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

so after all my problem was psychosomatic, it wasn't just the brain and the mind, it was the mind AND the body
that was the missing key, it's always been that!
you'll see that when you start to tremor you will have whole body tremors/shaking, this is tension being broken down and sending a message to your nervous system to balance and regulate itself, better yet, this will strengthen your nervous system so will you be able to cope with stress a lot more

 

but for PIED man, I recommend you to do the shockwave treatment, it's really effective (Low intensity shockwave therapy for erectile dysfunction)

 

Hey lebowski, have you tried TRE? I'm sure it will help you!

 

Thanks for putting it like this. I know this is an old post but I really appreciate your words. I'm closing in on 180 days and my symptoms are still debilitating. I've been a porn addict for so long that I now know that I spent the last 10 years with PAWS symptoms while living in active porn addiction. It got severe in 2009 when I had to come of benzos for anxiety so I thought all my PAWS-like symptoms came from that. In reality, that just destabilized a brain with multiple unknown addictions. I don't think you can recover from benzo PAWS while also active in another serious addiction.

During that time though I saw every kind of doctor and psychiatrist and took every psych med under the sun to try to feel better but everything just makes it worse. My story is too long to tell but the point is that no one even once asked me about porn addiction. I never associated compulsive PMO as an addiction or as a possible cause of my mental suffering. I knew I couldn't stop but I thought it was just sex. Eventually, I couldn't even work anymore due to cognitive and emotion dysfunction. The loss of executive function has been the worst. Being drug free, I never would have discovered the real issue without Nofap.com. Now, I know that it is all due to ever increasing hypofrontality due to hyperstimulation with porn.

At 6 months hard mode, I've reached a point where I know that recovery means making permanent changes. Meditation has always felt futile to me but recently it has started to help for the first time. It's not enough for me to just focus on my breath or an object though. When you have crippling anxiety, tinnitus, anhedonia, despair, etc... silence only makes negative things feel louder. Deep transcendental style meditation just leaves me feeling more disconnected because I'm already hypofrontal and doesn't really fill the void with anything. But when I play positive affirmations in my ears during wakeful mindful meditation it overrides my internal dialog and lets me be quiet inside while I focus my attention on my external environment. It lets me replace my negative monolog with a relentlessly positive one. The goal is to become more present, not to go deeper, if that makes sense. Repetition is the key. It's the only way to program an adult brain.

For anyone suffering like this they should know that gratitude is the first positive emotion that returns, but it takes time. It should be the focus of the meditation. Gratitude is required to feel contentment, which is the opposite of obsession. In the beginning it's a decision. You hear it, think it, say it, but you don't feel it. But with enough repetition it eventually becomes an emotion because by thinking about it over and over you realize it's importance and that it's missing from your life. It literally means "I'm happy with what is, and what I have". It precedes all feelings of contentment, which precedes optimism and satisfaction. It doesn't matter to whom or to what I'm grateful, it's just an emotion that I can now feel for everything if I aim it broadly at the Universe or God generally. You have to cultivate this emotion.

Edging and binging to novel porn is the opposite. It trains the brain to always be dissatisfied with whatever you have in front of you. It's never good enough so you keep seeking out more and more. Just like an OCD patient might touch a door knob over and over until it "feels just right" to walk away, the porn addict neurotically seeks out the porn that "feels just right" to finish with. The difference is that as porn addicts, we are actively reprogramming our brains, through extreme repetition and MO reinforcement.

We don't realize that the obsessive repetition is reprogramming our entire personalities as well. The reason that it becomes so hard to sit and stare at a spot on the wall is because we are trained to never feel content enough to do that. The stillness feels so bad because our nervous systems want to be compulsively obsessing and moving quickly from thought to thought. I think nofap sites are a double-edged sword though. They provide necessary guidance and support (good) but also yet another way to obsess on our health (bad).

