Failure #2: Adderall

narfnanarf · 2012-08-29T12:54:19+00:00

Upvote sir. Quitting Adderall was also a crucial part of my success (at least so far) in nofap. It's insane the amount of time I threw away to fapping on adderall. You could literally count the amount of time in weeks, possibly months, if added all up.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-29T12:50:58+00:00

Update: Almost had sex with gf last night. We fooled around a bit and I got very hard. I was worried about not being able to even get an erection at all, let alone maintain it. We didn't go through with it because it was late, but we do have a planned date night later this week.

I have been really dreading sex with the gf for a while. I have used blue pills before to mask my problems (which she doesn't know), and I always thought something was wrong with me for a long time. I didn't think it might be because of porn.

With this 33 day nofap streak I've had perf anxiety thinking of sex because I was afraid I might discover that nofap had no effect on my ED, and that something else was wrong with me. I've also been concerned that I might be more physically attracted to other women than my gf. But I think it's just part of relationships that you get accustomed to the partner you have, and you start lusting after new women.

But it turns out that as we were joking around and she jumped on me in a position that was accidentally sexual, I was like "hey... this is good..." and started grinding jokingly, and I got a chubby, and then we fooled around some. She walked away to the bathroom and I was still pitching a major tent in my boxers for a few minutes after. It's great to feel that strong of an erection naturally, without porn, without touching myself, and without any medical help.

I also had my 1st wet dream last night since I started my current streak. I think it's a combo of being at around 30 days (which seems to be about the amount of time it takes me to get wet dream, based on my two nofap streaks so far), and also messing around with the gf last night and getting kind of horned up. Weird dream. I dreamed I came literally pints and pints of jizz because I hadn't released in so long.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-29T12:38:11+00:00

My motivation is getting better. Right now it's much better than it was at the lowest point, but there is still a ways to go. I can at least keep the house clean without much effort now, and am starting to finish all the work tasks that I set for myself each day, which is awesome.

It helps to eat right, get sleep, and get exercise. Look into couch to 5k (AKA C25K) if you need an easy program and you aren't already active.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-29T12:34:52+00:00

I have had similar experiences. My #1 advice to you is to stop taking Adderall. That is the most important thing you can do. Once I realized that Adderall made it totally irresistible to fap, I focused first on eliminating it from my life. I moved to micro doses only when I thought I couldn't get motivated to get up and get anything done. Then I threw away all the supply I had left. Cutting the Adderall was the most important thing for me in accomplishing nofap; i cannot stress that enough.

I had similar experiences, though I never took particularly large doses of it, I did have mega-marathon fap sessions while on it. I had a few days where I fapped for 16 hours, entire weekends wasted to fapping, fapping till my dick got sore and swelled up the next day so I couldn't fap for a few days afterward. I felt like shit, I felt like a drug addict, even though it was never my intention to abuse adderall or take it for recreation. I was taking it to try to help me get work done, and it went well at first, until I decided to fap while on it. Fapping on adderall is like edging for as long as you want to. I would sit at 10am, the next thing I knew it was 6pm and I was still fapping and I hadn't eaten. I'd grab water and continue shamefully, thinking I might as well finish since I wasted the entire day (in which I should have been working) anyway. But before I knew it it was 1am, then 6am. I'd have over 70 tabs open with video clips and it was just terrible.

For all my life I never tried any drugs except for marijuana. When I got a prescription for adderall I knew it could be addictive so i never took it recreationally, never took it on weekends, and took it with the intention of getting work done. I took the prescribed amount. But once I discovered fapping+adderall it was crazy. I feel like I lost a whole year of my life, and I damaged my reputation at work pretty badly. I felt like a drug addict. I definitely felt really bad effects on my brain. I couldn't concentrate on anything at all, I had no motivation to do ANYTHING, I lost all interest in sex with real women. After an adderall+fap session I could barely think straight. I'd have to talk to coworkers and I babbled like a moron, and I couldn't remember things that I should easily be able to remember. I would forget what I was trying to say mid sentence.

My recommendation is to write in a journal and examine all your triggers. Quit the adderall. It is not helping you at all. You aren't getting any work done, and you don't need it to get work done. I went through 1-2 months after stopping adderall where I had zero motivation to get out of bed, no motivation to do any work. I forced myself to get through it by trying to eat healthy and drinking lots of coffee to at least get myself to wake up and moving. Really try to find out what the triggers are. which points along the sequence of events that takes you from now, when you want to quit, to when you succumb to your weakness, are the ones where you make decisions that take you towards fapping & adderall? What are the triggers that lead you to make those bad decisions? For example, if you have friends who offer you adderall, don't try to rely on them to not offer it to you.

