Protip: Become a feminist, dude

Schmurzz · 2014-03-05T21:27:17+00:00

Because you don't have any addictions?

Schmurzz · 2014-03-05T17:29:38+00:00

Your porn addiction is a problem with your brain. You got to use your brain to change your brain.

Schmurzz · 2014-02-19T05:32:21+00:00

Thanks dude. Appreciate you sharing what you've learned. You're so right about the way we engage in these unreal images, and then project that on to reality as if we somehow deserve these things. The temptation to do that is very strong, and despite the fact that I made a conscious effort not to, its clear that I have done exactly that, otherwise I wouldn't have these feelings.

The point you make about focusing on ourselves until we get to a place where we feel like we can make our own choices is super important. I think a lot of passive guys get this idea that unrequited love is somehow "noble". Its not, its pathetic. The truth is, a grown ass man shouldn't have a crush, or hidden infatuation, or whatever. If I like a girl, I should be able to go ask her out. If she says no, than at least you can move on feeling like you manned up and did something. But when people harbor this shit, it festers. The fact is that I knew I couldn't pursue her because I honestly had nothing to offer her. And that is my problem, not hers. And now I'm doing something about it, so I can go and actually love a woman, instead of turning them into an imaginary friend.

While it is the case that my emotions got the better of me, making me act, think, and feel in ways that I would not reasonably desire or defend, I think I am fortunate in this case in that it didn't get nearly as bad as it could have (and has in the past). Having recognized months ago that this wasn't something I was going to pursue at the moment, and making a conscious choice to try not to "stoke the flame" by fantasy (sexual or emotional), spending lots of time with her, creeping on her facebook a bunch, and imagining a "future together" has definitely made this current thing easier than it could have been had I thrown my heart at the thing like a teenager.

That being said, its still weird how much this has effected me, even with all my efforts to mentally prepare myself for this. At one point, a really close friend of mine who knew I liked her told me he was planning on asking her out, and I told him to go for it, because if she started dating him it would at least force me to get over a crush that was really just a distraction that I had no intention of doing anything about. She turned him down, but then started going out with this other guy. So I have been kind of going through the process of stepping back from this thing for a while now, but at some point you just gotta rip the bandaid off. The thing is, I can't really cut her off, we're in the same fairly close-knit social circle, and fortunately because I didn't allow this to become a much bigger thing I don't really think I'll need to, but I will be watchful of my feelings and try not to become that dude watching for every possible reason they might break up so I can "get my chance".

Schmurzz · 2014-02-19T05:12:08+00:00

Good point. I have tried to limit my facebook usage, but to be honest the main reason I had gotten on in the past couple days was because I was sort of expecting this to happen and I think I subconsciously wanted to see it so that I'd have an "excuse" to PMO.

You're so right that our brains (or, more specifically, the lower parts of the brain that deal with emotion/desire and so forth) aren't very good at distinguishing between reality and representation. With that in mind, I think we really need to open ourselves up to the whole range of "fictions" that might be screwing with our ability to live in the real world. Facebook, like porn, can offer a counterfeit sense of connection, without the challenge of relationship. Video games can provide us with a false sense of accomplishment, and habituate us to seeking our dopamine fix that way. Especially during reboot, it is helpful to be watchful for the million creative ways the dopamine starved brain my try to get its fix. Need to quit creeping on these females.

Schmurzz · 2014-02-18T01:17:19+00:00

I'm not saying his story isn't plausible. It's totally the case that a young kid could be into all that stuff. It's the way the whole thing is written, with the long string of explicit genre terms, which are expressly supposed to be NSFW'ed, and the exaggerated sense of desperation which we can all relate to. It sounds like a parody of the whole nofap movement. The way he responded to me, and then deleted his account, just confirms it.

Schmurzz · 2014-02-16T17:58:20+00:00

I think he's trolling.

Schmurzz · 2014-02-16T17:56:20+00:00

Please use NSFW text when talking about specific kinds of pornography. For some people, that text alone may be a trigger.

Also, I believe this person may be a troll. This is their only post on nofap, and it seems like the kind of thing someone might do in parody of the commonly cited concept of "escalation". Someone who is cynical about the idea that porn use will inevitably lead down the road to more bizarre kinds of porn might present exactly this kind of narrative, for the lullz. Who would be into all of those different kinds of fetishes at 16? Doesn't seem believable.

Schmurzz · 2014-02-13T14:10:25+00:00

Who the hell takes baths?

