I started my journey years ago with a 36 day nofap pornfree streak. My honest answer was that I was constantly on edge, anxious, and unfocused. I would spend years trying to recreate this streak with limited success; only once did I repeat it at 31 days with the same results: on edge, unfocused, anxious.
It’s only when I finally gave that up and went only pornfree did I start living a relatively stable life, not to mention making significant progress. As evidence, my last streaks were 62 and 42, and they felt easy in comparison to the last few years.
Also, I think you can still date regardless of nofap or pornfree; obviously it’s way better if you give up porn. I’ve had successful relationships even while addicted, but sex would always be tense because I would feel guilty about porn use. Keep in mind that I’m lucky to not have suffered from PIED, though I did suffer from DE.
Having been off porn, my DE is pretty much gone. Even days that I masturbate, sex is still great! It’s crazy how much power and life porn can take away from you.
I think in the end, it’s not about a streak length, but how you change yourself. Being pornfree helped me stop objectifying everyone (I’m dead serious about this one), and stop treating my life as a ticking counter (when’s the next time I get to use?).
So yeah just treat her like a person worthy of respect, and be her friend before a partner. Nobody wants to be treated like a toy to be used and thrown away, and that’s what porn wants us to do. Relax and have fun honestly.
By – seatint
UPDATE – A year of progress: what I’ve learned and how I’ve changed
Today I journaled and thought about what has changed between now and last year. I think it could help put into perspective my philosophy that recovery can happen in spite of relapses.
A lot has happened this past year with regards to recovery, and it’s been on average on the upswing. Just reviewing what I’ve gained in the past year:
I learned active coping strategies for when urges hit
- Bringing it back to the breath and relaxing
- Going outside
- Talking to friends
- Posting and hanging out on r/pornfree
- Urge surfing
- Distracting myself for 5 minutes
- Meditating
- Taking on an unrelated task to diffuse
I practiced ways to prevent urges from happening
- Changing my attitude to be more positive over time
- Exercising, even if it’s just once a week
- Giving myself unstructured free time where no work is allowed
- Being okay with having fun
- Eating well and enough as a principle
- Sleeping better on more days
- Making sure to spend at least a few minutes outside most days
- Going to see the therapist twice a month
- Being okay with failure, and adopting a growth-centered mindset
- Not beating myself up over relapses and accepting them when they happen
- Forgiving myself for being close to relapse
- Accepting negative emotions and days, believing they are just part of life, as are good days
I changed my attitudes for the better
- Fun is necessary for a good life
- Work is not all there is to life, and should not exclusively define good or bad days
- Productivity is only but one measure of a positive life
- Porn is not my sexuality, but an empty substitute for it
- It’s okay to be sexual!
- Whatever happened, even if in the last minute, need not dictate what I “must” do now, for I always have a choice, and I can always want to make the choice that is better for me in the long term
- I am allowed to be sexual, and accessing and enjoying my sexuality is not contingent on anyone but me; only I can give myself permission
- I am allowed to masturbate, and there is no contract binding me to “save it”
- Relapsing doesn’t make me a bad person, and being close to relapse doesn’t either
- Relapsing does not mean I am “deserving of punishment”; rather, I was met with a moment of weakness, so seeking help now will turn it into a moment of strength
- Urges come and go, and having to manage them doesn’t mean I’m afflicted, but that I am regularly presented with opportunities to practice being the person I want to be
- Being pornfree is not a contract on pains of penalty, but a commitment to a better life
- Overcoming addiction is more than maintaining a streak — it’s defining the life I want right here and now
- Seeking help is a sign of strength, and accepting more help makes me unstoppable
- Help comes in all forms, from food, to people, to places
- To want brings more personal agency than to need or to have to
- I love myself unconditionally
- I am worthy of love and respect, as are all
- I am imperfect, but that’s okay: it makes becoming better possible and that much more worth it
- Spending time with friends prevents urges and reminds me that I am loved
None of this happened in a day. By reaffirming to myself my commitment, I am always striving to become a better and more positive person, which like a positive feedback loop, makes recovery that much more easy and second nature.
Last year on December 8, I made my third reset post here, making 3 awesome streaks in a row. Those streaks showed me that I could do it, do this whole get rid of porn thing. Yet, those streaks, I didn’t learn the fundamental lesson in all this: you can’t go back to a self that didn’t use porn.
