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

Do you guys think that stopping the addiction will recover the way we see others? Essentialy sexually speaking. I think the way I deal with all that is very disturbed by porn. I started with that at the age of 13! So, I'm18 now. And wasting all my puberty with that changed all the way I see others.

 

Does anybody have recurrent constipation while rebooting???

 

Yeah man I go through phases where I'm constipated for 3-5 days, then it'll swing the other way for a set amount of time. My appetite and digestion, overall, has been majorly affected.

 

I think you're in the right place. You're only 18 and you're learning the most important lesson to learn in life. You can see clearly how important it is for a man to master himself to find happiness. If you decide not to be a slave, you're going to have a great life.

 

thank you!

 

It go longer than a week in my situation. It's a very frustrating thing....

 

My personally philosophy regarding sexual fantasy is that it's always a bad thing, it's prone to escalation, and the fundemental mechanism of why you'd even argue for it, is one of dopamine pleasure (fantasy gives you a hit of dopamine)

Fantasy is by far the hardest part of the journey for me as I have a strong active imagination, and I even inherited new crazy fantasies since starting NoFap, and it's part of why I acted out few months back.

In my last few months monk mode I've had barely any sexual thoughts, and I have 0 intention to ever willingly go down that path again, I recommend the same for everyone. Any form of lust is essentially unhealthy

 

Eat lots of nuts and seeds (25-50% of your daily calories) and you'll start shitting twice a day. They're also fattening so if you're trying to lose weight then make sure you're replacing food and not just adding. For normalizing the bowels nothing works better. Make a couple pounds of trail mix (almonds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, cashews, raisins, etc...) and make it your main source of protein and fat for a few days and see how you feel. It will also replenish your electrolytes potassium and magnesium. Very good for you. Drink fluids too.

 

Roger that man!

 

I don't really think it's possible to have zero sexual/lustful thoughts if you abstain from having any orgasms for more then 6-12 months. Fantasies are becoming a problem when you act out your sexuality inside of your head and imaging ACTIVELY all kinds of stuff because it's your last resort of having/simulating a sex life. If you develop new fantasies while being on NoFap then you have to spend a significant amount of time with your fantasies. I fully agree with you on that - this can't be healthy and good for recovery but there is certainly a difference between having those kind of fantasies and just thinking a few moments of something sexual which isn't related to porn or masturbation. Sometimes I get random porn flashbacks for just 1-2 seconds while I am deeply concentrated onto something but I instantly notice it and don't spend any time longer with that image. There is just so much old trash surfacing into consciousness and clinging onto that isn't good in any ways but having lustful thoughts for time to time doesn't seem to be that unusual if you don't have a real orgasm in dozens of months. If I wouldn't have any sexual thoughts or emotions then nature would have failed with it's most basic instinct and purpose of keeping the species going because in the end thats all nature cares about.

 

Had a WD a day ago, this is a good sign, it seems that despite falling back into the addiction for a year, the withdrawals oddly aren't as intense as before, I suppose my brain had time to establish new links in itself that are being reactivated right now, average looking women are now looking not soo average anymore, the tv is dangerous however, too much sexualization on it, I just distract myself whenever I am in the sitting room with somebody else or if no one is there, turn it off completely.

I noticed that withdrawals and urges tend to only attack when the habit hasn't been changed or if you are exposing yourself to cues, in my case, technology with internet access was a death sentence waiting to happen. With none left I only sleep or read books there, I'm coming up to 30 days and I haven't really had any serious urges, this is the obvious trick to this whole addiction to avoid relapse, it is where people fail constantly, but the answer is right in front of them, they are blind. When the habit is gone, it becomes a waiting game.

 

A little bit of progress for me. Too much bedroom activities still sets me into a flatline, but now I recover quickly, and my erections are now close to 100%, I think. Orgasms are still the damn devil.

 

I came to a final conclusion concerning wetdreams. When I first went into hard mode. I didn't had any of those. After around 3 months they start occuring from time to time and they always felt like a setback for me. Like I'm not doing enough to avoid them or that my old PMO habit ultimately is responsible for having a fucked up sexuality and thus I experience this weird anomaly of having an low intense orgasm every 7-20 days while sleeping. I spent so much time thinking about it and I kinda was 100% sure that WDs are something bad and that they cause the same 14 day orgasm hangover that a real orgasm is causing for me. Unluckily I often felt better after not having an WD for 14 days which further seemed to prove me right on this one. I thought my overall miserable state is even worse because of WDs. I started to fear them and a narrative of thoughts always started in my head the night I had a WD. It always took me more then a few days to let go of that mindset again, only to forget about it until the next WD is around the corner.

