Reaching day 70 - Approaching my struggles and goals

Dear community,

first of all, I like to thank you for your success stories. I love reading them and they motivate me again and again to be on NoFap and inspire me to reach higher goals since I see what´s possible. Guys, keep posting and sharing, you are helping others so much.
Today I am reaching day 70 and my current goal is to reach 90.

Story:
Different from many people here in the forum, I wasn´t addicted to porn from a young age. Sure, I had contact with quite explicit content from youtube, especially music videos. Seeing it now, they are quite sexually loaded with all the women little dressed. My 13 year old self was quite irritated by that. Nevertheless, Fapping started around that age, but, thank god, not to images or videos, but just to my fantasy. For years I was in brain fog mode, had no plans or ideas of what I want and like (which might be normal around that age, but looking back, I see it as critical) and did have rather a withdrawn youth with less of the teenager experiences of hanging out a lot with friends, going to parties and having first experiences with girls. Just around 19 I started fapping to images. Videos kind of disgust me and are not that interesting, images were far more interesting because there was sth up to my fantasy and some "unknown" factor. Right now I am 24 and after around 8-9 years of almost daily fapping and around 4 years of explicit content and being addicted to the content, I am approaching this addiction. I know NoFap for 3-4 years now and tried a lot of times to get out of the addiction.

Background of my current streak:
Right now, I am in my longest streak ever. 70 is on the one hand, quite a big success, on the other hand, it feels quite natural. I combined me moving into another city and starting a new job, having an entirely new environment with the very solid decision to not masturbate, not willingly watching sexual images, and only have orgasms with women or by natural circumstances like wet dreams. So far, my commitment is still place and I don´t plan to let it down.

My 70 days journey:
Sometimes I do think that the NoFap journey is quite similar for everybody... But then I am reminded how different everybody is... Really different. Some people are going quite a straight line in the process of recovering, some are doing some start & stop thing and others have struggle and taking a lot of curves and stops and turnarounds...
I see my journey not as the straight line, it is rather ups and downs I do experience. Let´s bring it all in chronological order...

Starting in the first week I was just building up energy. After fapping I do experience brain fog so that stuff lasted for a few days. In the second week I started my new job and activated a lot of energy. This week was so intense and felt like it lasted forever. In that time between week 2 and 4 I gathered so much energy and reached ways of being I have reached in the past:

• Being very focused in what I am doing
• Being great at socializing
• Always pointing out my opinion
• Feeling strongly attracted to women and feeling comfortable around them.

After a month, strange things happened: I got in a low mood which looked like that:

• Self-criticizing a lot
• Hating my new job
• Feeling stressed out at my job and in private
• Being very distracted
• Feeling bad for being a man/not feeling manly.

I got stuck in this mood for a while, getting out of it is like climbing a hill. It takes a lot to get up, it is tough and when you are up there you are just happy for being up there that you quickly forget how hard it was to get up there and just see is as a new normal.
Since day 30 until now (day 70) I had this experience around 2-3 times, mood-swinging between depression I would rate 5/10 and good energy. These ups and downs are more a general thing in my life which I less relate to NoFap. But since this is a Forum for success stories I want to put more focus on the good phase and good energy that let me:

• feel very harmonized
• feel in flow
• feel ready to approach all necessary thing in life
• feel very manly. It is hard to describe but I think every man can find an energy inside himself that is so clear and focused, but also warm and giving. It is hard to describe since energy needs to be felt anyways... But I got a glimpse on that... It is knowing that everything you are and do is right.

You see, my 70 days are quite an up and down story, but my main successes are:

• Since I moved a got my flat furnished and learned a lot about craft
• I also learned a lot about decision making: I do take decisions faster now, which is a relieve for my brain. (I think a lot)
• I got a new glimpse of feeling manly and want to continue doing the things necessary in order to find this state again.
• I found out critical points for my wellbeing and happiness, that I know that I need to work on.
• Addition to that, these days I do more and more have the realizations that I just have one life and that there´s no point in wasting it.

This leads me to...

What I want to accomplish after 70 days:
Part of my work is giving seminars which partly deal with coaching of young people. We work on setting up and reaching learning goals. This week I was having a seminar and realized that I cared for the needs of others but didn´t care for mine. I had the realizations that a few things are critical to my wellbeing and happiness and I need to approach them as soon as possible. My realization was that I need to tackle the following things:

• Getting enough sleep (Most nights I am on hour short on the amount of hours I should sleep to be energized the next day)
• Engaging enough in recreation (Similar to sleep, most of the times I skip that important part of life and going full work-/todo-list mode)
• Starting to chat up (more) women: I am very inexperienced and this has let me struggle for years.

The following days, I will create clear goals out of it which then need to be put in place.
This is more of an accountability thing but: If anybody is interested, text me if you´d like to be part of the goal-setting process or the goal-pursuing process.

Guys, I wish you all the best in your NoFap process. Be kind to yourself, since you are all valuable people, some- or oftentimes we forget the value we keep inside ourselves. This value is tremendous and by it you have the ability to make other people feel happy, feel loved, protected, feel worthy and happy. You all have the abilities to do incredible things in life and to outmatch the expectations other people have from you. The path is not easy but since we never know beforehand, how things look on the other side, it is worth trying. Good evening!

 

Thanks man! Approaching 90 days seems very doable right now: A thing happening alongside. I plan to update this post if interesting changes ocurr. Good luck on your journey. The start is tough, but not a hurdle you can´t take!