Dear fellow nofappers, I have finally reached 90 days in my journey and here is my report. I am aware this is awfully organized, forgive me for that.
Summary and overall judgement
Doing NoFap had a great effect on me. I started from a very bad addiction and I also had other problems, and it didn’t solve all of them like a magic wand, but it helped and relieved the sense of incumbent depression I had. I will continue!
My starting point
I was very addicted to porn, and I have never even had any real arousement for real women. I remember that my first vaguely sexual erection was when I was around 10, laying with my back pointing up, looking some kind of almost-strip-tease on the national television, rubbing against a carpet between me and the floor. Things slowly moved from that to softcore pictures, hardcore pictures, and videos. Since when I was 19 I had a room by myself in a university accomodation; it was the top university of my country, where many people study all day long and socialize little, and I could watch whatever I wanted. I got the habit of watching videos for hours doing my best not to orgasm. This continued until I was 24; it made me even more anti-social, with very few friends, all of them males and someway awkward, and though my studies went pretty well, there was nothing but those and fapping in my life. In the meantime, I didn’t ever do anything sexual with a woman and not even have an erection for one I was dealing with in real life. Heck, I never even had any close girl-friend, nor a sister. At the start of October last year, I moved to another country for studying (actually a PhD). In the first period you are supposed to socialize and make friends quickly as that becomes difficult later, but my social skills were awful, my desire to interact with people was low, and I failed to do that. On the 1st of November 2014, at the start of a weekend in which I was probably going to be by myself all the time, I felt very sad and was sure to be on the edge of a depression. I was about to start fapping for hours for the third day in a row when I started reading posts on addiction to pornography. I spent all day reading them and decided to join NoFap. At first it was difficult, but I was amazingly determined, and even if I relapsed, I always started again immediately. My strikes have been 9, 12, 13, 28 days long, and now I’m at 91. During the first strikes I felt the cravings were very strong, but then I learnt to deal with them a little bit.
After the first two, very difficult streaks, NoFap had succeeded in removing the impending feeling of depression that I was struggling with and I felt better. This is difficult to explain: the best effect for me was the removal of the constant sadness, not something more specific.
I eventually realized that I had to use this NoFap period to improve my life in many ways, as it was lacking. I started doing some light sport in January, which is something I would have absolutely never done before NoFap, and now I attend quite regularly. I stopped wearing the same t-shirts and awful jumpers I had been using for 7 years and improved my wardrobe, which is still bad but not disgusting. I learnt to cook many things and I now wash my teeth regularly. I do not think that working/studying all the time in the weekends is normal.
About girls. Almost immediately after the start of NoFap, I craved human connection and I started reading Seddit and books of Pick-Up Artists. I didn’t do anything like really going to clubs to pick up anyone, maybe because I didn’t feel like leaving my comfort zone so much, or maybe because my common sense was still good enough to see that that’s not what I really want to do. However, I learnt a lot of stuff from them and a few interactions I had with girls in this period, although still being quite poor and ending up in rejection or complicate situations into which I don’t want to be, have certainly been better than what I could have done before NoFap. I eventually realized that NoFap had someway clouded my judgement however, and I had risked a little bit to enter into a relationship with a girl that is incredibly (like, thinking that Islam is a language) empty and stupid just because she looked pretty and well inclined towards me, which is something I’d find shattering of my self esteem. I still have to find a good balance on this and while I feel very needy of girls, I might need a longer period of time to be able to have an healthy relationship.
About socializing in general. I was always an introvert who struggled to interact with others and I still am. NoFap gave me a boost initially, which is now wearing off, or maybe I got used to it, but I still don’t really enjoy going to the pub with people I don’t know very well, or meeting new people. The construction of a social circle isn’t going very well and I still happen to have quite empty weekends. I don’t feel as desperate as in November though, and the progress I’ve made would have been impossible without NoFap.
I still have two major problems in my life: waking up late and internet addiction. Last year, I used to wake up consistently at 1 pm. All through my life, I always slept as much as I could, even skipping classes for that, as I was good enough to study most of the things on my own. Since I moved here, I’ve had strange sleeping patterns that occasionally extended to 1:30 pm. In the last 50 days, I started to slowly, progressively wake up earlier, and now I wake up before 10 every day (no exceptions allowed). I’m working on shifting that even earlier, to something before 9 am. When this is done, I’ll have to deal with spending too many hours on the internet.
About rebooting. My reboot is still far from complete. When I have wet dreams and I can remember their content, it is still something related to porn rather than real girls. I have not yet had erections triggered by arousal for a girl that was close to me.
About wet dreams. After the first 2 streaks, I started having wet dreams, very frequently, and I felt they really reduced my progress and drained my energy. When I had one every three days, I decided to do something about it and changed my sleeping position in order to have less pressure on my crotch, and that worked for a while, but then my brain learnt to trigger them at the same frequency with less pressure. Now I sleep without underwear and the wet dreams that make me orgasm are less frequent, about 1 every 12-13 days, and with less material ejaculated. The cravings get strong after 8-9 days since the last wet dream but I think that’s normal.
So, to summarize: I think NoFap is something you have to do if you are addicted to pornography and fapping. I was, and I am doing it and it improved my life greatly. Since I’ve not recovered cured yet, I will have to continue.
LINK – 90 days hard mode! My report.
by krappa
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