Tales of Porn-Related ED 7

Tales of Porn-Related ED 7 is in an 8-part series of stories with a very small sampling of self-reports by various men who have experienced porn-induced ED. For more stories check out these porn-induced ED threads and forum sections:

• Too much porn/masturbation cause ED?  (3300 posts)
• 22 with porn induced erectile dysfunction?  (450 posts)
• Porn-induced ED section: YourBrainRebalanced.com
• Porn-induced ED section: RebootNation.com
• Porn-induced ED section: NoFap.com
• Porn-induced ED sub-reddit

Browse thousands of recovery self-reports to learn what those who’ve recovered have experienced: Rebooting Accounts Page 1, Rebooting Accounts Page 2, Rebooting Accounts page 3, and External Rebooting Blogs & Threads.

Hi I m a 28 year old and suffer some degree of ED in recent. I start masturbated since I m 19 and usually use porn as a form of visual stimulation. I have observed that I have lost the ability to maintain erect during intercourse or I only get weak erection. My question is: does masturbation in association with porn will “exhaust” my interest towards sex and create a negative impact on my ability to get aroused in real sex? I m worried cause I think I m still young to have physical cause  for ED. Any thought? LINK

Thanks for these postings. I found it very helpful. I’m dating or was a nice guy who after the 4th time in the sack with him could only get aroused by masturbating himself while in bed with me. Boy did I feel inadequate. I like to think I’m pretty attractive and love sex. He doesn’t like blow jobs… Go figure! He says his problem is years of chronic masturbation & porn and the only way he can come is if I keep talking dirty and describe real sex stories or sexual fantasies while screwing… I just make up stuff for lack of real true life kinky stuff to tell him. It seemed like a lot of work to me – making physical love and constantly talking to him so that he could eventually orgasm! It’s too bad because otherwise I really enjoy our time in bed and he makes up for it in fellatio which I think is his focus due to his trepidation when it comes to getting hard for the actual intercourse. What can I do because I know I’m going to run out of interesting sex monologues!

20 Years old, have had many sexual encounters in college but ED every time. What’s the best way to do NoFap for ED?

I’m a college student, I go to parties all the time, I’m pretty good at getting girls (I know this sounds cocky but I’m just trying to explain), but I can never get it up! I’m going to get a little graphic here: Just this Fall I’ve brought three different girls back to my place, and each time I couldn’t get it up despite both of us being completely naked.

Now, when I go to parties I do drink. But I don’t think the alcohol is my problem (although I know it is proven alcohol can give ED). I cannot remember the last time I have gotten a boner during the day, without looking at porn or touching myself. Even if I am looking at porn, I usually have to touch myself to get a full erection.

It’s not like I fap a ton either. Maybe once every 2-3 days. And I never watch any bondage/kinky stuff to get me off, my favorite stuff is stuff like X-Art or amateur videos.

Hi I’m here bc I need help!!! my bf has been masturbating to porn on a regular basis for a very long time looong before I even knew him. I’m 20 and he just turned 31. we have been dating for over a year now and i was having problems bc we weren’t having sex on a regular basis we never really have…more in the beginning thaan now tho fer sure..anyways i caught him masturbating to porn one morning even tho the night before we had sex and i asked him if he wanted to have sex n he said no…

So than i did some snooping and realized he had a problem with porn and masturbating…he masturbating at least 3times a week if not more and having sex with me once every 2 weeks….he knows i will do anything in bed and I’m young and hot so i just don’t get it! he has started not watching porn and not masturbating since early January….we have been having sex since then once a week maybe. but still really no change…is there anything i can do to help this process more or anything i shouldn’t do?! please help me I’m getting desperate!!!

I just wanna have sex with my bf and i just want him to wanna have sex with me…LINK 

In Any Breast

I intend to go into painstaking minutiae in my next post but for now: I’m a 23 year old male who has made the decision to give up porn and masturbation. It’s been a little over 12 hours and I’ve almost lapsed once already. I’m a virgin. I masturbate to porn at least once a day. Generally I stick to vanilla stuff but during bad spells I’ve sunk to more grizzly depths.

The main reason I’m quitting is that I feel porn and masturbation have had a deeply negative effect on my relationships with women and increasingly upon my mental health. Things ended with a girlfriend I loved; erectile dysfunction played a major role in that. I’m now stunted and blunted in my dealings with potential partners. It feels like I’m offering them a ride home in my car but I’ve lost the keys. “What’s the point?” is the thought that’s often crossed my mind, after repeated incidents of ED with girls, across seven years. So as part of a wider change (hence the above quote), I’m giving up porn and masturbation in the hopes of rebooting and becoming a more confident, sexually functional man who isn’t missing out on some great experiences during the best years of his life. It’ll be tough. I’ve tried and failed before but I’m heartened to have found this wonderful site and already feel comforted and bolstered knowing that there are other people out there going through the same struggle.

I Googled something like “porn erectile dysfunction” and without a lot of reading or further Googling I came across a fantastic and incredibly helpful website called https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/ (YBOP) that had many helpful articles and videos. I watched the videos and read the articles and it was as if someone had written down a brief synopsis of my life and put it on the Internet.

Now it didn’t have all the details that were pertinent to me such as being an only child, parents getting divorced when I was 5, not having any strong male role models in my life, not liking myself, feeling inferior and then sorting out my life correcting things with 4 years of hard work through life coaching. It certainly didn’t have anything about being a virgin until the age of 28.

