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

The way my withdrawals work is that they interrupt my sleep. It's not a self-induced thing. Just a peculiarity of my personal experience. At some points my brain just doesn't allow me to sleep. And then, all of the sudden, I'll start falling asleep with the computer in my lap, as if I were the best sleeper in the world.

Yeah I've learned, as time has gone on, that when I'm at my worst I think I'll be like that forever, but as you said, when we are in the midst of that pain, it's very difficult not to. I'm cautious of optimism because I don't want to feel let down by it anymore. I'm just going to assume the worst so that I don't have to endure grieving processes similar to the one I'm going through right now. I'm grieving because I've been forced to acknowledge that I'm a 2+ year guy. I may have written down that I was aware of my 2 year status, but I know there was a part of me that believed I would get better sooner than that. A large part. The optimistic part.

And then, recently, that part died, and now I'm all sad and angry because it's gone. I no longer can use that hope as an anchor. I've lost my life raft, I guess.

I think we tend to swallow real hard metaphorical pills in chunks. When I first started this recovery thing, I assumed it would only take 90 days, because that was a surmountable goal and one that my psyche could wrap its lips around. And then it became 6 months, because hey, I was bad off, but not like some of these sad sacks on nofap.com. Then it became a year, because I was definitely pretty fucked up, but not like Don Quixote or Darksektur, who must have these hyper-prone to addiction, peculiar brains. And so on and so forth. You know? It would be so hard to go into this thinking that I would have to endure 2 full years of hell. I wouldn't doubt that a lot of people thought they weren't as bad as the folks they were reading about, even if they wrote that they believed themselves to be a severe case. Perhaps I'm wrong on that, but hey, I'm an idiot.

So yeah, I'm just grieving I think. And that, plus the weather, and my fucked up sleep, have created a storm that feels as if it's never going to end. But I appreciate your insight. It's nice to get an outsider's perspective. Especially one who is in a similar predicament. I look forward to seeing where we all end up, since a lot of us are kind of like the 2nd wave of PAWs victims. Hopefully we'll all look back and wonder how we ever could feel that damn awful.

You're right man. In a week I'll be out doing shit and will have forgotten all about the pain of these past 2 weeks. Sometimes I just gotta spit the poison out though, you know? I gotta bitch a little, until things right themselves and I can resume being a human being. I'm sure a lot of us are like that: we feel as if we've entered the 7th layer of hell and think the world is coming to an end, and then a strand of good days comes around and, all of the sudden, we're out in the world talking, joking, listening to music, and having the fucking times of our lives. It's such a wicked dichotomy, isn't it? Jekyll and Hyde.

Good luck to everyone.

 

Guys do any of you sometimes edge/masturbate in your sleep? Happened to my 3-4 times and i dont know if its a dream about masturbating and my brain just make it feel extremely real or if i actually sleep edge? Happened last night and today i feel like my brain is fried, could of course just be a bad flatline day.

 

Hi guys, SleepIsLost here,


I See there is still a lot of drama going on here. I understand both sides.


I have been through a lot of rollercoasters in my life. I still think porn addiction is the main culprit. Everything started from there. The addiction to high dose benzo's (over 50mg etizolam) 30 grams of phenibut, 10 grams of pregabalin, 300 mg baclofen. I used these substances to deal with the SEVERE panic and DEEP depression right after I stopped watching porn. This stuff is definitely connected. I have an extremely addictive personality. I don't know how to handle negative emotions, because I had a pretty damn hard life. I have been bullied as a kid and made fun of every day in my youth. That all changed when I turned in a 6'6 280 muscular beast lol. I almost lost my mother due to suicide and had to take the knife full of blood away from her. If I did not stop he she would have been dead by now. All the extremely high doses of drugs brought be to mental institutions and on suicide watch. Of course, porn is not the main culprit, but definitely played a major part in it, and caused a lot of symptoms. Each PAWS sufferer has his own subjective suffering. Mine was extreme but nowhere as bad as a high dose cold turkey benzo, phenibut of Lyrica withdrawal. These drugs gave me TRUE symptoms of hell like SEVERE EVIL psychosis, delirium, grand mal seizures etc., I almost died multiple times. multiple weeks of zero sleep, terror anxiety from hell, and your body telling you to kill yourself 24/7. I have contemplated suicide many times. For me, withdrawal from GABAergic drugs was HELL on earth guys. On top of that, I also suffer from bipolar disorder, and I am still under supervision. (Trust me I have tried all kind of medications, and know a shit ton about their pharmacodynamics and their effects)

