Does Pre-cum Count?

If you have continued, you would have relapsed completely. What you have actually done is relapsed partially. But since you have stopped yourself, you almost relapsed. So, if I were you, I'd go back to Day 0 to be fair and square. You shouldn't be playing around while committing to sexual detox. You have to take this program seriously and passionately, and show NoFap more energy than you should show PMO.

 

When you commit yourself to NoFap, you're supposed to not masturbate or engage in any sexual activity whatsoever. You're training yourself to abstain completely from porn and masturbation, so when you have successfully rebooted then you can have and enjoy real sex (be normal, healthy and sexually active) without recourse to porn and masturbation (unnatural, harmful).

 

If real sex is not able to help you to overcome PMO, then that is why you are here, right?

 

Sex will slow you down, quite possibly even prevent your reboot, but the bigger problem is hookups. When you just hook up with a girl, you're doing it for fun and recreation, which creates and maintains the same neural pathways that make masturbation and porn addicting. When you have sex with your wife, you are helping to build your relationship and giving of yourself. With a hookup, your focus is mostly on yourself, how you can feel better, how you can make her feel better, etc... It's all about number one. Just like with masturbation and porn. whereas sex within marriage, is (or at least should be) focused on giving of yourself, making your wife happy, and solidifying your relationship.
I've heard a lot of arguments against this, but from what I've heard, read, and witnessed, it's the right way to go.
In short, I would stay away from hookups altogether, especially before your reboot is completed.
It's about more than just retraining your neural pathways, it's about adjusting the way you look at the world, other people, and yourself.

 

sure cause you WiLL fap later. Even A slight urge has the potential to lead to fap. I have experianced it. be careful!!!

 

Hi @steve234 and welcome to the forum.

Spend the next week reading the articles and material on Your Brain on Porn. It is THE number one resource for getting yourself informed about porn addiction.

Start with reading the Rebooting Basics.

Watch this video from the legendary Gary Wilson. It is 1 hour 10 mins long. Watch it in segments. Watch it more than once.

It is the best way to get informed about Porn addiction. It is worth the effort. Doing so will answer a lot of questions you will have (should's and shouldn'ts).

We on this forum will be here to support you.

 

I'm a newbie, and this might be a naive way to look at it, but I don't think masturbation and orgasm in and of themselves are bad, and I don't think a relapse has to be a "full relapse." The bad part is letting a step backward get us off track. I've done various diets through time, and one of the things that people tend to do is to view overeating once as a failure and then they give up, but one program I was on really worked, because it was of the attitude "you're never more than one meal away from being back on track." That way, the totality of your actions over time becomes the contributor to your success, not just one meal. But you can't keep slipping or else what's the point, right?

That is to say that, yeah, you relapsed, and your counter goes back to zero, but you haven't completely undone the progress you've made- you've had a setback, but if a neural pathway you have fires once in a very long period of time, it's still withering over time, and the important part is that you don't continue to reinforce that pathway by going full relapse. If you go back to fapping frequently, that pathway will rebuild. So keep up the good work, chalk this up as "slipping but not falling."

 

Focus on the fact that you want to stop and that is a good thing be nice to ourselves

 

I completely agree with you on not letting one, or two, or a thousand missteps get you off track, but why this?

Orgasm, of course isn't bad. It's a natural part of sex, so I don't think it's bad. I think masturbation is though. For one, it's addictive because of the high levels dopamine and oxytocin released. Those are the 'pleasure' and 'love' hormones. In high levels, dopamine rewires your brain and becomes addictive. In any level, oxytocin bonds you to whatever is helping you produce it, whether it's the woman you're with, or the act of masturbating, which makes it even more addictive, because your brain is telling you you should love it like the love of your life, or like a mother loves her child. Masturbation also takes one aspect of sex, and reduces it to a selfish act that's all about making yourself feel good, instead of giving of yourself and receiving from someone else.
All that brain rewiring and addiction can be fixed, but why go to the trouble of messing yourself up in the first place?

 

Honestly, I think that masturbation may have been a saving grace when I was a teen, and I think that if a couple of my classmates who got their girlfriends pregnant had just jerked off instead of having sex, they would have been a lot better off, as would their children. If you've ever had "blueballs", masturbation can be helpful, instead of getting pissed off at not getting laid and doing something rash and invariably stupid. And sometimes when your partner masturbates you it isn't bad; for instance, not all women feel comfortable with sex during pregnancy. 97% of males masturbate- what percentage of males do you think experience PIED or a porn-related sexual dysfunction? I don't truthfully know, but it's still considerably lower.

But you're right- the dopamine rewiring part that comes with excess of the behavior is bad, and I am a victim of that, too. For us, the excess has been so profound as to alter our brain chemistry and wiring. I hope that one day, in a partnered relationship, that if I masturbate, it will be rare, it will be without using porn, and that it will not affect the quality of the sex between me and my partner. I'm going through the reboot to "re-normalize" my brain (if you will), so that this behavior on rare occasion will not harm me the way it has.

 

I've heard an icepack works well too.

It doesn't have to be an either or choice though. You can have a happy fulfilled life without ever having an orgasm.

I thought that statistic was part of a joke about how all men masturbate. Was it actually a real survey? And if it was, how wide did they cast the net? I would bet the number is actually much lower.

The risks just seem too big, and the character you gain from not masturbating is a huge asset in all areas of life. In the end, it's a choice everyone has to make, but I think the choice is obvious.