P.A.W.S., Stress, Reboot, Biology and Energy (this may save your reboot) - my experience

UPDATED 30.04.2021

If you feel that your reboot is too difficult for you and you suffer from PAWS long enough, seek help outside in form of professional therapy ! You may not be able to cope on your own and external help may be necessary ! Addiction is serious thing, don't miss your opportunity and don't waste your time on rebooting alone, without help. It's not shameful to ask for help, it is sign of emotional maturity !
After receiving external help, read my post to add some alternative knowledge to your reboot.

Hi to everyone!

"LT;DR - understand and incorporate necessary attitude, mind and lifestyle changes in your life and reboot, otherwise you may suffer unnecessary and greatly prolong your reboot. View on reboot from the energetic point of view."

I will introduce myself as the one who started NoFAP in 01.2017 and have experienced stress, PAWS and even thinking that NoFAP started to steal joy from my life that is of course addiction speaking, not my true self ! I still experience some PAWS but I want to write overall about PAWS to give hope and encourage to the brave warriors who struggle with PAWS. To the one that know that PAWS ain't no joke. I know how true and painful frustration can be.
This will be about biology, body, mind, beliefs but also about energy. Seminal creative energy that leads to creation of life and sex is powerful and sacred thing. Firstly - only basic and holistical understanding of this thing can lead to better outcome in reboot. There are NECESSARY things to understand while rebooting.
Harsh truth is that to transform addiction we have to go through pain and we have to
fully embody and feel the pain to transform it to energy of life. There is no other paths - this is the one and ultimate path. There is necessary pain to go through but there also can be set of unnecessary obstacles in recovery.
I will divide addiction and reboot mechanism in relation to sex, social and biologial conditioning,
So to start and be simple:

Biological, mind-based mechanism:
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PMO and sex with physical partner is to our primal brain no different, PMO is making primal brain thinking that you are constantly reproducing (and having pleasure). Biological conditioning of the brain forces your primal power to maintain this 'reproduction madness' and it forces through stress and urges. The lack of dopamine is causing stress but this mechanism of dopamine-dependent stress is to force you to reproduce. When your feeling of happinesss DEPENDS strictly on external factor and dopamine - so then you are becoming a DEPENDENT kind of a personality, a victim to external circumstaces to make you happy. Lack of dopamine is causing you worse attention or even ADD symptoms, dopamine is required to have better focus and attention. So during PAWS you can experience months of underlying stress, bad sleep, worse memory, worse attention and overall screwed up like life. This is because biological conditioning is creating stress, putting you in a Fight/flight state (or even Freeze) to FORCE you to reproduce and this stress is leading to BAD SLEEP. PROPER SLEEP IS CRUCIAL TO WELLBEING IN LIFE! Bad sleep without deep and powerful regeneration of the brain is leading to dysfunction in the brain and accumulation of toxins due to lack of untinterrupted sleep and more stress and cognitive problems, in results creating more stress and distorting our wellbeing more, and then more stress and even worse sleep.

THIS IS LOOP - LOOP OF STRESS.
BODY AND MIND ARE RELATED IN LOOP.

Societal conditioning:
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Sex and reproduction is SUBCONSCIOUSLY linked with our inner conditioning to feeling of succeed, of being a good person, successful male, sex is reward, the most powerful reward in this world. Societally, sex and being in a couple and even in marriage is linked as being good, functional, successful, 'worthy' person of society.
Sex is mechanism of survival, so with sex comes even feeling of being alive, successfull person - it's the biological conditioning.
Without sex - you can have thoughts of being worthless, unsuccessfull human failure, unworthy of existence, with low mood and depression. It can lead you very much to isolation (and isolation fuels up negative thoughts and feelings). This comes because you are not satisfying biological conditioning patterns. You can even think that without sex you will die or will have poor health. One more time - it's because of deep biological conditioning of our brains to SURVIVE. Those feeling and stress are to FORCE you to reproduce at all costs. It's biology speaking. The same is about anxiety feeling of being alone - in old times it was indicator that you will die. Being excluded from society was like death sentence and because of this we may feel stress when we are long enough lonely/alone. Only until you will recognize biological patterns of your primal brain you can really succeed and not being dependant on 'hapiness and reproduction pattern'. Yes - without sex you can have unhappy life - but only if you are stressing yourself about it - then not lack of sex but stress will cause you mental and health problems. Without choice to have sex or not or living in marriage or not you are slave to biological-based sexual programming.
UNTIL NOW THIS ALL HAVE BEEN BURIED IN SUBCONSCIOUSNESS!
THIS CAN PAIR WITH THE PREVIOUS LOOP OF STRESS CREATING EVERN BIGGER LOOP OF STRESS. So we can have now 2 loop mechanism creating bigger one.

