P.A.W.S. - what are they, cure, duration

I am and have been in the same boat for a long time. Ive tried it all when it comes to recovery and for a while i thought if i did all the right things that i could speed my recovery up. For 7 months straight i went hard, constantly exercising, eating right, meditating and all that. Eventually i burnt out and came to the point where i am now, which is pretty much given up trying to speed up my recovery. I have been working minimally but my heart just isnt in it anymore, nor do i feel i should be working as i often put myself in dangerous situations with my job. I truly feel that the best thing for me right now is to work as little as possible. I have been 'waiting' to recover for a long time and have been PMO free for almost 10 months now. 6 years of escalating symptoms before i started recovery and 3 and half years to my current point of recovery where symptoms still persist, though in a different way. There is no doubt that i am getting better when i look back 10 months, though recovery is slow and good days are few and far between, though good days for me are just so in that symptoms improve slightly but dont go away.

Thus i am at the point now where i am just waiting and like you, i find myself floating through the hours. Going to bed thinking '1 more day down'. I am at the point where i am burnt out by recovery. Hearing that your recovery has sped up at the 20 month mark gave me great joy to know that there is an end, but also broke my heart at another year in this state. It is clear that anhedonia contributes to this state that i am currently in. The feeling of being bored by almost everything and finding no joy in most activities.

My libido comes and goes and symptoms generally tend to get better when it returns. I generally know when my libido comes back when i start getting solid erections in the morning, though this usually only lasts a few days or a week. Most of my time i spend in a flatline now which seemingly never ends.

 

I have a sneaking suspicion that at some point your brain figured out how to deal with the stress/anxiety of life without the need for PMO/drugs. I know for a fact that my brain never learned how to deal with stress without the use of PMO. I even know exactly why i used. Play video games > Get angry > relieve tension via PMO. It was as simply as that for me.

Your recovery progression still has me pretty confused, but i am happy that you are at least seeing little to no symptoms at this point and i hope things continue to stay that way

 

I'm close to 90 days and the last week or so has been absolute hell. Wet dreams almost every night and waking up feeling like I haven't slept for days despite getting at least 6 hours of sleep. Fatigue has never been so extreme. I been taking naps during the day because I constantly feel so exhausted. No matter how much I sleep I just feel terrible. I would appreciate some reassurance that this is normal and nofap related because it feels like there's something seriously wrong with me

 

Last night I had a wet dream so vivid that it almost felt like I was relapsing against my will. Shit was scary

 

It's as simple as the fact as it just wasn't PMO in my case. Like I said Cigarettes was a major factor as well. Since I have stopped them I am feeling better than ever. Everything in my case added up together and created a toxic combination for chronic stress/dopamine downregulation. Experimenting over the last 10 or so years has led me to believe, now, that the withdrawals I experience all mould into each other. Coffee makes my eyelids twitch, cigarettes gives me anhedonia crazily and PMO warps my mind beyond measure and heightens the stress response even further, creating more symptoms and issues.

It was just as simple as quitting smoking, limiting caffeine to one coffee in the morning and not using porn. Sleeping better definitely helps now as I am out cold at night a full uninterrupted 8 hours, which only a few months back I wasn't able to achieve since God knows when.

I just had a lot of shit going on and PMO wasn't helping. I think when you have cases like me who go over two years and not much entirely has changed you need to do some soul searching... not saying that my 27 months away from it had no positive effects because it did, but I still was smoking a lot etc.

I think people have more than they let on going on in there personal lives, whether than be psychological issues, drugs & stress etc. Don's last couple of posts was absolutely spot on, I could of written word for word. About before about being in that thought loop of recovery, thinking about recovery all the time. It's not healthy and is exhausting! We sort of keep ourselves in a toxic mindset with all this that isn't healthy, how to overcome that as well is your own doing!

Like for everyone else reading this, its all good sharing accountability, getting things off your chest, identifying similarities between you all and realising you're not alone. But if you were just waiting for recovery to magically disappear one day out the blue like me for YEARS you're doing it wrong! If I could shake my self to oblivion to get out of my own psychological torment of Recovery and everything else years back, I would of gave my self shaking adult syndrome.

Edit: And your totally right about my recovery progression being confusing haha! I really believe this isn't as straight forward as you may all think I believe a lot of us will come out of this confused as fuck. I remember you not long ago saying you done a 180 on PAWS for example, obviously we are all here by common ground but some of us will have underlying issues on top or some with just porn. It is like waking up from a deep sleep internally coming out of this. No two of us are alike kind of thing!

 

Reading these posts just makes me laugh at how fucked up of a situation we all got ourselves into. It's really nuts isn't it.

I resonate with all of the last posts, a lot of people might have seen me being hard on others in the past posting non-helpful things, but recently this thread is doing what it's meant to do; bring us together and provide much needed support and inspiration

I honestly have no idea how fucked my brain is; I have this really intense thread pressure, aching, constantly that no one else seems to report.

