Did NoFap cure your depression?

If you have abused your system with porn and excessive masturbation, it will take a lot of time to heal. Hang in there mate.

 

I already did. I'm too weak for therapy at the moment, but I hope I'll start the next month or so. And I agree with you, nofap is not a magic pill that can solve all your problems. Being 8 months 'hardmode' I already see lots of benefits like noticable reduced social anxiety, higher self-esteem, much better connection with myself, etc. and it is very valuable experience. One of the reasons that keeps me from relapsing is curiosity where this journey will finally lead me. But I also understood that it will take long time to heal, few years maybe and that I need to face reality and try better understand myself and my underlying psychological problems. The porn was just escape from them for years. So in my case nofap solely won't cure my depression, but it helps me to move towards right direction.

 

well done man
keep it up
pleased for you as this shit is hard, so you are doing great!!

 

Mine lasted eighteen months. I discussed it in one of my topics. Seemed like post acute withdrawal syndrome.

 

Cured now?

 

Yes I am hundred percent cured.

 

Bump

 

NoFap hasn't cured my depression, because it runs deeper than just Porn addiction. If anything, I think it's gotten worse since I stopped. I haven't had this many suicidal ideations and plans ever. Even checking out my journal, the number of days I mention being depressed or anxious far outweigh the good days. I can't expect a 20+ year problem to go away in 2 months, but how long do I have to go through this? 6 months? 12 months? 2-5 years? The uncertainty kills me, that all this effort is going to be for nothing. That I'll be 35-40 years old and still depressed, hopeless and stuck where I am now.

 

It's too early to draw any conclusions yet.

I know it doesn't feel like it right now but your depression getting worse is actually a good sign, it means your brain is recalibrating. Things generally get worse on nofap before they get better. Just look at how often guys say their dick is dead and worse than before, after some time though it comes back to life again and is way better than pre-nofap.

I liken the nofap journey to the square root symbol:



How long it takes to get to the peak though will differ for everyone. Porn gives you nothing anyway so don't look at it as giving something up, think of it as escaping from it instead.

 

I hope you are getting help. PMO is probably a symptom of a deeper
problem. Ask for help, see a doctor, be open and honest with them. There is no shame here. Maybe you can’t really beat PMO until whatever is really going on is fixed.

 

I have no doubt it is a deeper rooted issue I was avoiding with PMO. I actually go to a therapist once a week and it helps, but talking about my suicidal ideations is a red flag for any therapist. What I have learned is my experience with friends growing up really messed me up and gave me low self-worth/esteem and high social anxiety which bleeds into today. I can't even make eye contact with people because of it. Sometimes I think I might even be on the autism spectrum but I told myself I wouldn't try to take an evaluation until I detoxed porn and weed at least 90 days if not longer.

That's a good analogy actually. I'm still in that bottom part of the symbol so I just need more time. I wasn't in the best state of mind yesterday when I wrote that because of a new job and some body image issues. Oddly enough, I've never had PIED even at the worst of it. I was still able to have sex with my gf/wife, it was just I didn't always want it as often as when I wasn't PMOing. I just have to re-frame when I'm in that low mood.

 

I don't know if this can help you or is relevant, but I was lonely, sad and depressed for a lot of years after my divorce.

Finally, when I started to just feel that loneliness for a while, I started to recover from it.

What I am saying is that I was running from the sadness, but sometimes just feeling it makes it die quicker.

Usually there is some kind of "hard reason" for the depression/sadness, and fear is the core.

But it's ok to feel that fear and adjust to it.

Because when you understand what it's about, that's when you can TAKE ACTION to solve it.

TAKING ACTION in life solves everything.

 

Some time ago I visited a therapist with a similar question. I was swinging between, anger, depression and anxiety in my daily life for no apparent reason. Despite having 24 months NoFap under my belt, I felt like I was becoming a shadow of my former self. I felt numb. When I went to the therapist and explained all this (including NoFap) he asked me what had happened to me in my 30 odd years of life to be feeling the way I did. I burst into tears for the first time in at least 10 years, I was angry that I didn't know what was wrong with me and angry that nobody could tell me.