Right now I am doing a lot better. I have good and bad days. I accept that this is going to be my life. I don't really have PAWS symptoms anymore, except insomnia, slight social anxiety, and anhedonia/apathy.


Off-topic:


I have been in contact with Gary Wilson: I will share it with you guys.


Hello Gary,

We have corresponded in the past about the study I participated in, in Groningen The Netherlands, that studied the D2LR in people with porn addiction. I am a true porn addict, I know Nofap since 2013 because of your TED talk, and I am ashamed to say that I am still struggling with it. I have a lot more control over it, but man, the acute and post-acute withdrawals I have been through, they brought me on my knees. The anxiety, deep dark depression, insomnia, anhedonia, psychomotor retardation, brain fog, and 50 more mental and physical symptoms I had to endure, was hell on earth. That’s why I hate D4v\/dd L33y and Nic0le Prausehorseface, and debunk them with your articles and my knowledge in the Youtube comment section and nofap like internet fora. I use comments like this:

“D4viD L3y is a total fraud and I would call him an amateur when it comes to addiction. He is the one who uses pseudoscience. He has almost no knowledge of the mesocorticolimbic dopamine (DA) system. (He has no idea how the opioid and dopamine connection works) And has many connections with people in the adult film industry.


Ni1ol3 Praus3 focusses mainly on the female orgasm and female pleasure. She might know something about the mesocorticolimbic dopamine (DA) system, but she is not an expert on addictions. By using an EEG scan on people and showing them some vanilla porn pictures to disprove porn addiction is just laughable. She also has a lot of relations with people in the adult film industry and is a sex-positive feminist. It is her main job to defend porn and its industry.”


“Yeah I watched some of “doctor” L3ys content, it’s absolute garbage. He wrote an article on psychology today, where he stated “dopamine is not addictive, it’s opioids” He probably never studied the DRD1 medium spiny neurons in the ventral striatum and DeltaFosB, and the opioid peptides in the ventral tegmental area. Opioids make you feel euphoric, that’s a fact, but part of that euphoria is that opioid peptides, bind to GABAergic interneurons in the VTA, stop inhibiting dopamine from being kept into the dopaminergic VTA neurons, and project the dopamine to the nucleus accumbens, where dopamine DR1R on the neurons activate transcription factor DeltaFosB inside the neuron, which in time can create an addicted state in the brain. So YES, dopamine is ADDICTIVE mister Dav1d L3y. DO some better research. The poor guy even disabled comments on his article. And for the OP, he probably has personal connections with the guy or is a groupie.”



I wanted to say to you that the whole D2 porn addiction PET scan study was flawed and extremely badly organized. A lot of things went wrong during that day. There was no psychiatrist to question us about our addictions and they quickly had to call one who was actually off duty, there were more things not going so well for the investigation team that day, and Gilles Stormezand (a nice guy tho) came off as insecure and clumsy. I know this has nothing to with the study itself but still wanted to share it with you.


The questionnaire they gave me and (the other participants) were amateurishly made, and even a middle school student could come up with better questions that were relevant to porn addiction. No questions about withdrawal, the physical change caused by porn, etc. This is not to make them look bad and i have no real spiteful feelings, but to make clear what I fully thought about the study and how it was setup.



