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

What are your thoughts on Wetdreams guys? They lost their intensity to me for most of the days but they still feel like an obstacle that has to be overcome but I seem to have no control over them and tried anything I could to prevent them. Is there anyone in here that regulary got them and a certain point weren't affected by them anymore? They hit me pretty hard until about 2 months ago and since then they slowly started to loose their intensity but I can still feel that they drain me a lot and I often tend to feel a lot better after 10-20 days of no Wetdream. At this point I don't know if my psychological reaction to WDs is the problem or if the direct effects on the body and brain, while being in PAWS, cause the reinforced symptoms...

 

Anyone had any luck with anhedonia?

 

I remember when I was 12, me and my friends would talk about a "fall of excitement" after soccer trips. We socialized for basically 16 hours per day for 3 days and had lots of fun. But afterwards, we had low moods and didn't want to do anything. PAWS from PMO is the same fucking thing.

 

Do you feel worse when you spend too much time mindlessly browsing the internet?

 

Thought you were completely done with your reboot man...

 

Question: Could TMS affect my recovery? Could it somehow reactivate dormant brain pathways? I'm giving it a try for depression, but I'm afraid it could fuck up all the work I've already done.

 

Hi all, I am 33 years old. 15 years of everyday porn with often violent stuff. After 13 months free of pmo, 7 months of hardmode and a single pmo relapse at 4 months, I still feel super anxious 24 hours a day. The few moments when I feel completely on my own again, I feel like I can't handle my "normal self" anymore. It's as if I was too euphoric to finally find myself and unconsciously I sabotage myself and come back into the infernal loop of stress and anxiety ... I have tried everything; cold shower, sport, meditation, yoga, acupuncture, therapy, ... I am a little desperate and I hesitate to take antidepressant treatment. Anyone testing antidepressants? Would you advise me to wait some more?

 

I'm at 7 months hardmode with no relapses and still experiencing all of my PAWS symptoms. Sometimes at full force. According to other users on this board, it takes about 2 years for the brain to recover. The reason is that you have to stop reinforcing the addicted pathways in your brain. If you relapse you're basically starting over, although possibly not completely. If you binge to fantasy or porn though, you're back to square one. The 24x7 anxiety is due to hypofrontality. Basically, your brain loses it's ability to override anxiety and negative emotion with top-down regulation of thought and emotion. When you fantasize, you disconnect from reality and allow the emotional limbic system to override the forebrain and all of your executive functions. In PAWS this condition becomes semi-permanent. Relapsing only makes the dysfunction more entrenched. It takes so much time because the changes are adaptive and structural. Both the gray (neurons) and white (fibers) matter of the brain are effected.

Since you indicate that you used violent material, your reboot will take a long time. Sex was never meant to be about fantasy and delusion. It is a real-life experience where both people are fully immersed in the moment and everything that lead up to it. It is supposed to be playful and fun. When we fantasize to porn instead, we turn sex into a euphoric drug. We think about things and people that we don't even want in real life. We don't want intimacy and happiness and instead we crave euphoria and self indulgence. You have to re-sensitize your brain to the pleasures of healthy human contact. When you mentally reinforce fetishes, you can forget about getting any happiness from kissing, holding hands, or anything of the sort. In my experience the more hedonistic your fantasy life is, the more you obliterate your capacity to feel natural pleasures.

I think the most damaging thing about porn is when we start focusing on the emotional content within our fantasies rather than the physical pleasure itself. When you start to need the plot within your fantasy to go just a certain way, or for your fantasy partner feel a certain way, you create a hyper-emotional connection with sexual gratification. Now you are opening up unhealthy areas where masturbation is being used to both create and fulfill psychological wants and needs, instead of to simply satisfy normal hormonal urges. You become needy in regards to your sexual appetite. This moves the whole activity outside of the world of sex and pleasure and into the realm of social identity, social hierarchy, and self-worth. All of this has very long-lasting effects on the human psyche. In short, you are literally a different person than you were before porn fantasy. The fantasies have become "who" you are. Only time can undo that.

My best advise is for you to keep going and fully commit to removing ALL fantasy from your life. You want to be executing and not daydreaming. Vow to never ever again even entertain thoughts about sexual victimization of yourself or other people. It's totally useless. It only serves a selfish drug-like purpose, nothing else. It provokes anxiety, weakens your executive functions, and makes you an all-around creepy person. As long as you identify with your fetishes, they own you. They are your master. Fetishes are completely dysfunctional. Besides, in order to even live them out in real life you have to find someone with an equally fucked up brain as you. And then, you can only be equally as miserable as each other.

