What is helping me

I'm writing this as a guide for myself along the path to recovery, and I think that I have learned a thing or two about what works and what isn't helpful in overcoming pmo addiction. I am only at 8 days of nofap at the moment but I feel like asking myself what has helped me so far in abstaining for that long. There are tools I would like to keep in mind that are helping me, and to be aware of potential traps and dangers along the way.

Tools:

• regulated sleep
• exercise
• healthy diet
• reading
• gardening
• cognitive behavior therapy
• reducing stress and anxiety
• playing piano

Traps and dangers:

• video games
• internet surfing
• staying up late
• drinking alcohol
• being complacent or bored
• thinking about pretty women

Something I want to really stress in my helpful tools is the cognitive therapy. That has helped me to put things into a better perspective about things that have made me really anxious in the past, and that that anxiety was a trigger for relapse because I felt overwhelmed by the stress. But now after doing so much work in rearticulating my thoughts in a better way I feel more confident to solve my problems and to let go of things that I can't control. No matter has happened with things that I was worrying about it was never as bad as I was thinking it was, or that it was completely made up in my thoughts in the first place. And that I am more capable of dealing with the problems in my life then I first thought.

Reading also has helped a lot because it has allowed me to fill up my time with something interesting to do, and it feels a lot more meaningful than what I was doing which was playing video games. I think also rather than reading haphazardly, that I can do up a reading list as a kind of goal to work towards. Essentially it would be the same thing as not having a reading list, but having that list I think would be a psychological benefit to have that as a project to focus on. So I could for instance make a list of 5 books on a related topic that I would really like to learn about. In that way also I think it would make my reading and learning adventure more enjoyable by compacting books together that are on the same topic, rather than reading at random, because I would be able to connect together ideas related to each other in the list of books.

Also I have gotten back into playing the piano, and I am focusing on the RCM grade exams. Currently I am working on grade 6 so that is another goal I am focused on working towards.

 

An important concept I also want to stress is the essential way in which I make progress in overcoming pmo addiction or getting worse. Everyone talks about implementing positive habits because they are suppose to help you overcome addiction. In one sense this is true, and in another sense it's false. I can give examples where I am doing something positive but that it was also a trigger for pmo urges, such as going to university but being really anxious about it feeling like I was failing so I relapsed. And I can give an example of where I was in a negative situation but that it was an impetus for thinking in a positive direction and moving in a positive direction. During the covid lockdowns I hated being stuck at home feeling like I was doing nothing, so I decided to join a gym to focus on becoming more fit and I felt better from doing that. Essentially what I mean is the way in which I perceive myself as either moving forwards and upwards in a positive direction, or perceive myself as stuck or going downwards in a negative direction has a necessary effect on my pmo urges or lack of them. It doesn't matter exactly what is happening in my life, but whether I can perceive myself as making progress, or making no progress in my life. Whether I can see opportunity to work with, or whether I am focusing on a negative outcome. This has always been directly relational to whether I made progress in my nofap goals or not.

What are the pmo urges other than the instinct to create life? Your brain doesn't know any better and it thinks that you are copulating with a female to make her pregnant. When you relapse all of that energy is wasted, going into nothingness and you feel that nothingness and despair. No new life is created. You are descending towards death, and maybe this is your brain saying to you that you are infertile because no new life was created from your imaginary injection into a photographic image of a female. What is missing is putting those urges to create new life into something else rather than inseminating a female. In my opinion if I am still stuck addicted to pmo I don't want to get with a woman in the first place before getting my life together. And a part of getting my life together is to figure out how to use my urge to create new life, to use that energy to create other forms in my life such as accomplishing goals, experiencing adventure, taking advantage of opportunities to learn new skills, to grow psychologically as an adult human, to become stronger, wiser, to build up my professional life, and so much more that is the adventure of life. Life itself is the urge to create, to manifest, and that that doesn't need to stay confined to just creating other human beings with a life partner. That will come in time for me, but first I want to actually build up my life and to experience it for what it can be first before taking on the responsibilities of parenthood.

 

You can totally do it yourself. There's probably free online guides on what it is but I started with self help CBT books written by psychologists.

 

Yeah that is a part of it. The main thing is practicing to be aware of what thoughts you're having on a daily basis, and change them then and there. That's the end goal anyway, but its best to start out writing down your thoughts as you become aware of them and to make a habit of refuting the irrational thoughts that cause distress and replace them with a realistic perspective.

