I am 45 days clean from pmo, and to say it’s changed my life is an understatement. Check out my journal for the full story on how my addiction started, but to summarize it, I started when I was around 17. I am 29 now and from 2008-2013 I was deeply addicted to it and let it affect my life in ways I never realized until I have recently learned about it through yourbrainonporn and NoFap. Once I educated myself on how it affects our brains everything made sense, as to why I had no motivation to improve my life.
I started this journey in July of last year, but had many bumps for the first 4 months. I could never get past 3-5 days before the urge came calling. But every time I relapsed I wrote it down in my planner and started a new streak, determined to beat this addiction once and for all. I started off strong at the beginning of the New Year, but after about a week, had a family member pass away and thus it was easy to fall back to it with the emotional state I was in. After the relapse I went 2 days clean and then the day that changed everything happened.
The last day I gave into porn, it happened late at night, as I was playing a video game. I had the urge to visit my favorite picture site (something I did every day for like 8 years), and spent around an hour just looking at pictures, no mo, just viewing it. After the session was over I had a killer headache and went to bed. The headache didn’t go away for about 3 days, and with the headache came back all my anxiety issues, which were starting to go away slowly. It was at that moment where the light bulb finally came on and I realized this has to come to an end. I’ve never felt the negative effects of viewing porn like I did after that night. I attribute that to finally getting close to having long streaks so I was feeling better and the foggy brain was starting to go away.
I am happy to say since that night my life has changed dramatically. I’ve come to realize that porn is toxic and serves no purpose in my life anymore, and that the excuses I made for watching it were all in my head. I began watching it because I thought, well since I don’t have a girlfriend I’ll just do the next closest thing. Well as you all know pmo is no replacement for the real thing.
All my life I have struggled with the opposite sex, always feeling like I have to impress them with the hope that I will eventually get a girl friend. Because of my deep anxiety issues linked to pmo, it became nearly impossible to even get the courage to ask them out, and every time I failed I would beat myself up over it. Now that I haven’t pmo’d in a month and a half, that cloud that has been hanging over me all these years is finally starting to lift and I can tell you, the benefits are real.
I no longer have anxiety in approaching random girls. The amount of girls I have talked to in the last month is more than I have in the last 10 years, this is no joke. There is no longer any pressure for me to ask them out, I just go up and spark up conversation. If it leads to something more, awesome, if not, who cares? There’s millions more out there waiting for me to approach them. The shame of looking at porn is no longer a part of my life, and I love that the most out of everything (okay the attention with girls is the best part)!
Seriously guys, cutting out pmo is life altering. It has opened my eyes in ways I couldn’t even imagine. I no longer find myself making excuses for failures in my life. I now finally have the passion and drive to go out and live a productive and healthy life.
I do want to say that this hasn’t been an easy road, as at around days 20-40 I had ridiculously strong urges that were so bad I almost gave in. But I never did and I am proud of that fact. I posted a few times in the relapse report section before this streak and that too was motivation too keep staying strong, because every time I would post there it felt like I was a failure and that the addiction was winning. Same with resetting my counter.
I finally said “no more, I am taking my life back and now it’s time to start living the life I was meant to live, free from the grasps of pmo.” I know its cliché, but if I can do it anyone can. There would be days where 3/4 of the day involved pmo in some fashion. Most days involved me edging to pictures while eating breakfast, so from the beginning of the day till the end, porn was on my mind.
This isn’t easy, but once it hits you why you need to quit and you start to look at the big picture, it becomes easier and you gain instant motivation to never return to the old you.
volt2187’s Journal of Daily Improvement
LINK – 45 Life Changing Days
by volt2187
UPDATE – 90 Days…How Quitting PMO Has Changed EVERYTHING!
Edit: I added photos of my planners that I used to track my days and relapses to motivate others to know that the beginning is tough, but to keep going and to never give up on yourself. As you can see by my September being blank I all but thought it was impossible to do this. But I found a way to get back on that horse. For the new planner the dot’s represent days I either fantasized or started to m, the m’s are my mo’s and the lines are cold approaches with girls. I decided to stop tracking those, because A) it’s fucking stupid (lmao), and B) it just added more pressure to myself.
