Flatline questions

It helps to know that it is coming. Accepting it as a step in your healing, you can work through it better. The lack of triggers and urges is a great break from the beginning stresses. If you utilize flatline to get active physically, socially, and intellectually, it will pass faster and be a productive stage. Embrace it's peace and avoid the cheap thrill (=relapse).

 

Should be excited to face ur depression if it comes, porn has been hiding it and let it linger make depression your bitch

 

I'm on day like 26 I think. I had bad depression last week for a few days. Embrace it observe yourself on how low and pitiful you really are once it starts to lift you just feel strength in your veins and confidence that you'll get through this

 

Depression is an emotion we experience when there is something out of alignment in our lives. Porn addiction covers up the depression under layers of other emotions. When we abstain from porn, it gives the buried depression an opportunity to rise to the surface.

I would encourage you to face the depression outright, and caution against ignoring or simply trying to "push past" it. Depression is a great indicator that you should be paying attention to whatever caused it in the first place. Giving up the porn will not make depression magically go away. Though if porn was one of the instigators of the emotion (most likely), it will at least alleviate one of the origins of the sadness.

I will just say that I notice it's extremely helpful to pay attention to, and connect with whatever emotions I may be feeling, and not simply ignore or push past them. Porn abstinence will cause a rearranging of the current hierarchy of emotional experiences you are having. Use this time to connect with those emotions in a healthy manner.

Lastly, I think advice pertaining to "staying busy" just for the sake of avoiding porn, or emotions associated with making you more vulnerable to looking at porn is bad advice. You cannot stay busy for the rest of your life, and what happens when you are not able to? Living intentionally, versus "staying busy" are two different mantras, and I believe the first one is much more succesful.

 

@slappytappy , keep up the good work man. Freedom is achieved one decision at a time, and one step at a time.

 

For the first 14 days of my reboot, I felt great. Better and better everyday. I felt so different that it almost scared me.
Then came the crash and for the past 100+ days, I've been feeling pretty much the same as before, i.e. depressed, lethargic and anxious. There is no way to tell if this will happen to you. Maybe you won't experience a flatline at all. Maybe it will be significantly shorter. Who knows? Either way, the only choice you have is to stay persistent and push through.
I wish I could give you more optimistic advice. But I figured I'd rather be honest with you and tell you my experience so you're prepared for what might lay ahead.

 

Yea, I've been suffering from depression for a few years now.

 

This is a great post, and I'll just add that, specifically, depression is a lack of hope. When we have a problem that is hurting us, we might feel sad, but it won't turn into depression if we know how to fix it. Depression is an indicator that we not only don't know how to fix it, but that we believe, actually believe in our deepest core, that it is unfixable.

This is something that needs attention, because it causes major problems in your life and unchecked can even lead to suicide. Fortunately, it is always 100% curable with enough work and self awareness. I can say this, because there's no such thing as an unsolvable problem. If you don't believe that, then that's a whole other topic, but the short version is that there's always some way to fix the root problem. Not always the way you want it to be fixed, or maybe the way isn't occuring to you yet, but there's always a solution. So depression always means we're not seeing reality correctly, and if we can chase that down and realize what's really going on, depression will vanish. Depression is a bitch, because one of the side effects is that it severely hampers your brain and creativity, which is what you need to find the solution you don't think is there. It's sort of a self-sustaining cycle of pain. But it can be cured by refusing to give up. It's why getting help is so important. If you have a therapist or even a friend you can talk to, you get to use their un-depressed brain to find a solution to the problem, and thus fix the depression. Psychiatric drugs sort of help, because they try to combat the brain-suppressing aspects of depression (along with all their nasty side effects, of course), but unless you use that time to fix the underlying problem, the depression will persist.