From there, I was just plain struggling for 11 months. I expected my streak to come back “because I had done it before,” as if I could change nothing about myself and get back there. I watched as legends like u/MightyAslan and u/shortyafter go on to stay the course and always see higher highs. They made some real changes in their lives and they inspired me to think, man, what can I do right now to make my life better? I fumbled looking for the answers on the surface: stretching, exercise, therapy, staying offline.
Then, a few months after that December, u/foobarbazblarg had a brief moment of weakness he converted to months of strength: he actually reset his years-long badge in a brave act of pure honesty. That lesson resonated with me all the way until today: ultimately, the biggest asset we have as individuals in this struggle is honesty.
Around that same time, I started to put words to a simple observation. I am a porn addict. I can’t expect to go back to a self before I was addicted. I’m an addict, goddamnit. Addiction was something that happened to other people, and now, it is happening to me.
The way forward, I have learned, is not towards the past, but towards today. The future is always now, and you don’t have to wait to be that person you think you’d be at 90 days. Take that person, and be that person right now.
I now stand halfway up the mountain with all the little steps I took. A new record starts today, and I am damn proud.
And my favorite part is how poetic all the dates are. Last December 8th, I reached my previously largest streak at 68 days. This December 8th, I will be at 90 days, after 8 years of trying and failing.
Never doubt that overcoming porn addiction is possible. I have struggled and failed over and over and over, and here I am, a happier, stronger, more confident person. I stopped waiting for life to get better, because I can always live a better life right now.
I say it a lot, but prior to last June, I was using so much I didn’t eat or sleep or go outside. Porn was destroying me. I was scared, hopeless.
Today, I am that much closer to realizing my vision that one day, I would stand up to porn without sword in hand, because I wouldn’t need it.
I’m no longer scared. Today, I am strong, and tomorrow I will be even stronger.
UPDATE – This is some cool shit
Hey folks. Over 5 years sober from other things and 500 days porn free. Things have been gradually getting better and better over the last 5 years (and last 500 days), but the last few weeks have been pretty intense, in a good way. I’ve always written songs but I never really had a platform for it. Now I’ve got a band and we’re starting to record old material, flesh out new material, and get concerts together. I honestly think quitting porn (and getting sober) and working on all that stuff that I was running away from is the reason why I’ve been given this opportunity. It’s like, I’ve become more open. Before I was closed off to myself, to the world, to my emotions. In fact I’m sure it’s related to quitting porn.
I’ve always written music but it’s always been really hit or miss with me. Like, I’ve never been able to write consistently. Weed helped and I had a major dry spell with no writing after getting sober. Although some of my fav. songs I wrote before I ever smoked or anything so I know it’s BS to think I need that stuff. But lately though I’ve been really coming up with some good stuff. I’m never 100% sure on any of it but, I’ve definitely crossed the threshold of “definitely not” to “definitely maybe” more often than not these last couple of months.
I just pumped out another one tonight. As I was sitting there with my guitar I was asking myself… What is it that separates a mediocre song from one that I like? What is it that separates one that feels clunky and forced from one that feels genuine and artistic? What is it that makes me identify one song as junkable and another as a total keeper?
And honestly, I could find no answer. I think like… that stuff is just beyond me. If I tried to figure it out or put it into words, I would like, lose it all together. You just can’t. It can’t be boiled down to a science.
I can’t say I’ve come up with any that have been total bangers or immediate keepers. But… I don’t know. You never know what’s gonna happen. So for now I’m OK with keeping them in the “definitely maybe” category. We’ll see what happens. Again, it’s not up to me to throw them away, or keep them, or figure out why something feels right or something feels wrong. As much as I want to boil it down to a science, I just, can’t.
And all this, folks, isn’t really to talk about songwriting. It’s to talk about life. I don’t know why it’s worth it, or why it’s cool, or why bad shit happens sometimes, or where I’m going or what the fuck is gonna happen. It just, can’t be boiled down to a science.
And I reckon that’s a really good thing. Because, I can’t tell you what this life is, but like, damn. This is some cool shit.
Thanks.
