Hello everyone, and could I get some help

Hello everyone, you guys can call me Red. I've been a consistent pmo user for the past 9-10 years and I am ready to get it out of my life. I've suffered from depression since prepubescents, and I wouldn't be surprised if pmo has been one of the root causes. Until recently I was perfectly ok with pmo; I thought I could get through life, motivate myself towards my dream, and not need anybody to be in a relationship with because in my mind they'd slow me down. My mother is a hardcore alcoholic and my family on both sides have struggled with addiction, so I thought I was in the clear. Partly due to these thoughts I continued to masturbate thinking I was simply medicating myself in a weird way; keeping myself from the prongs of addiction and keeping myself from relationships so they couldn't hurt me. It's not until this last month I realized that I was simply an addict who was justifying his use. What finally scared me into realizing my problem was around the end of my last semester of college, spring 2016, I began to feel numb. The numbness grew and grew throughout the summer and things that used to give me deep emotions/pleasure like smelling the rain, watching the sunset, feeling a cool breeze, etc. simply had no emotional connection anymore. They turned to just simple sensations, which ultimately I did not like. I could still recognize simple emotions like anger, sadness, tiredness, etc. in me, but all the deep emotions I felt before were gone. This lead me on a path of self-discovery. Of course, emotional numbness is recognized as a symptom of depression, but I had deep emotions before even when I was most depressed, so I knew this was different. Another thing is my depression has been lessened over the past few years since I've become an active runner/exerciser so I knew something wasn't quite right. I contemplated on it and tried different things like binaural beats and meditation, which has helped some, until finally, one time meditating over the things in my life that could be causing the numbness, I realized it might be my porn use could be the thing causing it. I then looked google can masturbation and porn cause emotional numbness, and it led me to some interesting insights, and now I know what is most likely causing it. I am a daily pmo user who uses porn for hours on end and I am ready to end my substance abuse. I've been trying not pmoing for the last week, since feb. 22 2017, and have already looked at porn once and masturbated and masturbated twice to fantasy. So thank you if you've made it through my long introduction, I'd just like to know if anyone has any tips and a plan, like a workout plan, for no pmo? It's very hard for me not to masturbate or look at porn and the cravings can be overwhelming, but I'm dedicated to nofap. Thanks for any help you can provide and I wish you luck in all your endeavors.

 

Thanks for sharing your story, it does give me encouragement and I'm glad you included a list of things that have helped you

 

Thank you for the encouragement and advice. Right now I'm not currently seeing a psychiatrist, and I'd rather not in the future if I can help it; I'm a bit low on funds at the moment. I also would rather test not using PMO for a while and see where it takes me emotionally; I've read several cases of people, some of who were numb some of them who weren't, and most express that they started feeling again, or simply started feeling a lot more. Thank you again, it's simply good to have some people to encourage me and give advice, especially those who know the struggle.

 

Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for