My Total Guide to NoFap

This is my total guide to NoFap, based on my personal journey. I'm not posting this to say "This is the best/only way to do it", but to share how I'm doing it/what's worked for me.

When you’re about to reset, remember:

• You could hold on another 5 minutes if you wanted to.
• You could leave the computer and sit in another room.
• You could go out and take a walk.
• You could call a friend and chat.
• You could have an emergency cold shower.
• You could go to the gym/work out.
• You could do literally anything else to distract yourself.
• If you hold on for long enough, the urges will die down.
• You can’t reset if you’re asleep. Just make it to bedtime and you’ll be fine.
• If you make it to a week, it will be awesome. Ditto for a month. And so on.
• If you reset, you’ve literally wasted the last X days.

In emergencies

• https://emergency.nofap.com/
• Breathing technique
  • Sit in a chair
  • Slowly breathe in through your nose
  • Breathe out quickly through your mouth. At the same time, suck in your stomach as hard as you can. This forces blood away from your groin.
• Ask for help in the group. (Highly recommended to join one if you're not currently part of one)
• Remember how much it sucked last time you reset. Do you want to be a loser, or a winner? Now is the moment to decide!

I just reset

• Make sure you put “Reset” in the group. Accountability! EVERY TIME! NO EXCEPTIONS!!!
• Don’t reset again. (Duh)
• The chaser effect is going to be rough. Put everything you have into distracting yourself/holding on. A reset is a stumbling block, but a full-on relapse WILL lose you progress.
• DON’T RESET AGAIN YOU ASSHOLE!
• Think about why you reset. Figure out a solution… try not to reset for the same reason more than once, if possible.
• DON’T TAKE A HOLIDAY FROM NOFAP YOU ASSHOLE! Straight back into it ASAP!!! (See Mental Manipulation…)

What is a reset? (My personal rules)

• Orgasm
• Nothing else
• Other things (looking at porn/edging/etc) are bad, but are not a reset. However, they very often lead to a reset, so still don’t do them.
• Leakage is not a reset, even during the day.

Waves

• Phase 1 – Urges
  • Distraction is key. Always be focused on something
  • Minimize idle times where there’s nothing to focus on
    • In bed after you wake up/Toilet/Shower
  • If you start to fantasize, shut it down immediately, before it gets a foothold.
    • Think of mind as a whiteboard, and grab an eraser. Meditation can help with this.
  • Have an idea/project to think about, that you can focus on if you find yourself drifting towards fantasies. The more detailed/complicated the project, the better.
  • If you fail and start to fantasize
    • Don’t focus on the fantasy, just let it play out in your head without being too interested in it. You probably won’t be able to suppress it through pure willpower, so instead dodge/ignore it.
    • Resist the urge to dive into it, to start exploring it. Fantasies are just vague ideas at the start, it’s only by deliberate world building/adding details that it becomes more solid, and hangs around for hours/days at a time.
    • Increase the amount of distraction. Even do some YouTube, as that might make it easier for the fantasies to dissipate. Having a plan is useful, like working on a jigsaw puzzle, taking dog for a walk, etc.
  • No touching. Idle hands do the devil’s work. Even a tiny amount will shoot lots of dopamine into your head, and make the fantasies/urges that much stronger. (See Edging below)
  • Unhealthy dopamine (like UberEats) can make things worse at this stage, as they spike your dopamine, which triggers the chaser effect. This in turn spikes your fantasies up.
• Phase 2 – Flatness
  • If you manage to fight through the urges, you will feel flat/miserable, due to not having the dopamine your body wanted
  • Learn to love being miserable. It’s a good sign that you’re succeeding at NoFap!
  • You can try and balance this out by (carefully) getting dopamine from something else
    • Exercise is great
    • Food/YouTube, etc. if it gets bad
    • Or just tough it out if you want to, but it’s hard, better to have some YouTube/UberEats than reset (This advice only applies to new NoFappers... experienced ones should tough it out 100%)
  • This is the phase where you’re very likely to end up looking at porn. This always leads to a reset. Don’t look at triggers, no matter the reason! (Beware of Mental Manipulation below…)
• Phase 3 – Awesome
  • Enjoy it while it lasts

