I’ve been on NoFap for a while. Have not posted though. Reading content here, as well as the book Your Brain on Porn, helped me understand and eliminate my relationship with porn. I’ve come to an important realization. It’s not just about eliminating porn. You’ll see what I mean. While it helps – and it does, so so much – it doesn’t solve everything.
We need to heal the underlying unhappiness or psychological trauma that drove use of porn. While I do think that porn is addictive because of the desensitization to dopamine that is involved in use of porn, I think that what initially drives that abuse can be unhappiness and trauma. It’s important to create the best reality for yourself, be extra diligent about pursuing your interests and spend time with friends and family, in this time when these artificial distractions are so instantly accessible. In an experiment, when mice were given an awesome and fun cage, they found it easier to resist the drugs that the researchers made available to the mice.
The trauma is important to eliminate. Many people have early adverse experiences: accidents, poor relationships with peers, parents with high expectations, abusive siblings, whatever, that make us insecure with ourselves – unworthy. Rather than beating on the past, younger self (that is really our core self) we need to comfort that younger self and tell that younger self that we understand, appreciate, and are there for that self. We need to be the parent of our inner self, and tell ourselves that we will be the future parent and supporter of our present self. This has made an incredible difference for me psychologically. Bullied for being very skinny when young, and for having little confidence from an accident I had early in life, I then bullied my younger past self, and that was actually shaking my core self – because we are our attached to our younger past selves. Instead we need to cherish and nurture that younger self that may not have had the necessary help from parents or friends. We need to love that younger self and care for it and know that we will be there for the mistakes that the current self makes. There is so much else that needs to be done to heal trauma but this is the most valuable thing I have done recently.
I took time off from university to eliminate porn – to understand what was happening – and to reshape my life to minimize my vulnerability to these addictions. For more context, I worked at a Facebook partner in product management and was a student at UPenn. I eliminated porn, which is important because I think it’s autocatalytic (addictive), but I had to then dig in and deal with the pains that I had been artificially washing away through porn. But without porn, my sensitivity to pleasure increased, making it easier to be happy while I was confronting the pains from within.
I will say that eliminating porn has profoundly improved my mental state. I am much happier and have a much greater attention span. I don’t know of any other change I made in my life at the time I eliminated porn that would otherwise explain the happiness and attention span. I think the reason is this: pornography streamlines access to novel sexual stimulation, which allows us to artificially heighten our rate of masturbation and ejaculation. We release sexual energy abnormally frequently, which we wouldn’t if we didn’t have the access to vast novelty. With less masturbation and ejaculation and visual overstimulation, I have much greater 1. energy and 2. receptivity to stimulation, which allow me to be much more enthused with my work.
I also realized that my use of social media was fueling attachment to porn. This is because of the sexual content on social media, and the algorithms that can curate it very well for us (particularly on instagram). So I explored ways to reduce my use of social media in a low effort way. One was eliminating use of notifications. I let them pile up to 99 and come down to 0. While I miss certain things, I control my use much better now, and the benefit is worth the cost. This let me unplug from constant use of social media, whose exposure to sexual content contributed to porn.
Really the struggle here, with porn and everything else, is to reduce our addiction to artificial stimulation, and to increase real world stimulation. While artificial stimulation may seem more appealing and accessible in the short term, the consequences we are all aware of (which bring us here) warrant resisting those and developing greater receptivity for real world stimulation (by cutting out the artificial dopamine) and MORE real world stimulation (by using the saved time to spend more time with friends, pursue interests and hobbies, etc). Spending more time in nature I found alleviates the psychological pain from the digital withdrawal, just as getting more real world stimulation does as well. A significant other helps, but I think you need to be comfortable with yourself first before getting into a serious relationship. While real relationships are important, you should not use someone else to help you get off of pornography.
If any of you are working on eliminating porn and improving your inner life, I’d be happy to chat at any time, having crossed the line into a life fairly comfortably without porn as a 22 y/old male with early adverse experiences. I also am running a blog you can check out here that will give more high level insight on what is happening with technology, based on my work experience and research at Penn. https://medium.com/@thementalist
LINK – The Truth: Quick Perspective from a 22 year old who has not watched porn in over a year and a half.
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