But there were other details that were incredibly similar and it made me realise that the reason I have been slow to become aroused with a real life girl on a number of occasions has been nothing to do with the girl and nothing to do with my physical health. I am 28, soon to be 29, I am in great physical shape, eat healthily, hardly drink any more and have never smoked a cigarette and have never done drugs in my life. But what was stopping me getting a fully hard and consistent erection was the fact that I had become desensitized to the female form and basic sexual acts because of Internet porn use. Plain and simple.

From what I have read I am not a bad case and I KNOW that I can heal myself. It’s an addiction like any other drug or alcohol addiction and it’s all about how it affects the brain and dopamine levels and has very little to do with my penis or testosterone levels.

Finding the YBOP website seems to have been fate. I do believe in fate to a degree and it helped out when I found that site. Why? Because I have met Rachel. She is amazing. She is someone that I really connect with in a way that I have never even come remotely close to connecting with anyone else in the past. She is intelligent, funny, driven, caring, loving, tender, sweet and ridiculously physically attractive. She’s damn hot. She has an amazing body. She may not think so, but she is gorgeous and I am so lucky. Why? Because she is now my girlfriend.

But here is the deal. As one of the articles said (https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/how-i-recovered-from-porn-related-erectile-dy…) on a cerebral level I am fully aware that Rachel is physically attractive. As objective and horrible as this may sound in some ways, if I compare her physically to all the women I have ever dated (not many), the women I have worked with or women that I have just known in some way, be it friends, family, acquaintances, girls from way back at school etc, Rachel, comes out on top, way above everybody else. She is, without being too cheesy about it, exactly what I look for in a girl. She’s lovely. Truly lovely.

Yet when we’re together I only get partially hard and can’t keep that level of partial hardness for very long. I wondered if it was nerves. It’s not. I don’t feel nervous like I do before a job interview or a speech at toastmasters or like I know I would be if I was forced to do a bungee jump from a helicopter or something crazy like that.

The problem is that I have, without knowing it, and so have millions of other men worldwide, been damaging my brain by watching too much porn. The basic explanation is that I have tampered with the wiring in part of my brain by watching too much porn.

“The issue lies not in viewers’ perfectly healthy penises, but in their brain’s reward circuitry—and there is no quick fix. Normal dopamine sensitivity in the reward circuitry is critical to normal sexual responsiveness, and too much stimulation appears to weaken the dopamine response of many brains.”

My brain no longer releases enough dopamine to get aroused and I don’t have enough dopamine receptors in my brain to pick up the little bit of dopamine that is being released.

Thinking back, we never had broadband Internet in the house I grew up in and the Internet as a whole was very much in its infancy and I don’t think I ever really looked at porn. I can remember just surfing the Internet back then and these were the days before Google. It took a good 3 minutes for a standard website to load and for all the component parts of it to be assembled in the screen with things like (31 items remaining) showing in the bottom left and hand corner on the status bar. Even looking at nude photos of women would have been ridiculous because it would have taken minutes for just a single image to load. Also, in those days I was not as computer literate and Internet savvy as I am now and I think I was still conscious that Mum might find out if I did anything vaguely naughty be walking in on me.

I do remember that I had one, perhaps two copies of what we here in the UK term as lads mags lying around and I used to masturbate to them. They’re pretty tame. Basically girls in underwear or bikinis and no exposed nipples or genitals. It was easily enough to get me absolutely rock hard though. Crazy hard. If I had met Rachel back then I would have been able to carry her around on my erection alone with no hands.

So, fast forward to September 2001. I go to university in a major city. The Internet isn’t that big a deal. I take my PC to uni with me but there is no Internet connection in the halls of residence where we stayed in the first year. I don’t miss it though. I had only just got a mobile phone and could barely use that. Facebook and Gmail didn’t exist, and Google wasn’t around.

In halls I had no Internet and no printed porn. I masturbated over memories of pretty girls I had seen on campus, many of them unobtainable to me, because, back then, I was not the man I am now. I was barely a boy. I would use my imagination and nothing more. I would picture them in underwear or topless and that would be enough. I might picture them having sex with me, but that was it. Just very tame sex. Vanilla sex you could say.

In the second year, September 2002 to summer 2003 I lived with 5 guys 3 of whom were on the Computer Systems and Networks course and without being harsh, they were massive geeks. We got broadband as they needed it and they sorted the whole thing out and connected it all up for me. Thinking about it, this was the first time in my life that I had experienced broadband. I didn’t know what speed it was and I didn’t know anything about it really other than it was always on, and it was always fast.

So that meant that everybody could surf the net and download things at the same time with no loss of performance. Other peoples music collections were bigger than my hard drive and they were downloading TV series from the USA and watching them before they were released on TV in the UK. We didn’t have YouTube or iPlayer but the Internet was growing.

I remember that someone downloaded what they thought was the film Panic Room with Jodie Foster in it but it turned out to be a 3 hour Danish porn film. I watched some of it with one of the guys in the house in the same way that you would watch a normal film and found it funny but that was it. I also watched a porn film with briefly with another friend in my room because it was hilarious. Two guys were having sex with a woman on a beach. At this point I found that quite extreme and comically bad. It was mechanical sex and none of them seemed to be enjoying it. I remember that I wasn’t really aroused. At points we laughed at how awkward the whole thing seemed. I could imagine the director shouting at them to continue but they were probably just complaining at how cold the water was. There was a musical soundtrack. It was retro porn.