Up to this point, even though I've been hard mode nofap, every day has been a barrage of non-stop negative and repetitive emotional turmoil. If I do that for the next 6-18 months I know that I will still be sick because the negative emotions are all being heavily reinforced each day. Repetition is the language of the habitual mind. I firmly believe that true healing requires the same level of obsessive repetition, but in the opposite direction of edging to porn. Active daily reprogramming of the mind to seek gratitude, happiness, and all other positive emotions is the real rewiring that needs to be done. You have to think about happiness itself to wake up that part of the brain. You will never find happiness while focusing on anxiety.

Anyhow sorry, I didn't mean to make this so long. I really just wanted you to know that your post helped me and I appreciate what you had to say.

 

It sounds like you've had a very similar experience of PMO addiction to me. Have you heard of Marc Lewis? (see https://www.memoirsofanaddictedbrain.com/ ). I recently read his book "The Biology of Desire", which really hammers home the idea that addicts have trained themselves to get really good at getting their hit of choice, and that the best way to deal with addiction is to re-train yourself (involving a lot of repetition!) to live in a different way - ie a life without the substance or behaviour that was the focus of the addiction. It's probably the truest and most helpful approach I have come across.

Anyway, well done on the long hardmode streak!

 

Read my previous posts.

No porn ever.

Addicted to orgasm, several times a day as a teen and twenties. Im 38 and have averaged less than once a week in my thirties. Complete abstinence seems to be working.

 

Day 160

Im in a very stable place. A little flat but im super motivated and focused on work. Not really interested in chasing girls but going on a few dates.

No errections of libido really. No wet dreams.

Voice is very deep and raspy at points, feels great.

Mostly flat emotionally, but im good - content. I feel sort of magnetic to other people, work, people - both men and women seem to be drawn to me, interested in me. I feel my appearance is better, more of a glow hard to say.

Technically still in a flatline, as little sexual interest or function. But the depression, anxiety, extreme fatigue is gone. I can live with that, everything is a bonus right now.

 

Do you guys mostly get nightmares when you dream? That's all I've been getting these days, and I'm trying to determine whether or not they are addiction based or a sign of something more menacing. I'm also curious as to people's depressive symptoms. Do you guys find yourselves depressed more than you are not ? (I'm speaking to the people in the midst of PAWs) If so, how significant is the depression?

 

I'm definitely depressed, not something I'm prone to, but I might have been anyway. I don't know if this is PAWS or might have happened due to my current dire circumstances. However I'm not suffering nightmares, though my dreams are definitely more vivid.

 

Gary Wilson might be wrong about the whole D2 receptor downregulation/desensitization as well. So he could also be wrong about the "permanent" damage.

In 2017 I participated in a porn addiction study at University Medical Center Groningen in The Netherlands to investigate if porn addiction down-regulates D2 receptors in the nucleus accumbens by using radioactive raclopride (selective dopamine D2 antagonist) in a PET scan and an fMRI scan to scan the reward pathway VTA - NAcc - PFC.

Guess what, today I called the with the doctor to ask him the results, because I was losing patience, and wanted to know the results, which is: there was no D2 receptor down-regulation in any of the addicted participants, including me. They all had issues with low motivation, anhedonia, anxiety and severe PAWS, otherwise known as prolonged withdrawal. (including me). My brain showed normal D2 binding and normal blood flow to the prefrontal cortex. No sign of hypofrontility. The MRI also showed no sign of abnormalities in the nucleus accumbens of all participants.

We talked about other dopaminergic receptors that could be involved and maybe D3 has something to do with our problems.

The study is about to be published on pubmed, but it can take some time.

