Hi! The end of the self-sabotaging era.

Hi,

I’m 24 years old. I tried nofap countless times but never went longer than a week without PMO since I was 12. There have been periods where this addiction completely paralysed me. On the surface it looks like I’m doing great. I did well in school and university and got a good job now, but from time to time it gets out of control.

I’m working from home but because of my bad habits I only manage to work around 10-20 hours per week. It doesn’t make any sense because I love what I do. I’m imagining what I could accomplish If I would apply myself fully, but I’m hijacked by all kinds of addictive stuff like social media and porn.

I suffer from PIED and notice all the negative side effects that I’ve read on this forum. Normal sex can not satisfy me and it caused serious issues in my real life. I cheated twice on my ex-girlfriend because I wanted more and more. The guilt was unbearable so I confessed to her, we talked it over but eventually our relationship ended.

This year I started a relationship with an exchange student, she moved back in June so it’s long distance now. I had two occasions where I could have easily cheated on her but resisted the urge. This new situation put my bad habits in overdrive. I have really had it so last week I decided to do a reboot, was super motivated and put all kinds of systems in place to make sure I would make it this time. This failed horribly and I ended up binging on porn a whole day on Tuesday. Since then I had 0 motivation for anything. Didn’t get any work done.

I notice that masturbating drains all my energy. All the succes I had in my life were in a period that I masturbated wayyy less. It causes me severe stress. Four years ago I developed chronic back pain, stomach aches and had a bunch of very severe panic attacks which sometimes send me to the hospital. The weird thing is that I am a happy person nonetheless. I’m happy but extremely unfulfilled.

So as you can see it’s interfering pretty badly with my life, work and relationships. It really has to end but every time so far I failed. I need to take it way more serious if I want to fix this, so thats why I finally decided to post here. I find posting things online extremely frightening even if its anonymous. But I have really had it, I don’t want my brain to be wired in this way. I’m committing fully to removing my bad habits.. For 6 years now already, this time I’m willing to do anything it takes.

Reading the stories here motivates me. I wish you all the best and am very interested in seeing if anyone has a story similar to mine and how they improved themselves.