Any advice for beginning urges

That's a good first step, I would try to do a couple other things:

1) Exercise, especially if you get an urge
2) Bookmark the emergency tool or know where to find it, just in case (there's also an app)
3) Be sure to keep yourself busy, it'll be extremely hard to do this if you are at home doing nothing
4) Cold showers aren't for everybody, but if you're really serious just know that it will kill an urge

Good luck! I'm just restarting too so I feel you

 

Thanks for your inspiration. I am getting ready to make a reboot commitment myself and find inspiration in your effort!

 

I find that it is helpful to change your relationship to thoughts and urges. Thought suppression makes things much much worse.

So.... when an old porn memory comes to mind, i have a few mental techniques:

I say to myself "This is just my brain looking for a dopamine hit". You are just like Pavlovs dog .... a porn trigger is like the bell...... and the urge for porn is like the dog salivating. If you think about the physiology of it, it weakens the lizard brain. This is sort of cue exposure therapy. Practice being exposed to cues (triggers), but not following them.

Another technique is to ask...."where does this lead?" This causes you to think about the pain and suffering that PMO causes. This is sort of what could be called "Aversion Therapy". By actively thinking of the pain from PMO, your brain starts to fear pmo.

Good luck. Read a lot about addiction theory..... read, read, read. Learn, learn, learn.

"Willpower" is useless. It doesn't work. The key is to retrain your sub-conscious, not try to fight it

 

Willpower is no match for subconcious mind. and porn urges come from subconcious mind. I think the more you resist the more the urges will get bigger. Well I'm trying to change my browsing patterns. I left facebook and other social networking websites because they usually make me feel bad.

 

What helped me immensely was to learn about the negative effects of orgasm and the resulting two week hangover period. I don't know if I've done two weeks without PMO before the time that shows on my counter, but the hangover was palpably real when I knew to pay attention to it. Therefore I switched my center of action from orgasm centric to "getting where I want to be" centric I have had really easy time stopping PMO. My prior attempts all failed in quite early on.

I believe the easiest way to ditch PMO is to ditch O. Then the two earlier letters get left out without much notice. I suggest you take a look at the Karezza thread if you're willing to try.

While no O makes no PMO a cakewalk, one still experiences the flatline and other assorted withdrawal symptoms, so be prepared even if you decide to try what I did.

 

Congratulations on making one day! You made one day a little more awesome. Here's my advice:
1. Stop worrying about the past. You can't change that. You can remember it and use your past as a motivational tool but don't stay there. Guilt can make it easy for you to relapse. Instead, focus on being aware, making one decision at a time, and preparing to learn.
2. In regards to urges, I developed a little acronym R.A.R.E. Here's what it means:

• Relax. The first thing you'll notice with urges is that you get tense. Instead relax mentally, then physically.
• Accept. Accept what's happening.
• Recommit. Recommit to your goal
• Evacuate. Move away from things that trigger urges if you can.

3. You can set up a challenge for 30 days, but I would challenge to focus on it day by day.
4. Start developing a new habit in place of masturbation and/or porn. You can't get rid of a habit without replacing it with another.
5. Work on your foundation during this time: nutrition, exercise, relationships, and your big WHY. You don't want to just focus on the negative. You want to build the positive.

 

I've known that willpower is not as useful in these situations, but you summed it up wonderfully. Kudos!

 

@Mike12999 You have already received a lot of good answers here and i wish you all the best.