Trying to remove PORN from my life

hey man, get an accountability partner you can message back in forth daily, definitely helps bro jam.
cheers!

 

Hey man, good luck with the journey. I found that it was only after many attempts and failures that It really hit home with regards to the seriousness of the problem. So you may relapse but use the strength of the nofap community to help u get through the hard days....because they will come

 

Hi icognito, you have come to the right place. The description you give of your problem is quite similar to that most of us would give at the beginning of quitting porn. You need to understand your problem. Let me say that you did not get here in one day so do not expect to get clean in one day. Those who are seriously committed report good results in between 1 and 3 months. "Good results" are not just quitting porn abuse, but quitting it and not feeling like you are going to lose your mind. That "losing you mind" feeling is withdrawals, but, I'll come back to that--by the time you get to "quit" you will be able to write poems about withdrawals.

You mentioned the evolution of your taste in porn. Very common experience for a porn addict. That and erectile dysfunction are the two main reasons I see guys here quitting porn. By the way, once you get educated, you will see your taste in porn did not "evolve"; what happened is that your brain's reward center wiring got desensitized to the vanilla porn you started out on. As a result you needed newer weirder more difficult to find imagery to trigger the reward. Most guys quitting report that evolution; don't hold it against yourself personally, just your brain's way of getting a dopamine fix.

I say three things, and I have said them so much the guys here are tired of hearing it, but here goes: get educated, get tools, learn to love withdrawals.

Let's start with the education. By the way--this is going to take a minute, so take some time to get comfortable. Turn off the TV, find a quiet place, maybe get yourself a cup of tea or coffee. You took years to get here, you won't get clean for at least a month, and you will greatly benefit by the approximate one hour of education I am about to direct you to take in. Take some time to understand your problem or you will never beat it, but if you understand it your odds of beating it go up 100 times.

http://www.nofap.org/forum/showthread.php?2402-Get-educated-get-tools-and-learn-to-love-withdrawals

In the above link, first page, first link, in the Gary Wilson TED talk about porn addiction. Watch it, take notes, watch it again. You see, a porn addict has unconsciously rewired his brain's reward center by prolonged continuous exposure to porn. You need to think of yourself as a porn "user". The first question in quitting is not "how do I quit?" A lot of guys come here and ask that question, and they fail. The right question is "why do I use?" That is the question that, in answering, will define your problem, and in defining your problem you can begin to work out a solution.

You and I use porn because it is the button we push to get a dopamine release in our head. Our problem, my friend, is not below the belt, but above it; in our brain, specifically in our brain's chemical reward center. That reward center evolved to reward sexual thoughts, to encourage reproduction. Problem is that it evolved before we had High Speed Internet Porn. HSIP is highly addictive. Why? Our brain's reward center cannot distinguish between porn and thought of actual sex. It rewards both equally. Eventually, we come to prefer porn over actual sex because it is easily available, requires no effort, and offers something our hunter-gatherer brains really dig: the opportunity to search for something new and different. That is why we can spend hours clicking on thumbnails until we find the one we decide we are going to allow us to trigger on--it's not just the sexual thrill we find fascinating, it is the hunt
for the thrill that eventually leads to the addiction. That's the education.

Next, get tools. Don't quit porn passively. Quit it aggressively. Find technology to put between yourself and your problem. A non addict will tell you "just stop" or "get off the internet". That advice, by the way, will work, it just is not very pragmatic in this world. Get porn blockers, as in immediately, as in today. Put obstacles between you and porn. Get them on your computer. Most guys swear by K9. Get them on your smart phone, if you have one, and if you cannot find a blocker, trade your smart phone in for a dumb phone. Consciously, right now, make some decisions and do some things to make it hard if not impossible to access porn. True, you can get around anything, but that it not the point. The point is that you have to bring your dopamine levels down to beat this, and that means not pushing the porn button. Blockers will not stop us from accessing porn, but they will slow you down, give you a moment to remind yourself that you are quitting and why.