About myself: I have relapsed multiple times and no real bad withdrawal symptoms have come back. I still believe PAWS (withdrawal) from this addiction is real and it's a dopaminergic problem, but D2 receptors are not involved according to this study. My brain showed normal D2 density just as the controls. There are other systems involved, and me and the guy who performed the study hypothesize opioid and dopamine anomalies in the VTA (ventral tegmental area), but not with D2 receptors in the NAcc (nucleus accumbens)

I was kind of disappointed and also a bit sceptical, because I was hoping to see some changes in my brain. To prove that this porn addiction really is a thing and can be measured with scans. It's strange that people with other behavior addictions like gambling, do show this blunted D2 binding... This study can be used as fuel by the porn addiction naysayers. So I hope this study gets peer reviewed and more faculties perform more and advanced studies on the matter.

 

Thank you for this update @Sleepislost2 .

 

Wow, I didn't think anyone in the scientific / medical community was working on this. I didn't even think that they would take it seriously, to be honest. Congrats on being able to take part. I look forward to hearing more!

 

Yeah Universitair Medical Center in Groningen The Netherlands is the only faculty that studied it. Here is a translation from the dutch wikipedia on porn addiction:

 

We try to find the source of the problem because there are symptoms. It's not the other way around, i.e. we did not see some physiologic changes and wanted to find the side effects.

But the symptoms are very very diverse and its intensity is unlikely to be accurately measured or compared.

I think that the whole nervous system is a reflection of the real environment —this is not my own finding– and thus the PMO addiction, which must be seen as a whole, not separately, can fry your whole system because it's so hot, so desirable. As for P or M without O, I doubt it will cause so much change.

I mean, you are putting your nervous system in a new regime with PMO for extended periods.

 

It makes sense that D2 receptors are not involved in porn addiction. Mostly all of us here have erection problems (PIED).

Cocaine, opioid, speed etc. addicts don't have much problems with erections. These addictions have shown a decrease in D2 binding. So there are other receptor systems involved in porn addiction.

 

yes, namely diysfunction of autonomic nervous system
Pmo causes an overstimulation of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system which, down the road will put your body in a state of flight or flight and then even worse you will get into a frozen state where all the other systems of your body will shut down, the musculature, the endocrine system, the digestive system, so on and so forth
I'm getting spontaneous erections back after 5 years without them, after I've started to thaw my nervous system

 

Have you tried the ibogaine yet?

 

Dude I'm not going to completely shift my perception of this issue because one guy on a forum says he participated in a study. There is too much evidence of guys slowly healing their brains through the passage of time, and nothing else. I'm no neuro scientist, but I do believe that something in our reward system is malfunctioning, and that we need to rewire the faulty circuitry through denying our brains of what they want.

Maybe you aren't out trying to prove this whole paradigm wrong, but a part of me wants to reinforce the idea that no matter what receptor-y issue is being affected, people should still realize that the only way out of this is through, and that there are no shortcuts to beating this thing. Time, as they say, is of the essence.

 

In fact, I've noticed a pattern on this forum. There are guys who put theirs heads down, do the right things, abstain for however long it takes, and find success. And then there are guys who fail at maintaining their abstinence and retroactively decide that the status-quo isn't what it should be, and that all of the science is wrong. I believe that failure and the development of alternative theories are married at the hip.

Do the fucking work. It's the same kind of post as "I just relapsed but I'm not mad about it because I learned something" that I see on these forums all the time. People justify their mistakes--which is an understandable reaction. Sometimes, I believe that our brains will do anything to protect us from the severity of a mistake, and that whenever I've relapsed in the past, it (my brain) kind of hides all of the information from my consciousness so that I have a shot at restarting.

Maybe I've reacted too strongly, but something about this smells wrong.

 

I'm also a bit sceptical because behaviour addictions like gambling even downregulate dopamine receptors, and I find porn way more rewarding and destructive for my brain. So I could not believe it when he told me there was no change in D2 binding. This is the first study done on the receptor matter, hope more faculties follow up to peer review this study and do their own findings. Because this study would be used as fuel for the porn addiction deniers. And indeed I don't mean to say porn addiction does not exist and it does not cause any physiological changes, I found that out the hard way.