Goals

• There’s no way around it. The goal needs to be never look at porn again.
• As far as jacking off goes, do enough time to reboot your brain. (Which is approximately a full 3 month streak, though could also be 6 months with random resets spread in between, or something similar. Not sure of the exact maths here) After that, it’s pretty open ended… but the consensus is, if you have the urge to go back to looking at porn, you’re not fixed, so go do another streak. There’s definitely no law that says never jack off again, but it’s still a viable/decent option to never do it again.
• Even if you reboot and feel a million times better, stay away from porn, and it’s a good idea not to jack off either. The circuitry that associates those 2 with incredible pleasure is still there waiting to be kicked off again, given the opportunity. It’s like a former alcoholic, they’re fine as long as they never drink again, but they can never really go back to being a casual drinker like a normal person.
• In terms of time-bounded goals, be very careful. If you goal is 7 days, there’s a good chance you’ll reset on Day 8. Always extend your goals to the point where you never quite reach them. Once you get to a certain point, have a goal of never doing it again… it’s harder mentally to have that goal, but it solves the problem of hitting your goal and immediately resetting.
• It seems very harsh to reset all your progress back to 0, especially when you get into the weeks/months. After all, if you reset your counter to 0, then you have nothing to lose, and it’s much easier to relapse completely. Maybe you could get some sort of alternative system that doesn’t fully reset your counter to 0, maybe you just lose 7 days, or reduce your counter by 50%, or something? Unfortunately, any/all of these measures make it easier to reset… when the urges are at max, it is INCREDIBLY hard not to reset, and the thought of “If I reset, I’ll only lose 7 days of progress” will easily be enough to make you okay with resetting. And then, the chaser effect hits you, and you lose another 7 days, and very soon you’re back to 0 anyway. Only the crushing feeling of “21 days of progress will be completely lost” will be enough… hopefully. Ultimately, it’s incredibly important to keep a streak going at 21 days… the only way to guarantee you don't relapse at 0 days, is to stay at 21 days in the first place.

Willpower

• Surviving a wave takes a huge amount of willpower. Willpower is a finite resource. In order to survive the biggest waves, you will have to use all your willpower, which means other things you’re spending willpower on will have to slide. If you have other goals that are tough, forget them. Other things you’re working on, ignore them, unless they make good distractions. You are not superman, and the first month will take all your willpower and then some to overcome. Once you’re consistently getting to a week, then you can carefully start doing other things that take willpower.
• Willpower is a muscle. The more you use it, the more it grows. Use it too much, though, and it quickly wears out and becomes strained, and then everything falls over. NoFap will necessarily build massive amounts of willpower, as that’s what’s required to succeed, but building it is tough… it’s like hitting the gym, and every machine is locked to the maximum weight setting by default.