I remember that in the second year someone left a magazine in the lounge with erotic stories in it. It did have pictures, but I thought they were rubbish. The women were attractive, but I didn’t see the point. I read some of the stories however and got massively aroused within 10 seconds and had to put the magazine down and concentrate on something else to make the erection go away. They were very descriptive stories and got right to the point. Again, it didn’t take much to get me going. If I had seen a woman in her underwear at this age I would have had to have concentrated very hard on something else not to become aroused.

In the 3rd and final year, September 2003 to May 2004 I lived with two friends from home as well as a bunch of other people and I now understood the importance and the value of having broadband Internet installed in our house as it meant we could access the university portal and get lecture notes etc and email our tutors and basically do everything that could be done in the library from the comfort of our own rooms. The library was always crammed with loads of people and was a nightmare to use.

The porn I used in that year was still images of women with topless, or in swimwear or sexy underwear. The images loaded quickly because of broadband. I would load the one I wanted and look at it occasionally while masturbating to remind me roughly what the women looked like, but other than that my mind would wonder. I would still create my own fantasies. The woman and the scenario might change and become completely fictitious but that was it. I do remember as well that I downloaded maybe 30 short clips from a series of sites that I used to look at. I may have downloaded then in either the second year or that and final year, I can’t quite remember.

The clips weren’t long. Just over 1 GB in total for all of them. I remember sharing them on the house network with a friend who at the time was into porn. I’m sure all the boys in the house were apart from one guy who had a girlfriend and another who went through women quicker than I drank pints of beer. I can’t remember much but I was not a heavy user of porn. In fact I don’t think the volume of porn or length of the sessions is important with this addiction. It’s the intensity of it with regards to dopamine release and the frequency of the sessions. If you’re mentally turned on and ALSO using material that turns you on, then the time to climax isn’t going to be very long at all. That’s my experience from a decade of porn use.

About a month after I left uni we moved in July 2004 and I got broadband install for Mum and I. I had used it at uni for the last 2 years and was NOT going back to dial up. So we got it installed at home and my porn use continued. I am not sure what it was like when we originally moved in. I was still using image websites. I would look at images to get revved up and then go and get into bed and think about a select one or two girls from the images and then mix that with women from real life and fictional women that I would create in my head. I would then masturbate to made up scenarios.

At some point I started watching videos at home. Either really short clips online that you could get for free because you had to pay for the full ones, or I would download some clips using Limewire like I did at university. Just blowjobs and things like that. I can’t remember masturbating at the PC whilst living with Mum. I still preferred to use images or videos to initially get turned on and then return to bed in order to pleasure myself once I had become aroused enough.

I moved out of home aged 25 in June 2008 and went to live in a house near the town centre. Initially I can’t remember what my porn use was like. I remember showing my female housemate a video because she was curious and wanted to know about porn for her work as some kind of therapist. That was actually on my hard dive. Shortly after that I deleted the files as I didn’t like having them on my PC. Porn 2.0 sites kicked off in a big way in mid 2006. YouTube and appeared in February 2005 and it didn’t take the porn world long to implement a similar style of site but with an adult theme. So these tube sites were well established by the time I moved out in 2008.

At some point I think I found Youporn.com and then not long after that a friend who was also single told me about Pornhub.com and I used those two sites extensively. I would never be on them for more than about 30 minutes at a time and often only once every 2 or 3 days. I never really surfed for porn for more than about 30 minutes per session as once I knew what sites to use I just went straight to them which reduced search time massively. Add in a 10 MB cable connection and tabbed browsing in Firefox and it made things easier. I had also learned to type faster working as a result of working in an office and using MSN and Gmail at home and had geeked out a lot learning keyboard shortcuts for Firefox. All of these little things coupled with the privacy of my own room in the house made getting my fix very quick and very easy.

Pretty soon I had taught myself to masturbate in a proper position sat in my chair rather than lying down rubbing my penis against my thigh as I had been doing. I was fully gripping my penis with my hand and really going for it. That was the proper turning point. This now mean that I could masturbate at the PC rather than going back to bed and it wasn’t long before I was no longer thinking about my own fantasies, but was purely using the video that was on the screen in front of me. I wasn’t being creative in my own mind and I wasn’t even adapting what I was seeing, I was just using it exactly as shown. I was now just a viewer. I always wondered how other guys could do that, but I had finally become one of them. I felt a strange sense of achievement, because I was masturbating like a grown up.

It was brilliant initially but the way the internet had evolved meant that I could as the YBOP website revealed to me only yesterday, start hunting which is something that dopamine does. It hunts. It seeks rewards. The reward system in my brain was being screwed up slowly but surely.

I began to load multiple videos from certain categories on the sites like anal and bondage, rather than just generally browsing or just using the first video clip that caught my eye, which is what I had been doing for a while. I was now going to the section of thee tube sites specifically for anal, bondage, doggy style or whatever it was that took my fancy. That was another indicator of further desensitisation. I could also quickly skip through the videos to find the exact bits of the clips that would stimulate me the most, that would release the biggest amount of dopamine in the shortest amount of time. There was a really useful feature were you could hover your cursor over the time bar at the bottom of the clip and see a small snapshot image of what was happening at that point in the clip. I use this to hunt further, but this time not hunting for the clip, but hunting through the clip itself.

I would leave out any striptease, talking, flirting, anything like that, and cut straight to the hard fucking or the cum shots. Over the last 3 years and no more, I have needed harder and harder porn to arouse me. Nothing dodgy, just heterosexual stuff, men having sex with women, fairly rough sex, and some light bondage stuff but that was it. It is however light years away from the bikini clad images that I started with back in 2003-2004. But thinking about it I can safely say that now when I see images of pretty girls or pretty girls in real life even if it’s just random cleavage on a beach or something, I should be getting turned on but I am not.