After 5-6 sessions with the therapist, it was determined that I had been ignoring negative feelings from my past (emotional nelect-trauma) resulting in depression. PMO was the coping mechanism I had been using to 'press' the negative feelings down in my subconscious and by starting NoFap (and stopping PMO), I no longer had anything preventing the feelings from reaching the surface or my conscious mind. @OhWhenThe is spot on, the depression is positive but in the way that you can now begin to work with it and understand it (if you are ready) just go easy and keep on with therapy.

I am sorry to say that NoFap really isn't a fix all, but I would definitely consider that PMO is simply a method you have been using to hide the pain or depression you now feel.

Hope this helps.

 

Besides therapy, what ways did you deal with the surfacing emotions repressed by PMO? I heavily relate to being moody and having extreme anger, depression or plain irritable for no apparent reason in daily life, and I want to hear what worked for you

 

This is the difficult part.

You have to accept them. By accept them I mean acknowledge that you are angry or irritable in the moment and find a safe way to express the negative emotion. I know it sounds a bit trivial, but if you are in a position to verbally express the anger do it, if you have a punchbag (or even a pillow) use it, if you have to buy a stress ball and squeeze the absolute s**t out of it, do that too. Anger in terms of the emotion holds a lot of energy, so the idea is to express it as to get the excess energy out of the body and prevent further depression. There are alternative therapies that can help with releasing emotions in a more manageable way, DM me if you want to know more.

The level of anger you experience is directly linked to just how much of the emotion is still stored within you. The bad news is it can take some time (depending on your situation) to clear all the negative emotions out of the body. However the good news is that the more anger you express/release, the less angry/irritated/depressed you will feel. For a lot of us that are rebooting, this is why we get so pissed off during the flatline phase. We have cut out our coping mechanism (PMO, Alcohol, Drugs, Social Media etc) that has been masking our negative feelings and have to deal with the cesspool of emotions that lie underneath. In short, the depressed you is the real you without PMO.

 

I think this where you and I differ, @mentorr as I really do believe that PMO can lead to all of these various mental ailments. You say the depression leads to the addiction but why can it not also be the other way around? I mean what's more depressing than masturbating in your room, watching guys bang girls that you dream of being with? If we were talking about drug addiction here, would you still say that removing the addiction isn't going to fix anything?

Another guy started a thread on here saying that for years he saw a therapist for his depression, he'd mentioned a few times to them about his porn problem and was told that he uses it to cope with his depression. He went on believing that for years, continuing with therapy, still depressed, still watching porn until he decided upon himself to quit and see what happens. Well, he said his depression went away, his therapist saw the improvement and said he didn't need to see him anymore.

Maybe you think I'm clutching at straws but we've all led different journeys up to this point. Personally I was a pretty happy kid, then I started watching porn, felt worse about myself, watched more, began to hate myself and eventually I completely shut myself away from the world. Now I find myself in a hole but it all started with porn. For others however maybe they weren't doing too well prior to porn and used that to numb those feelings. Even then I'd say an addict is going to feel even more depressed eventually if they've hammered their brain with porn to such a level.

 

Exactly, this is what I can 100% relate what I have been going throigh now, you see there are two ways people got motivated to watch pmo ( negatively or positively). 1) They watch p and mo on them to relieve themselves from all the proble.s they gotta solve and whenever someone cut them off, instead of fighting for whats right as u said, they pmoed to numb.
2) They watch P & mo to get that extra boost of mental ability to solve any kind of problem they face, from school to real life. They feel a thrill after PMO, their past lives are already in the positive direction and they are leading it by their choice but they pmo because to it helps them to keep being on the positive side. And later they realise what really pmo does to the brain, then they stop it, they face Withdrawal symp., face a lot of different kind of traps the mind put up to go get pmo,
I certainly can say I fall into the 2nd category, and currently all I can say I can really see real progress and that initial (positive direction) showing up naturally and not needing any pmo... I m gonna make my brain up not to look at pmo as a motivation... This is what I want to achieve right now, but cant hurry it takes time

 

Honestly @OhWhenThe I welcome these questions. I honestly believe if we had more people open to questioning one another we would be much further along as a community, so no need to justify whatsoever.

