Let me introduce myself. I’m a medical professional, 28 years old and I quit fapping in early January. I started out with a 7-day streak, relapsed once and am fap-free since then. I started fapping really early, long before puberty, and it became a habit. When I was 12 or 13, I found the first bits of porn and dad’s stash of dirty magazines, as well as explicit stories.
When I got my first internet connection, I browsed for porn, in the old modem days mostly flicks of 15 seconds. Then, everything got faster. When I was 18, my life got worse. In hindsight, porn was a way of stimulating myself to escape the problems of daily life. High-speed internet made the availability limitless. Shortly thereafter, being a nerd (programming in obscure languages, yeah!) as an additional hindrance, my love life declined and for the following 8 years, I couldn’t get a girlfriend or even get laid. I developed social anxiety and depression. It got so bad that I had to take anti-depressants for about a year. They were a real relief and raised me back to life from a deep hole. I finally got back on the track with the girls, but only sexually – emotionally, I still felt quite empty.
The next step in bettering myself was a diet, I lost 20 pounds and felt much better by eating clean (thanks, /r/keto). In hindsight, grains and sugar now seem as unhealthy to me as arsenic.
Last year, I was still a big-time fapper. High-speed porn, limitless, with ever narrowing, completely random fetishes. My problem with real world sex wasn’t ED (only once), but DE, and it still is. My advanced fapping technique simply was too far from normal sexual stimulation that I have desensitized myelf so much that I never came from PIV sex. I even visited a professional in the hope that her experience would overcome my desensitized state, to no avail. It was only awkward.
I found this subreddit and it immediately clicked. My experience with diet was that not doing something is a far more powerful intervention that doing something.
So I tried.
What is my experience with NoFap?
Well, the first couple of weeks were hard. Especially during the first 2-3 weeks, I was horny all the time and even noticed that my one hand magically reached for my penis. I pulled it back with my other hand. After that, I had multiple flatlines. I moved all the porn on my hard-drive to a friend’s hard-drive, “just in case” (I don’t want it back, ever!). My mood stabilized after about 80 days. I had sex three or four times in that phase, and it neither hurt nor helped.
Since then, I noticed a couple of things.
First of all, I have a clarity of mind unprecedented. Through my diet, the phenomenon of mind fog completely disappeared (grains suck). NoFap was not a relief from mind fog for me as it was for others, but it extended my vision, my forward-thinking from a couple of minutes/hours/days to months and years. I have taken more and wiser long-term decisions in the last 70 days or so than in the last five years. Too vague? Here’s an example: Recently, a friend of a friend had trouble with her boyfriend, and needed some time off and find a place to sleep for one night. I offered that she could sleep at my place. Though she tried multiple times to coerce me into sex, I was easily able to hold back because the thought of possible and likely long-term consequences were more powerful thant the short kick from sleeping with a girl. I don’t think I would have been able to say no half a year ago. BTW, she thanked me the next day for not sleeping with her.
Second, I seem to spread a sexual aura everywhere I walk. Women respond to me in the most crazy ways, asking for my number after three minutes of talking, making explicit remarks etc. And the best thing is, I don’t care, because every time some tramp wants to get into my pants, I think to myself that she’s just not worth it, I want a real relationship. Problem is of course that not responding to such overt female advances it drives them crazy, because they are not used to rejection from men and they try even harder then. If you ever thought that in your most stupid fapper days you behaved in the utmost awkward manner and your behaviour could never be topped, look at a woman facing raw male sexual energy.
Third, I get more of my shit done. You know these boring tasks everywhere that need to be done and are as pleasurable as a root canal treatment? All that paperwork? I get ’em done.
Fourth, I think less. The constant babbling of the self in my brain is no longer that dominant, and sometimes a bit of calamity comes in and my subconcious takes over, simply doing “the right thing”.
Fifth, I take a stand. Where I would have backed down last year, I make a clear and loud statement that I disapprove of something. A female colleague attempted to look at my cell phone while I was messaging privately. My statement was heard by another 10 colleagues. She was pissed and I later told her that it was not personal, but that she simply crossed a border I am not able to tolerate. I can tell that this action made me interesting to her.
Sixth, I feel empowered. I am no longer the pawn, I am the one who makes the rules of his life (as far as that is possible in a complex civilization). And it comes with a lot of inner peace.
So, what is my conclusion with NoFap? No superpowers. A tough struggle that seems to be worth all the sacrifices of the first couple of weeks. NoFap improved my life very much, noticeably, but slowly. As the main page reads, it is the ultimate challenge. Go for it.
What are my plans? Get a little bit better every day, without any stupid self improvement tricks. Get rid of my DE by not touching myself long enough. Not looking at porn. That’s it. My credo: It will happen because I don’t do one specific thing. Not because I follow a thousand “expert tips”.
tl;dr: NoFap is da shit. This is a case report, you need to read it in order to understand it.
EDIT: Okay guys, the “sexual aura” thing doesn’t mean I’m walking with some magic cloud around me. There’s now something that wasn’t there before and it works, but it’s not some superior mystical thing.
LINK – A 167-day report
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