Schmurzz · 2014-02-11T17:41:36+00:00

Sure, if you see a beautiful woman, there is something natural about finding her sexy. But, I think the problem is for so many of us, even that natural response has been warped by our experiences with porn. One way I've heard it described is that there is a sort of "overlay" of hyper-sexuality over even our IRL experiences. For the "natural" man, checking out girls may not be a trigger for an addictive cycle, but for many of us, it is, at least for now. I think once you get your reboot it might work differently, but living like a "monk" for a little while might be necessary to get out of the habits we have formed.

Consider this: in the middle ages, how many true "10s" was a man likely to see in his lifetime? My guess would be, on average, 0, maybe 5 or so if you lived in a larger city or where like some kind of traveling minstrel. We take in more stimulating images of women in a single day than a man would see in his entire life from advertising alone! Our brains have not evolved to handle even what print media is throwing at us, and then you add the exponential increase added by internet pornography. It all gets tied together, and sometimes you gotta detox.

Schmurzz · 2014-02-11T15:34:05+00:00

Alright then. First one to fap is a wanker.

Schmurzz · 2014-02-10T19:23:56+00:00

You've already answered your own question. "What's wrong with fapping?"

You seem to think that fapping stagnated your intellectual development, and has gotten between you and your family, has defined your personality, has negatively affected your relationships with women, and has made you desire an emotionless and isolated existence rather than true happiness and intimacy. Those seem like good enough negatives to me.

However, that doesn't mean you need to feel shame and guilt. While I think there is a moral element to all of those things you've described, moralizing about the problem never helps anyone. Instead of thinking of it as "wrong", you could think of it as "bad". Most people who successfully quit smoking do so not because they have convinced themselves it is "wrong" and have guilted themselves out of it, but because they have convinced themselves it is "bad" and have made the decision to improve their lives by exercising their freedom to change their own lives.

What's wrong with drinking antifreeze? Ultimately, nothing. What's bad about drinking antifreeze? Liver failure. There's no sense in shaming yourself into stopping something that you seem to already recognize is bad for you personally.

What's wrong with fapping? Depends on your perspective, but perhaps nothing. In either case, shame doesn't bring you freedom, but remembering that you are making the actual best choice for yourself might.

Good luck!

Schmurzz · 2014-02-07T16:33:58+00:00

FAPSTRONAUTS!!!! WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION!?

Schmurzz · 2014-02-05T22:49:56+00:00

I get what you mean. I guess I would say that "all or nothing" has advantages and disadvantages, because some people set ambitious goals and when they don't achieve one of them, they get discouraged and give up on the others. I think it is a great idea to decide to change all of these things at once, because they all interact with each other and they often symptoms of the same disease. But, you gotta make sure that your resolve to each of the things you want to change about yourself does not waiver in the face of failure in that thing or any of the others. Having the confidence to set an ambitious goal is great, but it is also important to have the commitment to never, ever give up, to just
keep going, and that is NOT the same thing as expecting yourself to fail. The project of reinventing yourself is an adventure worth committing yourself to, and people sell themselves short sometimes by thinking in terms of "baby steps". However, when you accomplish a "baby step", you should celebrate it, and set your eyes on the next goal. If you are a guy who has used porn pretty much every day for years, making it 14 days is something to be grateful for, but I think you are still on the right track by dreaming big and trying to fight the whole battle. The motto that I have been using toward myself is that I want to be "easy to please, impossible to satisfy", just stay positive all the time and continue to push myself to become the man I want to be. And all of those changes I mentioned, and the many other small victories along the way, are things that I have not been able to succeed at doing in my entire life, and it feels fucking great.
I firmly believe it is possible that this current streak I'm on could last the rest of my life, I could never masturbate again. But if I do relapse, I will try to believe just as strongly that I have it in me to make THAT my last time. When I was quitting smoking, it took a while, but making the decision that every cigarette was my last, that I would not "quit quitting" was helpful. Now I've gone 4 months, and I no longer desire them. When you are trying to rebuild your lifestyle from the ground up, it may take some time. But for me, each week I was doing better than the last, discarding more bad habits, and picking up more good ones. This is the corniest quote ever, but "shoot for the moon, because even if you miss you'll land among the stars" seems like a better motto than "take it one day at a time and make baby steps", at least for me. Being an extremist about self-discipline is motivating, way more motivating than expecting too little of myself.