What I am trying to get at is that PMO as an addiction is not healthy. To begin PMO'ing excessively from a young age is not healthy. Most (not all) addictions suggests that there has been some form of 'arrested development' due to lack of care from parents during childhood. This lack of care from caregivers is not always done intentionally and can be anything from receiving a lack of love, affection, support, protection etc as a child. For example a child that is abandoned by his parents during childhood, will likely grow up looking for that parental love and connection elsewhere. The yearning for love does not disappear just because the child steps into adulthood, it continues to exist as a nagging feeling that lies within the mind of the individual. As a result the now young adult turns to PMO, as a means of suppressing the nagging feeling into his unconscious. 15 years later after years of porn and masturbation, his nervous system 'gives up the ghost' and we become what is known as sexually exhausted. Understanding this concept is key.

The problem here is we don't know what caused his porn addiction (if anything). What happened when he finally decided to quit porn? Did he go through the flatline? Did he undergo any additional symptoms? If so which symptoms did he experience? Most of all, this is only one case - admittedly he could have been an anomaly. I am not sure we will ever find out.

I agree with your situation you could be an anomaly. Alternatively (and I say this very carefully) you could have experienced hardship in younger years and be totally oblivious to it. Or you could be an absolute anomaly and be here by pure chance? One thing I will say is: those who started PMO'ing simply because they were horny, would they not have been able to quit by now? Doesn't the fact that they have continued to PMO suggest that other forces are likely at play?

 

What if those forces originated from the addiction itself though, rather than beforehand? I mean that's what addictive substances are designed to do, no? Reel you in and hook you.

There seems to be a big push to discredit the strength of porn addiction and explain it away as some kind of trauma control mechanism but why does it have to be so deep? I can't have only been the only young, dumb and horny kid to get a massive thrill from porn and then couldn't put it down(figuratively and literally). We now have 10 year olds getting hooked, are we seriously going to claim it's because they're using it to cope with trauma or low self-esteem? Does a 10 year old even know what self-esteem is and what it looks like?

Mental illness has exploded in the past decade or two, some would say it was always there but went undiagnosed. I hold the opposite view in that mental illness only became a thing when so many mentally damaging things were brought into our lives - not just talking about porn here but technology as a whole has imo had a net-negative effect on the world.

I respect everything you say but I always prefer to stay totally open-minded on this subject and I will never discount the experiences of others even if they don't align with my own. I've suffered from enough physical ailments that most would find absurd and that alone is enough to tell me that you can't write anything off when it comes to this addiction. We also have to remember that we are in unfound territory here, porn to this level is a relatively new phenomenon and the true effects won't be known, or admitted to, until many years from now.

 

I started to understand that a lot of my issues started in childhood as you have talked about. My parents never met my emotional needs and I was forced to try to find that in friends in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, those same friends also bullied me and some even sexually abused me. From then on, I was masturbating but not to orgasm (I mean what 6-7 yr old can orgasm?). Eventually, I did and it all went downhill from when I saw my first porn at 9 years old(i'm now 29 for reference). I've felt depressed for such a long time, I forgot what it feels like not to have it. I absolutely used it to mask the loneliness I felt going into middle school and beyond. Being the weird kid felt alienating and being a weird adult feels equally as alienating.

NoFap isn't going to solve all my problems but doing it has caused me more good than harm. It's opening up all the feelings and memories I had in the past that I didn't want to remember but need to so I can move forward. Every day I do this is one step closer to where I want to be.