[Note: don’t try this at home, kids.]
This is it. Today’s my 90th day. Thirteen weeks, or close enough. Never thought I’d make it this far. Whew.
The following post is not meant as an advertisement or to persuade anyone to follow my steps, especially if you’re a teenager. High schoolers, this is most definitely not for you. None of you would need it anyway, since it takes years and years to get as bad as I got with porn. For any of those who are older and who’ve struggled with a long-term, life-altering porn problem like I have, read on. It may be in a slightly random order.
I used to be the worst porn addict I’ve ever encountered. Over on yourbrainrebalanced about 6-7 years ago, we porn addicts would discuss how many hours a week we spent on porn. My tally was around 28-35 hours per week. That’s about 4-6 hours a night, most nights in a week, give or take. It was more or less a full time job. And that’s not even counting the times circa 2011-12 when I was getting into hard drugs and doing marathon porn/edging binges lasting 36 hours straight. I mean, sitting there with my dick in my hand until my eyes were about to bleed. It got really bad.
Everyone here who knows about the effects of edging can imagine what I was doing to myself. My brain was a wreck. I knew that porn was bad for me, a waste of time, a response to my lack of a social life, etc. but I was completely unaware of how it was messing with my ability to function mentally until I came across YBR in early ’14. Then I discovered brain fog and suddenly many of my problems made sense. I came across mindfulness shortly after and found that it helped with the brain fog. But like any addict, once I found something to help with the effects of my addiction, I just went harder. “No need to worry about brain fog, I can just meditate for an hour after this upcoming six hour binge.” And so it went.
I learned five years ago about the health/mental reasons for quitting porn but I couldn’t quit it. I was also aware of PIED by that point, which horrified me because I realized I’d had it to some extent since probably the late ’90s-early ’00s. I tried to quit… occasionally. Most of the time, I would put in a token resistance and then give up after a day or two. It was hopeless, I had no control. It was pathetic and I felt pathetic. I stopped talking to women because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it up if the flirting went anywhere. In fact, if a woman ever flirted with me, I’d run away for fear she’d find out.
So I haven’t dated anyone in ten years. And the last girl I dated, we were together for three years and never had sex, if you can believe that. And I hadn’t dated anyone for ten years before her, which means the last time I had sex was twenty years ago.
God, what a mess I made of my life, especially my sex life. No actual sex, just the fucked up fetish shit that you get into after normal porn loses its appeal.
A couple of years ago, I was telling all this to my shrink. As if PIED isn’t embarrassing enough when you’re the only one who knows, it’s humiliating to admit it to another person who’s asking you why you’ve avoided dating. He was stunned. “What’s it like, knowing that you did that to yourself?” he said. “It’s a shit-show, man. Porn has ruined my life.” He corrects me: “You mean, you ruined your life with porn.” BOOM. I was in complete self-denial about my responsibility for my problems. Took a long time to break out of that.
Anyway, I made a game effort to quit the porn once in a blue moon. One time, I made it to a month without. I told my shrink, “It’s funny, because now that I’m not looking at porn anymore, I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been, at least since high school.” And he quickly corrects me, “OR, or maybe you’ve been lonely all along and you were just numbing it with porn.”
BOOM.
I’ll never forget him saying that because it was so true. Man, I got so out of touch with myself that I was crushingly lonely for twenty years and didn’t even know it. I was alienated from myself and others long before this addiction got underway but it’s safe to say porn helps that alienation along big time. Like any addiction does. No friends, no girlfriends. Just porn. I think it’s safe I took my social awkwardness and made it 10x worse through years and years of brain fog.
But I went back to the porn. Knowing about nofap is a double-edged sword because once you know what you’re doing to yourself when you edge, it just makes the anxiety and guilt that much worse. And we jerk in order to deal with things like anxiety and guilt. And the fact that it’s fetish stuff, all stuff designed to play on your low self-esteem… it’s a mindfuck. You know you’re mindfucking yourself. And you know you’ve been mindfucking yourself for years, or in my case decades, driving this stuff into your brain through repeated use. You eventually despair.
And it’s a funny thing about long streaks without porn, it’s when you break that streak that you fall the hardest, right? Nobody ever breaks a six month-long streak with a 15 minute relapse; you figure, “Since I’m breaking my streak, I may as well go all the way” and make it for five hours or whatever. Turns out, alcoholics and druggies are the same way with their addictions. Alcoholics don’t just have one beer when they relapse, they have 18. It’s the same mechanism of addiction.
So I got pretty hopeless about this. Made it to a month a few times. Made it to two months once. Then fell big time after each streak. Eventually you give up because you know you’re not going to make it. Besides, the first couple days are always the hardest because that’s when your brain is still swirling with all those chemicals you’ve drawn out of it with the porn. So why put yourself through those first few days on a repeated basis? Every time the porn urge came up, I just gave in. I consciously said I’m giving in. No more fighting it, it has complete control over me, what’s the use. I’m going to die alone, as I lived. And who cares, it’s not a tragedy if some isolated loser dies alone. Isolated losers die alone all the time.
