30 Day Goodness Integration

Hey all!

Today is my 29th day and tomorrow is my 30th. I wanted to post tonight because it's New Year's Eve and it feels significant to write my first success story before the turn of the calendar year.

Pretty much I've been abstinent for a good 29 days. This isn't my longest streak; I've had multiple 100-day streaks in the past. I struggled though, for various reasons, and had long relapses. This time, I've already been through a lot of the sticky parts of porn and am not dealing with things like curiosity, or thinking that maybe porn from a women's perspective is less damaging than porn from a man's perspective, and I'm not thinking about how my friends still watch porn and seem to have decent lives. I know better now after having followed all of these avenues back into active use of porn.

Pretty much how this reboot period has gone for me is extreme horniness, mental clarity, less horniness, lots of energy and motivation, increased happiness, and a lot of working on myself internally. It's been a good period.

For a while it was like, BAM, women are sexy. When I was watching porn I wasn't attracted to real women. I never thought of them in any sort of way, romantic or sexual, since porn was my substitute sexual partner, and I was focused on "her". For a while, it was the stand-in for a real woman, and it worked. But then it got stale and I was incapable of feeling pleasure and getting it up to porn so I quit. And after I quit women became sexy, overwhelmingly so, but I was mostly looking at their body parts and reducing them to toys for my sexual thirst. As time has progressed, I've become less and less of an objectifier and more of an appreciator. Now I see attractive women and I don't look directly at their asses; I say "oh cool" and maybe think about whether or not I would approach them. In other words, I'm not just concerned about their sexual body parts.

But I am still horny. As I write this, I am horny. I think the biggest thing that I've realized is that I'm an addict all around. There are people who can do things that produce dopamine sparingly/without great frequency, and they're not easily addicted. I, on the other hand, can't do something that feels good in my brain without getting hooked and trying to do it all the time in a very disordered way. So I cannot masturbate. Otherwise, I will be doing it every day and I'll eventually have to escalate the behavior to get the same amount of pleasure. I don't want to be a slave to pleasure. I don't want to be hooked on anything except for like, success. Not even that. So even though I am horny, I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm learning also that horniness is completely antithetical to getting sex. Like if you're already in a relationship or in a sexual partnership or something, then horniness is great. But when you're meeting women horniness is possibly the worst card you can play and will get you disqualified immediately. At least for most of us with most girls. So it sucks that I have these strong feelings that are mostly useless to me. It's the only thing like that. It's weird. But usually, something triggers the horniness, and right now? I have a hairpin trigger.

But yeah, NoFap is great. I'm growing a lot and I feel like I'm being re-sensitized to life. Feeling happy again after not feeling genuinely happy since my last long streak. I definitely see the difference in life. This has been my Goodness Integration. I needed to write out the benefits that I'm experiencing so that I could see or myself how good I'm doing and how much of a positive force NoFap is in my life. Because for me, "cause and effect" is murky. But there are certain things I can attribute to giving up porn since other people do as well, and my previous experiences back it up, too.

Happy New Year all. And to all a good night.