During the MRI scan, the lady in the control room asked me to focus on certain things with my thoughts, I had headphones on, which were in contact with the control room, and all the noise from the MRI made me not correctly hear anything AT ALL. So I could hear nothing that the lady said and correctly conduct the MRI scan.



The worst part of the study was, they actually could not find any participants for this study. I think I was the only one that enthusiast signed up for the study. It took them a long time to find participants. They even needed the media to make them find candidates. I think the real non-functional addicts stayed away from this study and some functional semi-addicted students signed up for it since you could get financial compensation in return. Here are some of the articles about the University using the biggest media outlets to find porn addicts: (Use Google translate to English to make it understandable)


Dutch state-funded media outlet:

https://nos.nl/artikel/2154852-universiteit-groningen-zoekt-pornoverslaafden.html


Biggest internet outlet and dutch newspaper

https://www.ad.nl/home/universiteit...-zoek-naar-pure-pornoverslaafden-br~a6950645/


Dutch biggest skeptical blog:

https://www.geenstijl.nl/5095922/trekken_en_komen/


A TV channel interviewing people on the street about porn addiction.



Here an article of a dutch semi-addicted functional porn addict doing an interview. You should really Google translate this. The guy has some problems with porn, that’s for sure. But nowhere in this article he speaks of having porn-induced brain changes that caused him symptoms like depression, anhedonia, insomnia, PIED, brain fog, and other symptoms, let alone severe acute or even severe debilitating post-acute withdrawal (PAWS) that many men, including myself, have endured. Here is the article:


https://www.psychologiemagazine.nl/artikel/pornoverslaafd-pieter-vertelt/


I think he was the main type of guy they used for the study. I think I was the only one who signed up for the study, that had the real addicted brain changed, BUT, I think I was already on a 90+ streak anyway (I did not thought of relapsing to make the study look more genuine for the pro porn addiction provers, maybe I should have)


Anyway, the study was simple and the armatures that conducted it, did it flawed. When the study comes out and claims porn addiction does not exist, because no anomalies in the D2 receptors were found compared with the controls. We have to have some fuel back to the naysayers. That’s why I’m sending you all this information.


What you said about diabetes type 2 could be true in porn addiction indeed. So maybe the D2 receptor showed normal receptor binding, maybe the VTA is the one where the problem lies. Shrunken dopamine-producing neurons. Tyrosine hydroxylase immunoreactivity could be changed in the VTA and changed in the NAc of porn addiction compared to controls. Shrunken VTA producing cells. Dopamine segregation, Dopamine turnover, homovanillic acid levels. Also, what you said they focus on 3 ROIs, they should focus more on other parts of the brain like the insula and the ACC. They should have used voxel-based morphometry. They tested just one dopamine receptor subtype, just like cannabis addicts don’t show changes in D2 and D3 binding, in porn addiction there could be other subtypes involved. Just like cannabis works through different mechanisms via partial agonism of the CB1 receptor, porn works very different than drugs of abuse, sure, they avtivate the same nerve cells, but porn is tottally different, so should be treated different when a study is going to be done of it.


Here the cannabis D2/3 binding study:

https://www.pnas.org/content/111/30/E3149

I hope I have given you some insight and fuel for when the study comes out, and the naysayers use it as their fuel.

Thank you for your work Gary.


Kind regards,


Peter Groen



"Hi Peter,


I hope to get to this before long, but in the meantime, this study helps to back your main argument:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4258993/

As a neuroscientist friend of ours says:

CRF also causes another damaging effect: destroys the sensitivity of DRD2, creating another causal pathway for anhedonia.

What occurs with the opioid system can be understood in terms of a tension between system opponent-process theory: too much forced "feeling good" opioid release ultimately leading to the opposite process, that is, boosting of "feeling bad" opioid signaling (kappa receptors, dynorphins, etc.). Nature is always like this, you can be sure even if you don't find the neurochemicals to look at: yin follows yang and vice versa, also applicable to the endo-opioid system in PMO addiction.


