1 Year – Two months after quitting, anxiety hit. It’s better now.

Hello everyone. I just reached one year pornfree a few days ago and I want to share it with you.

To give some context: I had been watching for about seven years, but I was not regular in my watching. It could be 1-2 day a week up to everyday. But it was always for hours.​

One year ago I decided to try to stop porn. At first, I didn’t take it too seriously. The first week was fairly easy, as I already did it sometimes naturally. Then the last weeks were harder, but this was at the time I started classes. Not watching porn let me with a lot of time, so I focused on working for classes and seeing friends. I think keeping me busy was the key to not watch porn during this year. I also surfed very little on internet.

At this time, everything was fine. I was a few months porn free, I was doing well in my classes, I was not thinking about porn. Then in mid December the anxiety strikes. I never had anxiety, so this was new for me. This was in a period I had a lot of work and the exam approached. For about two months, I had anxiety, had not a lot of energy, not feeling good. Retrospectively I asked me this question: why did I had anxiety this year? What changed? Then I thought it could be I was not watching porn. It gave me insight on how I used porn : it was to escape the outside world, take a shot of dopamine to handle a stressful period.

After these difficult months, I began to feel better. I still had some anxiety, but this was less often. Then comes the holidays. Last years, summer was the period of year I watched most porn. It was more difficult to resist compared to the rest of the year: I usually have not a lot of free time so I don’t think too much about porn. Then suddenly I have nothing to do for the whole summer. So I did a lot of things to keep me busy like seeing friends, reading, gaming, going outside.

Finally, how went this year? Pretty good, I got a lot of time. I’m also more confident, but I think it’s more of a global self improvement thing. I started to become more confident prior to stopping porn, so it’s difficult for me to judge the effect of porn. But there is also some downside like anxiety. Now I can’t go back, I can’t escape from life anymore. I have to take decision, I need to handle insecurities. This is difficult at the beginning and is still difficult now, although I’m more used to it. But I think it is worth it.

Thanks for reading. I focused on all the other things that come around stopping porn as these effects were unexpected for me.

LINK – I reached one year pornfree

by Masteroid1