P.A.W.S. - what are they, cure, duration

Alcohol delays your healing. Alcohol is a drug and affects your brain. It releases neurotransmitters such as dopamine at unnaturally high levels like drugs. Alcohol is a super stimulus.

Here is an PAWS success story of 3 years from alcohol. He writes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PAWS_winners/comments/t4ayy0/paws_post_acute_withdrawal_syndrome/

Caffeine does not stimulate your brain or neurotransmitters in an unnatural way like drugs, including alcohol.
It is possible for caffeine or sugar to worsen your symptoms, but not prolong them.

 

What did you do to be one of the most extreme cases of porn addiction?

I've read a post once on Reddit of a guy that masturbated/edged a whole day - 16 hours until he went to sleep.

Did you so that in your weekends, or how did you get here?

I also saw one of your posts in another forum where you said that after 18 months you were feeling normal since 14 and we're socializing easily and went to many job interviews and we're about to get a job soon. Was that period just temporary?

 

I'm 8 years on and off Nofap suffering with PAWS and Acute withdrawals. Symptoms were at their peak from mid 2018 to 2021. I keep relapsing because I'm tired with the high and lows. So I'm kinda losing hope in the process.

 

I think this is the point, you are not supposed to ejaculate when you rewire. Rewiring is about gradually reintroducing intimacy so that the body and mind can become reaccustomed to it. I agree that this method is scary as hell and means putting yourself back out there, but what is the alternative? Waiting 4, 5 maybe 6 years for your libido to switch itself back on?

I 100% understand the stance of ‘ejaculation will send me back to the flatline’. In fact I couldn’t agree more. But waiting for it to return without evidence that it will might leave you worse off. There are definitely people that have woken up one day feeling 100%, but the problem is that none of us have been able to discover exactly why some people experience healing in this way and why others do not.

I said to myself that I would wait 3 years for my libido to return and if it did not return consistently, I would put myself back out there. It burns me (and frustrates me) to hear that there are so many of us here, sitting frozen in recovery, waiting for day 4531 for our libido (and the rest) to return. I just think a lot of us here have been dealt a ‘poor hand’ with recovery and likely need to act on things instead of waiting. If you don’t intend to rewire, at least use this thread to dissect your recovery and find a way forward.

 

What withdrawal symptoms have you been dealing with for 8yrs? Are you relapsing to a women or man? To porn? Did you get erections while foreplay or touch? Do you get erections?

 

Completely agree. I think some just begin to get impatient and feel they need to take action, which is understandable when it's taking so long but I see no evidence that it helps in the long-term. Maybe you'll get a short rebound of feel good chemicals but it's all a mirage and will soon go away again, whilst ultimately setting you back further. I don't actually think it's necessarily the ejaculation though that sets you back but more the arousal mechanism in your head being switched on again when it's not ready, otherwise wet dreams would make recovery virtually impossible if we were applying the ejaculation logic. There have been times during my reboot where just looking at an attractive woman for too long or thinking of something sexual has had an obviously negative effect on me, I call them "arousal headaches" but it's also often accompanied by heightened anxiety, insomnia, low mood etc.

I think the main reason I believe in time being the only healer is that during my first real reboot attempt, my libido switched back on by itself. I didn't "rewire" or "jumpstart" it with MO, it just came back naturally one morning. When you were a kid, you only began to have a sex drive when your body was ready, you didn't have to do something to ignite it yourself and for me the same deal applies here.

 

Hello, my brother. It absolutely 100% is linked, and I can attest to it both in my own personal life, but also second hand.

I am currently working towards a masters in mental health counseling, and one of the requirements of the program is that you need to see a therapist so you can see what it's like to be the client. The therapist I got set up for, I decided to be open with, and she told me a similar story to your Rob case. She said her supervisor has dealt with cases very similar to us, and they involve men whose brains "shutdown." And, according to her, it has everything to do with emotional dysfunction and brain adaptations that have occurred in response to our needs and our inability to meet them.

While in therapy for myself, I've had moments of profound affect flooding. Just this last weekend I was on a walk and stressed out of my mind with school, work, and life issues going on, and in that moment, I was allowing myself to just feel all of it, feel the burn, feel the depression, and it opened a floodgate that allowed all this sadness to come pouring out of me, which transfigured itself into this bizarre almost quasi-psychedelic experience (I wasn't on drugs). But it was a deeply spiritual experience and this rich focused imagery of a bonfire at one of my childhood summer camps kept materializing, and every time I focused my "third eye" on the bonfire, this sobbing catharsis just cascaded through my mind. I was completely saturated in emotion - and at the height of the spiritual experience, I felt, as best as I can describe it, "spiritually safe." It was like I was connected to God, but it was more than that. It wasn't the concept or idea of a supreme being. It was just this deep sense that there was in fact still a "safe haven" inside my own psyche where I could be emotionally spiritual and escape from the crust of addiction, numbness, and the habits of the default mode network.

