I’ll list some benefits here that can serve as motivation for others:
1.Clearer skin, better facial hair growth
2.Girls are DEFINITELY checking me out more. Girls are staring at me, girls have called me attractive, etc
3.Easier to hold conversation, MUCH less social anxiety
4.Much less depression
5.More energy, easier to get out of bed
6.More motivation and fuel to achieve what I want
7.Increased self-awareness and self-knowledge
8.It serves as a baseline for feeling good about yourself – even if you’re having a bad day or things are going shitty, it’s a nice feeling to be able to point at your nofap streak day number and feel that you’re still headed in the right direction at least in some way.
9.Able to have fun, able to feel emotions better (this is still improving). For the first time in my life, a couple nights ago I went to a party in a rooftop restaurant in NYC and had FUN – I’m talking the laughing so hard it fills my stomach with a warm feeling and I feel good about life kind of fun 🙂 I also feel sadness and guilt and other difficult emotions as well, but I’d rather take this 1000x more than the emptiness and resistance and confusion I was stuck in earlier.
10.Dick is much much harder – I was suffering from ED before and my dick wasn’t getting fully erect and I never got spontaneous erections. Now I get hard almost every morning, my dick is much harder when erect, my balls are bigger (obviously haha), and I just feel more sexually confident and accepting of my body and genital situation (lol).
11.I don’t feel as insecure as I used to about not being able to get hard for a girl.
Mind is much clearer, less brain fog (although this is still gradually improving – I still have periods of brain fog but I can push through better now)
12.1I’ve been going to the gym so my lifts are higher, my testosterone is up, and I can feel the difference in my body and it helps me with body language and eye contact and even my voice tonality is better
13.I just feel more “alpha” – I feel like I deserve more out of life, and when I talk to girls, I don’t feel like a stupid little boy (as much) and more of a man who deserves to be able to talk with and have as good of a chance as anyone else at attracting beautiful girls.
A lot of it is also the fact that I’ve been replacing fapping and other time wasting activities like going on the internet with taking massive action – socially, academically (I’m a junior in college), physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
I’ve been going to the gym, meeting new people, studying for classes, reading books and exposing myself to new thought, meditating, and journaling. I haven’t been consistent with all these things (not even close) but I’m trying and keeping track of my habits in an app. I feel that as I make more and more progress, I’m slowly becoming the person who I want to be, and that’s the best feeling ever, and probably the most important thing that NoFap makes you experience 🙂
Good luck to everyone fighting. If you are new, or if you are struggling, struggle with me brother. I’ve been struggling every day for the past two fucking years to overcome the past and build a new future. Fuck the past. Fuck the bullshit life of looking at hot women on the internet and slowly feeling more and more that you’ll never get them. The feeling of slowly losing sight of your dreams. Fuck that. What’s the fucking point in living if you don’t give it all you have. Don’t be another loser who wastes his life away in meaningless bullshit and forever looks up to an elite group of people that he could have been. Fuck that guys. We are doing this to become the people that we are able to be. Take it as far as you can. There is happiness and joy and MEANING on the other side.
LINK – Reached 60 Days!
2 MONTHS EARLIER – My spirit has weakened
(First of all, my badge needs to be updated – it’s more like 3 days haha)
I have been trying to do nofap, for 3 years. I have gone on multiple long streaks – three 60-day streaks, and two 30-day streaks.
But that was when I was 17-18. Now I am 19, and I realize that I’m not longer going to be young forever. The decisions I’m making now are going to be with me for the rest of my life. My work ethic, my character, my social skills, my time management/productivity, my worldviews that I am forming, the people I am spending time with, everything, is affecting me now, when I am young, much more than it ever will. I am changing faster than I ever will at any future point in my life. And what I am realizing, is that these things are all very very suboptimal.
I have difficulty concentrating because I don’t know what I am doing with my life or what I am aiming for. I have negative thoughts, resentment, feelings of superiority, feelings of inferiority, loneliness, social anxiety, and poor discipline. I am very far from having my head firmly on my shoulders. I have lots of existential angst, a lot of thoughts about how I don’t have enough friends, I’m not fully enjoying life, and depressing thoughts like that. I’ve suffered major depression in the past two years and I am still recovering.
