my introductories

okay, 'how to use nofap' document recommended making a thread here as a first course of action.
so i suppose i'm going to do that now.

hello everyone, my name is magical truthsaying spider, and i recently made the decision to reboot. i suppose i'll just use the rest of this post to answer the suggested questions...

your gender - male.

your age - 20, 21 in a few months.

how long have you been using porn - quite a long time, although i'm not sure exactly when i started. i know i started masturbating when i was around 9 or 10, after i learned about it from a health class i had to take at school, but i didn't have independent internet access until i was around 13. at that age i mostly read porn in the form of fan-fiction, but it didn't take me long to graduate to video porn.

the impact pornography has had on your life - when i first started using literary porn when i was younger, it acted as grist for the adolescent curiosity mill, and i was soon using it regularly of an evening. i don't really think my usage at this point in my life was that unhealthy. oddly enough, once i discovered video porn, i don't think my usage really became any more intense - my pmo cycle stayed about the same for a few years, until recently. as of the past few months, however, i'd noticed that my tastes in porn were gradually becoming a little more extreme as time went on, and that i was finding it harder to masturbate to an orgasm without the use of porn.

why you have decided to quit using porn - partly due to my increased dependency on porn for arousal as mentioned above. however, as of the same past few months, i've also noticed myself being increasingly less satiated with a single pmo per day (as was the norm when i was younger), sometimes needing to do it three-four times a day, sometimes interrupting actual important things i was supposed to be doing. i also once got caught by a particularly strong urge while out for a late-night walk a few weeks ago, which led to me pmo-ing in the great outdoors. this was a few weeks ago now, but it was really the first warning sign that i needed to get my habits more under control.

the last time i had a pmo was yesterday afternoon, while i was supposed to be working on something. as soon as i finished and got back down, my body immediately wanted to do it again. this was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back - instead of pmo-ing again, i decided to just try to ignore it. this was my way of determining whether or not i needed to try and get help -- if figured that if i didn't really have a pmo addiction, then just not masturbating for a while wouldn't be a big deal. anyway, it turns out that it *was* kind of a big deal... and so here i am. score one for the scientific method, i suppose.

your chosen rebooting parameters - abstaining from p, m and o. "chosen" may not be the right word in this case -- if i were with a partner, then i would only be abstaining from p and m, and aiming to have orgasms exclusively with them, but i am unfortunately single, meaning total pmo abstinence.

when you started your reboot/how long is your current streak - i started about halfway through yesterday, after the aforementioned circumstances, and have already gone my first full 24 hours without any pmo whatsoever, making my current streak 1 day. today was my first full waking day without pmo, so i'm counting this as "day 1".

i am planning on getting starting my own journal thread -- the idea is to write up an entry for the previous day on the following morning, it's just what makes the most sense with regard to my schedule, so i'll be writing up today's adventures tomorrow morning.

i'm about to go to sleep for today, so if there are any thread responses i won't see them for a while. this is probably going to be my biggest challenge yet, since i used pmo as a soporific to help me get to sleep for a very long period of years.

anyway, that's all for now. sorry about the humongous wall of text this post deteriorated into, i suppose i must have had more to say than i realized. i'm very new to the concept of porn recovery, so if anybody has any advice for a newcomer like myself, especially regarding things like avoiding reset/relapse (which is pretty much my biggest anxiety right now), then i'd really appreciate it. wishing you all the best in your endeavors.

- magical truthsaying spider