Try to become sexually pure again. Remember the days when just the scent of a woman or a beautiful smile aimed directly at you would make you feel amazing. Remember when libido was mostly about hormones and physical excitement, instead of being about emotional neediness, anxiety, and self-indulgence. Strive to become that person again. Back then you were naïve to the disgusting things that you think about now. You want to become naïve to your compulsions again, embracing all of life's experiences and not consumed with sex at all. You can be naturally attractive to women only when you are naturally responsive to women.

During the process you will feel anxiety, despair, confusion, depression, and many other symptoms. The only thing you can do is to experience them and accept them. No hiding from them and no crutches. As for antidepressants, they only make me feel 10x as bad. They don't cure anything, much less PAWS. At best, they can provide a new crutch for you if they have any positive effect at all. For me, they don't even do that. Remember that they can also remove any chance at recovering a natural libido while you are on them. Most ADs will exacerbate ED and you can also find yourself years down the road facing yet another withdrawal syndrome.

With PAWS in general, I've found that anything I take to try to alleviate the sadness, despair, and fatigue only exacerbates the fear and anxiety. And likewise, anything I take to try to alleviate the fear and anxiety only exacerbates the sadness, despair, and fatigue. YMMV. I haven't found any substance that helps my situation, but many that make it worse. That makes perfect sense because it's easy to further destabilize and already unstable brain. Homeostasis is, by definition, achieved from within. Time is the only way out.

As a side note, now that you are well past acute withdrawal and avoiding MO altogether, your body will probably be more receptive to any muscle relaxing, stretching, strengthening, and releasing techniques. Tension causes more tension so any gentle physical work you do to release muscular tension will help release emotional tension as well. Even just creating a new habit of sitting Indian-style frequently can help to open up the muscles of the hips and pelvis and teach the body to physically relax. For me, chronic MO caused an enormous amount of constant congestion and tension all throughout my pelvis and lower back. This tension is controlled by the CNS so it's very difficult to change. It is still there today even after many months of celibacy. Try gently working on physical tension as a way to address emotional tension from a different angle. The two are definitely connected, albeit in mysterious ways. It's sort of as if my pelvis and core area are still connected to and identified with my emotional stress.

Sorry for the long post. I'm still suffering too but all we can do is push forwards. If you read through this thread, time is still considered to be the most important factor in healing.

Take Care.

 

What a great post man! I feel you on everything you said, especially the chronic tension that one carries around. For me doing reverse kegels help to actively stretch the pelvic muscles. At first it felt like impossible to do them but after a few times I got the hang of it and actually noticed that I had tension in my pelvic floor the whole time. This is also connected to the fight or flight reaction as the pelvic muscle is also the fight or flight muscle. Emotions are felt in the body and then are translated by the mind. When we feel anxiety, depression and sadness they are often created in the field of the body and then picked up by the mind translated into negative thoughts. That’s why it’s so important to help yourself by calming down the body and trying to override the false emotional reaction by your body with something like stretching, breathworking (deep, slow, long inhales) and meditation until you got control back. If anyone wonders how to do reverse kegels then I would best describe it by pushing out our anus muscles and the muscles you push out when you want to release urine extra fast. The pelvic floor is separated into different muscles if I’m informed right. It’s a bit tricky to get the hang of it at the start but I feel like a always tensioned pelvic floor and front muscles above the penis are highly connected to premature ejaculation. If I have a boner at random times then it often feels like the energy is stuck down there and if I then practice a reverse kegel it feels like all the arrousal softly goes down, just like a balloon where you slowly let out the air. Contracting the front muscles and flexing them works exactly in the other direction and increases the arrousal and speeds up the process of having an orgasm. Sorry for this little excursion but I often wondered why I have premature ejaculation and why mind and body are so connected. But it makes perfectly sense. If you struggle with PE then you mostly have performance anxiety which leads up to you tensioning the pelvic area which makes you more prone to ejaculating. To sum it up: helping your body to relax is often helping a lot, at least for me.

