410 days without being addicted

Yes, it is possible, 410 days without being addicted.

Someone who was addicted for more than 10 years, who almost dropped out of college, who had suicidal thoughts, who only could see womans like sex objects, who had urges that could make me stop anything i was doing to pmo, even when i was driving or studying or working... who had DE and sometimes PIED, who was numb emotionally that even when my grandmother died i didn't feel nothing...

So what's your excuse to quit? To stop trying

 

As i said in my journal before after i started to understand better and better the roots of the addiction to me, i was able to change.

Not being able to deal with emotions, low self steem, working with something that was making me depressed and some other stuff..

These were all triggers to me to go after PMO.

And I can see clearly now, after more than 1 year without pmo, that if you don't change the root/ the process, the outcome will be the same.

And why is that?

Because PMO are super stimuli that affect our brains, they give much more dopamine than the rest of things.

So when you have a lot of these triggers in your life (maybe low self-esteem, problems in life in general, anxiety, depression), you search for dopamine to feel better.

And why is so easy to make that a bad habit?

1 - triggers - Because the internet provides us with unlimited content, so besides our own problems, there are a lot of triggers out there on the internet, in social media, tv, movies.

2 - desire - Besides that, pmo are super stimulus of dopamine

3 - process - And are easy to do it

4 - reward - And after that, you get your reward.

You do repeat it over and over, for years, and that habit becomes an addiction. With a LOT OF TRIGGERS and A SUPER DESIRE, that habit becomes an addiction.

And bad habits/adiction makes you feel good in the short term, you feel the pleasure of the act, but mostly we tend to forget the downside of that in the long term (emotional numbmess, pied, sexual objectificacion, low energy, brain fogg, waste of time, low sefl steem and the list goes on).

Unlike a good habit, that you don't have an instant reward, but if you keep doing you will see the good benefits.

Ok. But why it's so difficult to quit? Because it's your survival brain (the amygdala) that makes the call, that part of the brain just wants you to survive and procreate. not your cortex prefrontal (associated with self-control, rationalization).

So how we can regain control over our primitive brain?

Understanding how it works and changing the process.

Understanding how a habit works give you the power to change that bad habit/addiction.

You need to work on your triggers, on your desire, in the process and in the reward.

What i did?

The triggers part
- my triggers were like i said, a lot of problems in my life that made me escape from my reality (low self steem, working with something that was making me feel depressed, emotional numbness, anxiety and some other stuff...), to feel pleasure (dopamine). So i had to change that, i had to turn off these triggers, so i did that working with a therapist (i changed career, started to working out and eating better, started to go out with girls...

The desire part
- pmo feels good. But i had to change that, i had to think of pmo of something bad. So I did watch a lot of videos of sex traffic, rapped girls that were forced to do pornography. I remember watching these videos and sometimes i cried because of their pain, so i started having the feeling that i couldn't be part of that. My identity slowly started to change, i view P as a industry associated with these crimes. That truly changed me inside, I couldn't be part of that anymore, so every time I feel tempted I remembered these girls, I rewatched these videos. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjkeSB7CO3KMfX_JMzX8JDKCNtsCifKAV
- THAT REALLY worked for me, because just knowing the bad consequences in my life i couldn't change, the instant pleasure was bigger. But when I truly made that association in my mind and added with these bad consequences in my life, it helped me a lot to not even crave to P anymore until this day.

The process part
- instead of making it easy to access, you have to make it hard to do it. I installed blockers in my pc in the beginning, but i must warn you that if the desire part and the triggers are still strong, no blocker will be enough to stop you. So working in these 2 part are the 80/20.

The reward.
- i changed habits, so the reward of pleasure remained with M and with sex. And started to deal with my emotions, so i didn't have the need to escape, so I just had to bring some happiness in my life (more intimacy with my parents, working in something that i like, that challenges me, working out, eating better, improving my self...)

That all made me change, changed my identity, i don't view myself as an addict. I didn't just achieve x days. I changed my system and my identity. I have confidence that I can maintain that for my entire life because I have a system that backs me up, and an identity that despises P and that blocks me to going back to that old life.

There is the blueprint of my change to quit P of my life and quit that addiction of my life.