Addictive mind speaking sabotage:
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So to say, what are the qualities of addictive mind ? Addictive mind is a victim to external circumstances, looking for the easiest (not always fair) way to gain pleasure. Addictive mind as victim of circumstances, thus creating VICTIM MENTALITY in you, waiting magically until external conditions will change to make you happy, until the 'salvation from heaven' comes to make you fulfill you purpose. Or you can wait on your reboot helplessly to things 'click' magically into the right setup to be happy and live as you always should. Waiting for reboot to be done is 'addiction victim-mentality' waiting for externals (or internals - like our thoughts) to change and to please us. So then how can you be happy, waiting for the external conditions to magically be set-up for your hapiness, while we are living in a world of constantly changing and evolving forms. Until you will become creator of opportunities you can lead more fulfilling life.
Only until you will be free to be happy and calm without counting on external and internal conditions, then you will be happy.

How can you recognize that your mind sneaked into getting quick fix of pleasure. In other therms, how can you recognize that your mind replaced one addiction to another for purpose of pleasure ? The answer is SABOTAGE. Yes, the sabotage is subconscious mechanism to easely getting pleasure from ruining your life. If you will examine long and deep enough conditioning of your mind, then you will come to a point where you will understand that unfulfilled life, lack of changes and lack of purpose is due to subconscious sabotage of kind of a TROLL in our mind that is happy when you are getting frustrated. SABOTAGE is speaking as inability to perform long term task, such as reboot, exercising, studying ets. Ego is another therm for this troll. David R. Hawkins is writing greatly about this subject. This discovery was a breaking point in my recovery process. You must discover, what really in life makes you happy and fulfilled - its part of succcessfull reboot and no one will do it for you, nor will it magically drop onto you from heaven one day. PURPOSELESS LIFE FOR A MAN IS A MISERABLE ONE. MAN WITHOUT A PURPOSE WILL END INDULGING IN VAIN PLEASURES (as a replacement to purpose). So after setting your purpose you must maintain forging and exercising your WILLPOWER - it simply means keeping your purpose no matter what feelings are telling you. WILLPOWER is like muscle, you can train it - because addict is the one whose will is against him.
And it is possible that this mechanism of sabotage will add to our previous loop made from 2 previous mechanisms - this mean we can have now even bigger loop, made from biological,societal and sabotage programming!

Body and fear:​

Fear is greatly perpetrated by weak feeling of your body - this manifests as lack of energy to direct your body to do something. Sports and physical activities helps to reduce fear by letting you feeling better your body. You have anxiety ? Start to train Crossfit or BJJ or even Yoga and watch the miracle happen in your life! Cortisol is opposed to testosterone, so with much fear you will less likely to be masculine, in other hand, sport promotes testosterone secretion ! TIRE YOUR BODY, USE YOUR BODY IN SPORTS AND IT WILL THANK YOU WITH HORMONAL BALANCE AND GOOD HEALTH !

Stress, Depression and underlying causes from previous lifestyle:​

Of course, it's very likely that reboot itself will let you discover some underlying frequencies like depression, traumas from bullying, neurosis etc. Seminal energy will fuel this things up to direct your awareness to them maybe for the first time. Be thankful for your reboot and be thankful for your body for this help. These can be also mixed with actual PAWS so it's where the reboot becomes really hard to conduct. When I mean hard - believe me, without enough awareness you can retraumatize yourself or be sucked into PMO addiction. THIS STAGE IS WHERE IT'S EASIEST TO RETURN TO ADDICTION AND IN THIS STAGE I STRONGLY ADVISE YOU TO SEEK PROFESSIONAL HELP TO FIGURE THINGS OUT. I CANNOT STRESS IT MUCH ENOUGH ! SEEK HELP IF YOU FEEL STUCK IN REBOOTING!
You can end up thinking like you developed some PTSD or have and ADD/DDA symptomps. Surely part of rebooting is going through hard symptoms but it's up to you recognizing what is actually PAWS and where are some older underlying issues.
Rebooting may be like opening PANDORAS BOX for the first time, where all the problems were hidden.
Remember, while rebooting all those things are being fueled up by you life force energy !

This is where knowledge about reboot and evolution to being freed from biological conditioning serves you. Because we are biological but also spirit beings.
So with reboot and PAWS you can experience low mood, depression, irritability, stress, bad sleep and all of them can create loop without you knowing it, thus it can contribute greatly to your miserable feelings, but what is more important, you thoughts may become low, apathetic, angry and hopeless.
Why subject of thoughts is crucial to reboot and how it is linked with seminal energy ?