 

I have the same issue with PE and 24x7 PC muscle clenching. I'd bet that most people who are PMO addicts with acquired PE have the same issue. Tension gets habitually stored in these muscle groups from long sessions of chronic squeezing and edging to porn and sexual fantasy. It also gets stored in the muscles that surround the anus, coccyx, and the lumbar vertebrae. These are all intimately involved in maintaining erections and ejaculating. I think that for some of us the brain rewires the whole nervous system to be at the edge of orgasm all of the time. Our thoughts are already hyper-excited, our fantasies are emotionally charged, our prostates are inflamed, and our pelvic and spinal muscles are already spasmed. We are also primed for extreme anxiety states. That's why I wonder if delayed ejaculators (I used to be one) are somehow less damaged or, if there are just different phenotypes that suffer and experience anxiety differently. PIED seems universal.

My hips are so tight that when I try to sit cross-legged my knees go up to my chest because my nervous system just won't let go and relax. After 7 months PMO free I don't clench the pelvic floor muscles anymore, and pee normal again, but the muscle tension at my 1st vertebrae is as constant as ever. I also have tension all throughout my spine and neck but it's the pelvic and lumbar areas that holds sexual tension and anxiety. If I simply put my awareness there I can still sense the tension. It also seems like hip opening stretches increase my anxiety a lot. It's like there is this emotional death grip down there that the nervous system is still afraid to let go of. The pelvic floor muscles keep you alive by holding all of your organs in place so your nervous system doesn't automatically relinquish voluntary control over it. Our genitals are among our most physically vulnerable areas and are heavily intertwined with our fear response.

But since people who aren't porn addicts can also experience anxiety, hip tightness, and pelvic floor dysfunction, that means that celibacy alone isn't likely to reverse those symptoms by itself. Who knows, maybe anxiety and fear of all sorts can cause those symptoms. Either way though, for those of us who have neuromuscular issues in the pelvis and spine due to excessive PMO, eliminating the PMO and also doing physical rehabilitation are probably necessary for symptoms to fully resolve. Stretching and reopening up the hips might even be necessary for the nervous system to fully let go of the nervous tension and fear. Many people believe that the mind-body relationship is bidirectional so it makes sense to gently work on hip flexibility during PAWS in an effort to make a more complete recovery in the end. For me, opening up the pelvis and not being constricted anymore seems important to every aspect of healing, both physical and emotional.

Since I'm far along now and not actively worsening my symptoms through PMO, I'm starting to experiment with something called Gravity Yoga. The idea is to engage in a small hand full of long-hold poses, that use gravity, and actually work to open up the hips. I haven't had success stretching in the past but apparently these stretches actually train the legs to lay flat when sitting Indian style. If that happens then obviously tension is being released and I'm all for that. We'll see how it goes. It seems like a wholesome activity that works in the opposite direction of porn so I'm game. Like anything though too much too fast is not good. The nervous system retaliates by stiffening up afterwards.

Thanks for your kind feedback DerJogge. It seems that our experiences are kind of similar.

 

Thank you very much for your answer. This is exactly the kind of message I needed to regain confidence. Deep down I know I have to give my body at least 2 years before considering any antidepressant treatment, but some days are so difficult with no real prospect of improvement ... If only there was something to speed up the process ... "Our patience will achieve more than our force"

 

As long as we accept the futility of relapse, I think recovery is inevitable for everyone. It can't stay like this forever. Your head is in the right place and that's the most important thing. Check in once and a while and let us know how your doing!

 

Acute withdrawal can last for several months. Your symptoms could easily just be transient withdrawal symptoms. Don't put yourself in the PAWS category just yet! Hold the course and stay positive.

 

Dude, this post helps so much. I'm nearing 7 months and your first paragraph literally describes my life for more than 10 years. No one could accurately diagnose me before I found NF. Porn addiction had been the bane of my existence for 25 years when the extreme symptoms started happening. I lost my career and everything else. There was no way to ignore what was happening but nobody knew why. I was put on every psychiatric drug they make and everything just made it worse. When you're as addicted as me, PAWS is in your life before you even quit PMO. It's there even if you don't know what it is.

Your post gives me hope. At 7 months, there is some difference but I still can't function in a meaningful way. I can't design or create. My mind just races with anxiety. Organizing and acting on complex plans is impossible. I just draw blanks when I used to be full of ideas.

What was life like between 8 and 20 months? Was it linear progress or just continuously crappy until it got better?

 

Maybe I will be absolutely ZERO help here, but I was lurking and I really feel like saying something. Just on the off chance it'll help someone.

