MO without P will lead to your downfall…

Definitely you should considerate what is best for you instead to give too much attention to others' opinions. At the end of the day M is not the best thing to do and is more like a control tool, considering you are feeling side effects of nofap like thinking about sex all the time, angerness, etc.

The best is to do NoPMO till the reboot is complete or engage with real sex.

 

Hey bro, this is exactly my experience.

At the end of this month, it will exactly 1 year since I’ve dropped porn. Haven’t looked at it since Dec 2022. And I also had a 4 month streak of no masturbating and no visiting massage parlors for illegal sex.

However, I succumbed to temptation and went back into masturbation and massage parlors. It’s horrid.

So yea, P itself is just one type of vice. You can be addicted to a plethora of other sexual vices and never watch porn. But, it is good to get rid of porn because that’s just one layer.

I’m currently working on abstaining from masturbation and parlors.

 

Sometimes you're in so deep that MOing is your only way out of Ping. But after you're done with P, MO exercises the same lack of restraint in my opinion so its best not to. If you've already given up, MO without P is better for you than PMO in my opinion.

 

Yes, PMO is absolutely worse for you than MO. But "not worse" shouldn't be conflated with "healthy."

There's a huge swath of mental health and sex-focused professionals who will insist that masturbation is healthy--and I suppose in proper proportion, maybe it can be--but I've only ever known it as a compulsive behavior. If I do it once, I'll either want to do it 5x in a row, or have one extended session that lasts for hours until I feel horrible about myself for wasting my entire day.

If MO is a compulsive behavior for you, just don't fall into the trap of minimizing it by saying, "well, at least I'm not watching P." Ditching P is a critical first step, but the next step is getting a handle on MO.

 

Yea the thing about masturbation is that it is incredibly addicting…

they don’t tell someone to use cocaine in moderation..

 

Yeah, this is a place where self-avowed addicts are running the rehab facility. It's... not always ideal.

We want to find the moderate position, but for an addict there is no moderation. Most alcoholics famously can't even have one drink, unless they want to risk going on a binge and killing all their sobriety momentum. One would think porn addicts would take note, but many don't. We like to get as close to the line as we think we can get without technically crossing it, when we should be running to the other side of the room.

 

It is true but there is a complication. Sex is a natural need but booze is not. Living without ever drinking alcohol isn't just fine, it is a great choice. Living without sex is possible but it is not so clear if it is a great choice, even if you are an addict. At an early stage of recovery though, having a complete sexual fast for a prolonged period is a great thing, no doubt about that. Our brains have to become de-sexualized and we need to find a healthier way of dealing with emotions instead of numbing ourselves with sexual activities.

 

True. This isn't the best analogy. Let's try food.

A person with an unhealthy relationship with food, in the habit of "eating their feelings," has to establish strict rules about what they eat, when they eat, and why, if they hope to build a healthy relationship with food. I don't see a lot of porn addicts doing the same in relation to MO. For them, "M is healthy tho" looks mostly like an excuse to whack off.
I also have not seen any convincing argumentation from anywhere that MO really is healthy. I'm not an SR bro, but frankly that line of thinking makes more sense to me than the claim we need to ejaculate on a regular basis. What happens if you don't MO? You don't suffocate. You don't starve. The semen doesn't rot in your balls, you don't get cancer, you don't go insane. The worst thing that clearly happens is you get uncomfortable, as your testicles overproduce for a while. Then they get the message that they don't need to work so hard, you reabsorb those nutrients, and you have healthier skin and teeth.

That's totally on point. I'm not going to claim that sex is always bad, full stop. Neither am I going to claim sex is always bad for addicts. We have developed an unhealthy relationship with sex, though, so it isn't enough to merely quit PMO. We have to work to unlearn the backward beliefs about sex and emotions that porn taught us, before we can expect to conduct a healthy relationship with the partner of our choice.

 

I did several months without PMO and then took a couple months off from Hard Mode and did no porn mode instead, while MO'ing once in a while. At first I planned to maybe MO once every week or two, but I ended up doing it way too often, up to multiple times a week. it did not made me want to watch porn at all, if anything it made it easier to not care about PSubs, but I also did notice that I was doing it for negative reasons, like to cope with stress, anxiety, insomnia, etc. And that's not healthy IMO, if one is using MO as a drug to numb stuff.
I might still try it again in the future and see whether I can do it in healthy moderation or not, and not due to compulsive reasons. But I gotta do some more rebooting first and find some healthy coping mechanisms before I do that, otherwise it will end up the same.

