Day 22 Padawan. I am feeling better today with less anxiety. My decision to focus more on my therapy than other external goals seems to have worked. I might have been overextending myself and causing unneeded stress. I am personally still in the phase of learning how to deal with anxiety in an appropriate way. I think that I was simply letting worry and anxiety get the better of me when I could have just made it my focus to unravel those worrying thoughts. I got up at 7 today and felt better waking up than I have in awhile. I did my positive affirmations, yoga, and then went for a long walk. On that long walk I realized how much more at peace I could be feeling rather than living in anxiety. None of my worrying thoughts were telling me the truth and I had the freedom to just relax. I have the time and ability to deal with my responsibilities and that I don't need to waste my time worrying about them. I can just enjoy my peaceful walk in nature. A part of my therapy is to think about the good and peaceful things that have happened in my life rather than focus on negative things. And I noticed how much better I felt as a child than I do right now. The only reason I felt good as a child is because I wasn't corrupted with negative thinking, I didn't have to try to feel good. I just felt good naturally. I felt those feelings coming back to me while going on the walk and I think I enjoyed it a lot more because of that. I can remember going for walks in the past to try and get out of a negative mood, but sometimes I would come back from the walk feeling even worse because I just kept on thinking negative thoughts. But all of those negative thoughts never came true anyway so in the past I just suffered for nothing. 99% of the time my negative thoughts never come true. I also realized that having this PMO addiction is like an inversion of something good. The problem with being addicted to this, or to anything really, is that we waste our dopamine or our positive expectations of life by putting them into addiction rather than into positive things. So by being free of PMO I have started to feel good about expecting to accomplish my goals and to have a better life. By having a PMO addiction it is just really hard to expect anything good happening in my life. In the first place having a PMO addiction is a negative anxiety management system that only hurts me in the long run and it doesn't teach me how to deal with my anxiety appropriately. In the past when I felt anxious about a problem in my life I would just go to porn as soon as I could to calm down. I PMO'd every 2-3 days essentially for years. What happened is that I learned that as the way to solve my anxiety, rather than the problems I felt anxious about. But the longer this went on the longer I avoided living, and the more that my anxiety grew. Now if I'm anxious about something first I will see if there is any real reason to think I should be anxious about it. Then if there is anything that I need to do about it, I will start with the first step, and continue step by step at my own pace. Most things in life are not actually as anxiety provoking when I start to do those things. I will feel better afterwards for realizing how wrong my negative thoughts were. So I had a moment of feeling really free this morning by thinking about being free of porn and having that energy freed up to expect good and positive things happening for me. P.S I think that anxiety is the most common trigger for porn urges.
Day 23 Padawan. I've heard someone else say to stop counting the days and instead to make the days count. I really think this is about proper anxiety management.
Day 5 Again. I have a chess tourney in 46 days. So I'll need all my energy and mental clarity. I Felt with better focus in during this week.