Here comes the deeper insight !
The Seminal Energy aka Rocket Fuel

1) THOUGHTS:​

Why some rebooters are reporting GOD MODE while many others can stuck in miserable, low life of constant rebooting ? The difference is in mental attitude boosted by Rocket Fuel Seminal Energy. Abstaining from sexual activity gives you gain in energy reservoirs, thus then semen becomes fuel to your life, thoughts and actions. What thoughts do you have - that kind of life you will have. Seminal energy is neutral.​

Without being aware of your deep thoughts, purposes and motivations you will lead life by accident. Not having direction and purpose will lead you to fuel-up your based on unhappiness and being unworthy sexual-biological-societal ridden conditioning. You will be victim to your own bio-mind scripts. Rocket Fuel only helps you to see them by fueling them, thus making them bigger and more observable. You wanna know what hidden thoughts and purposes you have ? Look at your actions and results in life - they speaks truly, by themselves. Learn how to cultivate noble, life serving thoughts instead of miserable ones, full of fear and anger. Learning to thinking differently is similar as learning other things but self discovery contributes greatly in changing thinking patterns.
With new kind of life serving thoughts powered by life force, you will become master/knight/super sayian or whatewer you wanna be. Examinating and mastering your thoughts is crucial part of rebooting - without it rebooting may become failure.
'What is the purpose of my thinking' - ask youself many times a day.
ALLOW YOURSELF TO SPEAK AND ACT IN THE WORLD, EVEN IF NO ONE TOLD YOU SO THAT YOU CAN DO IT OR EITHER YOU WILL END UP WAITING FOREVER FOR PERFECT CIRCUMSTANCES.

2) POWER OF LIFE FORCE:​

Seminal energy itself is powerful like a volcano and it takes time to recognize and learn how to manage this volcano. Building up this energy without proper mastering will lead you to feeling of uneasiness, tiredness, tensions in the body and feeling like your head might explode (tensions in the head/racing thoughts/brain fog). Flow in you body and in your life will stop. You will feel like you are stuck and this stuck feeling and situation is fueled by volcanic-like force of your semen. Your life force will be bottled-up increasing tesion, waiting to explode (i.e. in anger).
WITHOUT PROPER MASTERING AND CHANNELING YOUR VOLCANIC ENERGY YOU MAY END UP WITH SYMPTOMS LIKE THIS:
1. Unmanageable tension in the body.
2. Brain fog.
3. Depersonalization/derealization sydrome.
4. Inability to focus aka ADD
5. Racing thoughts.
6. Being ungrounded, not in the body, not in the world

If you had some previous health issues like PTSD, you may end up in really screwed up position, thinking that NoFAP contributed to your demise. This is only partially true. What contributed to demise is lack of knowledge, not NoFAP itself - it's like accusing your own life energy for your poor life, while that's not true.
To reboot you have to learn by yourself how to master your focus, examine your thoughts and beliefs, you must have purpose and then have to learn the skills to channel your newly gained seminal energy into the direction/purpose you have. Your reboot demands new you in aspects of thinking, behaving and understading you life.
ONLY THEN THE REBOOT AND NEW LIFESTYLE ENERGY WILL SERVE YOUR LIFE AND PURPOSE.
SEMINAL ENERGY IS THAT SERIOUS POWERFUL FORCE - ITS LIKE RIDING A BULL !
IT ALWAYS CREATES - IT CAN CREATE WELLBEING OR IT CAN CREATE DESTRUCTION IN YOUR LIFE !
IT'S SACRED THING, DESECRATION WILL LEAD TO DESTRUCTION (as PMO was).

3) MASTERING/CHANNELING:​

Channeling is conscious putting energy into action while mastering is a process of maintaining conscious constant wielding of channeling practice. It's like gaining new skills. Running, writing, learning, playing guitar, talking, painting, building house, repairing car, creating new solutions for problems, meeting new people is channeling. Go and figure out where you can channel your energy and how to do it, there are no recipes ready and waiting for you - attend it as an adventure! Recognizing your thought patterns is channeling your energy/focusing you awareness to do it. Directing your focus and attention is channeling your energy.
So we are coming to Universal Laws:

Energy follows attention​

I.e. If you indulge in dirty thoughts you will relapse - this is this law in action.

You become what you think​

Constant indulging in dirty thoughts will make your life miserable, isn't it ?

The difference between burden and bliss in life is where your life energy and focus is consciously AND subconciously directed.​

Channeling your energy will help you to become more calm during reboot, better sleep, have more clear head. Channeling is making your life force flow again, so it will not end bottled-up in you. But heres the trap - don't wait for your life force/willingness to happen magically to live - instead engage in some channeling actions of your choice to wake up energy flow! Waiting is victim-mentality addiction speaking. Action and channeling demands to learn yourself to be brave. According to knowledge of David R Hawkins - only from the level of braveness kundalini energy starts to flow - its another Universal Law. Harsh truth is that mastering and channeling demands forging your WILLPOWER while being an addict means being slave.
With much awareness about subject of addiction it's easier to forge willpower but it' newer easy - it takes willpower to forge willpower ! (but it's more easy if you know what purpose you love and enjoy and brings you happiness) It takes keeping your decision and sticking to it no matter how much hard feeling and SABOTAGE plays role in (do you remember what I wrote about sabotage?).
Psychology says theres either expression or depression - to both of them contributes this same energy. Difference is between direction (inward-outward).

