. So what they suggest in the course is... give up or limit social media.

Switching from M'ing to porn to memories really drove this point home to me in relation to porn. It made me realize something I never really thought of. Of course, we all know that when we wank to porn, we are living in a fantasy world. We are wanking to people we not only will never have sex with in real life, but in realistic terms, will not even meet at all. We will never even make eye contact with them or shake their hands in real life. This we all know. But.. the thing we are not considering is, is the person who is fucking them. (I will use a straight example because I am straight- feel free to switch it around to whatever applies to you).

Of course I am lusting over a woman I know I'll never have in real life. But what I'm not considering is the guy who's fucking her. I'm not considering that whether I realize it or not, I am making a harmful upward comparison to the guy. Here I am, a guy wanking to a girl I know I won't ever meet in real life, who I also know is highly unlikely to fuck me even if I do. But... here is evidence of a guy who did. Not only did this guy get to fuck her in real life, but she fucked him while taking the extra step of doing it on camera. And then.. click to the next video. Another super attractive woman I'll never meet in real life. And another guy who was successful in real life doing what I will only fantasize about. And then the next clip. And it keeps going. And it becomes the same effect as only seeing people's right hand sides of the bell curve on Facebook.

Harmful reference points. Harmful social comparisons. Tons of girls who would never have me in real life. Tons of guys giving me evidence that they're doing what I can't.

Now for the flip side of the coin. M'ing to memories. I have to admit that for the first day I went on a bit of a no-porn M binge, mostly to memories. I relived some past positive experiences that I hadn't thought about in a long time. There were no other guys around to provide harmful reference points. All there were were girls who truly wanted me (as they had in real life in the past). Another thing they mention in the course is to relive happy memories. They say to set a timer for 8 minutes and just go back in time to something happy and relive it. This is kind of like that. It's not only memories, but also imagined happy outcomes based on reality. For example, there was a girl I went on a few dates with about 5 years ago. There was solid chemistry there but it never really took off. Of course I imagined having sex with her. I know this never really happened in real life. But the effect is way different than if I saw her in porn. In porn she would be unattainable. In real life, this could have been a true outcome. If I had played things differently on my end, if she had more free time, etc. The point is that having sex with her is something that I view as a realistic outcome. If we crossed paths again now, maybe it would work out. So that when I wank to that, the psychological effect is positive.

I am definitely not trying to promote M here in and of itself. But it's obvious to me now how much of a difference it makes from a psychological happiness perspective when compared to porn.

 

Also back to zero...

@discovery, you obviously didn’t consider tentacle porn!

I am totally jesting, but I do notice that ever since I started PMO’ing again, I can’t watch any videos, sexual intercourse of any kind, genitalia or even faces... I call this “Mickey mouse porn” and I am trying to figure out the psychology of it.

 

2 weeks clean. I feel better. I usually face temptation by now. Thank God i have no urges today. My longest streak was 60 days. I am only looking at staying clean just for today. Tomorrow is another day.