You're welcome, Paul, and thank you too, for your detailed and thoughtful reaction. It's very much appreciated!
These are good. But self pity (at least empathy) is very ok. Life is often difficult and challenging. I noticed that I go longest in my streaks when I am honest with my emotions. Lying is never good, I think. I will write long post about dealing with emotions someday. Because I think from several sentences you may misunderstand me and laught at me.
I won't argue about that. Thank you for your insights. And nobody's laughing at you!
I am not sure I understand the logics behind this completely. If you abstain from pornographies and erotic stuffs for a while, won't brain generate abnormal amounts of dopamine when seeing simpleton girls. I had to block sports section on news sites, if you know what I mean. I never thought I will have to do this. I was never much interested in that. I am not sure is this is due to more receptors, or brain sending more dopamins, so that I would keep "reproducing".
Ok, let's keep reproduction out of this for a moment. Because dopamine goes beyond sex and reproduction. It is a hormon that drive your actions, motivate you to do stuff. It's part of the reward center, although not it's only part (there are other hormones involved too, like serotonin for example).
One example for the functioning of dopamine would be: you wake up in the morning, hungry. You're motivated to go in the kitchen and look in the fridge. Empty. Then you're motivated to go get some food. Maybe you buy it in the supermarket. The drive to do all this is triggered by the release of dopamine. Finally you have your groceries and you have breakfast. Now the dopamine spikes because you achieved your goal plus you fill your empty stomach.
What happens during pmo? Because the primitive brain functions can't differentiate between real mates and real sex and the fake of it which is porn, it releases extreme amounts of dopamine. Compared to working, exercising, looking for real mates this is a ritual of effortless instant gratification. But from the brains perspective (and also our own I would argue) pmo is nevertheless a hyperactive state, we click, we hunt, we engage and we trigger all those chemical release. It may start with the goal "look up model A" and the implicite goal of self-stimulating to O. But on the way we find many more goals (and rewards!) and the hunt goes on and on ...
Finally we end up dopamine-depleted (never zero but too low) because this hormon is a non-infinite yet renewable ressource.
The other problem is that these high dopamine spikes may create not only a momentary low (until it's replenished) but over time lower our base-level of dopamine which equals low drive, bad moods and other problems. (Plus this reduction of dopamine receptors but I don't understand really
why and
when. The good news here is: they can come back).
This can happen to the porn addict or to the drug addicts. But even to healthy people with very exiting lives, full of adventures (at least then it's worth it).
I think most of us rather aim for an exiting life then one without surprises. But it's good to understand these mechanism, for example that we can have a crash after we've achieved something big or had a lot of exitement. Because our intuition is rather than we get depressed because of a life too boring and without enough exitement. But (imho) when we want to do a lot of tedious work or learning over a longer period of time, maybe it's a good idea to cut all the sources of high dopamine release short for a while.
The withdrawal of high dopamine spikes through reliable sources of course creates withdrawal symptoms. So when your brain suddenly switches from porn to clothed girls from the sport channel, it's actually a good sign. Your reaction to block the sports section was the right one, in my opinion.
What you want is an uncoupling from your reward system to females on a screen and a re-coupling to "the real thing". Well at least in parts, because since we will continue to watch people on screens we will continue to feel aroused sometimes by some of them, but that's of course completely natural.
So while blocking and avoiding is a good tool for us that we should use, at some point we have to get used to our reactions and deal with. Of course we don't look at porn to see if we still have a brain that wants unnatural high and effortless dopamine kicks and if we still NOT have the sheer willpower to hold it back
But all the more natural or unavoidable stimula are learning material for us. It's a long process