4) Greater Purpose/ Soul connection:​

This one is necessary, to feel deeper connection with the world, your place and life itself. Finding one's soul is one of the Hero's Journey thing.

5) Motivation:​

Understand that no one will come to save you, will decide and will keep decision and actions for you. No one can stop you from owning your life ! Understand that there are always consequences, either if we choose for something or we are scared to choose for something - there's always consequences of our action/inaction. Not deciding will not save you from suffering consequences ! Enjoy the pain and joy of self-development or suffer the pain and consequences of being a slave to your biology and mind! Man-fucking-up!

IF NO ONE TOLD YOU THAT YOU CAN AND SHOULD ACT IN THE WORLD AND LIVE YOUR LIFE - THEN I'M DOING IT FOR YOU - YOU ARE LOVABLE, WORTHY AND UNIQUE HUMAN BEGING READY TO GO OUT TO THE WORLD AND LIVE YOUR LIFE ! GO AND CONQUER YOUR LIFE !
YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING ON YOUR OWN, IF YOU FEEL YOU NEED HELP, THEN REACH OUT FOR HELP. ADDICTION IS NOT A JOKE, SOMETIMES PRIDE OF OVERCOMING THIS BURDEN ALONE CAN COST MUCH MORE THAN REACHNG FOR HELP ! I LEARNED IT HARD WAY !

SUMMARY
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You must recognize where is stress, how to overcome it, how does the sabotage works, where are the stress loops in your life. To put it simply - you must fully recognize situation in your life with every factors involved - the more the better. Or to put it defferently - to recognize fully tactics and fields of your enemy.
Without involving this in you reboot, you may end up unhappy with perpetual stuck-like-feeling, and Rocket Fuel fuels your shame,pity, self-doubt, fear, anger, worthlessness feelings making them bigger. All those feelings are part of rebooting but don't make them last for more than they should last. Improper managing can end up in you having depersonalization/derealization disorder. PAWS means being stressed and this stress is sourced in our bio-societal programming. Stress screws up health, poor thoughts and poor actions together with seminal energy can make overwhelmingly big loop of misery.

PAWS symptoms means that real rewiring of brain is happening.​

Inform yourself, reach for help, this reboot is demanding new you ! You will not overcome this addiction with staying in the same place !

If you feel that this can help to some others Fapstronauts, please share it wider/ on reddit etc. ​

To sum it up - I'm not anti-sex, I know that sexual intercourse is medicine itself when properly attended and conducted and I miss human connection but sex is not necessary to be happy and fulfilled. Although it can be icing on a cake of a beautiful and well organized life. I'm not telling you to stay isolated or trying to be happy living in a mancave - we are human begins and we need human interactions like air - but we need to be healthy to be that, not be dependant upon them like kids.

I would love to hear from you what are your thoughts and experience in relation to this knowledge.

Tips and things that work for me:
1) Recognizing and maintaining deep and regular sleep ! (CRUCIAL!)
a) drinking plenty of water before sleep and keeping window open to make air circulation and avoid brain fog, last meal 2 hours before sleep
b) quitting screens 2 hours before sleep prior to maintain melatonin release which contributes to regenerative sleep, organizing memory and cleansing brain from toxins,
c) daily meditation before sleep
2) After waking up - meditation, and sometimes journaling, to clear my head and organize my mind,
a) not scrolling in the morning
3) "Letting go" technique to process emotions and map of 'levels of consciousness' made by David R Hawkins (one of most mind altering knowledge I ever attained),
4) Running - to channel my energy,
5) Journaling - life saving thing, also helps in channeling energy,
6) Wim Hof Method and cold showers/cold bath for keeping my nervous system in a relaxed state, getting high on my own supply and exercising willpower,
7) Recognizing conscious and subconsious thinking patterns and results in life,
8) Meditation - releases dopamine and help in focus training, and also calms the mind,
9) Regular Sauna,
10) Forgiveness Meditation - it helps restore harmonious brain waves thus ending conflict and stress,
11) Grounding - spending time in nature, walks in forest, barefoot walking, outdoor water dips, drinking a lot of water, bioeneretic exercises, breathing exercises,
12) Quitting coffee ( it perpetrated my anxiety and lightheadedness, also contributed to lower mood after waking up). I use Yerba mate instead (in moderation),
13) Help of other people, circle of supportive friends,
14) Not being involved in news from the world
15) Learning the subject of neurogenesis, in other words - which environment contribute to our wellbeing and which one is degenerating us,
16) Fasting (it erase urges for some period of time, thus giving a rest),
17) Compassion for self and for others,
18) Uplifting music,
19) Inner Child Work
20) Eating meat in moderation - it helps in grounding,

What I would like to do more/what I miss:
Meet people, dance, paint, have aquarium, attend to Wim Hof journey with Wim itself to Mt. Śnieżka, biking

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Thank you, to which part you can relate the most? Which part of this speaks to you the most ?