I should of added in my post that I have pretty moved on from practicing CBT because it's natural to me now. I don't need to try too hard to think about my thoughts and to refute them. I've moved onto a Nietzschian way of thinking.

 

I have listed as a danger thinking about pretty women. Well I decided to join a dating site, specifically to have sex. If I get into a relationship then great. But I think the reason why my urges are so strong is that they are telling me to have sex with a real woman. Actually joining a dating site was itself a motivation to join the gym yesterday and to lift weights. I felt so fed up in feeling that I was holding myself back by being pedantic about waiting to go to the gym and to go out with women. What the hell am I waiting for? There's only so much time in my life, so I should explore everything and have every kind of experience, within reason anyway. I should be ascending over old boundaries and limitations, and the biggest part of that right now for me is moving past pmo and moving into a new and better way of life.

Pmo is the biggest thing holding me back, and it is currently my number 1 priority to overcome. By still being addicted to pmo I am held back from doing anything. When I relapse all of my energy and drive to act in life is deflated and gone. That sexual energy and tension is the same energy that we use to first imagine how better our lives can be, and second, that is the same energy we use manifest anything at all in life. With that energy depleted and used up on pmo, then I'm not moving really anywhere near my goals.

My life and time is limited. There are only so many times I will have the ability to do certain things, such as having sex with young hot women. I don't mean that to be a triggering thing for anyone, but that is I think what those strong urges actually want to do. I will keep up in nofap but not count sex as breaking the rules.

If my priority is to avoid pain, discomfort, anxiety and problems then I won't have a life. Life necessitates chaos in order for it to come to life and to thrive. Struggle is a rule of existence, and not agreeing to deal with it is to become a slave to it. What are my priorities? They are not to spend the rest of my life as comfortably as possible. I will not feel satisfied in not overcoming preconceived limits and barriers. I will not feel content with myself if I live the rest of my life avoiding pain, which means avoiding acting, avoiding actuating a way of being. If I avoid becoming who I want to be, then I might as well say goodbye right now, go to sleep forever and forget about everything that I could have been. Life is what you make of it, and it is the ones with a victim mentality that turns everything into something to be scorned and hated. The strong in mind use everything in life as a stepping stone on the way upwards to new and grand horizons.

The most important question for myself is what am I going to do today, right now? It surely isn't to play video games or watch porn. I want to live instead. I want to create. I want to feel powerful. Before my evening shift at work I will go to the gym for an hour, and before that I will start reading a new book and look after my garden. Everything starts from here, in making a choice. And choice means thinking about different ways I can go in. Most people I think don't actually make choices, but that they lower themselves to purely automatic habit of following their feelings, and most of the time those feelings are negative such as anxiety and stress. To decide means to make a judgement and to be decisive, with no wavering or doubt in your decision. Epictetus says that all of our control lies in our choices of impressions and judgements, anything outside of that in the external world is nothing. And I choose to center myself around a principle of hammering myself into the best form of a human being that I can possibly do. Come what may, that is out of my control as well.

 

I think Epictetus helped me to let go somewhat of the anxiety that was making me relapse, in seeing how inconsequential it is, and how anything outside of my control isn't what I should be focusing on. What I should focus on are the assessments I can make about myself and about life. That I have everything I need to live my life properly, and that the only thing that is not perfect are unrealistic thoughts I have of myself. Also having read Nietzsche helped me to sustain in this nofap streak so far.

 

I have relapsed. I cannot believe I let this happen, and I really let it happen. The problem is that I was focusing on the possibility of dating women or having sex. And I did some things just now that I feel guilty about. Not only did I pay for a couple of dating apps, but also that I paid for one of those online streamers just now to do an act. The rush I got from just that was almost more than anything I ever had from porn, but it was for a split of an instant and then it was over. I was also seriously considering of paying a prostitute for sex. All of this started about 5 days ago when I was thinking about dating. This is not going to work, and it was a trap.

Normally in the past I might have just taken a break from nofap and from this site from feeling shame of relapse. No, I will not be taking a break from trying to get over my pmo addiction. This ends now. I have had enough of this. I can't live the rest of my life like this. This addiction ruins everything that I want out of life, and it ruins the person that I am, considering doing acts that I would never have thought about before.

I was feeling well this morning when I was at work, and I was considering do a diet journal to track how much physically better I feel from doing a no junk eating challenge, and doing a sort of paleo diet. And I was also feeling even better after the gym from doing leg day. I felt beat but I had a heightened state of mind. The problem started when I was browsing the dating apps when I got home, and I sat there for an hour just browsing them. What in the hell was I doing?