My therapist and I are working together on making emotional connections in my brain. She thinks I've almost entirely disassociated from the different parts of my psyche, adaptationally to cope with early childhood trauma, and an emotionally avoidant strategy, which is partly why I've had these persistent intractable issues that never seem to be able to achieve final resolution. It's why my brain feels shut off rather than on, despite the enormous improvements that recovery has offered me.

I still have cognitive impairments. And I've learned to compensate for them. I mean, I'm in grad school, and it was reassuring that I was able to get an A+ in all my classes so far. So, I'm no dummy. But the cognitive impairment is the most traumatizing aspect of my situation. To think that my brain will never turn back "on" like it used to be is devastating to contemplate. And it has been the central fixation of my entire recovery because I need a fully flexible and active mind to be able to pursue the things that give my life most of its meaning. Without that, you just feel persistently broken. But I'm hopeful that doing this emotional work will be pivotal. I've already noticed an increased tolerance for stress, and I mean a serious increase. It's like I've suddenly developed this ability to use my stress as a fuel that helps propel me across instinctively avoidant thresholds. Like I was getting stressed out about my classes, and my first instinct was to give up and drop them and just quit, but that made me more stressed out because I'm starting to "feel" things more, but I'm realizing that stress is an energy, a tool, not a poison that's slowly killing me, but a power I can harness and channel as a means of confronting realities. It's only poisonous if it stagnates; as long as the stress is fluid and dynamic, it's a power, but if you avoid stress, it'll turn into anxiety. If you disassociate from it, it'll turn into depression or numbness. And those factors compound over time, and only then, it becomes poisonous. I've learned that stress is a baseline good thing - how we respond to it is what makes it healthy or toxic to our minds and bodies.

It's about rekindling that relationship with your gut instinct, your physiological perspective as opposed to your psychological perspective. Our psychological experience is nested in our physiological selves. We are embodied creatures. We are feeling beings who think not thinking beings who sometimes feel. But if you shut down your emotional functions, you quite literally are impaired, disassociated, fragmented, and, as we report, "dead inside." There is, then, an entire reality you've lost access to. And I think recovery is about reintegrating all the parts of yourself back into who you really are. To be able to recognize the adaptational changes you've made growing up in responding to your experiences.

As for sexual activity and nofap is concerned, I'm on the no-go side. While the sexual experiences I've had more recently were critical in resolving some psychological fixations that were haunting me throughout my recovery, it's safe to say that I, myself, have never truly fully recovered, and there was always a price to pay for having the sex (despite the enormous benefits). That being said, I don't think any of us really know the extent to which recovery is possible. Will we ever be able to tolerate a normal sex life? Will those circuits heal themselves with time? Or can we heal within a fixed framework with stipulations and limitations that will always be attached to our new lives post PMO addiction. I've heard that segment on Dave Huberman's podcast where he breaks down the dopamine spikes of different substances and activities, and he mentions that the anticipation of sex and the act of sex itself doubles the dopamine levels by 2, and something like cocaine doubles the dopamine levels 2.5 times. We know that cocaine has neurodegenerative effects that can be lifetime persistent. Is that because of the dopamine? Because think about what we've done with this hyper stimulant PMO. Some of us did abuse it so aggressively that we were transfixed in these highs for hours on end, day after day, week to week, months, years long, all the while already suffering from PAWS.

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom because it's really not that awful. We don't really know everything. There's still so much mystery. And we haven't tried everything either. The brain, and its potential, is still a mystery. But at what point do we have to begin to consider our own grief? When do we begin to entertain the idea that some of us may have crossed a threshold beyond which we can never return? And how do we integrate what we are now into how we live now? I am beginning to work on acceptance. I'm beginning to consider these nightmares, to face them head on. I'm starting to pursue wholeness rather than "recovery" (in the sense of reversing what I've done). I'm back on nofap, and I haven't had any release in almost two months. Since I've started school, I've made tremendous strides in my health. I feel more structured, more purposeful, more emotionally present, better able to form interpersonal attachments, I'm less disassociated, and more willing to dive into stressors and contend with the struggles of life.

I've been on this journey for half a decade, and I'm still seeing benefits and learning new things, who the hell knows? But one thing is for sure, we all still have reason to hope.