Now I don’t just need porn I need specific sections of multiple, hardcore, tailored videos in order to get me off and I have noticed that I am able to masturbate and ejaculate with a soft penis. That always made me wonder what was going on. I did read somewhere ages ago that the penis should be rock hard at the point of ejaculation, but I know from personal experience that this is not the case.

So, there we have it. No need to say much more apart from this continued when I moved to my current flat in June 2011. I had the added bonus of being made redundant shortly before the move and that gave me more time alone in the flat during the day and time that I could be spent masturbating. Funnily enough I probably looked at porn for less than one hour a day even when unemployed. But it’s like a drug addicted. They shoot up in the morning and they may not need another hit for a while.

For quite some time whilst unemployed I didn’t watch porn more than once or twice a fortnight.

Once I had Rachel on my radar as someone that I would like to talk to and get to know more, then I stopped masturbating completely. Perhaps it was coincidence, or perhaps the social interaction and connection had filled a void. I ceased to masturbated in late August, and only did it a couple of times in September and a couple of times in October. Once with porn and the rest of the time without.

The fact that I had low self esteem and no girlfriend for many years can’t have helped this situation. Those two factors and the porn use probably fed each other in a destructive, downward spiral.

I have without knowing it been going through the initial stages of withdrawal symptoms as described in the recovery article that I linked to earlier.

“I feel nothing. It’s like I just don’t have a libido. No morning wood. No wet dreams. No spontaneous erections. No cravings. Haven’t been horny. I’ve had opportunities to have sex but my body is not responding. I’m taking tango classes, so I’m reasonably social but still no sign of my libido. I can dance with a beautiful girl and have no physical reaction whatsoever. I’m aware cerebrally that a girl is attractive, but I don’t feel it physically.”

That feeling is quite common to me. My porn use and general masturbation habits have diminished but because they have not ceased completely I believe that for the last year or so I have been locked in a cycle of partial rehabilitation and relapse, never able to fully escape from the clutches of porn. I have never had many wet dreams, only one that I can remember waking up from ejaculating everywhere and that was before I had any Internet connection many may years ago. I haven’t had morning wood properly in years. I think that the problems have only become properly apparent in the last 3 years when real women have had some part to play for the first time ever.

I can remember talking about it with with my life coach and putting it down to performance anxiety. I am now guessing that genuine performance anxiety would have been responsible for no more than 10% of the problem. Shocking really, but the main thing is that I now know what is wrong with me and I know that it can be fixed without spending any money or seeking professional help or anything like that.

Porn, Masturbation, Orgasm or PMO for short. I need to go without PMO until New Years Day. That is my initial goal, any day from then on will be a bonus. If I take today, 18th October as Day 1, then New Years Day will be day 75. If I can go without PMO between now and then, I fully believe that I will be back to normal. It may not take as long as that, but it may take longer, I don’t know. One thing is for sure, I will succeed. My motivation? Rachel. I don’t need any stronger motivation than her. Thinking about it, there is no stronger motivation for me. I want our relationship to be the best it can be, and me functioning properly on all levels will help that. I am helping myself to help us. I will need her help, awareness, understanding and support as well. I will beat this.

Whilst I do want to have sex with her I don’t necessarily want to be banging her brains out over the kitchen table or something like that, I know that she is much more special than that. We have such an awesome connection and enjoy that way more than just sex as a physical act. I think that my fear of not being able to properly enter her has in a way forced me to enjoy the non sexual side of the relationship and actually look at her as a person and get to know her and become attracted to her, fully for who she is and every aspect of her personality.

I want to fall in love with Rachel, I want to be her boyfriend, I want to make strong, passionate love to her. I want her to become incredibly aroused by how big and hard my penis is. I want sex to be fun and enjoyable for us both and not just her.

She mentioned not having sex and focusing on other stuff and at the time I didn’t like the sound of that. At that point I hadn’t discovered YBOP and that I have an addiction. Having learned about my addiction and given it some thought, I would like to do that, and I think she would appreciate it too. I have no problem pleasuring her manually or orally, and she can touch me as well if she likes, but the simple thing is that I must not PMO on my own.

My only source of porn is the Internet on my laptop. There is no printed porn anywhere, and no files saved on my hard drive. It’s all out there on the web and can be accessed with just a few clicks. It’s just going to be a question of remaining strong and using my relationship with Rachel as motivation for not giving in and being weak.

Another thing to overcome will be my own thoughts of sex and porn like images. It’s not actually that bad. From now on when something like that pops into my head I will just think of Rachel, and not necessarily in a sexual manner.

But alongside that there will be a plan of action.

Now when I want to masturbate I will do press ups instead, aiming for sets of 20. This will serve as a distraction, use up physical energy, build muscle and strength that I can then use in the gym or real life, help hormone production, make me look better and feel more confident.

Once I get back to work, office hours, combined with all my hobbies, keeping this PMO diary updated, and the need to cook, shop, do housework, see Mum, see friends and spend time with my wonderful loving girlfriend Rachel will mean that I don’t have much time to spend thinking about porn and that kind of stuff.

Distraction and diversion of focus is the key along with abstaining. The most difficult time will be falling asleep at night when I am alone. I used to masturbate to help me fall asleep a fair bit, but that won’t be an option now. I will have to get Rachel to where the least sexy pyjamas possible when we sleep together so that I can be sure it won’t tempt me.