From wednesday three weeks ago until last night I didn't had any wet dream and I kinda was expecting my symptoms and overall negative state to slightly improve after being free from WDs for more then 2 weeks. But my symptoms stayed as shitty as they ever were. My sleep even got worse over the last days. I acutally felt worse the whole last week compared to the second week of being WD free. Even today, after having a WD, sleeping only 5 hours, working the whole day. I was in a better overall constitution then the whole last week. I had 20 really happy minutes today and I enjoyed them to the fullest. So I decided to never gonna worry about WDs ever again. It might take some days to really leave the negative conditioning behind but I'm positive that I no longer will dwell onto having WDs. I can't avoid them so I need to stop worry about them.I read success stories of guys coming out of the flatline/PAWS and still having them but they dont notice any bad effects anymore. Many people report having them without any problems. My problems seems to be that I'm frightend of them which causes an underlying subconcsious reaction which further increases stress and anxiety and thus my symptoms. I'm done with that shit. I tried sleeping naked, no meat, literally taking a piss right before sleeping for nearly a year straight, sleeping on my side, big pillow, small pillow, lajin strechtes, qiqong, meditation right before sleep, no food after 6 pm, I even tried praying and asking my brain to not have any WDs anymore. NOTHING. DONE. Experiment failed and it just is something that is out of my hand. Maybe I can increase the time span in between the WDs but that doesn't makes a big difference either as the last 3 weeks showed. It's just fucking PAWS and the whole time I was mixing up my struggles with WDs and the symptoms of PAWS. So for anyone ever asking yourself if you should worry about WDs - the answer is a simple NO. All the time, energy and stress you put into avoiding them ultimately lacks at another place. They don't seem to hinder recovery as people get out of PAWS although they keep having them. They might worsen your stress respons for 1-3 days or so but this might only be due PAWS itself and once PAWS is gone, that effect may be gone as well.

Another topic: today I wondered why PMO could cause those tremendous effects on an otherwise healthy person. Most people in here aren't any ex-drug-junkies like me with different substance addictions. I know many guys that don't have any other big addiction beside PMO and video gaming. So why is masturbation and porn having such tremendous effects on our brain? The answer might be very obvious to many of you but I think that the sexual reward system is totally overseen and underrated. These few generations of humans have probably seen more perfect naked butts, titties, vaginas and buttholes then all our ancestors combined times 10. Todays well spread luxury and thus room of privacy allows masturbation to be exercised. You need a room for yourself where nobody comes in suddenly, in order to regulary masturbate. I mean you still could use a shower or the toilet as many people did back then but the overall chances were tremendously lower back in time. What many of us did for many years was simulating living in harem with 10/10 chicks. I know this point is overused and anyone knows it but just imagine. Our primal brain actually thought it had sex with over thousands of the best looking chicks this planet has to offer while living in a time where every sexual taboo is broken and where every fetish is served on demand. Back in time only kings, emperors and sultans had the possibility to live in a harem with dozens of women but even then there was a somehow limited amount of new 10/10 girls. To cut this short. Our primal brain lived in a harem of girls since early puberty and today we wonder how porn could eventually cause a 2 year withdrawal process that literally lets you go to hell. It would be the same as living in the kings harem as a young prince right when you are able to have sex and then they kick you out at the age of 23 and all those women are just gone forever and all your left with is an oversaturated brain that is conditioned to receive its fix out of 10/10 women. This reward system has the basic function of keeping the species alive which is natures most important task. There is no doubt that nature is rewarding every orgasm with a shitload of dopamine, serotonine, endorphines and big paddle on the shoulder for being a good servant to the human race. But your primal brain isn't able to differintiate between masturbation and real sex. Yes the body releases different neurotransmitters when having sex with a partner that you love (oxytocin) which counteracts many negative effects but I'm taking about the primal most fundamental reward through reaching orgasm. I can't imagine by any logic why nature should reward us for wasting our seed into a towel. Nature didn't had in mind that we humans can do whatever the fuck we currently want to do. I know many of those informations aren't new but for the first time in this whole process of being into noFap/SR I truly realized the true range and dimensions of what this habit really did to us. In natures eyes we are the freaking best while our cortex and society reflects a completely different picture. It's like a (adult)life long cognitive dissonance paired with over saturated feel well receptors and all of this while you are going through the most important years of your life. Many of us don't know life beyond this state of a lifelong cognitive dissonance. Sorry for the long text but I just had to completely formulate the realization that I had in mind while its present and then I thought I might as well share it with you.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comm..._source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body