Mental Manipulation

• After you survive the first wave, your brain will start the mental manipulation to get you to reset/look at porn.
• Any reason/excuse to reset/look at porn is pure bullshit.
  • If you never look at porn/jack off for the rest of your life, you will be fine physically. There’s no physical reason to jack off. Ignore blue balls, they’ll be fine. (Blue balls only happen because you were hard for a long time without jacking. Control your fantasies, and blue balls won’t be a thing)
  • You are not a god who can search for triggering content and still keep your streak going. Don’t even try and test it, you will reset. An hour later, a day later, you will reset. Even after doing a 2-month streak, you will still fall over eventually. Guaranteed. (See Triggering Content below)
  • There is increased stress from NoFap, especially after a trigger. Just deal with it, even if it makes your life harder. At some point, you’re going to have a shit day/week with work/family due to NoFap, but while resetting may fix it short term, it’s still a terrible solution.
  • You’ll still get better if you reset once a week, rather than going cold turkey, right? So why not do that! Then you’ll even out a bit more, it will be a bit easier, and you’ll still get better over the long term… AAAAAND you just reset 5 times in 3 days. You: 0, Chaser Effect: 1
  • “NoFap is too hard, I need a holiday. I’ll just take a week and let myself jack off if I want to. Then I’ll get straight back on it.” Congratulations, you just lost a month of progress. Before you were getting to a week without issue, now you’re struggling to hit 3 days again.
  • I haven’t jacked it in 2 months, I bet my orgasms are amazing now. Chaser effect. Terrible idea.
  • ANY REASON TO RESET IS PURE BULLSHIT. If it seems perfectly logical to reset, then ignore logic.
• At some point (around 1-3 weeks into a streak) you may forget why you’re even doing this. What’s the point? I’m purposefully making myself miserable, I could just reset and I’d be fine. Keep in mind here that rebooting your brain means more happiness/energy and less apathy over a longer period of time. Hold onto that.
• After a month or 2, you may notice things kind of level off. There is no real lightbulb moment, and while you do feel way better, you get used to it very quickly, and can trick yourself into thinking that you’re fully cured/have no more need for NoFap. This is the sort of thing that can kill a streak that’s longer than a month. If you run into this, just remember that a reset (with or without porn) can easily lead to lots of porn/resetting that can quickly spiral out of control. There is no safe point where you can go back to jacking off without a danger of going back to old behaviour.
• NoFap is a treadmill that goes on forever. Once you get on, you can’t get off without losing progress. The purpose of NoFap is not to get off the treadmill… it is to run for long enough that you get used to it, and running on the treadmill is no longer a challenge. Normal people already run on this treadmill without even thinking about it, you’re the only person sitting on the floor and out of breath. (If the treadmill is depressing you, see Depression/Brain Fog below…)

Edging (Jacking without the finish)

• As mentioned above, any sort of touching can put dopamine into your system. Edging actually gives you far more dopamine that having an orgasm. If you edge every day, but never finish, then you’re not doing a dopamine reset.
• When you get to the point where you’re hitting 1 or 2 weeks without too much trouble, you may find unconscious edging starts to happen. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings. Try and avoid this at all costs. Wearing shorts to bed may help with this. Be very mindful when taking a leak/in the shower of what’s going on.
• After you start getting into the months, edging is your most likely source of a reset. You think you’re in control, and then suddenly your body says “fuck this” and goes over the edge. You didn’t mean to, but you were edging, so you still fucked up. This is a reset.

Triggering Content

• Avoid watching movies/tv shows with nudity/sex in them.
  • You can check IMDB -> Parents Guide before watching something.
  • War movies are usually pretty safe.
  • Lord of the Rings trilogy is excellent for motivation. No sexual content, and watching Frodo get slowly overwhelmed by the ring draws a lot of parallels to a Fapstronaut and porn/fantasies.
    • This challenge is also cool: https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/the-lord-of-the-rings-challenge.250868/
• Get a website blocker for porn sites, if that’s an issue.
• Triggering content you accidently see is possible to overcome with some effort. Triggering content you purposefully search for is WAY more overwhelming, and usually cascades into total failure.
  • If you see any accidently, just close it ASAP and move on. Keep yourself distracted for the next few hours, so it doesn’t blow up into a full-blown fantasy. Distraction is key.
• If you purposefully look at triggering content, YOU WILL RESET! It’s just a matter of time!

Depression/Brain Fog

• After a couple months of making good progress, you may find yourself feeling more depressed than normal. This is actually good. While jacking off too much, the huge amount of dopamine actually gives you brain fog, which makes you more apathetic towards life in general. Nothing seems to matter as much as it should, and this includes the problems in your life. Once the brain fog starts to lift, you start caring a lot more about things, which includes the problems. If the problems are large, this can cause depression.
  • There’s no way around this, just fix those problems over time.
  • If you don’t fix those problems, they may lead back to porn/jacking it.

Flatline

• At some point you might lose all interest in sexual activity. Might happen after a couple of months in a streak. It’s normal. Don’t reset to check things are still working, it’s normal. Should fix itself after a few days/weeks.