What exactly did your doctor ordered to you - my post ? Just kidding but I'm curious about how can you relate to my experience and knowledge

 

To add more knowledge and experience, here is post wrote by Don Quixote, with which I agree completely
https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?t...ey-cure-duration.231859/page-103#post-2861504

"Addiction induced hypofrontality is very real to me, and I think it's what helped send me down the sewer drain. But abstinence aside, with recovery, it's like if a pro football player suddenly stopped his rigorous regimen of diet, exercise, and practice because of a physical injury causing him to be benched. He goes into "recovery" with a lot of bed rest, taking it easy and such. Over time, his muscles break down, shrink, he gets a pot belly and becomes moody and lethargic from his long stretch of cooped up do-nothingism. Now if he got it in his head that healing would constitute waiting on his fat ass for his muscles to grow back chiseled, with max physical dexterity, precision, endurance, energy, flow, like when he was playing football, we could rightly conclude he has become delusional. At some cresting point of the physical healing of the injury, waiting around and doing nothing actually starts making things progressively worse. "Recovery" with time can potentially heal the initial wound, but waiting around cannot get you ready to jump back on the field and play at a professional level again.

Also, I'm just getting older; you're teens and twenties are your physical and mental prime regardless. It hardly means I'm approaching worthlessness because I'm approaching my 30s. Tough break to think you are! Sheesh! But yeah, if I want to be super sharp again, I'm gonna have to hit the "mental gym." However, I will say I'm still noticing organic mental benefits even now. So that's something. My brain is still tweaking, stretching, flexing, growing even. My frontal lobes are feeling fuller, etc. Can't lie, I really put myself through a mental cheese grader.

Also, some advice to the others: The avoiding stress thing can become neurotic and self-defeating. You can develop a fear of stress that puts you in a catch-22 paradox where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. You end up building a cage around yourself trying to avoid stress. All that does is nurture a hypersensitivity towards everything and develops a psychology of physical/mental frailty that is crippling to your well-being. "I can't lift this box because it might stress me out. I can't go to this function it might stress me out. I can't get out of bed because that will stress me out--stress! Stress! STRESS!" The paradox is that it keeps your stress and fight or flight kicking like a mule.

I think the key is not developing stress avoidance tendencies but stress tolerance. Cold showers, exercise, maybe learning martial arts, or generally crossing thresholds into the unknown on a day to day basis to, yes, actually cause stress to your body, forcing it to adapt and evolve a tolerance is good. The sit by a waterfall, meditating on a soft cushy pillow, listening to someone serenade you with a pipa, as you tranquilize yourself with "Oms," and deep breathing, can (not always) be a smoke screen for stress avoidance, and in those specific instances it isn't doing anything for you. Your body is struggling to deal with stress not annihilate it from existence. Stress avoidance won't get you to a place where your brain can handle it. Of course, stress relaxation and management is a key element.

One helpful neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman makes the insightful point that we live in a society where stress is perceived as the evil of evils--and therefore, should be avoided at all costs to preserve your fragile porcelain self--it couldn't be farther from the truth. Stress is an ally--an essential one. Of course, when it becomes chronic, overbearing for long long stretches of time it becomes neurotoxic, which is obviously unhealthy, but that doesn't mean it's then a purely bad thing in and of itself. We, as addicts, just become horrible at managing it, utilizing it, appropriating it as a tool for change, growth, and achieving purpose.

Dr. Andrew Huberman defines addiction as, "a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure." Some of us have narrowed out so thin from abuse that even our god (PMO) has forsaken us to pure anhedonia--and we can't feel anything. Huberman explains that dopamine exists as a bountiful generic motivator to kick us in the butt to do generic everyday tasks as well as complete specific goals. Through healthy developmental periods our reward system learns to disseminate dopamine to these tasks and goals by mapping appropriate expectations for reward to varying activities--leading to a well adjusted chemical distribution and function throughout our brains.

Addicts, for complicated reasons, find one reward that disproportionately outweighs the others, and over time, it becomes the sole source of reward distribution, meaning it crowds out and steals dopamine associations with all other tasks--making literally everything else seem hopelessly boring, uninteresting, frustrating, undesirable, and overall impossible to do. We still have desires, dreams, and goals, although those diminish, too. But without dopamine, there is no expectation of reward mapped to that non-sex driven desire, dream, goal, so it remains pathetic, crippled, unmotivated, and therefore, perpetually unrealized.

I know some of you already know this, but I hope it's insightful because it relates to the issue of stress and the debate about abstinence and how far it can take us. Here's my thinking. When your addiction gets as bad as it has for us guys, not only has the narrowing occurred, but it's shrivels up into a dust. Abstinence seems to help with clearing out a lot of the worst paws symptoms and regaining sensitivity. But why do we relapse? Complicated question, but I think part of it has to do with the fact that we regain sensitivity, but sensitivity to what? Sexual addiction! We're primed to jump right back in the sack of our abuse, because that's how our brains are wired, which is why we often do as soon as we start feeling "better." Trust me, I've been on this forum. You guys know who you are. After hellfire misery from addiction, as soon as you start feeling better, boom you waddle, tip over, and relapse, and often binge. We've all been there. But why? The brain has not learned new paths of reward, new avenues of expectation, pleasure, delight; joy isn't being distributed to any other activity than sexual gratification. Even after long extended abstinence, our reward system, while now fresh perhaps, is still bound up and wired to sexual pleasure. Remember, addiction, "a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure."

