1 Year Of Monk Mode – The Phoenix Has Risen

Hi fellow fapstonauts,

it's a big day for me today, a day I couldn't even dreamed of not so long ago. A year has passed since I've risen out of 25 years long addiction to make the first step on the road to permanent recovery and what a journey it has been so far. I'm not gonna bore you with obstacles I encountered along the way (you can read more about them in my journal if you wish to do so), but if I had to summarize the path in one sentence, I'd describe it as a walk out of hell towards normality.

You can't walk through a fire and expect not to get burned and not being greeted by the daemons from your past and present. There is no way around it, but as Winston Churchill has put it:"If you're going through hell, keep going," and you'll get out of it eventually. As the phoenix, the old you has to dance and die in the nest of fire in order to allow a new you to arise from the ashes, tested and purified by the flames of pain. This was my first lesson learned: Expect and accept the suffering in advance well before you step on your path to recovery. Most life changes are uncomfortable, but breaking out of addiction means experiencing hell.

The second most important task I can think of is to look at and honesty evaluate your current life, identify what has been going so wrong that you need to numb your emotions and pain with addiction and start addressing it alongside abstention. Addiction expert Gabor Mate wrote: "Don't ask why addiction, ask why the pain... Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. The effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”

There is no shame in seeking professional help If you have troubles finding the root causes of your ills. Reaching out and asking for help is not a sign of weakness, on the contrary, it's an act of strength and bravery. My problem has been clinical depression and social anxiety originating from long childhood trauma. Your cause might be different. I tried to break out of my addiction cycle countless times before, but I kept relapsing and relapsing until I finally started addresing underlying wounds covered by my binge PMO addiction. It's crucial not to skip this step. Celibacy only uncovers underlying issue(s) allowing pain to resurface. You have to take care of »your wound(s)« or built-up stress and pain will become to much to bare and you will relapse eventually. I learned this the hard way in 2018 when I relapsed after 6 months of abstention.

The third step has to be a mixture of determination, discipline and perseverance.

Determination that PMO is off the table for good. If you can't convince yourself that you're done with addiction for life and truly believe it, don't even bother trying, as your recovery will end up in ashes. I don't want to sound rude, but it's the truth. I'm a living proof where self-dellusion can bring you. I lied to myself for 2 decades, wasting half of my life, before I truly admited that I'm in a deep shithole in a desperate need to stop digging and start climbing out of the hole I digged for myself no matter what.

Once you have identified the reasons behind your addiction and established your recovery plan which addresses your issue(s), you will have to develop self-discipline to follow the program.

The plan has to be followed on daily basis as new habits and changes in thought patterns can only form through repetition, repetition, repetition. This is where perseverance comes into play. It's easy to follow your program when you're OK, but it's doing the right things on the days when you feel like shit, that counts the most. You have a headache and you haven't slept for 2 days? Tough luck, you're gonna go under that cold shower and hit the gym because your recovery plan says so... this is how your recovery mindset should look like. Do the right things first, self-pitty later if you must.

The last note is on how we perceive and react to outer events. Wayne Dyer used to say: "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change," and Einstein wrote pretty much the same with different words:"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." The point I'm trying to make here is that how we perceive and react to our own thoughts matters a lot. Locking yourself into ruminations will do you no good. If you are a glass half empty guy or a girl as many of as addicts are, you need to reprogram your brain on becoming a person who can see something good in everything. Bad experiences can often be the best teachers if you let them teach you. The other thing I'd like to mention is the importance of making peace with your past (letting go). Past is the past, you can't change it, future is uncertain, so all we really have is a present moment. Try to focus your attention on the tasks at hand, rather than ruminating over your past negative experiences, multiplying them in your head and projecting them into the future. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations that you can only control your own thoughts and actions, so there is no point in worrying about anything else. As long as you do your best in a given moment, you should feel content with yourself regardless of the outcome. Be it a success or a failure. Life with it's ups and downs happens to us. We have very little to no control over how our life will turn out to be. "If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans" - Woody Allen. Our lives are profoundly informed by chance and randomness, everything from our relationships, job success, school grades to health are less predictable than we'd like to believe. You can do everything right and your life could still turn to shit. Randomness is the fact of life, so all we can do is to try giving our best in a given situation and learn how to detach our emotions from the events outside of our control and outcomes as much as possible. That's very hard to do and demands constant practice, but it is the only way to find some peace of mind in constantly changing world and society. Why is achieving emotional balance so important? Because a buildup stress and an emotional instability are the two main reasons why people relapse in the times of hardship. Permanent recovery is not compatible with emotional instability. Shit happens, but it's up to you how you react to it.

That's about all I wanted to write about. If you have any additional questions feel free to ask or visit my journal. Best of luck to all of you who have decided to break out of addiction cycle. Now is great time to do it. For you already on the journey, just hold on, it gets better every single moment, even if you don't feel like it right now. Don't get overwhelmed by the mountain you need to climb. Keep climbing one step at the time. It doesn't matter how slow you progress or how many times you stumble. As long as you keep picking yourself up and continue walking, you'll get on the mountain top and the view will be well worth the efforts. The reward is not in gaining some kind of super powers, but in becoming normal, emotionaly balanced and addiction free man/woman you deserve to be. The better version of yourself. When difficult times come remember these words: "A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trails" - Seneca. You are diamond in the rough, precious, beautiful and unbreakable, just waiting to get polished so You can shine your light on the world. Much love to you all and make 2020 your best year yet!