90 days without looking at porn and using it to masturbate, who would have thought it would be possible? If anyone has followed me from the beginning when I joined this site and movement in August 2015 you may have witness some of my struggles in the beginning, which I will be touching on, but when everything clicked for me, it CLICKED, and I’m never going back to my old ways ever again. This post will be long, as I’m going to break down my entire journey from the beginning to where I stand today.
Before I start though I want to thank everyone who has talked with me or even just replied in my journal. It’s the community here that makes the process that much easier. @numpty, @ThisChangesEverything, @WokeUp88, @taqwa, @JohnDoe2016, @G.Baltar, @ICDMatrix, @reconditioned mind, @Phantom04, @Physicist, @TheAVExperiment, @Observation_Action, and anyone else I may have missed, thanks for the support and motivation to keep going forward. Whether you’ve already reached your personal goal or are still going towards it, know you are a stronger person by recognizing your faults and by wanting to change them.
How It Began
Growing up I was always shy, so you can imagine I struggled with girls mightily. On top of this I had an addiction to video games as well that made my social anxiety and phobias even worse. I discovered porn (or in my case for years, p-subs, nude scenes and girls gone wild type stuff) out of curiosity through girls in video games and movies (American Pie anyone? lol). Eventually I discovered masturbation at around age 17 and soon things started to snowball from there. I had a deep shame and fear of being caught, but part of me (the addicted mind) told me, just keep doing it, you won’t get caught, it’s okay, the pleasure is just too good to stop doing it. I had also failed to get a girlfriend, even though my senior year when I lost a bunch of weight I had tons of friends and multiple opportunities to get a girlfriend or even have dates. Because of this, I used pmo as an excuse to keep doing it, and I told myself, when I get a girlfriend I’ll stop, for her, but guess what…..
The Peak Years
Around 2007 I had still been somewhat sneaky about how I got my porn fix, as nothing was really “porn” persay. I did a lot of the videogames still, but had moved onto softcore pictures online. In the summer of 2007 I bought a gaming laptop, which is what got the snowball rolling. I actually intended to use it strictly for school and gaming, and did so for about 4 or 5 months. But during the end of that summer is when I discovered the tube sites and it all went to hell from there. I had made the choice to stop gaming and spend my time on the laptop looking at porn instead, which was doubly bad, in that I had been caught up in the grasp of porn, and I lost my main form of socializing, as I played online games where we talked over mics. All I can remember from that exchange was that something in my brain told me, fuck everything else, this laptop’s for porn!
A few months into the semester I had dropped out of college. I used my new job and lack of desire for my major at the time for dropping out, but looking back, it was the brain fog and anxiety caused by pmo that led to me dropping out, because my grades had dropped and I had little motivation to work towards improving them. So the easy thing was to stop going. 4 years of constant pmo use later I had switched jobs, after “hating” the job I was currently in. Truthfully I was only miserable because every single night I would make it a habit to pmo for hours on end, downloading video after video. When the first hard drive filled up, I got a second one. Yes, I fell for the trap of pay sites, because it was the quickest and easiest way for me to download that garbage. Easily over a $1,000US spent on subscription sites. Pathetic.
So getting a new job would fix everything, right? Wrong. Another 4 years had passed and the pmo addiction is still at an all time high. I had attempted to go back to school over different periods during these 4 years, but with the pmo brain fog I struggled mightily, however I kept at it. During these 8 years of pmo use I had gained over 50lbs, going up to around 220. I began flirting with some of my coworkers around 2013, but was a pathetic mess. This was the first time since highschool I had shown any interest in real girls. Before this, if they weren’t pixels I had no part of them. This was mostly though because they showed interest in me first, so I followed suite. Me approaching a girl in my pmo-soaked brain state that I was in? Yeah right. Because of this I finally started to get motivation to lose weight and slowly started going to the gym, slowly because I had a huge fear of it, but eventually got over it.