Kind regards,

Gary"

 

What did he say about diabetes? I'm type 1.

 

It was a typo. I just meant diabetes type 2, which is reversible by lifestyle changes. Just like changes made in the brain by addiction.

 

i am getting many urges to peek, and that is causing some of the symptoms of PAWS.
ay idea how to stop these urges to peek (not relapse)?

 

DerJogge, I remember you mentioned at one point having visual symptoms - have you seen any improvement? I’m struggling real hard with the visual disturbances and need some hope that this is not permanent.

 

Sunday is the National Exame to University Admission here and I definitely can't study. The brain frog and the void and absolute lack of motivation just make me feel like trash. I studied throughout the year. Hope I can handle it.

 

I still have them but they slowly improve. I’m not waking up everyday checking if it got better or not. I stopped worrying about them for most of the time as I had short phases of feeling really good and the visual disturbances instantly got better. It’s like there is a invisible wall between me and the world. Things being 2D and when I feel fine the world turns back to 3D. Also I had really intense visual snow. This noticeably got better. From intensity 100% to about 30-50%.

For explanation: those visual disturbances are caused by a constant fight or flight response and your gaba/glutamate-system being out of balance. When you’re in fight or flight your pupils dilate so you are able to see better by inviting more light into your eyes. In these modern times there are so much bright light sources like smartphones, Displays etc. That’s why you feel even more irritated when sitting in front of technical devices. Also texts with a black background and white font causes some afterimages of lines in my vision. All this has improved and is 100% stress/anxiety/fight or flight related (different words for the same thing).

It‘s not permanent - just very annoying! Beside bad sleep this is the symptoms I just want to be gone. I would be the happiest man alive if my vision just went back to normal.

 

The worst thing of any addiction is that you've been around these state of being for so long that you don't know how it's to feel normal. And the case of PMO, which we got hooked in the childish, it's even worse, because you aren't a child anymore!!

 

Yeah I have no idea what the real version of me is like.

 

2019 and 2020 was a year of studies and I realize that I lost my focus and concentration very easy. When I reading book it doesn't happen too much.
Could this super stimuli caused that? Before PMO, when I was a child like 10 - 12 years I've played A LOT of video games. What a shame for me, ofc!
What y'all think?

 

I think... U should Take omega 3 supplement + wim hof method together... Or Are u already taking it???

 

Well, I have to say that this period( PAWS) sucks, i don't find myself in this period yet, its just the "normal" flatline.
But I can remember of the days which I was completely immersed in the addiction. I just felt nothing!! Zombie like life. And now, at my 2 - 3 weeks flatline, I don't feel the happiest guy out there but I kinda enjoy because I know it's temporary and this help me a lot in self-learning. Sometimes it's okay to feel depressed, anxiety or whatever.

 

I can't go back to work yet when the symptoms were at their peak. Still lack mental and physical energy to do chores. BTW I'm 3 years in PAWS....

 

3 years in PAWS? How long did you PMO? No matter how severe it seems there could be other problems man

 

Bro no one said PAWS doesn't exist. We're just considering the possibility that there are underlying issues.

 

Bro just because you relapsed doesn't mean recovery will take 2 more years. You're not back to square 1. I just relapsed after a 116 day streak, and I know it sucks. But there was progress, I truly believe that.

 

Thank you for sharing this very informative update.

 

Thanks man, I’m glad to hear you’re seeing improvements with regard to your vision. It’s really a comfort to know intellectually that these things can get better with time, even if you can’t believe it in the moment.

I totally relate to your point about the invisible wall between you and the world. This is something I’ve read about people on benzo recovery forums dealing with, which I think is just more evidence that the effects of PMO are somehow quite similar to those of benzos. I read one thread where someone made this point that the barrier between themselves and the world seemed to be “in their vision” (hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it) and that as their vision improved their sense of connectedness to the world also improved. I guess all of our senses are more deeply intertwined than we think.