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I have to disagree. I'm not talking about majority of population (88-92 %) who has no problems with occasional use of porn out of curiosity or to spice up their sex lives here. I have in mind unfortunate 8-12 % group who gets hooked to PMO. This percentage is pretty much universal across the addiction board. Give postoperative patients morphine for 3 months to relieve their physical pain and only 8 % of them will develop psychological dependence. Send a large mixed group of people to gamble in a casino for 3 weeks and you'll see 10 % of them struggle with addictive compulsive behavior after completion of the study. Similar numbers came out with alcohol and shopping. I have no problems with the use of porn or masturbation per se, problematic is our need to develop compulsive behaviour around it. That's why dr. Gabon Mate says "don't ask why addiction, ask why the pain". In other words what is driving someone to develop addiction in the first place. Primary goal for someone who has developed compulsive PMO dependency is not to satisfy sexual urge but to escape from or numb some kind of inner tension or pain. As I've said we're talking about 8-12 % unlucky group here, not the general population. Majority of people doesn't have the need to get hooked. Compulsive PMO was just our drug of choice, a comfort blanket to self-medicate our ills. That's why you have to dig deep to identify and address the underlying issues if you belong in that unfortunate group who developed addictive compulsive behaviour or substance abuse. Abstinence alone just won't cut it.

 

Hi PoW, I'm glad you find my journal useful. My symptoms have improved considerably. Low energy is a thing of the past and depression/anxiety wise things have improved as well. I'm still not where I want to be regarding self-discipline and more stable balanced mental state, but I try improving on that on daily basis.

 

What is DR/DP?

 

Anhedonia for me is not being able to experience any pleasure from any activity.
I didn't experience depersonalization/derealization. On the contrary. I've experienced some pretty deep life realizations. One would be that everything is connected and that we play only small part in the web of life, so there is no need to take own own lives too seriously. The other would be accepting two unavoidable facts of life: suffering and mortality. The end result is always the same - death, so why stress about it?

 

Yeah pretty much. I've established daily routines that keep me going. I've become so conditioned over time that I don't have to rely on willpower to do them anymore. I just do them, no matter the physical or mental state I'm in in at the given moment. These routines usually uplift my mood a bit during a day and make me more mentally balanced. My current routine is doing 5 Tibetan rites and 2 cycles of Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutation) after waking up followed by 8 min of cold shower. I go for an 60-90 min walk/run in the forest (and do some Wim Hof breathing on the way) when I come from work (I used to go cycling uphill instead but it's too cold now) and do 3 free weightlifting sessions + stretching/pranayama breathing in the evening during the week (mon, wed, fri). I also started to do 50-100 push ups on the days when I don't do weightlifting as I find it to be a quick mood lifter. I just get on the floor every hour or so when I'm at work and do 10 to 20 pushups. Male coworkers look me a bit strange, but I don't care. I prefer being a bit of a weirdo compared to being "normal weak Bierbauch man" nearing his 40s. For me the easiest way to take control over my own mind is to take control over my body. I found out that vigorous exercise is a training of mind more than anything else. For example when you cycle uphill and part of your mind starts screaming at you "just stop man, don't be crazy, stop inflicting this meaningless pain on yourself" you have two choices, either listening to your brain, accept defeat and turn around or say to it: "f... off do what you've been told to do", and carry on to the hill top. The same could be said for taking cold showers. If you repeat these body-mind exercises on daily basis, over time your brain stops negotiating with you and starts executing your commands without question. Buddha said: "Rule your mind or it will rule you." I needed a year to truly understand what he meant by it.

 

I followed Wim Hof method. It was not hard because I started doing it in the summer. I basically cycled uphill or went for a run for an hour to heat my body, did 3x30 sets/breaths of Wim Hof breathing technic when I got home and entered cold shower starting with my feet and slowly progressing upwards towards the head. This way I could be under a cold shower up to 20 minutes. But now in winter time when temp are below freezing and my house is at 15C in the morning I tend to do it more quickly and in the morning. I still start with Wim Hof breathing and from bottom up (palms and feet first followed by arms and legs) but I speed it up. I found out that 8 min is perfect as going beyond that time causes slight hypothermia and I get more cold prone.

Nothing special. I try to eat healthy non processed food.
Supplements wise I only take omega3 (large spoon of fish oil), vitamin B complex, Zn and Mg. I also drink cow milk (Ca) and eat bananas for K on daily basis and drink 50g milk protein shake on days I do weights.

No, this is quite easy training regime. I used to target 3x running + 3x cycling uphill + 3x weightlifting a week during my first 6 months of abstention. Now that was too much.
Since I started doing 15-20 min stretching after waking up (5 Tibetan rites + 2x sun salutation) and whole body dynamic stretching immediately after every weightlifting session I get no muscle fever anymore.

Sunday is when I do nothing. I also consider days when I only walk in the forest an active rest days. I basically listen to my body. If my legs feel heavy or have any ache, I walk, if not, I run. The most recent study has men walking 15-18km per day and women 12-15. So walking 8K a day should hardy be considered a workout. More like an easy going day.

I do have rest week every 2 months when I only do stretching/yoga, easy walking or swimming.