I'm nearly 15 months in. Recently I have been sexting alot and talking to girls, it will be over a 48 hr period then Ill stop, and then a month later another girl will text etc. This definitely makes my brain ache alot, and causes stress and anxiety, if I see a naked picture or sext it can get really unpleaseant and painful near the front.

The good news is overall I do feel better, I still have social anxiety but I think this is due to the constant mini relapses. My whole experience and state of mind is completely different then 1 year ago, those days were completely dark. It's impossible to describe the dark days; it's not just one singular thing like depression or anxiety, nor is it accurate to just describe an accumulation of symptoms, its so much more.

In the beginning and middle you simply don't feel yourself.... 24/7, there's a constant feeling that your whole emotional, mental, physical, endocrine... any system the body has... is completely fucked, and you feel in no mans land, like your in water, and its coming over your face, and your feet cannot touch the ground.

You have this feeling of not feeling right 24/7 on top of a host of horrible symptoms; your whole perception is bleak. The only way I can describe it is if you take an ecstacy pill, the difference of being sober or ecstatically high; but inverse. Imagine if you took a pill that changed your state as much as ecstacy, but in a negative way, and then imagine this 24/7 for 9-12 months.

But now my perceptions and sense of normality is back; a meta-normalness. I guess this is what I'm describing in the beginning you're meta-fucked plus tons of negative symptoms, now I feel normal with negative symptoms. This is a massive difference.

Now I feel normal but have constant head aching that fluctuates throughout the day, and sleep isn't perfect. And I still have anxiety; I definitely wouldn't want to give a presentation yet, but there's a sense of hope and normality returning.

I need to go 90-180+ days completely dopamine induced sexuality free (no sexting or girls) to let the anxiety dissipate.

I relate to everyone saying about sick about thinking about being sick. The issue is though its self perpetuating; you wake up with symptoms and the symptoms remind you off the hell your going through.

When all symptoms disappear I guarantee we will all be able to laugh and talk about our experience without being trapped into associated negative thinking.

I just want to make a final note to those earlier on; recovery really is non linear, at the beginning I was aiming to completely eradicate sexual thoughts, I even spent 2 months in silent meditation retreat. I've been periods of upto 90-120 days of no sexual thoughts, but at 15 months, they still come and they can come intense, with all the same fetish content as earlier, and sometimes worse.

But there is a big difference now, the sex thoughts, the fetishes aren't a problem now. They are seen for what they are, in a clear way that again is hard to describe. The disconnect and disparity between fantasy and reality can be seen clearer and clearer, and the sex thoughts seen as such; completely imaginary constructs designed by my brain to do nothing more than give me a hit of dopamine; the content isn't real.

In the beginning when they came it would be scary as you had no idea if you would relapse or not, you feared the thoughts. At 15 months its extremely unlikely a sexual thought would cause me to relapse, so they are not as big an issue.

As you clearly see and understand the disparity between sexual thoughts and reality, and the understanding that all they do is translate int a hit of dopamine; you start to consciously turn away from them, and this gets easier and easier. This isn't a turning away due to fear, this is a turning away due to discontent with them, an understanding that you genuinely don't want need or like that hit of dopamine. This is true power and true recovery

Godspeed

 

Fatigue is the main symptom for me. In recent times it has been so bad that I have had doubts about whether it was PMO related or not, because too much normal activity (walking round the block, long phone calls, cleaning the house etc) can leave me panting for breath and having to lie down. But, guess what - whenever I have lapsed, the fatigue has got worse. Not always straight away, but after 24 hours or so, definately. The main "event" for me was a day last august, where I binged for 4 hours. Before this I was feeling bad, but since, I've been in a different world of exhaustion, with my underlying level of energy much lower - I'm still recovering from that one incident 9 months later.

I'm also napping in the afternoons to try and shore up my energy levels, and TBH, the only way I've been able to sleep for years is to take medication to get it. One of the reasons I want to quit PMO for good is to quit the medication. Once I'm off that, and able to sleep well, I'll consider myself "cured". I'm sure that there will be other issues as well, but exhaustion and sleep are the biggest deals for me, and the best markers for progress. I did manage it once, over a decade ago, but at the time it was more of a co-incidence (I inadvertently gave up PMO for several months due to domestic circumstances, and saw a huge improvement).

So IMHO this is Nofap related, and needs a long time to re-balance. Stick with it. There is so much to gain, and so little to loose by giving up PMO!

 

I still want to again just to throw a different experience in the mix; I don't relate to @Big Lebowski situation at all, and it just shows there are many casual factors to feeling like shit.

I genuinely have no other psychological issues, or life issue; I'm a multimillionaire, in great physical health, with good friends and family. Everything I am dealing with is 100% related to PAWS from sexual thoughts, sexting, porn, sex etc...

I just want to be clear as sometimes Big's post insinuate that we all must be going through other pyscholgoical issues. I am not.

 

Man, happy for you!

You're totally right in saying it isn't just anxiety and depression, I can't really put a word on it. Just a state not worth living it but worth fighting for to get out of! Accurately depicted with the Ecstacy pill analogy too. The only word that springs to mind right now, is complete and utter burnout syndrome, like a zombie, useless flesh of meat with no cognitive capabilities and physically hard to get by with the symptoms day by day.