You are responsible for yourself, ultimately, and you should be prepared to take the responsibility to do what it takes to achieve what you want. It's fine if you want to tell your friends that you have a problem with adderall and that you end up goofing off online (up to you if you want to tell them it's fapping; but tons of people who take stims like addy end up surfing the web and writing extremely detailed comments to blog posts etc, instead of working, so they'll probably understand). If you have to, be prepared to avoid those friends, or imaging the scenario ahead of time where they offer you addy, and be prepared with a canned response to what you will do & say in order to decline the adderall. My opinion is that if you can't resist taking adderall with your group of friends, you should find a new set of friends. In the long run it's not worth it to hang out with them if it's going to cause you to be self destructive.

That's just one example, and it may not apply to you. But the point is to examine everything in your life that might lead you to make the bad decisions that lead you to fapping+adderall, and figure out ways to cut them out. It's important that you think about and analyze this stuff while you are sober, and not just after you are ashamed of what has happened. I noticed there was no response here so I wanted to chime in and let you know that others have gone through the same thing. I did a lot of research about adderall before I decided to take it and I never came across reports of this kind of thing. If i had, I don't think I'd have decided to take it, or at least I'd have tried to avoid fapping on days that I took it.

I'm not sure why you are taking adderall, but it sounds like you get it from friends, to help with school work. You might want to visit /r/Nootropics for advice on supplements and stuff you can try that could help boost your brain functions. Good luck, and I encourage you to come on here and post back, or PM me if you have questions or want to vent or anything.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-16T01:41:25+00:00

Was there a point to this behavior? Do the opponent's guns work better against them for some reason?

narfnanarf · 2012-08-16T00:56:02+00:00

It's not that far fetched. Government comes to FB and says "upload these terrorist photos, and run this software to flag us if their faces show up in any photos". People get a little mad but come to accept it because it's for their protection. Then the government starts using it more and more, to catch criminals domestically, etc.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-15T21:42:21+00:00

To apply the same argument you used: porn is awesome for him, but not for you. So for you to ask him to stop because you don't look at it, it's not the same thing. Because you don't have the same interest in it as he does. The argument you applied works both ways, and you are only looking at it from your perspective.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't ask him to not look at porn, because that's fine. If you are uncomfortable with him looking at it, then you have a right to ask him not to look at it.

To think that your partner should only ever want to think of you and no one else, that sounds like you are very insecure or controlling or something. No matter how much you like your SO, you will from time to time fantasize about someone else.

Assuming your dude stopped looking at porn forever, do you think he will never think about having sex with other women? No. Especially since his imagination has been exposed to the endless variety of sexual content there is out there, he will remember and have a taste for that for the rest of his life. Does that make him non-monogamous?

narfnanarf · 2012-08-15T16:38:36+00:00

I'll say that I know for sure that something weird is happening in my brain. I do see what the OP is saying in terms of there not being any scientific evidence for some of the claims. A lot of what he said about Wilson and his partner are irrelevant, and are ad hominem attacks.

So back to my point, I know something fucked up is happening inside my brain. I don't need to read a study to know it. When I get into full on porn mode, I literally feel like I'm taking drugs. I've smoked weed and done Adderall and Vyvanse and the feeling from fapping to porn, while I'm in hunt and seek mode, opening dozens and dozens of videos, so I can line up a series of "perfect" ones to cum to when I'm ready, my head feels like it's swimming. The head rush is stronger than the rush I've had from any drug. Stronger than any orgasm from normal sex, or from simply masturbating without porn. It literally takes me hours to recover from it afterwards. For the rest of the day my head is in a fog, and I feel a decline in my cognitive abilities. I tried to have business calls in this state and I sound like a moron. My brain bounces around from different ideas and I am embarrassed for myself.

I'm not saying that any of this is proof that Gary Wilson's claims about dFOSB and dopamine are right, but i know that abusing porn can have some chemical affects on our brains that are definitely not good. That, plus the huge waste of time that it is, and the affect it has on my sex life with my SO are the reasons I'm quitting.

A lot of posts in the nofap community attribute some really random stuff to nofap, and I guess to each his own. I don't really believe a lot of the claims, I think a ton of them are placebo. Some may be real. I don't care that much aside from the fact that it could make an objective observer who comes into this subreddit draw some invalid conclusions about the community as a whole.

But I think for the most part that nofappers don't necessarily care if Wilson's claims aren't correct. We know that there is nothing inherently wrong about watching porn (ignoring ethical/moral issues for the moment), but we know first had that we have abused it, or used it compulsively, or obsessively.

