Nofap is a lie

There is something to be said about meditation, even though I presented the counter I do enjoy practicing what your talking about, it helped me immensely when dealing with my fears, I grew past how I use to feel and now it all looks so small from my current pov. It took a lot of work to get over trauma and self limiting beliefs from childhood onward.

 

When you go to the gym you count your reps to measure your progress. If you bicep curl 7 reps, then the following week 8 and then the following week 9, you know that you are making progress. However if you curl 7 reps on week 1, and then 6 on week 2 you can be sure that you are not making progress. Counting days is a method of measuring recovery.

Another example, time is a man made concept. Clocks were designed by us to measure the minutes, hours, days, months, years of our existence. Can you imagine if we didn't bother to measure time? Don't get me wrong, there are pros and cons to counting days, but for those of us who want to understand and measure our recovery, or who are subject to a longer recovery than usual - it is simply an additional aid. Not all of us count days out of ego.

 

But that's only your opinion and from your perspective. It's not a fact.

 

But I think this is the point - day counting can't be a 'lie' if its based on your opinion.

Say there is a chocolate cake, and we both eat a slice. I then ask you what you thought of the taste. You respond: it tasted amazing. I then point at you and call you a liar and say that the cake tasted like absolute dog s**t. Me calling you a liar doesn't mean that the cake really did taste like s**t. That is my opinion.

Counting your days whilst doing NoFap is subjective. Whether it is good, bad, positive, negative, amazing or cr*p is all down to individual opinion. You might think Nike trainers are better than adidas trainers. Or that Lamborghini is better than Ferrari. It all comes down to your personal experience and what you personally prefer. By saying day counting is a lie without any form of measurement other than your own personal experience, makes your post a personal viewpoint without any facts. And do you know what - that is ok. The same can even be said for me, I have no way of proving that day counting should be used by everybody and that is ok.

What is being pointed out here is that you are addressing only one side of the NoFap coin, your own. It would be good to hear your own experience with day counting, or why exactly you believe it is a lie.

 

Meaning comes in many flavors shapes and sizes what is a counter, some would say it's a means of counting days time keeping, some would say it symbolizes effort and struggle, each number holding inside it what that person went through, the journey and the destination.
this isn't invalidating your premise, what your saying it's to help not be myopic in understanding.

 

Again, what you're saying here does not hold much weight simply because it relates to only one individual, who also has not been succesful in rebooting. Find me 10 posts that relate to recovered rebooters that decided not to count their days and ill raise an eyebrow. It is worth pointing out that the very site you are using to send your message advocates the use of a day counter while rebooting.

Below are 6 recovery stories from successful rebooters that decided to day count:

1 - 12 months - https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/7zmzs6/out_of_a_300_day_flatline_ask_me_anything/
2 - 16 months - https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/2cg8in/27_year_cured_after_two_year_flatline_severe_ed/
3 - 18 months - https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/2rz2bl/very_long_flatline/
4 - 23 months - https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/d53vlt/just_came_out_of_a_2_year_long_flatline/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Semenretention/comments/e6anqd/25_years_my_experience_and_benefits/
5 - 24 months - https://www.reddit.com/r/Semenretention/comments/famhte/lessons_learned_from_a_one_year_pursuit_of/
6 - 27 months -https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/csqkbw/yes_end_of_27mo_flatline_826_days/

I am simply saying that if you decide to push not counting days, then it does help to provide references from those who have been successful AND not counted.

Never to gloat, but I have been recovering for 800+ days from an addiction that spans across 20 years. In short I have been around the NoFap block and a lot of what you are suggesting counteracts good recovery. If you hit 600 days of real recovery and you are still suffering, something else is potentially wrong.

Can you give any advice for keeping a level peace of mind while suffering addiction?

 

As far as counting days goes, I think we can all agree that it isn't necessarily an indication of progress. My longest "streak" was around a year and a half ago now. However, I was severely lacking in what I needed for long term success and was likely to fail even if I went 100 more days.

 

I don't quite understand why you are saying NoFap is a lie. Are the benefits from avoiding porn a lie? Or are you just criticizing the methods used to do so?

 

Yeah I can understand this. I guess the assumption would be that IF you are doing NoFap correctly, and following the guidelines, counting days can be a reliable measuring method for progress. Again only if you are actually sticking to the guidelines of no PMO. If you are doing otherwise then yeah, counting days is pretty useless.

As @Marcus Aurelius Pilled said, I don't quite understand the benefit of saying NoFap is a lie, on the actual NoFap forum. Is it a troll or?

 

What @Quezatolah is trying to say is that(correct me if I am wrong @Quezatolah) is that stop focusing on the number of days of Nofap, and start focusing more on the good, lifechanging habits that we do on this nofap journey. The day counter indeed shows a part of our progress but consider it to be just superficial, the real progress is the 'paradigm shift'
in our thought process towards being great human beings. Set up the day counter and just forget about it, instead of thinking "How can I not masturbate", start "How can I meditate" or any other good habit that you want to follow. This forum is a wonderful support system but if we use it as a tool or completely rely on it, we won't understand our own true potential.
Focus on the process to reach the goal, instead of focusing on the goal.
-James Clear(Atomic Habits)

 

I think the number of people who rely on their counter as their main source of progress is quite small.

You just have to look at the success stories across the internet to see the incredibly varied number of days people have done before declaring themselves successful. Other sources of measures include how they feel physically, mentally, the changes in their life, and to be honest, I believe that's what most Nofappers will do. They just use the counter to prove to themselves (maybe for accountability purposes, to others too), that they can go a long period of time without it.

But I believe most of us are looking at other factors primarily, and once we hit our own personal day targets, we'll move on, stop counting (maybe even before that), and move onto the next stage of our development (maybe returning to the forums to help others, pass on advice).