I really think addiction is a brain learning disorder. Abstinence might dissolve the post acute withdrawal suffering after a while, but you still feel forever anhedonic, forever unmotivated, forever lethargic; fatigued, depressed, slow, dumb, heavy, a total bum on the street--an "L-7 weenie, Oscar meyer even," to quote the Sandlot. Why? Because abstinence won't train your brain to distribute rewards for tasks it's been trained for years to believe are unrewarding. Again, you might regain a thin sensitivity and sense of normality through abstinence, but your brain won't automatically un-narrow itself. It's learned a singular distribution of dopamine, which doesn't magically untangle itself with abstinence.

For some of us, those algorithms are more than a decade old--they're entrenched. And one crippling thing that keeps us bound up is the sinister sex thoughts we harvest and fantasize about despite our pmo abstinence. I bet a lot of you guys, myself included, spend hours and hours still passively releasing dopamine into your brain simulating sex imagery and narratives in your head--perpetuating the narrow bind, fixing it in place! Or re-animating the shell of former pmo behaviors spending hours+++ mindlessly roaming the internet, seeking infinite novelty with video after video on YouTube, Reddit, or whatever. Maybe, even edging a squeaky bit with photos. Again, all releasing dopamine for passive, mind-numbing rewards--teaching the brain to behave exactly as it has for years. Sitting around all day, listening to music, watching tv, binge eating. "But we aren't pmo'ing? And fantasy isn't that bad! Right?" Well, yes and no. We're sexual creatures, but you've narrowed your pleasure window down to the eye of a needle! Abstinence might loosen it a bit, but it wont expand it for you--not in my experience. Our brain has reached a point where it believes and behaves, according to the learned principle, that the only thing rewarding (dopamine worthy) in life is doing nothing, laying around, staring at screens, eating, sleeping, shitting, sexualizing, and vegetating like a blob.

But doing nothing is miserable, and it's the antithesis of the human spirit. So why don't we change? Narrowing of Dopaminergic distribution is what has shrunk the parameters of our sense of security, our motivation, pleasure and reward expectancy. It's bounded the psychic landscape. But we stay on that insufferable island of confined limitation for one reason--fear of stress. Stress avoidance. Addiction might have shipwrecked us on that island, but fear and the stress that comes when we begin to inch our toes over unknown thresholds is what keeps us trapped there--forever.

As soon as our brain thinks it's going into the unknown, it releases stress chemicals. Every single time. However, we are gravely mistaken to think this is somehow unhealthy, toxic or bad. It isn't. It's what we are as organisms, fundamentally. And stress is the threshold upon which all active brain plasticity occurs. Our brains, in the first 25 years of their development, retain a generic passive plasticity, enabling children to develop complex life-algorithms for language, cognition, emotive/behavioral patterns, and social organization by simply being exposed to the phenomena. Take a Chinese kid and drop him in India or America, and his brain plasticity will activate, absorbing the language of the culture passively via mere exposure. After 25 though, things change. According to Dr. Huberman, the brain theoretically retains relatively equal proportions of plasticity throughout adulthood, but the methodology of plastic change reverses--from a passive template to an active one. No longer does our brain plasticity activate and adapt through mere lucidic exposure. It can change just like the pre 25 year old brains, but it requires a different means of activation.

What are the primary means of activation? Focus, concentration, and you guessed it, STRESS. When we try to do anything new, by concentrating on it, we experience resistance; our brain is releasing norepenphrine, which is a stress chemical that produces that sense of resistance. It exists to regulate behavioral durations. Once enough of that builds up in our brains, it overrides our executive control and we quit the activity. We peter out. But if we push through it, staying in that stress zone, focusing on whatever it is we're trying to learn, our brain releases another chemical called acetylcholine, which marks off the neurons being used in the activity, so they can later be changed. Those neurons remain marked for change and do change, but only if, and here's the kicker, only if we get a full good nights sleep to follow up. Because it's while we're sleeping that the brain actually induces synaptic plasticity and coordinates the specific firing of the used groups of neurons.

