Around the Urges for 42 Days

So I started with NoFap exactly 42 days ago and I think the results are quite remarkable.

I would never have described myself as a Porn-addict and I think compared to other people in this forum, my habits where very moderate. I masturbated about once every two days and it would never have been coming to my mind that this is a problem.

My journey started rather by accident than by determination. As I was moving to another place I first lived in a hostel and then in a shared flat with pretty thin walls. So yes, I think it would still have been possible to masturbate at least in the second place, but something just held me back. I remembered a friend of mine frequently talking about his reboots a while ago and so I came to find the NoFap-Webpage.

The first two weeks weren't that hard because I already was used to them from experiences in summer camps and the military service. After that it was very hard for a while because in my mind there was somewhere the conviction that it's almost impossible to do this longer than 2 weeks. I started reading the success stories in here and they were serving me well. Then it went very smooth for a while. Some days ago I had very strong urges but they also went away with time.

After reading all these success stories I had the expectation that I will suddenly be able to walk over water and talk with animals after doing NoFap for a large enough time. This was, surprisingly, not the case. I gained a little bit more confidence I would say, so this is not bad. Also, I think I have about 22.3-34.5 % more energy than before, which is definitely a good thing. Could be a placebo though, but I think it's most likely not.

There was one change that was really making my life better though.

Although I never felt as an addict to porn, I definitely felt addicted to all kind of media, news-pages and especially Youtube. I always wanted to quit these things and actually I succeeded once where I had a very large studies-related pressure on me, but as soon as this pressure went away, I was back to default. I would estimate that I have wasted about 2-3 hours daily on reading the News and watching Youtube-Videos over years and years. When I suddenly had all of this time at my disposal I was able to read more interesting books, exercise more and practice on my guitar. These are all things that are making me waaaaay more happy once done for 5 minutes than binging low-quality information. It may seem a very small step for some, but for me it was a huge leap forward.

Now, resisting to all the urges is far outweighed by this one benefit alone. I'm already looking forward for completing the 90 days challenge. However, I think NoFap is a great motivation for many things but by just doing NoFap and neglecting every other aspect of self-improvement I will likely reach a plateau very soon. A week ago I also decided to quit drinking for a while. Next I will have to improve my social life as this is pretty much non-existing at the time due to my relocation. Now that I have the time and the tools this can be achieved!

Thanks for reading.