I’m actually genuinely pumped up and excited to have discover the YBOP website and identified my problem. I know it’s a genuine site because a) it isn’t trying to sell me anything or get me to sign up for anything, b) it’s no covered in adverts for anything and c) when I read the articles and accounts of other men, I can identify heavily with what they are saying and it’s so incredibly similar to my own personal experience that I am 100% certain that this is the affliction I have been suffering from.

As the website says, your doctor won’t be able to help you as medical practice is years behind and cannot adapt at the same rate that the Internet is evolving. I am convinced that many men suffer from this, and that the trend in porn related erectile dysfunction mirrors the increase in the speed and availability of broadband Internet.

That’s it for the first entry in my diary. It’s been long but it had to be. From now on the entries will be shorter, but still detailed enough to record my feelings, thoughts, events and changes.

Well here it is I’m 17 Ive be watching porn since 13ish at first i remember i could practically bust just looking at porn but now couple years down the line i cant even geta stiffy without porn and I’m ****** losing my mind over it like last night this girl Ive like since 6th grade was practically begging me to **** her but i had to make a ******** excuse to get out of that situation cause i know i couldn’t live with myself if i couldn’t *** to her i haven’t been watched porn, jerked it, or orgasmed in like a week and a half and at this point i don’t even want too

comments would be greatly appreciated if not watching porn actually works, how long does it takes to get back to being able to have real sex, anyone around the same age dealing with this same ******** etc. LINK

Epiphany and the quest for change

I’m a 19 year old male who began online porn use around the age of 13. Initially it was just semi-nude images and things I didn’t really consider were “bad” such as the Victoria’s Secret webpage. Then I learnt to masturbate at the age of 14, but for quite a while it was fueled mostly with imagination and fantasizing, since my Internet connection couldn’t stream videos very quickly back then. Strangely enough, I didn’t really actively seek out porn at the time because I didn’t feel good using it. Heck, I felt…unready…to see nude women for a long time, so I stuck with the semi-nude images.

But as I realise now, even that kind of behaviour which I considered “mild” can lead to many of the problems I’ve read on Your Brain on Porn. One day, I suddenly realised just how dead my penis felt. I wasn’t having any morning wood whatsoever when I clearly remembered frequently having them only about a year earlier. The semi-nude images were beginning to lose their effect of arousing me, and I had to browse bigger and bigger galleries of them just to get the same high. Any erections I did manage to get also didn’t feel the same as before. They didn’t feel as alive and pulsating with a “mind of its own” kind of way. For a teenager, I thought this was a very serious problem. Here I am supposed to be at the horniest point of my life but I just wasn’t feeling it! Finally, I decided to tell my parents about this concern and they took me to see a total of 3 doctors over a period of a year.

The first was a urologist who ran a blood test to check my testosterone levels and also checked my prostate (unpleasant first experience of that, urgh). In the end he couldn’t identify anything physically wrong with me, and short of actually “testing” with a real girl, there wasn’t anything he could do further. He even encouraged me to masturbate to porn more, advice which I foolhardily followed :/

The second was some other kind of doctor that I visited for another sickness but told him about my problem anyway. After detecting nothing physically wrong again, he referred me to a neurologist. This neurologist did a fricking MRI on me to see if my brain was the one having problems, and for the final time, seeing nothing physically wrong, kinda gave me religious-ish advice such as not having guilt about masturbating as a Christian. Suffice to say, I felt like all these doctors did nothing to give me the answers I so desperately needed.

Fast forward to recent years when my porn use had evolved from just images to “normal” intercourse porn, my life was in a rut. I was about to finish high school and suddenly felt like my years in it were spent in a daze and that I’d wasted all that precious time. I felt depressed and lonely, and nothing seemed to be able to give me lasting peace of mind. During this time, I medicated myself with porn and masturbation, considering it the only thing that felt good in my life, even though sometimes immediately after I’d feel even worse about myself. I also noticed that the only way I could get hard was to look at porn while masturbating, and my style changed from stroking with lube to a dry, rough grip. Many times, I just masturbated with a penis that wasn’t fully hard at all. By this point, I had almost forgotten what a rock-solid erection felt like.

Then a few months back I stumbled upon YBOP on a psychology article, and suddenly all my doubts were dispelled. In a way, I felt so relieved that my problem wasn’t uncommon and that it was easily fixable with the right amount of effort and time. I had almost given up hope on ever being healed and thought that I would have to go through all my adult sex life with this problem. Now, I’ve set my mind on completing a successful reboot by the time I finish my pre-university studies later this year, while reaping the slowly acquired benefits along the way.

Currently I’m on day 14 of my reboot. I had initially been on an 11 day reboot before that but relapsed and then binged for 2 days before starting my current course. I am so happy to see some obvious benefits beginning to surface in my life. I don’t feel so lazy about going to the gym every once in a while now for a good workout. I don’t stay depressed for as long if the day did not turn out well, unlike previously. I feel a little more energetic going about my daily life. Even though I’ve yet to actually put that to good use such as studying more lol, but it feels good not to feel perpetually exhausted and foggy-brained.

