Summer time worries

Hi fellow Fapstronaut-who-wants-to-be-called-Albert-but-really-should-think-about-using-his-name-in-an-anonymous-online-addiction-community.

It's a great time to get started, because you have a goal, a specific one. This will help you gather your senses and energy and willpower. Sure there are plenty of ways to try and control your urges. If you get to read the "Success stories" section, you'll find specific exmaples of what people used to succesffully get away from PMO. You'll find that some have an easier time going cold turkey at first - and others succeed better when reducing their use first, then stopping. You'll find recurring mentions of Cold showers, Gym, Reading, Running, and a whole lot of activities which have the common characteristic of not being that important in your life right now, AND require a lot of willpower to get into if you're not already.

1/ Strangeness - it's about making a change and meaning it : See what I mean? Try to get someone to read a 500 pages book if they haven't already : it's tough, and they probably will have a hard time finishing it. Well it's the same about all those activities that you will try and put in lieu of your PMO : they won't be natural at first. What will be your go-to activity, is PMO, and whatever you're going to try and put instead will have to be shoved in there at first. What benefit do they bring then? Well, they keep you busy with something that's way more productive/interesting/improving/distracting/etc than watching pink pixels move around each other in circle, and then try to find better pixels, indefinitely, until the internet runs out (hint : it never will). So you're essentially grabbing that "lost time" used in PMO and putting it to use for that thing you've been delaying for so long, for example. Sounds like a good start.

2/ Willpower channeling - it's about your mental agility and defenses : Take cold showers for example : it's a great way to get started because it's most likely easily available around you. Feel an urge and want to stop it? Get a cold shower, I promise you the urge will pass, most likely because you will be focused on doing it, and on not yelling because oh-god-i'm-gonna-die-it's-too-cold. It doesn't have to be long. After that, you'll feel like you've resisted the urge, nad this will give you pride (and a slight physical kick). Pride is one of the strongest ingredient againt a vicious PMO cycle that feeds on secrecy and shame and inadequacy.

3/ Delayed gratification : It will also mean that you've gathered enough willpower to choose something which didn't provide instant gratification (quite the contrary : at first a cold shower sounds like torture), but delayed gratification (i.e. the physical kick, the pride, and the increased mental strength). And that is probably the most important thing : we've come to use PMO to soothe ourselves from lives we could improve. But instead of acting to make those improvements, we chose to take the dopamine hit, and instantly forget about all of it, until it rises again. The instant gratification must be fought everywhere you will find it in the next few months : that is the main battleground against PMO. And it can be done, oh boy can it be done

So get reading those success stories, see what inspires you, what you deem feasible at the stage you are now, and get trying.
And remember if you don't get the results you were hoping for at first : keep trying. You only fail when you quit trying.

All the best