Some questions from an inexperienced fapstronaut

Hey I’m not the most experienced person ever but I had a similar experience. I went 16 days on my first streak and I eventually fell into a trap I had literally warned others about earlier in the day... it was the same kind of thing where I had urges I could handle but I let myself get too tired and too comfortable and instead of sleeping I fapped.

I simply underestimated porn and fapping because I was able to go cold turkey off chewing tobacco and tried the same strategy here.

After I relapsed I felt guilty, tired, physically and mentally exhausted, my penis had this kind of pain to it like it wasn’t ready for that kind of activity yet in that level of recovery. It just was a shitty experience.

But then I read a post on here that changed my thinking... when you lose weight by eating healthy if you have 1 day of binge eating it won’t make you magically gain all your weight back. You still did 2 weeks worth of work towards making healthy habits and ultimately productively affected the part of your brain that deals with addiction. To me this gives me hope....

The reason is I went 16 days and in a moment of weakness relapsed and reset my counter. But i have been clean ever since. If I had a relapsed and you know... went 3-4 or even 5 times it would have been a problem but I did it once I don’t feel like I refired the addiction wiring in my brain..based on my experience now I understand that fapping to porn wasn’t what I wanted it was to burn off some of that energy I had pent up...in the future I should just go to bed sooner and use that energy in my work or while running or something that isn’t fapping.

I am now a day or two back in the game I would be on day 19 or 20 today... relapsing once in 20 days isn’t the end of the world or some earth shattering set back. It isn’t ideal, it isn’t right to do, but it is in the past and there are lessons to learn from it...

-30 minutes of fapping over the last 20 days is 19.5 days of undoing the damaging affects of addiction.
-I went after (and got) a job I thought was out of my league.
-I bought a food scale and started eating healthier
-I started running again...
-I have become more active in my church.

I don’t condone fapping to porn or giving yourself an out. But I want you to be positive and find things that you can count as blessings. If you’re not chronically relapsing and you are actually staying in the nofap game, your brain is healing... you may think you’re not but be positive.

When I quit tobacco I failed 5 or 6 times but I was able to space out my relapses and cravings enough to eventually go cold turkey and run with it. I don’t think it will tske 5 or 6 failures here to do this because I am learning new tricks every day...

God Bless

-Brian

 

^^ This is a great answer. To sum it up: progress over perfection.