Digital Journaling

Before you call me lame or scorn this video, just listen to him and journal daily even if you can only muster a paragraph and have to force yourself to sit and write it out every single day without happy thoughts or a smile.

Think self therapy.

Everyone should be journaling here. People with issues like many here need to be journaling without asking why. Just do it. At least while you're using this forum.

Hey people who have overcome issues similar to this and even people who have entirely rebooted kept a daily journal in one form another as have people that never became a victim of PMO or another vice on par with the destructiveness of fapping.

 

I don't yet have time to watch the video, since I'm working right now, so if any of the points I mention in here are things he already mentioned in the video - that's to be expected!

In my opinion the single most effective tool for succeeding with a long no-PMO streak is keeping a journal here. Prior to joining this forum and keeping a journal my longest streak was 8 days (and I had done LOTS of streaks like that). After signing up, I managed a 90 day streak my first try, and have had a 78 day one, and now my current 294 day streak since then, with only a few shorter streaks in between.

It's not just helpful for NoFap though, they're so helpful in all areas of life. There's a reason I'm posting in my journal even though I don't really need to journal NoFap related things anymore (since I never think about fapping these days) - I started journaling and I realise it did a few things.

For one, public journals like here actually have an additional advantage: public accountability. It's one thing to promise to yourself privately I'll try this, or I'll do this, or I'll quit this, or I won't do this for x days.. you can always convince yourself to change your mind. If on the other hand you post a public commitment to do something, it's a lot harder to back out, as you face social embarrassment - which is one of the biggest motivators to prevent you from doing something.

Imagine every time you jerked off to porn a big beacon appeared above your house showing a freeze frame of your sweaty face and greasy hair as you reached orgasm, and a pic of the fucking weird ass porn that you were looking at next to it. All your friends and neighbours could see what you've just done. No matter how big the desire to jerk off, you'd probably think twice if that happened every time you finished. Keeping a public journal where you have to be accountable for your actions is like a toned down reduced version of that. There's not as much shame or embarrassment as a great big beacon, but it's enough to give you more motivation to stay on track.

Now onto some more reasons to keep a journal:

• Every single person should have goals and should monitor their progress towards them. Think of goals like a GPS. Imagine you're in some unknown town in an unknown country and you have no directions or anything for where you want to go. That's you without goals. The moment you set goals, it's like setting a destination in your car's GPS, because from your goals you can figure out the next step you need to take to move closer to them. Journaling and regular self assessments are vital if you actually want to achieve any of your goals in life.
• A journal helps keep you honest with yourself. We often distort the way things happened in our heads, making things seem better or worse than they really are. However it's much less tempting to distort or change facts when you're forced to write down events in detail. It also helps prevent things getting distorted simply due to poor memory, since you can simply read back to an earlier entry and find out if you remembered things correctly or not.
• A journal is great for starting lots of new positive habits. Whether it's NoFap, working out, cardio, cold approach, meditation, cold showers, yoga, qigong, reading a book every week, or something else - a journal is one of the best ways to stay focused on new habits because every day you write down how you did with all of them. So you're unlikely to ever forget to do anything, and in fact when you feel tempted to skip out on something, you'll often be able to convince yourself to do it simply because you want to be able to write it down in your journal.
• People tend to vastly underestimate their own potential and progress. When people set goals, they usually set goals that are too low for what they could really achieve. They also make light of their past achievements and can't really see how far they've come. Writing down your progress regularly in a journal or elsewhere can help mitigate this. I remember looking back at goals and journal entries I made in late 2015 back in late 2016 and I was just blown away by how much I accomplished. I'd even forgotten about a lot of my goals and so hadn't realised that I'd smashed through them in record time.
• Keeping a journal actually rewards those positive habits and things you do. There's a reason video games have things like achievements. They give you a brief dopamine spike that tells you to keep doing that thing - in that case, playing the video game more. We can use this same concept to get us to stick to healthy positive habits. Every time you write down how long you meditated, or how your workout went, or stuff like that, you've given yourself that same dopamine pat on the back that an ingame achievement gives you. You're telling your brain's reward circuits: Do this thing again, it got me a cool reward!