But it’s a tough process for sure. When I say day 14 of rebooting this only applies to M and O. In recent days the urge to look at porn was so overwhelming and I glanced a bit as some covers of Maxim and Nuts, so porn abstaining keeps reverting to 0 days. But at least without the M and O, I don’t end up in a downhill cycle of all three again and it’s easier to stop myself from seeking porn. Still, my brain has been whining nonstop today and I had to take a long nap to alleviate the urge. I guess maybe it’s kind of like “hitting the wall” in running? When actually you do have enough reserves of energy to go on but your brain is already telling you to stop? But if you manage to break that wall, then you feel that energy and can go on nonstop. So now it feels like I could go on abstaining but my brain is already calling out for me to binge. I’m hoping that once I break that wall, my brain will stop pestering me and I can focus on my reboot.

Also, realising the danger of not having enough things to distract from the urges, that’s why I’ve finally decided to start a journal here. Once again, I’m glad that I was led to YBOP and all the successful accounts of people who’ve rebooted and this has given me great hope about jumpstarting my life again and living it to the fullest now.

Here’s to life without porn

Getting out of this hell, 1 day at a time.

Hey there, I’m a 21 year old with what I think is now HOCD stemming from ED.

I’ve been suffering immensely with this for the past 3 months and it has pretty much debilitated my life. I’ve lost all of my confidence, all of my expectations and pretty much been to hell and back. When this first hit me back in January I had no idea what to do with myself; In the space of 6 days I had a panic attack on pretty much every day (the worst part about this was the fact that I was also sitting exams during these days – they were an absolute nightmare).

I believe the stress I was under was the straw that broke the camels back as such; under normal circumstances I would shrug these thoughts off jokingly knowing how untrue they really are – but because I was so vulnerable around this period I gave that one thought emotional importance. That was the big mistake I wish I hadn’t done. Since then I haven’t had a single day off from this constant doubt; I mean literally constant. There wasn’t a single period where I haven’t had some kind of awful thought associated with this type of OCD.

After the exam period my stress levels initially went down and I wasn’t having anxiety attacks daily, but I was suffering from extreme levels of discomfort (and high levels of anxiety and fear) daily, and I’d spend literally hours of my day ruminating and worrying about where the HELL this had all come from. Like seriously, where on earth did I get these thoughts from?! How the hell did they appear? Knowing full well how much of a sexual deviant I’ve been in the past. I’ve always felt strong and confident about my heterosexual identity, and it all came shattering down when this happened.

Hello, I was wondering if there is a relationship / connection with the visual relationship of the brain and the physical functions of the penis. When a man is aroused, is there a chemical reaction that increases libido or excitement that might be interfered with or encourage it??

I’m having problems getting excited with a woman as well, same thing with the ORIGINAL poster and his problems. However, I am in my 40’s and still wanting to be sexually functional and active with out meds.

Porn does stimulate me, but the naked lady next to me produces half mass erections. But the porn erections are still 18 year old solid!!, (bad example, but I remember) but you get it.

I do think I’m addicted to the chemical excitement and the feeling of getting off, MAN.. that an addictive feeling and I enjoy it a TON. I often masturbate 1-5 times daily!!, for the past 20-25 years, really! (at least5 outta 7 days a week) I think I need to take a break form porn and masturbating, but its EXTREMEMLY hard. Could someone point me in the right direction on this problem of mine, its beginning to bother me and my partner/s.

Hey, this is my first post here. So Hello everyone.

I’ll give a brief background history. I accidentally discovered MB when I was very young, I don’t remember how old I was but I think I was between 10 and 12. I didn’t fully understand what I was doing at the time, just that it felt good. There was no orgasm involved either. This continued on an almost daily basis up until age 19. I’m 22 now. I realized my problem a couple months ago, and since then I masturbated twice in the past two months (Before I decided to quit however, I found myself MB much less. About once a week, if that, for two or three months prior to my official quit date). But it has been over a month since the last time.

I’ve had sex with decent amount of women, and with all of them gaining an erection was very hard (Ironic, right? It usually required manual stimulation from me or her, and I could get hard enough to go for a while. After a couple minutes I’d lose it, however). This had taken a real hit on my self confidence, I really didn’t understand why it wasn’t working for me at first. Once I read this website, literally everything just clicked. It all made complete sense. Since I’ve stopped watching porn I’ve been having morning erections for the past month an a half pretty much daily (which from what I’ve read is good!). I’ve also felt much more socially active. When I go out I feel the desire to have sex with women, which I didn’t before. I would see a girl and know that I was attracted to her, but I wouldn’t feel the urge to have sex with them. It was like my brain was thinking that, even though this girl was attractive it could find better and more stimulating with porn. Now I find myself actively trying, and succeeding, with hooking up with girls at parties. It feels much more natural and fun than it ever has.

However there is one huge thing that has been worrying me. Wet dreams. I’ve had two since my abstinence from PMO. However, in both of my wet dreams I was watching porn. I’ve been having a relationship with this one girl for the past couple months, and haven’t seen her in a couple weeks due to being away on break for college. She’s coming to visit in a couple days, and I got really excited about it last night and nearly got hard just talking to her about coming over and having sex. That was a huge ray of hope. But last night I had one of the most vivid dreams I have ever had, and I was back in the worst times of my addiction. It felt so real that I thought I was awake, and I felt possessed. I had an uncontrollable urge in this dream to watch porn, and I succumbed. It was pretty hardcore stuff in my dreams, which from everything I’ve read here is bad (to watch while awake..but while dreaming??). The orgasm was the most intense I’ve ever experienced, by far. I fear that this intense orgasm connected with my dream fantasies of hardcore porn will only set me back..