I just had my supper, now I'm getting a cup of tea to relax and calm down. I will continue my post when I have my tea...

How I feel right now is reminiscent of how Vegeta felt when he attained super saiyan form for the first time.

I don't care anymore. I demand from myself absolute commitment to nofap, to never fall into pmo again. I've deleted those dating apps, and I won't give it another thought to go on dates while I am still in nofap training mode. That was a trick of my mind to divert my attention back into pmo. There isn't anything that is going to take my focus away from improving my life and of getting rid of my pmo addiction once and for all. I declare that I WILL get over this now. I just don't care anymore about failing, because it's a natural process of life. I'm not going to be afraid of making mistakes, they will just happen. But I need to learn from them. And what I learned from this relapse is that I cannot let my guard down, and I can't relax too much to fall into the comfortable embrace of pmo.

Usually I feel depressed and tired after relapse. But I have abstained for 20 days until now, and thats a while for my energy to build up. Now I just feel angry, and disappointment. I feel that I should not have relapsed because I know better. There isn't anything more important in my life right now than overcoming this addiction, because while I am still addicted I don't have a life. I've had enough, no more. I don't want to just survive, I want to live! I want to take life by the horns, grasp on tightly and go as fast as possible! No more instant gratification. No more meaningless pleasures. I will turn my life into a life of meaning and discipline.

Overcoming pmo addiction isn't impossible, it's necessary.

I'm not playing anymore games. What I've been playing with and wasting is my life. All of the potential and possibilities that I could have had that will never happen again. Life is short and I only have so much time, so many breaths to take. Mozart by the time that he was my age he created all of his works and died young. What in the hell have I done with my life so far? I'm still living with my parents, and I don't have any kind of tradable skills. I did nothing as a child and had no guidance so I have a lot of catching up to do.

Life is struggle, and every effort made takes a tedious amount of time to accrue, whereas all of that effort can go down the drain in an instant with a relapse. Life, sexual energy, the urge to create, all of this stuff that makes us tick is so precious and fragile. We cannot waste it because our lives goes down the drain when we do this. An undisciplined life is not worth living, it is all shallow, hollow and vain pleasures that lead to no satisfying end. There is no "arriving" when you relapse. There is no meaning in pmo because it's a completely artificial experience created through technology that hijacks our billions of years old nervous system to make us think that we're having sex and procreating when that's not happening in the slightest.

I have written this journal to prevent myself from spiraling into a depressive episode of post relapse. And it is your thoughts that counts in how you feel. There will be some knockback from relapsing just now, but I am keeping those negative feelings to the purely physical effects. What I am feeling and thinking is angry that I haven't gotten over this addiction yet. I am feeling rage, and I am claiming my destiny right now. No more falling for weakness. No more falling for meaninglessness. No more letting myself down. The time is now to get back up. Just get back up! Stop lying down in feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness. You have the power to get back up, you're not weak! You're better than that!

 

Yes I haven't lost much momentum and I just need to continue on with what I should have been doing. My idea behind my last post wasn't some vapid motivational speech for myself. It is a declaration, a commitment, the will to power, a spiritual demand of myself to adhere to what is right and my chosen code of ethics. My fire up speech is a pseudo mantra to concentrate my thoughts and purpose, and that I would come back to read it to remind myself over and over what that purpose is. As with everything on the internet there is always lack of explanation and context, and I didn't mention everything else that I've been doing that is an anti-pmo life, such as having joined the gym and that I plan on going for an hour everyday.

I did use the panic button on the website after my relapse yesterday and it actually brought me to a post that someone made about scheduling all of our time throughout the day so that you don't have time to even contemplate pmo. I think thats pretty useful and that I should do that as well.

 

My word is everything, my friend. Hold me to it! If my word is worthless then I'm worthless. Let it so be! I WILL overcome my pmo addiction and put my life in order, in the way that I wish it were ordered. “…Higher than ‘thou shalt’ (obedient doctrines) stands ‘I will’ (the mythological heroes); higher than ‘I will’ stands ‘I am’ (the gods)." - Nietzsche, The Will to Power

 

I had my last therapy session with my therapist and I talked about my porn addiction. His suggestion was to be mindful of what goes through my mind when I have an urge to relapse, that there is a line of reasoning that goes through your mind when any addict commits to that behaviour. And that you can make a different choice by know what thoughts were convincing you to relapse.