My journey so far...

Hello everyone, this is my very first report and is a pretty long one.

I feel like NoFap is not the only thing that keeps a person from reaching for his/her's ideal perfect self. Which is exactly what I'm trying to achieve at the current moment in my life.
I've prepared a schedule, one which would cut-off all of my sources of free unearned dopamine (like bingeing on youtube, instagram, facebook, anime and porn). And instead through this new schedule, I've prioritised earning dopamine over the long run while being productive at the same time. Been following this ever since I started the reboot.

There are 2 reasons for posting this-
1. To share the things I've learned over this time of how to stay in control and how to get back up after you've relapsed.
2. To remind myself that I need to get through the 90 days reboot no matter what.

This is how I failed to complete a NoFap 90... thrice:

Yep thrice, and every time I relapsed, I learned something new. I decided to review what exactly happened each time. I wanted to know how I turn from being in control to the point of lying to myself, justifying the very thing that I decided to quit. There is a certain pattern to how a “Relapse” happens.

It goes something like this-

Thought & Curiosity: I'm assuming that most of the fapstronauts no matter their current streak, are stuck in this phase. This is when you are constantly being bombarded with sexual thoughts of different fantasies & fetishes and even memories of porn. This phase is a constant struggle and you'll be on this 90% of the time (except when you are flatlining, I guess). This is the whole Nofap challenge.

Distractions:
From distractions is where it all starts. Convincing yourself that you need to pat yourself on the back for all of this self control and discipline that you've shown over the week, when in reality you know that you haven't given it your all, you know that you haven't achieved the results that you set out to achieve. And you know that it is too early to celebrate. But still you loosen your will power just a little bit, you make an exception just this once to stray away from your schedule. You might start doing something like watching youtube when you are supposed to be working/studying or whatever. Anything that gives you a free surge of dopamine. So you have basically allowed your mind to take advantage of you.
Congratulations now you've got a weakspot on your will power.
And thats all it takes for a relapse.

Rationalisation:
This is the next step. This is when you would convince yourself that it is ok to pmo, it is perfectly normal to do this. You even worry that ''If I don't comply to my urges then I won't be able to concentrate on my other tasks''. Sometimes in the long run, when the days go by, you might even start thinking things like ''So what happens after a 90 day reboot? Surely I can't completely stay away from masturbation. So will I start fapping again after the reboot? If so then why not just do it right away and get this over with?'' This leads to the next phase.

Edging:
This is when you act on those urges, you start looking at porn. But you might still be putting up a fight as you are edging and almost always this is when most people give up. Rationalising that ''This is not hard mode anymore and by that rule, I've already crossed the line, I have already relapsed''. But it dose'nt have to end this way, surely you've lost the hard mode but it doesn't matter. Cause even from this point, you can turn things around.
Make a new rule for yourself.
Say to yourself- ''If I get out of it right now and manage to get a Perfect record for a week, I get to get back on to the pmo with my streak still intact''(By Perfect record I mean:- that if I stay on track without any action or indulgence and I Break thought a 100 times, a 1000 times, and don't edge).

[Break Thought- Meaning to cut off the thought processes that are running in your head, in this case, any thoughts of pmo]

Now this in no way is the same as a pure hard mode and I'm not encouraging people to edge, but this is a still better outcome than giving up.
Besides, once you've edged, it is not an easy task to stay without relapsing, for a long time.
So set yourself a rule

What I learned on each round:-

Round 1:
I was edging a lot and I eventually relapsed on the day 14th.
Round 2:
I learned from the 1st round, I did not watch porn on up until I relapsed on the 10th day. Not much I know...
But I realised that the reason I relapsed this time was that I did not actively try to control my thoughts and curiosities.
Round 3:
So, on my 3rd round, I began to control what I think. In fact I even kept count of the number of times I'd “Break thought” on a day.
This very act of breaking my thoughts carried me upto day 23. Then I relapsed yet again.

So what went wrong this time?
I realised that it was the Distraction phase that got the best of me this time . Every time I allowed myself to deviate from my schedule by watching youtube or an episode of anime or surfing facebook and instagram, I was basically allowing my mind to slip off from the hold that I had over it. I gave it permission to ask for a reward every time I felt a bit difficult to stick to my routine.
This weakness in my will power slowly built up over days.
The diversions from my normal schedule, slowly chipped off little pieces of my discipline. And finally when my mind asked if it could get a reward via pmo, I was not able to say no. And I failed for the third time.
Well, lesson learned. No more excuses from what you know you are supposed to do. Prevailing in a nofap requires discipline and a strong will power. Will power if comprimised in any field of your life will automaticaly be taken advantage of in other fields.

Round 4:
I'm on Round-4 day-1 right now, just reset my counter yesterday.

Thanks for reading.
And stay strong fellow fapstronauts and femstonauts. See you all on the other end.