Another good story. After his libido returned he started masturbating once per day (obviously without porn) and still felt good!

 

My dreams are a testament to how chaotic my inner world is right now. I think back to the sentiment that Derjogge shared about the subconscious working things out. My dreams are so fractured and odd that some days I wake up feeling like I just endured some sort of Mullholland Drive-esque oddity.

I like to think that I'm growing from this process, but another part thinks 2 years is a bit excessive. I don't know if there is a God out there, but yeah man, this is a lot to throw at someone if you're wanting them to grow.

Just about at the 16 month mark. A forewarning to some of the hard cases who are still in the earlier stages of this process--this part of the marathon (another DerJogge metaphor) does get pretty damn tough. It doesn't feel like an adventure anymore. Not that I felt all excited and motivated in the beginning, but earlier on in this thing it did feel as if I was discovering new things at every turn. Shit felt new.

Now I'm just in a place where I'm so fucking ready for it to be over, yet I still have months and months to go. It's gotten really, really fucking old.

I'm ready for this winter to be over with. I need to feel as if I can spread my legs a little. Maybe some time in more open spaces will help me not feel so stuck. This reboot is starting to feel like quicksand.

I'm in the part of this current wave of withdrawals where my brain is really craving porn. On some days the thought of it being a pleasurable thing has snuck its way into my mind. Scary. I need to constantly remain within the right perspective, which is that my brain is a filthy trickster, and it will do just about anything to get me to relapse. Fucking frightening that it still craves it so hard at 16 months. You'd think that it would loosen up after this long of a timeframe.

Seems that these porn cravings occur when morning wood is at its peak. For the past 2 weeks I've had MW more often than not, and it would appear that my sexuality is still so intertwined with porn that it correlates it with sexual relief/drive. Waking up reared to go still steers me towards all of this fetishes and evil fucking porn sites that I've spent so many hours perusing. It still hasn't switched over to vanilla, emotion-filled sex.

Speaking of fetishes, mine are still there. I'm still attracted to the deranged.

I'm hoping that I'll just, one day, leave the flatline and everything will kind of vanish.

I don't know how this is going to end. Maybe it'll be more gradual. Who the fuck knows.

Good luck to y'all.

 

Dreams can be very strange. Around a week ago I woke up and could not believe that I had watched porn again. But very soon I realized that it all happened in a dream. I had scrolled through a tube site that looket completely real in my dream. And this is after over 2 years with no porn..

 

I literally feel the same about those grotesque dreams and just your overall state. It’s crazy how similar our processes are and I think in some way this is a good sign. I also feel the same about cravings lately.

 

I've heard from so many that the flatline just suddenly disappears. Hang in there man.

 

From my experience people who masturbate, orgasm and losing semen a lot tend to take longer to reboot than a light user. One thing I've noticed, your body will begin taking nutrients from other organs once your testicles run out of fluids. And when you begin your taking your reboot more serious by completing good streaks, your body will take back what was his i.e the semen your testicles produce to fill out....

 

Hang in there dude. For what it's worth, I'm looking to guys like you who are further along than me for inspiration and guidance for what I can expect. I'm past the five month mark, and it is getting old... every day I hope that there will be a sudden improvement, but it doesn't seem like I'm anywhere near. The one consolation I have at the moment is that urges are very occasional and mild for me, and dreams aren't a problem. No idea why - all that stuff has been a problem in the past. But I am making a massive effort to avoid thinking about my preferred fetish stuff, and to try and see women through a non-porn lens, when watching TV etc, and I can feel that I am changing in this respect, which may explain the lack of problems overall... or it could just be because I'm so exhausted that I barely have a pulse!