The worldview that I am forming is very unhealthy. Life just seems like a big competition, for the best jobs, for the best colleges, for the hottest girls, for the biggest muscles/body, for the highest social status, and now, with the rise of internet marketing, the best lifestyle, an escape from the 9-5. I am going to college in order to learn and form a new way of looking at the world – and to an extent I have done so – I have learned about the brain, I have learned about data structures, algorithms, linear algebra, multivariable calculus, philosophy, drugs, attraction and relationships, science fiction, and many other things. But at the core, when it comes to what I want out of life, it is still a competition to live the best life. It seems that in my mind, everything is under that category – this idea of “living the best life I can”. In my mind, for better or for worse, that is what the purpose of my life seems to be, or at least the best that I can come up with given everything I have learned.
This is a toxic mindset – instead of doing things just to enjoy them, I am doing them so that I can accomplish this overarching goal. I have an ideal self that I envision in my head that I want to be in the future – highly knowledgeable, no social anxiety and widely liked and loved, great work ethic, curious, passionate, driven, well traveled, dated lots of girls, lots of friends, muscular and well built, good fashion, having a lifestyle that I love (owning my own business that I am passionate about), financially wealthy and secure, disciplined and productive. And I imagine that along with all these things, somewhere along the way I will have found meaning, fulfillment, and happiness.
The problem is that the older I get (I am 19 already, almost 20), the more improbable this ideal future seems. I no longer feel like I have all the time in the world. I am already almost 20, and the past two years of college have blown by. My 20s will also blow by, and by the end, I will either have achieved these things, or I won’t have.
It’s going to take a HUGE amount of drive, perseverance, and hard work to make these things happen, and there are a few things holding me back that are weakening my spirit and drive:
- I currently have social anxiety and difficulty connecting with people. I’ve had it my whole life, and I’ve made major improvements on it in the last two years, but it’s still there. This is one of the things that I want to improve, but it’s very depressing for me to think about all the things I’ve missed out on and continue to miss out on because of this (friends, fun, parties, girls, networking, business connections) Since this is so difficult to fix (I’ve tried therapy, medication, a lot of things), I am feeling hopeless about it. Every time I see someone, even a friend, I get anxious and it becomes difficult for me to think properly and just have a good time – I’m always wondering if I’m being normal or cool, whether he likes me, etc. This is still going on, and I’m SICK of it to my core, and it’s making me feel like giving up at times, despite all the hard work I’ve put in to improve up to this point. But it’s just so freaking depressing that I have to deal with this. I’m starting to go into victim mode, because of my spirit weakening, which is weakening my spirit more because I know I shouldn’t go into victim mode so I feel like I’m losing ground. Instead I need to gain back my spirit, but I still feel so far away from feeling normal and not feeling anxious. Being good socially with friends and girls is a huge part of my happiness in the future, so this is making me feel terrible.
- My concentration and willpower are low, which is affecting my work ethic. I find it difficult to concentrate and focus now. Again, this is a similar spiral where – I have low willpower/concentration now, which makes me feel like I’m very far away from my goal of having a good work ethic and focus, which lowers my willpower further. Also, I have a fear that once I start working in the tech industry (my goal) 2 years from now, I won’t like the work and find it boring, or feel like it’s insignificant. Or feel average. And I worry that this will demotivate me and lower my work ethic.
- I’ve always been driven by a kind of narcissism to be the best. I was the best in high school (All A’s, got into several Ivy League colleges, won lots of math competitions) but now that I’m in a top college, I’ve realized that I’m not the best anymore, and that I never will be – there are always going to be people who are smarter and more capable than me. I also have a terrible habit of comparing myself to people – I’m always thinking about how other people are smarter than me, or other people have better social skills than me. This is totally killing my confidence and motivation/spirit. I know I shouldn’t compare myself with others, but part of what has always driven me is the idea that some day in the future I really will be the best. But now that this ideal has been disillusioned by losing my innocence and naivety (I have seen a lot in the last two years), I no longer feel that it is possible to one day be the best. So I don’t know what my goal should be anymore, so I’m sort of lost and floating around, unmotivated and not really doing anything or directed anywhere. Just thinking about how everything seems stupid, life is meaningless, etc etc, just useless thoughts to have. However, I’ve always had this philosophy that even though life is meaningless, I want to experience the glory of life (all those things I wrote above – money, girls, power, fulfillment, discipline, happiness) before I die, just for its own sake. So I still want those things, but this new motivation doesn’t have an underlying note of “I want to be superior to everyone” because I know that that can never happen.
It was really helpful to be able to write this all out and just get this off my chest, but if anyone has anything helpful to add, I would also appreciate that.
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