Is it possible your fear of getting rid of PAWS is fueling the very anxiety you're trying to get rid of? Ok, I don't doubt PAWS is a real thing. In fact, once I overcome PMO, I'm very well aware that there will be new things I'll need to address in my life. That is expected. Again, I know I need to get to 30, 60, and 90 days myself. Then I can see if I'm in the same boat... But I feel bad for you guys. I really do!

Remember, everyone's healing is going to look different!!! Find the reason for why you chose PMO in the first place. Is there someone in your life you need to forgive? Is there someone in your life you need to apologize to? Is it a spiritual issue? Environmental? Dig deep to find those things I think the detective work may be lacking here... just an engineer's perspective.. good luck.

 

Hey, thanks for your post.

How do you explain anxiety in those terms if I can wake up in the middle of the night feeling very anxious and even panicky? I.e. there is no consciousness either to provoke or to supress the anxiety, right? I suppose the frontal cortex is not doing much work while you sleep, so how is a healthy brain going to be advantegous in that regard?

 

Activation of the anti reward pathway is what mainly causes anxiety during porn and substance withdrawal. Anti-reward conversely pertains to a between-systems neuroadaptation involving over-recruitment of key limbic structures like the central and basolateral amygdala nuclei, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, the lateral tegmental noradrenergic nuclei of the brain stem, the hippocampus and the habenula, responsible for massive outpouring of stressogenic neurochemicals like norepinephrine, dynorphin (which depletes dopamine) corticotropin releasing factor, vasopressin, hypocretin, and substance P. This gives rise to such negative affective states as anxiety and depression.

 

Even in your sleep, the limbic system is hyperactive. The problem has to do with changes in neurons, not consciousness. Sleep is even more complicated because your brain is supposed to be reorganizing and compiling memories. But in our mental state, new memories are difficult to form because they aren't reinforced with enthusiasm or reward. You remember the things that mean the most to you. Who knows? Maybe that's why we rehash old memories so much, because it's so hard to create new ones.

BTW, I share your symptom of anxiety and agitation during sleep. Not every night though, at least not now. I used to think I was dying. Even now though mornings are the worst time of day, by far. How do you get out of bed when you have enthusiasm for nothing? The fact that PAWS symptoms can flare when I'm asleep always reminds me that it is out of my conscious control. Every once and a while the intensity during sleep is extremely high and for no apparent reason. The negative emotions are just pouring in without a filter.

Keep in mind that my opinions are only opinions. They are a fusion of my personal experiences and what my research has lead me to believe and frequently they change. I'm not trying to establish hard science here. I'm just trying to make sense of it all like everyone else. I think it has taken a collective body of input, on this board and elsewhere, to arrive at the place though where we understand the problem to be structural in nature and not just a chemical imbalance. To me that is key. That means that the pathway in and out of PAWS is adaptive. Accepting that let's me move forward and to embrace to suckiness of it all.

 

So do you think (new) memories are important to symptoms or to undo the structural changes that PMO has caused to our brains?

 

Thanks for giving more insight onto the workings behind PAWS. I know it doesn’t change much recovery wise but it certainly helps me to understand and rationalise why I‘m feeling so bad at certain points. It’s funny you mentioned dynorphin. I read a book 1,5 years ago that successfully helped me to get rid of my alcohol addiction and never ever spend one thought on drinking alcohol again („This naked mind“ if anyone is interested in reading it). A memory of a passage popped up out of nowhere and I just want to cite it although it originally is about alcohol and not PMO.

„The lows are created when your brain releases a chemical called dynorphin, which counteracts the „pleasure“ from alcohol in an attempt to maintain homeostasis. Again, you know this phenomenon as tolerance. Dynorphin not only dampens the effect of alcohol, it also turns down the natural pleasure you get from everyday activities.“

This also explains the effects PMO and every other addiction onto a persons well being. The brain protects itself from to much dopamine by releasing dynorphin which then leads to the inability to get any pleasure or rewards out of other activities in ones life.

Beside anxiety and depression, dynorphin might also be the cause for anedonia. The brain either has little to no control over the release of this chemical or it actively releases it to prevent dopamine binding anywhere so the system can repair itself by getting the receptors back up. This is pure unscientific speculation from my side but I’m sure that the cause of PAWS is mostly chemical at this point and the individual can do very little to actually speed up the process of the brain resetting itself. What the individual can do, is to work on its mindset and put suffering and symptoms into the right perspective as something necessary and good. All those chemical processes of the brain are necessary to find back to homeostasis. The symptoms of PAWS is the expression of your brain healing from addiction.