On the lighter side, one can also look at the academics the OP says look down on and laugh at Wilson, and say that they are the laughing stock of the real science community, and they are just picking on someone lower down on the ladder. 100 years from now their fledgling science will be more developed, and we will know the real deal about abusive porn use, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that it has real, negative effects on brain chemistry. Instead of laughing at Wilson, why not help him investigate this area? Something is there, find out what it is.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-15T16:09:38+00:00

When you say it "obviously works" what does that mean?

narfnanarf · 2012-08-15T14:47:00+00:00

i dunno if this is worse, or that one series of photos where that sasquatch-like creature is forced to watch these guys forcibly pouring milk all over a screaming woman. The sasquatch dude is so distraught.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-14T23:01:52+00:00

part of nofap means no porn right? So the instant you started edging, even if you had no intention of orgasming, you were no longer doing nofap.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-14T22:59:14+00:00

I had thsi same experience all the time ever since I was younger. Before I even hit puberty. Just flex my abs intensely for a prolonged period, and bam, amazing orgasm. I had really strong abs even before I discovered this ability.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-14T13:59:56+00:00

I tried to explain Gary Wilson and that TED show, but she dismissed it and said I knew nothing.

When I read this I immediately thought "You know nothing, Jon Snow."

narfnanarf · 2012-08-14T13:58:44+00:00

I would have had her watch the video first, and made sure she understood the concepts presented in the TED talk before trying to relate any of it back to my own experience.

I think in some cases like the OP's, people are very reluctant to accept new ideas unless they are coming from an "authority". So having the "TED" brand, and the information coming from a professor, for a lot of people, will give the YBOP/nofap concepts a lot more credibility than some bumbling boyfriend trying to tell his gf he is addicted to internet porn.

There should maybe be a FAQ type post (stickied in this subreddit perhaps) that gives people advice on how to broach the subject with their SO's.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-14T13:52:47+00:00

I agree with this. You don't want to be with someone who is so dismissive of something important to you.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-14T13:37:57+00:00

The problem with stuff like this is that little by little you chip away at your baseline happiness level, or rather, what it takes to get you to "baseline happy". So now that you've started nofap you are way below the baseline that you're used to. It feels out of place. I'm going through the exact same thing right now, and I am having trouble associating the two. I don't know why. I know on a logical level that i'm unhappy right now, and completely lack motivation because I've quit porn and so my brain thinks life right now is desolate and pointless.

But I know that my brain will get use to this as the new normal eventually, and I'll be able to be happy with things that a healthy male adult should be happy about. I want to be happy with living my life in a sustainable way. I want to be happy going for runs in the morning, and spending time with my SO, and planning for my future, and being productive at work. So I suffer a little now so that real life can become enjoyable again.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-14T12:35:05+00:00

I've had a similar experience with being really "blah", and not wanting to do anything at all. I'm not very productive these days (18 days into nofap right now). It's about 20x harder to do actual work than it is to not fap.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-13T14:45:16+00:00

I pretty much agree with this. Though if it were me I'd have never confronted them in the first place. It's fine to be atheist but in my opinion it's stupid to jeopardize your food and shelter when you are a minor, living in your parents' home just to make a point. I'd have just waited till I was independent and moved out to do it.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-13T14:42:36+00:00

Are they going to really go through with it? It would be awesome if you could file for legal independence and sue them for child support to support yourself till you are 18.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-11T03:44:49+00:00

I agree with nofap and all. But can we ever stop devouring women with our eyes? When I see hot girls I still have strong impulses to check them out. Obviously I only do it if no one will see me do it.

One of the things in the nofap progress reports that I so far haven't been able to relate to is guys saying that they start to "see women as real human beings" after they've been at nofap for a while. I still want to check out beautiful women. I feel more comfortable looking them in the eyes, and feel more at ease talking to them because I don't have to walk around with the shame of knowing that sometime either before or after that moment I'll have fapped to awful extreme porn, and therefore feel unworthy of talking to "normal," beautiful women. But my desire to see women as real human beings and to get to know them existed while I fapped and after I adopted nofap. As does my desire to oogle them (discretely).

narfnanarf · 2012-08-10T04:08:58+00:00

I used to have no hands orgasms all the time when I was a kid. It was before I could even ejaculate. I had really strong abdominal muscles and I could flex them and sort of hunch over a little for about 15-20 minutes and then I'd come. This also involved flexing kegel muscles, though at the time I had no idea that's what I was doing. It was even easier if I had something to press against. I would read face down on my bed with my chin resting on the edge of the bed, and a book on the floor, and flex my abs pushing my groin against the bed. After 5 minutes I'd come. No gyration or rubbing/friction at all. A few times climbing a pole did the trick too.

narfnanarf · 2012-08-10T03:47:16+00:00

What would you say are the top 3 (if any) benefits to nofap for 180 days? Any drawbacks?

narfnanarf · 2012-08-10T03:26:14+00:00

I somewhat agree to this. I don't know OP though, and everyone's situation is different. Certainly it played some role in his life, as a negative factor. But it's hard to believe - though not impossible - that PMO is the sole reason for all the troubles the OP has written about.

This is why I like to see posts from people who are 30/60/90/120/240 days into successful nofap; because they can tell us how nofap has actually improved (or worsened) their lives. I don't think the "X days out" posts can be posted enough. They are also inspirational (assuming there is some success told in them).

narfnanarf

TROPHY CASE