That’s a bad place to be.
I can say from experience now, it’s a lot easier to be three months away from your last porn binge than three days, that’s for damn sure. Because you don’t have all the excess D2 receptors or whatever floating around in your head at three months. A couple of times, I made it to two weeks, long enough to get the vaunted T-spike, but those were few and far between.
Eventually, I got to the point where I gave up the struggle. It was pointless. I had PIED and I needed to stop if I ever wanted to even think about relationships again, but I’d need to take at least three months off from porn if I was going to get my cock back and there was just no way that was going to happen. It was impossible. Had so much stress related to looking at porn by this point, because I knew it meant prolonging the misery and screwing my life up even more. Once you know what you’re doing to yourself with it, the experience of looking at porn is depressing. You’re horny and depressed at the same time.
That’s a lot of neurosis to be putting into your orgasms.
And you see it with a lot of other guys, or at least you used to on tumblr, these guys who do femdom captions and the captions are mocking the viewer for having PIED and being useless to a woman. And they would know because they’re mocking themselves, they’ve eroticized their own low self-esteem. Man, it’s sad stuff to look at and it’s sad to jerk off to.
There was a point where I half-jokingly considered starting a tumblr page where I was going to be a psychologist offering therapy to all these people with their fetish pages, asking them how they came by the low self-esteem that got them into cuckolding and all the other shit. Because the truth about tumblr was that all those pages had to be curated by people who were sifting through dozens if not hundreds of porn pics or videos every day. We all know what that does to your brain. But it’s all dressed up in some glamorous tumblr format to make it look like a happy, enchanted world.
I figured out several years ago that when you were looking at somebody’s tumblr page, it was like reading a journal of their slow-motion self-destruction, all dressed up in fairy dust. The format’s all meant to make it look glamorous but on the other side of the screen is a miserable guy jerking himself into oblivion in a studio apartment.
So I’d long ago given up hope of ever getting out of this. But then about six months ago, I came across a discovery that has changed everything. At this late stage in my game (I’m 45), I have another chance.
I read about people microdosing with psychedelics for addiction and depression. I’ve never done psychedelics before but as you can tell from all of the above, I was in such a state of despondency that I was happy to grasp at any straw that would help me out. So I checked out some research chemicals, analogs of psilocybin. Other folks microdose with them but I began taking normal-sized doses every now and then about six months ago. I’d try one RC and then another to see what their effects were.
One night, I came upon a major discovery. I had taken a certain RC and then decided to check out some porn. Much to my dismay, I found myself -for the first time in my life- completely turned off by the porn I was looking at. Before the trip started, I’d opened up all these porn tabs, was downloading a massive porn file, and then as I started looking at it all, it became so unappealing and even revolting to look at. I’m not talking about being overcome with moral qualms about it, I mean a visceral disgust with it even at a sexual level. I started looking frantically for other porn that would do the trick but nothing worked. It was only after the trip was over that I realized what I’d stumbled upon:
A drug that helps with porn addiction.
Well, I was actually on two RCs at the time, so it took me a little while to sort out which one did the trick. But I got it figured out three months ago. Three months ago, I sat down after that day’s trip was over and said, “I’m going to stop looking at porn now.” And I did. Anyone who’s still reading at this point will understand how difficult that is for a normal porn addict, let alone someone in my shoes. I’ve said, “I’m going to stop looking at porn now” a million times before and each time I immediately went back to porn. I had no control, no wherewithal. This stuff gave me both.
And a funny thing happened. Not only did I stop looking at porn, I stopped going on political web sites (or twitter) that are designed to keep you in a constant state of outrage in order to keep you coming back. I do think there’s an unacknowledged connection between porn and ‘outrage porn,’ they seem to activate similar parts of the brain, even if in different ways. Not only that, but I’ve become a lot more socially engaged, more caring, considerate, the whole nine yards. I’m unfortunately not one of these kids you see around here, “I stopped masturbating for two weeks and now I’m dating my crush!” Wish I were but I’m still in my shell so to speak. Got the social awkwardness sorted out, it’s not a problem anymore. But doing social stuff after decades of my old lifestyle is pretty uncomfortable and it takes effort to force myself out of my shell. That’s coming, though. I feel like I’ve got a new lease on life, even as I’m ashamed of the life I led and worry about the fact that any woman who dates me is going to be dumbfounded and scornful at my utter lack of life experience. I mean, I have no life experience because while other people my age were out going to concerts and parties, hiking and scuba diving, establishing careers and raising families, I spent most of the last twenty years looking at porn. I have that thought in the back of my mind all day and it’s crushing but what are you gonna do. At least I got something of a second chance here. So we’ll see what I do with it.
tl;dr
-Loner fucks up his life with porn
-Gives up on trying to beat his addiction
-Stumbles upon a research chemical that takes care of porn addiction as well as many of the issues that led to that addiction
-Celebrating 90 days porn free as of today
LINK – How I Went From the Worst Porn Addict in the World to 90 Days porn-free.
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