The Turning Point
So over the course of a year and a half or so I had lost over 50lbs, but nothing had changed in my life. I still had social anxiety. I still pmo’d once or twice a day. So why did I still have all these issues when it came to socializing and having opportunities to go on dates? In the summer of 2015 I had started going to a social anxiety forum to see if there was anything there to help me out. I was at a loss. Hours of browsing later and I came across a topic about NoFap and how people were reporting positive changes. So the research began. I found yourbrainonporn.com and started reading the effects of porn use and testimonies and was absolutely floored. It all made sense after all these years. I remember in highschool during my senior year when I began to come out of my shell (before pmo use) I was semi-social and had a good circle of friends. But most importantly, I remember I talked to a TON of girls back then, in fact I probably had more friends who were girls than guys. At one point I had 3 ask ME out to prom, lol. Everything listed as a negative effect from high speed internet porn use I had or could relate to. So the commitment to quit began.
Replace, Don’t Erase
So in the beginning, I simply wanted to quit out of the desire to better my life. I had not given any thoughts to what I would do to replace the pmo use. And this is when the relapsing began. At first if I was lucky I could get to 3 days. After about a month of that, I reached 5 days before a relapse. In November I had made an online dating profile and began chatting with a couple of girls, one in particular. For some reason I went the entire month of November without viewing any porn, but did mo about 4 times, after about 7-10 days. It was around this time I really began to feel better, so I wanted to meet up with this girl. The main problem was I began to come across as clingy and scared her away. I took it harder than I should have, because I barely knew this chick, but between getting her number quickly (which made me confident) and her sending me tons of pics, she lured me in. Shortly after our “break-up” the relapses, and porn, came back.
December through early January were rough with relapses every few days. After getting a good streak under my belt the desire to go back to an old site that had softcore pictures hit me so I browsed it for about an hour in my bed. For some really odd reason I never mo’d to it, just looked at picture after picture. Shortly after and for the next few days, I had the worst headache that I can remember, and the light bulb turned on and I haven’t viewed porn since.
After about a month I began to gain some confidence and began talking to girls again. This time though things had gone so much better. There was no longer any fear of how they would react to me, or having to build myself up to go talk to them. After about 60 days I began noticing more about them than just their bodies, and I’ve become attracted to so many that I would have never had, back in my pmo days. I will admit, I have mo’d 4 times during this streak, but each time they were weak and pathetic, took only about 1 minute and I never felt any sexual satisfaction from them. The thoughts are still there for me, as it’s very easy for me to picture real life girls in sexual situations. My new goal is to stop or greatly reduce this and to stop objectifying girls as much as I still do. It’s not nearly on the level that it used to be, but it still happens occasionally. But seeing them for who they are has gone a long way in fixing this. Because of wanting to quit the pmo addiction, I don’t consider these mo’s to be relapses, because that would be counter productive to my progress. My beginning goal was to eliminate pmo from my life and I have.
My new goals are to stop looking at people and either objectifying them or having assumptions on them. I am fully confident I can accomplish this sooner rather than later. So why did this streak succeed when all my others failed? I finally had the motivation and drive to pull my head out of my ass. I finally had acknowledged I had an addiction to this. And I finally found some strength inside myself. So as you may have read, the only girls I talked to before recently between now and highschool where those who approached me first, which was around 5-6. In the past 3 months, I lost count of how many I’ve approached. At one point it was around 20, but now I know it’s well into the 30’s. By just having a few successful encounters I’ve gained the confidence to finally go after whatever I want in life. I’ve been going to school full time since the fall and will graduate next year, which excites me more than just about anything. Just like in highschool, I want my senior year of college to be one to remember, and with all the success I’ve had so far I can only imagine how much fun it will be with my newfound confidence and drive to succeed.
So a tldr version: Super shy growing up, never talked to girls, began pmoing because of no girlfriend, 8 years of misery and zero drive (and no girlfriend), quit watching porn, life completely turned around, happiest I have ever been.
A quick summary of the benefits I have noticed:
– Confidence THROUGH THE ROOF!
– Very little anxiety that rarely comes up anymore.
– Looks from girls like crazy. Smiling, staring and being happy in my presence.
– Seeing girls for who they are. Noticing the small details and appreciating them.
– Positive thoughts and smiling are natural for me now.
– Muscle gains, from just a little gym time.
– Motivation and drive like never before.
– Deeper voice (yup).
So yeah, fuck porn. Quit watching that shit and start living your life.
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