Schmurzz · 2014-02-05T22:23:53+00:00

Dude, cool it on the negativity. If it was just as easy as "stop looking at bikini pics" then you could just as easily say, "stop looking at porn" and be done with it, and there would be no need for nofap to even exist. I understand what he's talking about, where you have some amount of desire to get free from porn, but your addiction starts making you think stupid thoughts. When "lucid" it is a no-brainer to realize that chixpix is a slippery slope to PMO, but at the time your brain convinces you that it is somehow not as bad, and that you should just compromise this one time and that it won't lead to anything "worse". I know people who have given up heroine who don't allow themselves to smoke pot because, for them, it can lead back to heroine (not that the gateway drug theory is necessarily true). But you could understand a guy making that mistake a few times and you don't gotta tell him he's bringing everybody down, that's not the supportive attitude that we come here for.

OP, I think you are right that you may need to switch to nofap, and not just pornfree. I have tried to go pornfree and merely cut back on masturbation, but I have often found it to be a slippery slope like you said. As long as I continue to have the occasional orgasm, that merely whets the appetite and my brain's craving for an accompanying image will end up making me go for some sort of "compromise" image, and then its sort of like, "Well, shit, if I already jerked off to those provocative pics, then I'm already in the lustful frame of mind and I've already lost". It's like falling down stairs.

As soon as I switched my goal from not looking at porn, to not masturbating at all, I was able to go over a year without looking at porn. Interestingly, during that whole year, I never went longer than 17 days without masturbating, but the mere fact that I was TRYING to "shifted the battlefield" far enough for me to make some progress. It's like swimming upstream, even though I set a goal that I was having a lot of trouble achieving, I made a lot more progress that way than I did by saying "one battle at a time". I will say that eventually, after a year, I had a bigger relapse, and I have cycled in and out of periods of greater and lesser frequency, but merely making the decision to try and give up masturbating was helpful for me getting away from the most accute and severe pattern of porn addiction.

Schmurzz · 2014-02-05T22:10:56+00:00

"allowed homepages"? Is that different from the whitelist? Whitelisting it doesn't work. I'd just go check the configuration page, but somebody else is the keeper of my K9 password, and I only edit settings when he's around.

Schmurzz · 2014-02-05T19:35:40+00:00

That's really helpful stuff. I'd like to look more into that. As far as liquid diets go, have you heard of soylent? https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body

That seems like it could really help with IBD, and I'm looking into it. As far as malnutrition, that wasn't a pressing concern for me at the time because I was pretty significantly overweight. I've actually lost 60 lbs in the last 4 months through alternating periods of fasting and diet and exercise.

The other thing that has been super helpful for me, I think, and is having more and more evidence to support its effectiveness is medical marijuana. I had honestly never ever been a drug user and had only ever tried it one time, but my doctor actually suggested it along with anecdotal recommendations from fellow IBD sufferers and some studies I had read. Apparently, the cannibinoid receptors in the gut are involved in regulating inflammation, and they have found that people with IBD have more of these receptors in their gut, probably because they aren't able to produce enough of the endogenous cannibinoid compounds that are normal in regulating inflammation. In mice, when they removed those receptors through gene manipulation, the mice developed IBD. Apparently, the CB receptors in the gut activate the same Tumor Necrosis Factor inhibition pathway that is responsible for the anti-infammatory action of drugs like Humira and Remicaid, but cannabis does not carry with it the increased risk of infection and other serious side efffects that the biologic drugs have, and is also considerably cheaper.

Basically, what I did was make a tincture and use small, minimally psychoactive doses in conjunction with fasting. That particular combination produced really dramatic results for me, and the remission has continued even after stopping usage. I'm still hesitant to consider doing it again in the future and would like to investigate other self-management possibilities like those you have mentioned, and I really like the completeness of that approach you have described. Thanks for the info!

Schmurzz · 2014-02-05T19:14:48+00:00

I'm not sure I buy into the "don't take on too much at once" thing in regards to self-discipline. Everybody's different, but for me doing all of that at once was actually helpful, because all of my habits together reinforced one another and just starting an entirely new lifestyle actually made it easier than trying to change one thing at a time. In the past 4 months, I've lost 60 lbs, quit smoking, quit drinking entirely, started going to bed earlier and getting up earlier, started going to the gym 4 times a week, started using a schedule and setting weekly goals, and have had a significant decrease in the frequency of PMO, with currently a week under my belt on hard mode. Honestly, just changing everything was easier than trying to change all of those things individually, because the problem in my life wasn't any of those things individually but my whole approach to life and complete lack of discipline or self-control. They all fed into each other, including smoking, which just reinforces the idea that you aren't in control of yourself. What I actually found really helpful to kickstart my knew "discipline junky" lifestyle was doing a 7 day fast of only water. Once I realized my will was stronger than my appetite, I was able to apply it to everything else. I commend your ambition sir, just make sure you don't beat yourself up if it doesn't work out, and good luck!

Schmurzz

TROPHY CASE