The question I’m asking is, what effect do you think this has on my recovery? Before this morning I was super confident that everything would work in two days when she comes to visit, but now I’m seriously doubting myself. It really pisses me off that all of this happened during a dream, because I’ve felt so in control of abstaining for the past two months. I literally haven’t even felt an urge to watch porn or masturbate. It was as if all of the urges and withdrawal symptoms I should have felt hit me at the same time in this dream and I had no control over my actions. I really want to be able to perform when the time comes this week. We’ve both been waiting for this for a long time now and it would really hurt our relationship if I’m not able to ‘get it up’.

LINK – I’m a 23 years old male who’s been fighting with erectile dysfunction during sex for over 3 years now. About a year and half ago it began to affect the relationship i had to the point of us breaking up.

For lot of reasons (primarily anxiety and fear but also some desire of improving myself) I’ve spent over a year now being single and without having female partners. I ended up masturbating 2 to 3 times a day to a variety of porn.

I’ve known for a while that that much masturbation and porn were probably a cause for my ED and tried several times to stop and/or reduce the amount of porn I watch. A few months ago I met this girl who I like pretty much and we’ve been hitting it off. But knowing that I may perform poorly I’ve done a lot of excuses for us to not have sex.

A few weeks ago I started not masturbating in weekdays, changing that for exercise or running. But after finding out Gary Wilson’s TEDx Talk and YBOP and finally this subreddit I feel like I’m not alone and that I can overcome this, it will be hard yes, but at least I will not be alone.

I havent masturbated since yesterday and now I pledge to last at least 50 days without it.

Hey man, I wish you all the best on your journey. I come from a pretty similar background. Struggled with porn induced ED for about 3 years, which has really destroyed most of my relationships with women as well as my self confidence. But now there is a new girl in my life, and I will do anything in my power to make this time different.

I really believe that nofap can change our lives. But we have to stay commited. I encourage you to stay as active in nofap as you can and stay away from needless temptations. Good luck! I hope you and your new girl find happiness together.

42 yr olds story..hopefully it’ll help some of you young kids stop when you see what lies ahead

I started the fappin in elementary school like most of us. Did it 2-3-8 times a day for years (not to porn cuz it was’nt readily available) I was fortunate in that I did pretty well with the ladies in HS and college and managed to bed around 140 by age 28 all while still fapping avg 3 times/day. I could get it up whenever and where ever I wanted (still no porn cuz I was to embarrased to rent it and high speed net was’nt readily available).

Then I started dating a girl who LOVED porn! She would rent them and I was quite sure I had won the fuckin lottery. We would act out the scenes..man life could’nt get any better. Then I could fap to the movies when she was’nt around! Well after about a year of this I started realizing I was having trouble with ED if I did’nt have the visual stimulation of porn. Soon after she was gone and I had gotten high speed net. Looking back now, this is most likely the single biggest mistake I have ever made in my life. I could’nt get enough of the porn the net had to offer.

I started dating another girl (who hated porn, but loved to drink) The sex was great at first cuz it was new and she was hot. But after a couple months the ED came roaring back..It really sucked cuz she wanted sex all the time and I wanted to watch porn all the time. We would end up getting drunk and this would be how I could hide my ED with her, just by claiming I had whiskey dick, but by now(surprise surprise) I had severe performance anxiety to go along with the ED. Viagra helped a little at first but soon that didnt work either. Needless to say, she was soon gone along with most of my self esteem.

This is when the Porn addiction really kicked into high gear. At the bars I could still get the girls, but I was so afraid of the ED I would just get drunk, blame the booze, and became a world champ pussy eater (I’m about 32 at this point and sliding down a very slippery slope) Depression (induced by the porn I realize now) was getting almost as big of a hold on me as the porn had, but the porn made me feel good so i kept fappin…A LOT, and when I was’nt fappin, I was drinkin to numb the depression.

Fast forward 10 years: I’ve gained 50 lbs, lost my house, my business, got 2 dwi’s, there hasn’t been a woman in my bed in years, to be honest life was pretty bleak. 3 weeks ago i saw YBOP and I have’nt watched porn or fapped since. The trees are greener, the air smells better, I started exercising, there’s gorgeous women all over the place, and I have a completely different attitude on life. I’m by no means cured and have a very long way to go, but if this first 3 weeks is any indication of what’s to come, I cant fuckin wait! btw.. I had my first morning wood in a decade this morning! Good luck guys..stay strong! and thanks for reading.

Hey all, I’ve just discovered this community.

I started PMO probably around the age of 14, so 7 years ago. Initially I would hate myself for it, and feel incredibly guilty – I knew it was wrong deep down… but the more I did it, the more de-sensitised I became and the less I was affected by it – I became less and less guilty, it became less of a big deal.

The last few years have been really bad – I sort of convinced myself that it was OK and no big deal, I would PMO most days, and sometimes multiple days a week.

It was only at the end of last year when my best mate suddenly brought up his struggles with porn, he was someone I was comfortable talking about it with and he showed me some articles on PMO’s effects on the brain.

When I read these articles it was like a cloud of naivety was lifted – it seemed so obvious and logical that PMO was harming me – I just had been trying to avoid this obvious fact and suppressing what I knew deep down.

After that, I went a while without PMO, but it was pretty hard to go cold turkey and I relapsed multiple times. I installed K9 browser and gave the password to my aforementioned friend – which has been a massive help.. but unfortunately in moments of horniness I had discovered certain workarounds… Although I’ve watched a lot less porn this year, i’ve found it hard to stop the fap – my best has been about 2 weeks. I always say that i’ll do it properly the next time, but I always seem to give into the temptation far too easily.

