Hello fellow fapstronauts –
I am thirty days in, still ten days short of my initial goal of 40 days. My goal wasn’t completely defined when I started. I just wanted to stop doing porn. Over time I set it as no doing porn at all. I don’t mind masturbating, so long as it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to get done and I don’t do it very often, and I’m certainly pro-sex-with-my-wife. I just wanted to eliminate porn completely from the situation.
Although it seems like it’s gotten a little harder as time goes on, results have come in: this past weekend, after several years of ED, my wife and I had the best sex we’ve ever had! Twice within a 24-hour period. This is a MAJOR relief, and my wife is of course quite happy too. I can’t quite believe it. I think my wife and I were both just resigned to having a defective sex life.
I’ve kept the porn out, and I kept the masturbation to a minimum too (only three times during the first 30 days, and each was over and done with in under 5 minutes, and in one case in under 2 minutes).
The porn urges come on, sometimes very strongly (more so if I am tired). But the thing is, if I can just hang on and breathe deeply, THE URGES GO AWAY. I have to admit that I didn’t start this thing from a completely bad place. Years ago I used to spend 5 or 6 hours a day fapping to porn if I could. But even more recently, when being married and having a kid and a busy life cut down on time available for fapping, it still managed to erupt into every sliver of private time that became available, enough to cause ED and other serious consequences. (See here: http://www.nofap.org/forum/showthrea…s-and-counting)
After I complete the 40 day goal on May 3 I suppose I’ll hop onto the May train. I don’t want to set a grand goal of 90 days or something even larger, I’m happy to just continually add another 30 day cycle to my goals and let my counter keep on running.
So keep it up, people. It’s hard for everybody, but rewards await you
by reedman
Fuedem: Results after 30 days
Greetings, Fapstronauts,
I write today on the occasion of my 91st clean day, hopefully to impart the kind of inspiration that was so graciously provided to me by others who returned from the depths of porn addiction to tell the tale.
As with all recoveries I’ve read about, it took a lot of perseverance, in my case over many years. My addiction to internet porn took off in the mid-1990s. In some ways I’ve been lucky because it didn’t hit me until my late 20s, after I had already experienced sex and healthy relationships with women. But it took a long, long time before I faced up to the fact that I had a serious problem, in part because on some level I knew I had no idea how to deal with it. It wasn’t until 2002 that I opened up to my then-girlfriend and a therapist that it was seriously out of control and messing up my life.
But that didn’t mean I could find a solution. Even knowing about the problem, I went on with my life, sometimes dealing with it pretty well, other times really sinking into serial binging. Getting married, having a child, and having a career cut down substantially the time available for fapping, but over the past 5 or 6 years it often erupted into any spare time that was available. I hated the way porn made me look at and think about women because it clashed with the respect I felt at root for women in general, and especially for the women in my life, both family and friends. This caused serious depression, feelings of worthlessness, self-loathing, etc.
I found NoFap a year ago last March, and built up streaks of about 50 days, then 40, but I couldn’t seem to beat that, and then I couldn’t seem to get past 4 or 5 days for a long time.
What finally pulled me out of it was NoFap Academy. The program is extraordinarily powerful. Perhaps the single most significant thing that really brought about a deep change was simply the preparation and commitment to changing my life that Mark demands from people in the program. Just physically writing down “I promise to quit doing porn and live a more awesome life”, then signing and dating it, was much more significant than it seemed at the time. All the other tools the course teaches you, such as the willpower process, methods of raising self-awareness, learning to observe how your mind works, really won’t get you anywhere unless they spring from the deep, well-considered commitment that Mark demands of us when we embark on the course.
It’s so powerful that it’s changed several other things in my life. I already had the fulfilling disciplines (mainly music), that the course requires us to develop to take up the time that becomes available after stopping porn use. But it’s deeper than simply doing it to avoid doing porn. It’s now become difficult to quit working out, to quit practicing music, and I want to make it at least as difficult to stop doing these things as it was to quit doing porn when I was at my worst.
For a very, very long time (well over a decade!) I seriously believed that this problem would always be with me, that I simply had to accept the porn use as something that would never go away, and to simply deal with it as best I could. I CAN NOT BELIEVE that I’ve actually gone over 90 days without fapping! And the longer it goes on, the easier it gets! (I must credit my wonderful wife with my hard-mode commitment, she has waited for the 90 days because she knows how important this was for my personal development, and ultimately for our relationship and for our son.)
So to anybody who feels like they’re in a hole so deep there can’t possibly be a way to escape, know that THIS IS NOT TRUE!! You CAN fix this. It will require a very deep and strong commitment to altering your life, and you will come out of it a stronger, more human person living more in harmony with yourself, your friends, and your loved ones.
Finally, I STRONGLY encourage EVERYONE to enroll in the NoFap Academy course. Yes, it cost a little cash, but man, in the long run, if you stick with the program and really commit to improving your life, it will come to seem like you got a giant gift for yourself with virtually no monetary investment. The real investment is the work that you put into yourself.
Good luck and more power to us all,
Reedman
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