There are other tools too. I use this site to read and write. It helps. You might try it. The main thing, don't try and quit in ignorance and use the tools you can to help you quit. Think of quitting porn as preparing to run a marathon. You would not go out and run a marathon. You would prepare for it, practice, find out what the best shoes and running gear it, find the route, drive it, then walk it, then jog it, then run it, then race it.

Lastly withdrawals. Withdrawals suck. By the time you get to where you are at, withdrawals are what is preventing your from quitting easily. Dopamine is why we watch porn in the first place, so when we deprive ourselves of that fix our dopamine soaked brains do not like it at all. Your reward center is going to punish you when you quit pushing that porn button, so be aware of that. It is going to hurt.

An excellent article on porn withdrawals can be found here.

http://yourbrainonporn.com/what-does-withdrawal-from-porn-look-like

Lastly, it is OK to laugh at yourself. I laugh at the ridiculousness of becoming porn addicted all the time. The good news is it can be overcome.

I am almost 8 months free myself.

I hope this helps. Good luck on your journey.

 

Wow very well put my friend. I agree with you 100% I too am giving up a long time addiction it's very hard to say the least. I found myself watching types of porn that would have otherwise disgusted me and still does . I feel as though I was almost numb to the normal porn and found myself watching the extremely bizarre stuff just to see it . I was way out of control but kept on returning to it as a means of escape and comfort since that's what I was using to get away from reality and it became a familiar thing to do almost a routine . After awhile the porn wouldn quite do enough so I started with online cyber sex which only added fuel to the fire

 

dont worry we're all here for you

 

Hi Jce80. Yep, we are victims of our own sexual reward center, in the brain. A lot of us start out on vanilla porn and progress to harder, weirder, stuff. If you have studied the problem you know a lot of that has to do with us wanting to experience the new and the novel. There is a scientific explanation for that. If you have a change google the "Coolidge effect." It explains why, sexually, keeping what we have can grow uninteresting to some of us. I am lucky, I never progressed to online cyber sex, which provides the most novelty of just about anything online and I am sure is highly addictive.

Good luck on your journey.

 

Yes that's it keep fighting and set off for your goal bro you can make it

 

Keep going, porn is not an option. I like that you state "I won't do it." That is what we have to tell ourselves. I see too many guys negotiating with this problem when they should simply deny themselves from doing it. Stay strong. Porn is worthless, so you are giving up nothing when you give it up.

Good luck on your journey.

 

Hi incognitomode, let me stress that you must lower your dopamine levels back. You can quit P and you can quit MO and you can quit PMO, but if you are allowing hypersexualized thoughts to run around in there you are still walking around high on dopamine, and that equates with torturing yourself. You brain has been a high speed dopamine pump for years, so you need to slow those thoughts down. I know, easy to say, harder to do. Most of the literature says the relapses don't put us back to square one, so don't kill yourself over that, but do yourself a favor and try to keep sexual thoughts out of your head for at least 30 days. Is that possible to do? No, you cannot actually keep all sexual thoughts out, but by trying to I promise you you will be lowering your dopamine levels, and with that, the withdrawals of dopamine deprivation lessen.

Good luck on your journey.

PS. Thanks for posting, reading posts and replying are part of my recovery, so thanks.

 

You can do it, but you have to know all the tricks that part of the brain that loves dopamine will play on you to get it. This includes withdrawals and the binge/chaser effect, both of which it looks like you have experienced. There is a reason we love dopamine--best brain drug in the world. You can get back to "balanced" but balanced is not "high", and we love high. I think if you can get 30 days clean you will find that going on becomes significantly easier, but you must expect to suffer before you get there. What I am trying to tell you is that you need to plan on hurting for the next 30 days, expect it, want it. Don't start this hoping the pain will go away and asking how long it will go on for. For me, quitting meant I essentially had to tell myself that if this was the pain I had to live with to quit porn, I was willing to feel it every single day of my life, if feeling it meant giving up porn. It will go away, but when quitting you have to something that is difficult; you have to want the pain of withdrawals more than the dopamine high porn is going to give you. I said "want it more" not "like it more."

Good luck on your journey.