I’ve had a couple of girlfriends, but get bored with them too quickly, I’ve even struggled to get turned on by them, resulting in ED – over which I’ve been incredibly embarrassed and depressed. I bet myself up about it quite a bit – not making the connection that it was down to PMO. It’s obvious that I get bored because I’m so corrupted by being able to cycle through new virtual ‘sexual partners’ as I please.

Because of these experiences, and my PMO habits, I’ve historically been pretty poor with the ladies. Thing is, I’m not bad looking, and I have good things going for me – people often wonder why I don’t have a better record with girls… but every time a chance comes up I get way too paranoid that I won’t be able to please them.

I turned 21 recently, and binged out badly on PMO after resisting P for a decent period of time. But I’ve decided that now is the time to grow up and actually do this properly. I’ve realised that I’ve been way too weak in resisting the temptation, so I’m gonna try harder this time – I’d love to have some support as I go. My first goal is to get to 30 days and from there I hope I would have accumulated enough days that I won’t want to break the trend.

I feel like I can get my life back

I had heard of /r/nofap before but didn’t check it out until today. I read a LOT on ybop. I almost started crying.

I’m 30. I figured out at age 8 that if I climbed up the pole at recess it made my dingdang feel awesome. I eventually figured out that I could just tug on it instead of pulling myself up and down on a pole/side of a door/whatever. I had AOL at my house at 13 and those jpegs took forever to download and print out. I had broadband at 17 much faster and movies were totally rad. Then I went to college and tugged the lights out.

Despite all my tugging, I seemed to do well with my boner with actual women. It didn’t always work though, occasionally retreating from the battlefield at exactly the moment at which victory was assured. I blamed it on the standard things – too drunk, girlfriend gained some weight, stressed out, etc. I just assumed those excuses were valid and normal. I went to a doctor around age 20 to have my testosterone checked and I wasn’t quite sure that the doctor wasn’t an idiot when I was “totally normal”.

I met a gal, she was great. We banged like rabbits. No more problems. Not at first anyway. Over the next 9 years we moved in together, moved away, got married, and then she left me. Gradually over that time we stopped having sex as frequently. I figured it was normal, hell we were married and married people don’t fuck, right? Once a month or less. She’d occasionally go from one visit from aunt Flo to the next without getting laid. The last few years I started having more and more trouble getting it up/keeping it up. It terrified me. I became so scared that my dick wouldn’t work that it started to never worked at 100%. 80% on my best day. 0% on my worst.

Been single over half a year now. After I bottomed out from depression I bounced back and started going out. Picked up some amazingly beautiful women, took them home and… couldn’t get it up or couldn’t keep it up. Mentally I was excited beyond belief that I was about to bone someone new for the first time in nearly a decade. Physically, my junk awoke from a nap, yawned, then rolled over and went back to sleep. Fucking great, I thought, I’m 30, single, and my dick is dead. I figured maybe it’s just performance anxiety left over from the ex, but I knew there was something else. My crotch just felt kinda dead except when I watched porn. I realized I hadn’t had morning wood in YEARS. Hadn’t had a random boner in YEARS. But I’d have a stiffy in seconds as soon as I hit CTRL-SHIFT-N.

I’ve been terrified and depressed for months. I figured I’d just have to pack up and move to a monastery. How can I ever create a meaningful relationship with a woman if I can’t have sex with her. Chicks love to bang, especially the awesome ones. It’s science. I couldn’t bring myself to try boner pills. Maybe if I go to therapy and talk and talk and talk about how scared I am I can figure out what happened and fix whatever is wrong with my head.

And today I found out what happened to me. Whacking off to porn on a near daily basis for the last dozen years happened to me. But there is hope. I can be a man again instead of the insecure, depressed, limp dicked d-bag I have turned into. All I have to do it quit “climbing the pole at recess”. It will be the easiest thing I have ever done because it will give me my life (and my dick) back. I really, REALLY want my life (and my dick) back. And that makes me so happy I just might cry.

For my SO, I begin the 90+ challenge

I’ve been with my gf since two years and almost four months. I’m 17, and I haven’t stopped fapping for porn since I’m 11. I suffer from ED almost since me and my actual gf took each other’s virginity two years ago. I see her in privacy on average two days a week : the first day after having been separated everything works normally, but the following days, it’s nearly impossible for me to have another erection than the morning wood. My gf doesn’t know I’m fapping, doesn’t know I’m watching porn, and I hope she will never know, it would hurt her way too hard.

I have successfully stopped fapping between 07/03 and 07/13, and during these 10 days I have felt like I was becoming a man (testosterone boost, isn’t it?), but on 07/14 I felt the chaser effect which forthwith stopped my nofap adventure.

I stumbled upon this subreddit today, and read everything on yourbrainonporn. So I have eventually decided to begin the 90+ challenge. Thus I won’t fap, edge, watch porn or make porn fantasy in my head for 90 days, and when I’ll reach that milestone, I will stop fapping for good. I will still continue having sex with my gf, as it is the main purpose of my time out, but I’ll be careful of the chaser effect.

I thank you in advance, my fellow fapstronauts, and I thank all this community around this no-fap thing.

TL;DR : I’m 17, and in order to not have anymore ED with my all-life gf I stop fapping, edging, watch porn and imagine porn until I reached the 90 days milestone, and after I’ll quit fap and porn forever and ever.