MO without P

It really depends on the recovering person and because of this grey area people tend to not take any chances by going full hardmode or monk mode which i do recommend doing so.

This is because " neurons that fires together wires together". We have trained our brain using porn,masturbation & orgasm at the same time. Doing any of those will light up your neural or addicted pathways to crave more and end up doing the whole PMO package.

I'll tell you my experience and how bad it is for me. Doing anything which involved the use of electronic will slowly lead me to relapse. So if i play video games and binge on it (thats the usual case) it will slowly lead to relapse. If i listen to music which is perfectly normal and okay but bit by bit the dopamine levels will start to build up and i will start to crave other activities which are more fun and give me bigger dopamine hits. Imagine a water-cycle process or how rain is form. U know water source evaporates and condensed then it rains and become water again, u get it right? Just replace all those processes with music, youtube, social media, video games, anime, movies and pmo. I kid u not, any of those activities will eventually lead me to binging and then relapsed. Been there too many times to tell this story.
To make things worse, i recently found out that doing cardio workouts or high intensity stuff will cause bigger urges the following day. I play basketball and the next day my brain was driving me nuts with all those urges.

In my case i think it is safe to say pleasurable activities will fire up my pmo pathways. But it doesnt apply to everybody im just using my experience to tell u why u should not MO during your reboot.

 

So the literature, counter to the NoFap in general, says that masturbating too much is usually the problem rather than porn being the problem. If porn makes you masturbate too much, then don't watch porn. But watching porn and masturbating from time to time while in a relationship shouldn't have a negative effect. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pere.12267 . Ejaculation has sperm health benefits and immune system benefits, whether my masturbation or by coitus, but you get more health benefits from coitus https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14681990601149197 . Masturbation early in life doesn't negatively effect us https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01542359 . Masturbation is negatively correlated with all satisfaction measures, while coitus is positively associated with all satisfaction measures, other forms of sex are a wash https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1743609515325972 . All that said, excessive porn use is associated with compulsive computer use, changes in social function, lower reactivity to sexual stimulus (hence PIED), and uses the same circuits as other addictions. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/1874574 . I wish I could find studies saying that abstinence from porn gives you benefits but I haven't. It does make sense that taking a few months off IF YOU ARE ADDICTED will help. But otherwise if you're just using from time to time it should be okay. Since the same circuitry is used for other addictions, you should get dopamine downregulation from excessive porn use, and it should only take a few months for that to come back to normal based on similar findings from internet and gaming addiction. The more intense your use though, the longer you should stay away in order to fully recover.

 

My opinion is this: if you are just interested in healing the neurological damage of compulsive PMO, I believe simple masturbation can actually be beneficial, because you have removed the supernormal stimulus and you need to condition yourself to this new, less neurologically stimulating reality. Some of the younger dudes, for instance, may never have masturbated without pornographic aids.

However, if you are interested in uncovering the deep psychological trauma that has lead you to use these compulsive sexual behaviours to regulate your emotional life, then you must be prepared to abstain from both porn and masturbation, possibly for life. This is a spiritual task and you need balls to even comprehend the enormity of it.