So stress isn't the enemy. It's the means through which and from which we change, but if you're over 25, change has to be active; passive exposure won't cut it. Mere abstinence isn't enough. Willpower is essential, but it's not enough either. The norepenphrine that accumulates in your frontal cortex under unfamiliar situations will shut you down eventually, and it's why you always give up even when you do get those star bursts of inspiration to change. As soon as you act, norepenphrine spikes you like a volleyball, and you quit, tail between your legs, diving into the comforting arms of your programmed do-nothingism. It's even 10,000 times harder for addicts because of dopaminergic narrowing of pleasure and reward. Nothing kicks in to back you up in any of your efforts to adapt to the unknown. You're throwing raw naked willpower at a rigid machine that's ruled you with an iron fist for decades. So, the key is to hack into the machine. The funny thing is the antidote to norepenphrine shutting down your efforts to change is actually dopamine! If you're frontal cortex is filling up with norepenphrine, as soon as you experience a reward, the dopamine will flood your frontal lobes and cancel out the norepenphrine giving you "second wind." With intermittent dopaminergic rewards mitigating your activity, you could theoretically focus forever! Resulting in deep, deep plastic changes, assuming you also are getting a full good nights rest, too.

If you're laboring on a new task or crossing an unfamiliar threshold and you feel that resistance, you feel your system trying to get your frontal cortex to give up, run away, shut down, QUIT, you can and should throw all the willpower you've got to keep yourself going, to keep focusing. But furthermore, you also need to train your reward system to back you up with dopamine, by rewarding the activity, so the norepenphrine will cancel out, and you can keep going, achieving a deeper change through time and investment. This is the subtle hack into the system. Neuroscientists call this CHUNKING. It's brain change with a carrot instead of a stick, and it's way more successful than the alternative.

We addicts suck ass at rewarding ourselves--hence the progressive narrowing of pleasure to a needle eyed size. We're either bingeing on waterfalls of passive dopamine abuse with sex, drugs, sugar, whatever, or we're white-knuckling and whipping the living shit out of ourselves to be more ideal, more perfect, more flawless and on point. We live in a constant space of all-or-nothing, and it never works out. We always bottom out and binge, because we experience ZERO reward for any of the genuinely good things we whip and willpower ourselves into doing. None of it sticks because it doesn't get marked down in our brains as rewarding or valuable, and so our brains bitch and moan, "why would I hold out for this if it's not going to be rewarding?" Of course, they quit! I would! Wouldn't you? It's a bullshit contract we write between us and our brains. It's slavery. It's unfair, and our brains know it. So we stay gridlocked. Dopamine is never distributed to those desired activities, and so they remain eternally difficult and miserable.

So, in summary, don't train your brain to be stress avoidant, but to become stress tolerant. Develop stress management. Work through your psychological baggage. Try therapy. Take Karate lessons. Work against the frail mind/frail body dysmorphia by doing physically aggressive things as well as psychologically challenging stuff. Regard stress as a potential ally--a great and powerful friend. Respect it. Don't fear it. Utilize it. Don't serve it. Press through everything.

Change is incremental. Small bits and pieces day by day builds Rome as the cliche goes. Having trained our brains to expect massive returns on virtually no investment can be reworked. But it won't happen if we try to beat the shit out of them with the baseball bat of willpower. Swing hard, but also play smart. Use chunking. Start infinitesimally small. We wake up and want to be a rockstar in minutes. We want big change NOW. But how about waking up and slicing up the smallest conceivable task and breaking it into mini sequences that have cleverly designed and legitimately satisfying rewards attached to them. Get good at rewarding yourself. That's key in all of this! Can't get out of bed? It's too miserable. Don't think! ACT! Get out of bed. Stand up in your underwear. Then Reward! Reward! Reward!

"Oh, shit, but now I don't want to get dressed!"
"Do it!"
"Ah, it's too hard."

Ok, fair enough, maybe it is too hard. Maybe, that's a legitimate complaint. Let's work with that. Let's break it down. Act I: get some socks; Act II put them on; Act III REWARD/CATHARSIS! IF that's too hard break it up into more acts with intermissions of rewards, BUT always be pushing that threshold of stress. Willpower against the norepenphrine, but give your willpower fuel with reward. Give yourself an M&M for getting dressed, or doing whatever. You won't become dependent on the M&M as an expectation for reward for menial tasks or small goals. Eventually the reward expectancy becomes automated. It's like my niece learning to potty train. She gets a piece of candy every time she goes to the bathroom. That behavior becomes natural, fully incorporated. She won't revert back to shitting in her diaper if the candy gets cut off, which it will. The potty algorithm will take root, and the behavior associated with reward, and her brain won't calculate the bait and switch. Soon, it won't need the artificial stimulant for the brain to release dopamine to motivate the activity and experience it as satisfying. It's classical conditioning. Operant conditioning. Goes way back to the early 20th century. Treat your brain like a dog! Give it treats!

Start small, my friends. Infinitesimal. And slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, expand your circle. And that needle eye window of pleasure will expand, and becoming a generic non-junky who experiences motivation and and pleasure doing menial tasks will return. But we need to be generous in our rewards to our brains. We aren't like the average joe. Their dopaminergic distribution has been properly proportioned and disseminated through healthy developmental years. We have the needle eye from addiction. But it can expand with concentrated effort and retraining the brain for rewards.