 

I mean you are speaking about libido, that is not something that has bothered my at all during flatline. I dont want to fit in and have lots of sex. My libido has been fine for the past 2 years, i can have sex easily. For me flatline is the severe mental effects such as depression and anxiety that absolutely sucks your soul out and makes you feel like a zombie. Libido wise i have been fine for years and i get morning wood pretty often, of course some months in paws i have very little libido. It varies. But i was purely talking about neurological paws. The libido i cant say if sex helps it return, for me it did not. Hard mode made my libido alive again. We are programmed to believe ejaculation is natural, i really dont believe it is. I believe it was meant for creating a baby and giving a part of your life force away which of course drains you. Sex without ejaculation, karezza, neos? I strongly believe that is our naturally state and how we actually benefit from sex. Just like society wont speak about porn there are a dozen of other things that have been kept a secret for us to keep us sick, and its really tough to deprogram from all of this, but i have found that many on this semen retention thing tend to do so

 

Remember, rewiring does not mean ejaculating. To rewire correctly you are still required to avoid ejaculation.

So if you were to partake in sex right now and ejaculate - what would happen over the next few days (or weeks) neurologically for you?

 

Yeah and imo that is just a form of edging. If you haven't recovered you will feel the negative effects(once the "wooo I just had sex" happy neurochemicals begin to wear off).

 

Rewiring does not involve having sex. It is physical intimacy without having sex to get your body re-accustomed to being intimate with another.

 

But I don't think your problem has anything to do with needing to "rewire", or maybe you do but it's by-the-by at this point.

Rewiring is for guys who fundamentally have nothing wrong with them, it's just they've trained their brain to become aroused by pixels rather than people. Unfortunately, you, I and many others here are not fundamentally ok, we are broken, perhaps even irreparably so. You need to unwire, once you've done that then you can worry about "rewiring". Doing the two simultaneously is merely a form of wheel-spinning. You are welcome to try it, maybe I'll be proven wrong but for now, I believe that not to be the case.

 

But I think this is where I disagree.

We unwire by abstaining from PMO, and then once ready we rewire, correct?

If I am no longer addicted to PMO aka I have successfully unwired. Would the next step not be to rewire?

 

Yes, but where we differ is that I believe your body will let you know very clearly when you are ready, whereas you think you need to do something to make it ready. When I say unwire, what I really mean is recover. You overheated your brain and it needs to cool back down first until you start thinking about sex again(regardless of whether it involves orgasm or not). I get that you've been at this for two years(?) now and you're understandably frustrated but I see little logic in what you're suggesting. You see P/M as this horrible unnatural act, whilst sex is natural and good but the truth is, fundamentally they are not really all that different as far as your brain is concerned. Both are highly stimulating, it's just that whilst sex provides a shot of dopamine(and other feel-good chemicals), P and M can provide a never-ending blast of it and that's why we're in this mess.

There are plenty of guys on here who have given up P and M yet they still live shitty sex-lives propped up by pills because they refuse to do what's necessary and let their brain recover, if it really was a case of needing to rewire then they would all be healed by now, yet curiously they aren't.

You could debunk all of this by finding yourself a woman, having a relationship and propelling yourself to the other side of recovery through sex but I personally don't believe that it would work. What I imagine would happen in this situation is that your body would be forced to wake up, you'd have a short rebound where you start feeling better and think that it's working but after some time it will stall and start to go in reverse again. I'm open to being proven wrong but that's how I see it.

 

As this is all anecdotal its hard to say for sure what either of these drugs have on paws recovery from pmo specifically. I will mention though that there are also cases of paws from caffeine. Im also interested to see how caffeine impacts my own recovery in the long term. Its certainly improved sleep and lowered anxiety in the short term however ive only been off caffeine for about 2 months.

 

Hello. I wrote you a private message there right now. Please answer. This is very important to me

 

I'm glad to hear someone talk about these things. I feel inspired to try and get back to hardmode!

Sexual energy is energy. It is profound, and almost no-one talks about it.

 

I mean by "one of the worst cases" regarding PAWS. I'm talking about people who don't relapse all the time and don't use alcohol, drugs or medication.

I know 6 guys who have PAWS and they are over 24 months abstinent with no relapse and 10 other guys who are abstinent for over 12 months and they still have PAWS.

As mentioned in previous comments, only 1% manage to stay abstinent for that long. Most of the NoFap community doesn't even know that PAWS exists.

I need to change this 18 months post. I had a PAWS reduction at month 18 and was so happy because I felt really bad for a long time. The last PAWS reduction at this time was at month 6. I was too enthusiastic and it was "just" a reduction. Imagine you have months or years of always the same symptoms and then a reduction comes. I have published this post 14 days after the reduction.

I didn't have a day without symptoms at all. But only PAWS reductions and the last one was at month 32.

 

@Experiment1996 how many years of PMO are you recovering from? Do you feel as though you are making progress.

It would be good to here from other rebooters with long abstinence times.

 

Has anyone lost weight on abstinence? I noticed that during the strip I start to lose weight. How to explain it?