I wrote this in response to a private group question “Where do you think you are in your recovery?” I like how it turned out, so I’m posting it here as a pre-celebration celebration. Tomorrow is 90 days pornfree, and I couldn’t hold my excitement after taking 8 years to reach this point.
I am entering a new chapter in my recovery. For the past 7-8 years, I have been stuck in that initial pornfree stage of fighting off urges and trying just about every trick and shortcut I could try to Get Better Quick™. It’s only once I formally joined pornfree and cast NoFap into the past that I started to make real progress, but it was very slow. I was coming out of a deep addiction to porn that basically was the endpoint of all of the other problems in my life. Relationship struggles? Use porn. School too hard? Use porn. Just not feeling good? Use porn. Bored? Use porn. Family relations strained? Use porn. Porn was quite literally my solution to all my problems, not to say that it was even a solution at all.
I had some amazing initial streaks upon joining pornfree where I went 62, 42, and 68 days a piece, after basically never making progress for 7 years straight. I felt great about that, but something was missing. I would make it to 40 days, and then start peeking and then basically binge really hard for weeks on end. Something wasn’t right, and I decided that just abstaining wasn’t going to heal me. I had to heal me to abstain.
So I kept a monthly log in the year long threads tracking my progress and setting goals. I stumbled for the first few months trying to figure out what were realistic goals and what was attainable, and I settled on setting an easy “umbrella” goal that I then splinter into every day activities working towards the bigger goal.
I continued to stumble for a few more months until September, when I decided to leave my job and return home to take my recovery more seriously. I took an easy job with a flexible work environment.
With a few months of attempted changes under my belt, I had a better idea about what was realistic for me. So I started with developing a support group. I reconnected with a lot of old friends and that kept me from my computer. I then started addressing the other bits day by day. I joined an exercise group to push my fitness levels in a controlled manner, started regularly cleaning after myself and my apartment, taking long walks outdoors, and set up my computer by the window for sunlight.
I think the big thing that has changed though for me is my relationship to NoFap. I still had a tenuous relationship with it despite deciding to throw that idea away. I had no idea how to reincorporate masturbation into my life. I also had a plethora of sex toys that I had collected. Something inside me felt that I shouldn’t feel bad about that at all, because it was the insecurity talking. I had a revelation in October: NoFap has no benefits for me. For me, it represents all the insecurities I have about my body and about being a sexual being. I then realized: pursuing NoFap, even in random passing “I’ll just go 7 days”, was what was making me hate my body and question every single time I got aroused. It’s OK to be aroused! It’s OK to be sexual! What’s not OK is porn.
It’s when I realized the hard truth: NoFap was a porn-induced fetish for me.
I like that it feels better when I wait, but this obsessive holding in of orgasm was in of itself what porn was doing to me: forcing me to organize my life around getting off. NoFap was a contest in how long I could hold it in, and this was a porn attitude that was hiding right under my nose.
Since then, I have let myself use my sex toys liberally and basically do whatever I want with masturbation with two rules. 1: Don’t do it twice in one day. 2: Don’t do it in the morning. Those two bits were what I did with porn, and these rules have worked wonderfully well for me. I have actually dissociated sex and masturbation from porn in a very real way as a result of accepting my body and my sexual needs.
I have grown a lot during these past few months, and have gained an invaluable skill: the ability to recognize what I can and can’t do. By recognizing the little steps I can take, I prevent recovery burnout and celebrate every tiny victory I earn.
I want to say a lot more, but the short of it is that I have shone light on the demons of my past. In the past 1.5 years, I have addressed and overcome:
- Depression and anxiety
- Fetishization of my close friends
- My unhealthy relationship with masturbation and NoFap
- My poor exercise habits
- Habitual negative language
There’s probably more that I forgot about, but these changes alone have changed my daily perception of life from “I hate myself and everything about my life” to “I am okay and I actually like where I am, in fact.”
I really connected with something u/shortyafter said in a previous post on r/pornfree. He said his life had become manageable.
One day from 90, I sincerely believe I’ve just about reached that point myself. Things are manageable. I can dream up a positive change I want to make and get myself there. I don’t run from my problems anymore. When I look behind me, I see mountain ranges I have climbed to get to this point. There’s only up from here, and I wake up each day excited to see where I’ll go next.
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