quiting porn but still masturbating can cause brain fog or flatline?

Yes MO is not healthy nor a natural thing for the body to go through. Humans should only ejaculate during sex. That doesn't mean it's ok to have sex when rebooting becuase that's like a heroine addict saying im only guna do half of the heroine for now on. Once the brain becomes addicted to a substance (dopamine, oxytocin, opiods) it needs a lot of time with complete abstinence in order to fully recover. After 1-3 years you should be able to go back to natural sex but you still need to be careful because it can still take you back to the addiction since it's still the same drug you were abusing that caused the addiction in the first place, just not at the same levels.

 

I suppose yes. Masturbation is natural, however will be good to avoid it for a while (just to make the reboot better).

 

From what I've learned, between the Porn and the fapping, the porn is the one you should definitely avoid for better brain health. As far as fapping is concerned, I say as long as you don't do it real often (trying to keep it down to weekends myself), I think you'll start to recover. Though ultimately you should be abstinent about it, because after you ejectulate, your body will use focus the blood to replenish your lost seed, taking the bloodflow away from the brain.

 

Yes, it could cause these. The reason is that M and O will activate at some degree the same brain pathways associated to your addiction. Of course, it depends on how addicted you are and what kind of behaviors you have associated to that addiction (M and O are naturally associated to P). I think most guys here would tell you that the symptoms are significantly milder than full PMO. Still, it might worth abstaining completely from all sexual activity for some amount of time. If you choose to include MO, you may find that your recovery can take longer.

The question of 'natural' and 'unnatural' is not particularly important here (everything can be considered natural - being part of nature). Porn is not more "unnatural" than a knife is... in terms of cultural evolution and technology. Of course, porn has elements which we consider 'artificial', in the sense that our biology has not been adapted to deal with these. Masturbation itself cannot be considered "unnatural" in the same sense. Animals do it too. Would you consider animal behavior as unnatural?

But as @Hellboy222 said, given the addiction, all sexual stimulation can be counter productive.

This is a difficult point. Firstly, I don't think 1-3 years is a reasonable estimate, even for people which are heavily addicted. In fact, I could imagine that being abstinent for such a long period of time getting counter productive in terms of your emotional and sexual health.

However, I agree that for most addictions there's plenty of evidence that suggest a long-term memory of the behaviors, which can always act as triggers for relapsing back to the addiction. It seems though that people who have been abstinent for a long period (>3 - 6 months typically), appear to be able to go back to a healthy sexual life. The difference with other addictions, such as substance addictions, is that sex is a natural behavior that you cannot (and don't want to) eradicate. I believe the reason why people are able to adjust to a healthy sexual life has to do with the approach in sex, and the reasons behind their behavior, rather than the behavior itself (this is what makes an addict, an addict).