I lost my appeal to Porn 5 years ago and was still fapping and feeling like shit, now it's like it doesn't come into my mind. Even logging on here and other forums, I guess you could say I was addicted to that too, living in despair from misery from PMO and it all. Reading, learning about recovery, other peoples stories, symptoms, painting a big perfect picture that you try too relate too but it is cracking the puzzle yourself! This is why all these people like DarkSektur, Saneagain, Beanburittio, Bken leave after a while I think cos they have figured it out.

 

Did you not see my thread on my original account where I had the exact same constant head pressure? That I had over for a year? Then on and off? Many people have this symptom. It is universal with people who have abused porn, chronically stressed etc!

https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/continuous-head-tension-senation.198395/

 

Let me be clear that I think PMO'ing on its own can cause issues. In my own journey it was exacerbated with other habits and stress. I cannot begin to describe how bad I was a few years back, I think it would of tipped other people over the edge.

 

Thanks just seen your original post. So you also had this head pressure? I feel like once this goes along with the anxiety (it correlates; whenever I get anxious the head pressure gets worse) Ill be mostly healed

 

Oh for sure, not just me but many others on here also.

Once the head pressure subsided I still had social anxiety and other symptoms. You may be different though and I hope that's the case.

I just had continuous head pressure, didn't matter if I was anxious or what. It was always there in varying levels.

 

Just checked your original post, I actually posted on it in Aug last year.

Yeah my head pressure is constant too, it just gets worse/more intense for me when I think of sex or get anxious

It was improving and then I was sexting and girls sending pics/vids etc and its way worse again. I need to cut everything out and finish the course to the end. I feel like if I can get another solid 6 months in I will be good.

The issue is the better I feel the more risk taking I get, just got to remember how bad the beginning was to not get reckless

 

It's like our brain has a step for

Those are all dopamine related activities you were doing and they putting stress on your nervous system as time goes by. PMO just so happened to decline your health the fastest. If I listen to music for 2 hours right now, it's like I watch 10mn of porn due to brain in reboot process.

 

Precisely the point I made. Why I developed a lot of serious symptoms and so on.

 

I have seen people reporting this besides you. Moreover, in my last post, I did say that I feel it when I watch some hot scene on tv/movie or on internet. So mine is limited to that. But there are people besides you who have reported having this on consistent basis. And obviously the sexting part is contributing to that which you need to stop, I know you know that already.

100% agreed with this. It has been discussed several times before as well. My life turned upside down after I started my reboot so it is 100% PAWS and porn related withdrawals. I was expecting a 90 day recovery and had no first idea about withdrawals or PAWS. Anyways, there are ppl who didn't believe this and relapsed. After that, they are back on this forum with worse symptoms than before.

I have discussed the case of an Indian guy who I am in touch with recovering in 650 days. He shared the same thing that he tried to speed up recovery with different things for 7-8 months but it didn't much for him. The only thing he says that helped is TIME. Time away from porn, any sexual stimulating stuff, masturbation, and orgasm. He did hard mode and has now recovered completely. So basically we all need time to heal. I think if we stay away from all kinds of sexual stimulation in that time, that may help speed up recovery.

 

If you suffering from paws, calm down there is hope, it will be over, and those symptoms will fade away.

I'm long term rebooter also, and all I can say around 2 year marks free from P many of my symptoms faded away already, or at least alot better. I had two relapse to M altogether in this run, one was planned to test, the other one was out of control relapse to M.

People just make that impossible to relapse to P, and be proactive. Know what are your triggers, recognize if you triggered, and stay safe. That does not mean you free from this poison from few months that your brain clean from it! One trigger and you will go in zombie mode...and then relapse come.

https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/2-years-free-from-p-bondage.276990/

 

I have a question.

I get morning wood around 4-5 days a week. How encouraged should I be by this fact?

My story is similar to you guys’s. The last 3-4 years have been filled with long streaks broken up by 3-4 day binge relapses. Ive kindled the living hell out of my addiction. When I say long streaks I mean a couple 200 dayers, a 150, a couple 90s, and a shit ton of others.

The first streak I had almost had me to the finish line. By day 205 my libido was just about returned, and i was having just as many good days as bad. I remember one of the days being the most joyous I’d ever had as an adult. I watched a movie and had no idea how emotionally affecting they could be. I was entranced. And that night, I was able to fall asleep on the couch while watching TV—an ability I’d lost as my addiction got worse.

Like I said, I get MW more often than I don’t. They don’t last that long, which I know means that I have a ways to go, but how much optimism should I garner from the consistent morning erections? I’m 28 years old and I need to free myself from this shit.

 

Day 52 of flatline/paws and the anxiety depression Anhedonia is relentless.

Those of you still suffer long term do you actually see slow progress? Can you see that your heading in the right direction?

Or do you just feel as bad as when you started?

I’m not completely sure I have a addiction here, not sure if Nofap is the answer.

Should I expect steady non linear improvement?