Hi everybody
Now, this is going to be a rather long post, but just jump to the conclusion if you don’t want to be bored by details about my personal life. I have been lurking around this subreddit for a while and never really contributed much. Today is a special day for me though: It’s been 90 days since I last looked at porn or jerked off and I feel that it’s almost my duty to explain how I got to where I am today. I got started with NoFap by reading stuff that you guys wrote and that was what motivated me to try myself.
Addiction
I am 22 years old now and I think I started watching porn when I was 13 or 14. I know I borrowed my sister’s laptop whenever she was out and I started downloading porn. I grew up right as high-speed internet was becoming a reality for the average person, so when I opened the door to a whole world of variety and excitement, there was very little that could stop me. The young boy I was at that time saw no problems with it, it just felt good and he didn’t have the maturity or knowledge to know that too much of a good thing can actually be bad.
So I moved from borrowing my sister’s computer and using BearShare and Limewire (ah, those were the days :3) to download porn, to getting my own computer and by the time 2007 dawned I had already started a rich collection on an external drive. I think this was also the time I felt the first signs of desensitization as well. As soon as I got over the novelty that was unlimited access to porn I also started getting bored by the standard guy-with-girl porn. I think this is very normal for boys of my age. What is perhaps more normal when you feel the boredom is to direct your interest towards the opposite sex and start developing real relationships with real people. That’s where I went wrong. Instead of making the transition from fiction to reality I started to dig deeper and deeper into the world of porn, becoming interested in more and more bizarre stuff during the next few years.
Realizing the Problem
I think it was around 2010 or 2011 I started to think that porn was actually not good for me. By this time I had already been using porn daily for 5 or 6 years. I didn’t consider it an addiction because I hadn’t seen any negative consequences of it. I had no real relationship with women, but I figured it was because I had a lot of acne and never really pursued any relationship, even though I wanted to. Stupidly, I didn’t realize that to my brain I was actually engaging in sexual relationship with women every night as I jerked off before going to bed. There was no need for anything else, so there was no motivation to find a real girl.
I think the time I realized I had a problem was when I felt my brain reaching for pornography types that started border lining on the illegal. I could feel that I wanted to look at things that flew in the face of my values and ethics. So for the longest time, probably a couple of years, I refused to take that step but tried hard to find types of porn that could be excused and would appease my need for something new and exciting. When 2013 came around though, I felt that I had reached my limit. I would either quit PMO or I would move into the darker sides of porn. So the 25th of July this year I joined NoFap and quit watching porn. I relapsed once, 21 days after I started because I had been edging and tricked myself into thinking it was okay to look at porn just as long as I didn’t jerk off. As soon as I realized I was fooling myself, I relapsed for one night, reset my counter and started working on my current streak.
Motivation and Goals
I don’t want to give the wrong impression here: NoFap has been a tremendous help in getting me going, but to all of you who want to succeed with NoFap: My experience tells me that you have to do more than just start NoFap and see how it goes. You need to be ready to fundamentally change yourself and do a lot of work to be successful. To me NoFap wasn’t the main goal: It wasn’t enough to just stop jerking off. Why not see this time of self-improvement as an opportunity to improve in all parts of life?
Since starting NoFap I’ve also started working out, going from 94 kilos to about 89 or 88 at this point. My goal is to be 84 kilos by July next year and I also want to run a 10K then. I have moved from being a slob who didn’t exercise at all to running 3 times a week. I’m not saying that you have to do this when doing NoFap, but if you’re a bit on the heavy or lazy side you should consider it. Use the boost and tension you get the first 10 days of NoFap to push yourself further on. The energy I’ve gotten in my life now that I’m actually pretty fit is amazing. This also makes it easier to motivate yourself to keep going, because you can feel and see that you are changing, both physically and mentally. It’s amazing.
The other thing I wanted to improve was my social skills. I was never that bad or particularly socially awkward, but I had started to become kind of depressing and no fun to be around. I often focused on the negative in a situation and was probably pretty boring to talk to. I hate talking to boring people myself, so I couldn’t accept that I was becoming one of them. This was surprisingly easy to do something about and I think the reason for this is that the second you say to yourself that you’re going to seriously change and you really believe that, you automatically start behaving differently.
There is basically one thing that has motivated me whenever I felt the urge to jerk off or skip a work-out session. The idea is this: Now that I’ve got so many expectations and goals to accomplish, one of two things will happen: I will either do them or not. It’s important to be aware of the consequences of this choice (and it is a choice). If I couldn’t quit PMO at this point, with all the motivation I had, I would probably never do manage it. And if I managed to achieve my goals then I had succeeded and the results would be rewards enough for me.
It wasn’t difficult, it was easy and simple. I was going to do this and there was no alternative.
After making sure I understood what was at stake I barely thought of porn or NoFap after that. I rarely visited the subreddit at all. I think that reading NoFap during the process can be just as harmful as helpful actually. When you’re trying to distance yourself from porn and PMO, I found that it didn’t help to visit NoFap anymore, because that just reminded me of my addiction and I don’t need to remember that. I wanted to look forward, not dwell on the past. The NoFap-site is great for motivating yourself, but when the work is to be done I found it best to stay away.
Conclusion
NoFap doesn’t have to be difficult. I know that there are many who struggle with it, but I think that the difficulty of the challenge may be a bit overstated. I don’t want to diminish your struggles or problems, but when you’re doing NoFap you really shouldn’t think too much. I think that if you take the time to properly lay out the situation you’re in and what your goals and dreams are at the start of the streak you can make the journey much simpler. I had decided to stop PMO, so that’s what I did. It’s that easy. I didn’t think about it much after that – there was no need to think about PMO, because I wasn’t doing that anymore.
It worked for me in any case, I hope it will work for some of you.
Starting NoFap and generally trying to improve myself has yielded many positive results for me: * I’m happier and have more energy * I’ve started working out and feel and look a lot better * I’m on fire socially
Now, finally: I want to thank every single one of you guys for being here. I really mean it: the time I stumbled upon NoFap, I wouldn’t have started if there hadn’t been 70 000 others there who all had similar problems and stories as I did. There is strength in numbers and I would never have started, never continued and never gotten to 90 days without PMO if I hadn’t known that there were thousands of people out there with much the same feelings and experiences as me.
So, thank you very much everybody – you are awesome.
PS: If you have any questions – feel free to ask
LINK – 90 Day Report – It doesn’t have to be difficult
by naaget
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