I've reminded of a post that was posted a long time by an Admin account—Masturbating once is not a "relapse" it's a "reset" - Risky/excessive masturbation can be a relapse—I think this makes perfect sense! I mean if a person who is on a diet is beating themselves up for binging on junk food then I guess it makes sense, but if they are beating themselves up for having a couple apples you would think they have an eating disorder! The same way I don't want to freak out about a little bit of MO, I'm sure it can be done in healthy amounts. But the fact of the matter is that there is also such thing as excessive MO'ing, and I think for most people masturbation is compulsion—they couldn't even stop it for a week if they tried. But whether that compulsion is worth getting rid of cause it is negatively effecting somebody's life or not is a subjective thing to everyone.

 

Certainly moving to a porn-free approach to M is a stepping stone to a better and less braindwashed life.

I feel like M and MO can still be problematic as both can be very compulsive behaviours, if not done mindfully or with boundaries around them. For example I have some boundaries set that more than once a week is slippery ground for me. If I begin to flout this boundary, i'm aware now that i'm sliding back towards PMO because i'm upping the frequency of the dopamine rush from the orgasm cycle. Quite simply, orgasms will lead to the desire for more orgasms.

Many on this forum will say cut the MO out altogether, but this can still be a goal to work towards. Personally i'm not there yet, but just putting boundaries in and cutting the P has meant the behaviours are far more regulated in my life than they ever were. Find what works for you!

 

This is something I've struggled with a lot. If you read my journal I tend to flip-flop back and forth between wanting to go hard mode and wanting to moderate. I still maintain that for some people MO without porn is viable. But for me it's clearly not. Even talking about it as though it is may as well be me working up to a reset. The mental reset before the physical, if you like.

I think for people like myself (maybe like us, I don't know) there's something wrong with our brains where we can't just be happy with what we have. We can't just be happy jerking off to sensation, we have to watch porn. We can't just be happy watching porn, we have to watch fetish porn. And so on. This applies to other areas of life. I know that when I spend money, I always feel tempted shortly after to spend more money, and I put this down to my brain craving something. Dopamine? Maybe. I'm not an expert.

And yeah I agree there are far too many people on here who play the role of the devil on your shoulder telling you M without porn is fine. I'd argue if you're even having to ask yourself if it's fine, it's not. Same thing with people acting like sex is somehow the cure for this addiction, when it's really just another layer of it.

 

I have tried many times to stop with P and only MO but after a few weeks i get the urge to watch porn becouse normal MO gets boring and does not feel enough anymore.

My brain knows that P will elevate the sensension (dopamin) by a large admount compared to normal MO. First its vanilla porn but then when that is not enough anymore, i get into fetishes, trans and sissy.. Same pattern every time.

Only thing that works for me is to completly stop P, M and O. at the same time. That is more effective and makes it much less likely to trigger the urge.

 

You’re absolutely right.

You’ve gotta get rid of all of it. I find myself struggling in the same manner.

 

It's difficult on this site sometimes with the recent increase in the amount of people saying things like "Porn is the issue, not masturbation" and encouraging users to just go out and have sex as some sort of cure-all. I respect that others have opinions different to mine but having this attitude on this site of all places feels to me like a guy walking into a meeting for recovering junkies while smoking an opium pipe. It's not as bad as just injecting black tar right?

It's like I said. Even entertaining the idea of masturbating once is dangerous for me. Theoretically I could masturbate without porn and probably be fine. But in reality I can't. It's a pretty-much impossible fantasy. It always leads to more. Always. In a weird, blackly comical sort-of way, I'm actually glad that I'm a virgin. There's a real concern that if I was able to have sex regularly I'd just be a sex addict.

 

Unpopular opinion here but I think MO is the bigger problem than P. If you didn't have an MO problem, you wouldn't have a P problem. After all, what is the purpose of P? Its purpose is to aid you to MO more; its a booster. A fucking sidekick to help you continue being a fucking slave to sexual gratification.

 

Fair point, the two things go hand in hand for many.