One last footnote: Necessity is the grand master of neuroplastic change. Put a 25+ year old in necessitating circumstances, and brain plasticity is shown to activate and amplify tenfold. Trying to learn a new language, going to university, studying flash cards, practicing for years, but it's not sticking because it's boring, tedious, and slow, and you don't really care? Aside from mitigating incremental learning through reward, try also throwing that same person in a situation where learning the language is life or death. Their brain will learn ten million times faster in that context. Let's be honest, most of us would still be jacking off to porn if these horrific symptoms didn't manifest, creating necessitating circumstances for drastic life change. 2, 3 years of abstinence is largely the product of those necessitating circumstances. Just something to think about when considering the transformation of your brains, and how it all works.

We don't pursue pleasure. We pursue value, and use pleasure as a means to attain valued things. Use pleasure wisely, and live well.

My friends, it can be done, but it wont be done for you. Not what matters most anyway. And remember, perfection doesn't exist. It's merely a relative metric our brains artificially construct to measure progress and perceive contrasts. There is no evidence that perfection exists in some metaphysically binding sense. Be free, and go easy on yourselves. No one else will."

Written by user Don Quixote.

 

Thanks ! Which part resonated the most with your experience ?

Agree !

 

Believe me, being rebooted and enjoying life is incomparable to misery of porn addiction. Obstacles in your life mean you decided to grow and you have to break the layers - this is the natural specific of growth - breaking the layers, and keeping awareness what is important for you, what kind of activities will lead you to what you need and what kind of activities will derail you to misery.
Enjoy the obstacles of rebooting or suffer the consequences of weakness. There are no third way.

 

This is very powerful and brain waves altering also practice, so good that you are able to do forgiveness meditation, it takes a courage to forgive

True! Self love at its deepest point !

 

Indeed, forgiveness is life altering attitude to life and world, the best remedy for pain in my case.

It's probably kind of misunderstanding or barrier language. I'm far from telling that addiction is only about pleasure, because it is not. Every addiction have some basic foundation and is consequence of something, not the cause. Strength of urges is exactly the 'other shape' of drive that pushes you into life, world, performing tasks, catching food etc. but in PMO addiction it is hijacked and distorted to fulfill distorted sexual drive that is channeled to PMO because our subconscious mind don't distinct between reality and pixels. In other words rebooting mean retraining awareness, brain structures and reactions into fulfill healthy sexual purposes, not distorted ones. Addiction is multilayered issue and you can only see as deep as you consciously have been deep. I dug literally under and farer away than instinct, personality, pain, birth and childhood traumas to point of totally denying my personality, thoughts, deeds, life, everything. What I understood in these work helped me in transformation of addiction into realigning it to be person that I always meant to be. From this point you are recognizing every other person as yourself because we have different names but are the same begins, with the same set of ... being.

We will not understand each other because we have different basis of view. I'm writing from the place of energy as true nature of universe and nature while you are 'scientific'. Science even don't fully recognize Porn Addiction and are not conducting proper research to help people so ... approach of science is by itself explanation of their intentions. It's probably impossible that you will agree with me. It's not bad - it's only matter of difference from viewpoints that come from being grounded in different frames.
My own experience and understanding led me to transform addiction and it's enough for me. To someone it will speak, to someone not.
As Tesla said - "If you want to understand everything, think in matters of energy, frequency and vibration". My post is written from energetic point of view. I'm not fluent in scientific research but Nature is enough for me to discover and heal myself. Science will never understand what I wrote because science don't operate on level of reality that is energy. This is also basis of every yoga, taoist/chinese medicine, kung-fu etc. Nature is real science, scientists with their frame of minds and understanding have poor version of more deeper knowledge and understanding .

Thank you for your comment, I would be more clear and write something like Index of Concepts because I forgot that what is clear for me by itself may not be clear to anyone else. If you need explanation for some concepts I will try to make it more clear to you but I need to know what exact phrases .

 

I will give example of what I'm talking about with the example of dr. David Hawkins, person that involved his experience and understanding of energy into subject of psychology and psychiatry, helping thousands of people (still even after his death in 2012, myself included). He pushed forward psychology and psychiatry from their limited frames into greater understanding and developed knowledge that is really helping people.

Source: https://veritaspub.com/dr-hawkins
Sir David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. was a nationally renowned psychiatrist, physician, researcher, spiritual teacher and lecturer. The uniqueness of his contribution to humanity comes from the advanced state of spiritual awareness known as ” Enlightenment,” “Self–Realization,” and “Unio Mystica.”Rarely, if ever, has this spiritual state occurred in the life of an accomplished scientist and physician. Therefore, Dr. Hawkins was uniquely qualified to present a spiritual path that is scientifically compelling to modern society.
"Dr. David Hawkins: "Handling Major Crises""

Some other facts of his life:

In some of his book he furtherly and fully explained what addiction is and how to cope. His teachings helped me tremendously to release past stuff (and still helps me as I apply to his wisdom every day) .