Rules without any consequences are useless. Rules with lenient or weak consequences are to be abused/taken advantage of. Only rules with severe and harsh consequences are respected and followed by the masses. When you decide to NoFap, you are essentially placing a rule/law on your yourself to not watch porn and masturbate. With societal rules, you have the government/police enforcing it, so it is out of your power to choose what the consequences are. Therefore, you respect these rules according to the severity of the consequences that are set in place. You wouldn’t rob a bank or kill someone because you would end up in prison. But you might speed, because the worst that can happen is a ticket. With personal rules like NoFap, you are the enforcer of your own rules and the abuser. This is why you keep failing NoFap. The consequences or the lack there of, are all decided by you! So you can always have the freedom to fap without any consequences whenever it is convenient for you. This is why you relapse. Without any strict/serious consequences that triggers fear, you are always bound to fail and relapse. This is why back when religion was forced upon the population and most people actually believed in a God/religion/existence of hell; they adhered to moral rules that the government/police aren’t able to enforce effectively as God/religion (the all seeing eye). Sins such as masturbation, gluttony and infidelity were known long ago to be destructive to the human mind, body and soul. A society with too many immoral people often results in an unhealthy and destructive society. So these immoral acts were considered sins to be condemned and avoided in a religious society. One must not sin and repent when they do. People adhered to these religious rules to satisfy God and to avoid the most terrifying consequence of all, Hell.
TLDR: You keep failing because the immediate reward from fapping outweighs the immediate consequences, if any at all. You allow yourself to fap and get away with it without any sort of punishment. Therefore, it is more advantageous to your PMO addicted brain to fap and get the quick easy dopamine rush than to NoFap and stay horny/bored.
It’s a solid idea but there’s got to be more to it. First, many porn addicts conclude there are extreme negative consequences from porn use, but still struggle to abstain. Mental health is a big one. A friend of mine just today was telling me how he learned there are so many trafficked women coerced into porn, it’s impossible to consume without creating the demand for more which he saw as making him complicit in the rape and sustained abuse of women. Despite these negative consequences, some guys still use. Maybe it’s too abstract, and maybe we’re too permissive as a whole. One reason most of us don’t steal, even when it’s easy, is because it’s drilled into us from an early age that stealing is wrong, whereas porn is even encouraged in some contexts for most. Another is easy access. If theft were as simple as searching in your phone, I’m 100% certain there’d be a lot more thieving going on. Oh sure, many of us wouldn’t go straight to stealing a trillion dollars, but we’d take a $20 to $100 here and there, to help with the bills, buy a nice steak dinner every once in a while, and we’d slowly justify it in our minds until we were using other people’s hard-earned money as our personal bank account. You’re absolutely correct, lack of immediate, perceived negative consequences is a huge contributor to addiction, but I’ve known too many addicts who believed porn was undoing them and still struggled to stop. I am one. The reasons why we use are many, and complex.
In some cities in the US, shoplifting is easy now. Many stores like Walmart and Walgreens has abandoned cities like Chicago because of theft. When crime goes unpunished, there is no point of doing business. And the criminals take advantage. Also a lot of people use the self check out and commit petty theft by not scanning every item. If people can finesse the system and get away with it, they will. People need to held accountable otherwise the problem will continue to get worse. Just like we need to be held accountable with our addictions. Well, we struggle to stop because it has became an addiction just like an alcoholic or a smoker. They are also very aware of their problem. Alcoholics and smokers might be victims of mental illness too but they put their health and longevity on the line for it and that seems to be worth it for them to stop. I think there should be a strong personal motivator to stop an addiction if there isn’t some form of punishment for it. But it seems like the fear of punishment and pain is the strongest motivator there is. And Yes, I agree it is hard to quit because our media encourages this horrible habit and say it’s okay but I think they’re getting paid to say so by the porn industry. And everyone is addicted so we try to justify it and say it’s a healthy habit. In contrast, Korea banned porn and discourages it, I don’t know if that benefitted them or if there is still a fapping problem there as a result. But the West will never do such a thing so we must take matters in our own hands to ban it from our lives just like a smoker should ban cigarettes from his life (even though it’s easily accessible like porn), otherwise it becomes a chronic problem and we will be stuck trying to beat this addiction for life.
I follow a lot of rules that have no enforcement mechanism - such as manners, common courtesy, and decency. I'm on a 40+ day streak. How are you doing?
Manners don’t need enforcement, because why would you need enforcement for that? You don’t need enforcement to do alot of things. It’s only when things become problematic or have the potential to be problematic that they require enforcement. Rules are placed and enforced so people don’t do something bad that they otherwise would if there weren’t any.
Original Poster, you're not getting consequences from this addiction? In my case there's many consequences when I fail. I noticed theirs a period where I'm high afterwards, but the come down will make me feel the worst. This comes generally 2 days after the act and will last for up to 3 days or more. During the comedown I'm moody, irritable, I have insomnia, I'm impulsive with junk food, I have a bad migraine, my digestion is off quite a bit, I will feel anxious, heart palpitations, sometimes sweat and get nauseous. When I'm sober, it's opposite, my mood is greatly enhanced and I'm more optimistic, I'm sleeping better, I can poo properly, there's no aches or pains, I'm calm and collected.
Not really, I just keep fapping cause it was a habit and I was bored. But the more I do it, the more extreme porn I needed and I was starting to become aware of what it was doing to me. I felt bad for the porn I watched and it was because I was fapping to porn too much, which desensitized my brain.
I'm not sure I agree with this. A lot of people I've spoken to (and myself too) suffer immediate consequences if we PMO, or at least PMO too much in a certain time frame. Brain fog, general apathy/listlessness, muscle weakness, headaches, irritability/anxiety are all symptoms I personally experience within 24 hours of relapsing.
Well, y’all keep doing it despite those immediate consequences so it can’t be that bad. If the consequences were bad enough, you wouldn’t be so inclined to do it again.
Uhhh, you do know that you're posting on a site for people addicted to porn right? You do realise that recovering addicts are absolutely aware of negative consequences and relapse anyway because they are addicts?
The idea behind this post was that the negative consequences aren’t bad enough to stop y’all from doing it so you keep doing it. It’s not about awareness. I am telling people that you need to punish yourself for a bad habit instead of not doing anything about it and letting it slide like nothing happened. Just like criminals needing to be punished accordingly to the crime because if the consequences are not serious and they get away with it, they’ll just go out committing the same crime again.
The negative consequences absolutely are bad enough. Beyond the short term ones I mentioned you can become so addicted to PMO that you become impotent. You can escalate to full-blown sex addiction and that brings with it lots of other problems. Even if those two things don't happen (as is the case for me) I still spend weeks not living my best life because of constant brain fog, mood swings, etc. It absolutely is about awareness too - heroin addicts are well aware that every time they shoot up it could kill them, but they still do it because their brain has literally altered on a physical level so they struggle to override the impulse. The exact same is true of PMO addiction with the obvious exception being that PMO won't kill you (although excessive masturbation can). I appreciate what you're saying but your outlook is simplistic. Addiction can be so powerful that even if you did punish yourself after a failure, it still wouldnt stop you from doing it again. You're approaching this from a hyperrational viewpoint that doesn't work in the real world. Addicts are not exactly known for rational behavior after all.
I don't think punishment really works for addiction. That's why the world has moved away from punishing drug addicts with jail time toward a treatment-based model.
