Background: 26, Male, Gay.
I’ve been fapping regularly since I was 16 or 17 and always to porn. I didn’t believe that porn could be detrimental to my mental health because everyone did it, but the way I used it was definitely hurting me. I had the image surfing down pat and had several bulk image downloaders and site rippers at my fingertips whenever I needed to get new material, which was about once every other week. On those days, I’d just lock myself in my room while downloading porn for hours until I’d finally masturbate to orgasm, then retire to bed feeling dirty.
When (hetero) sex was a new thing for me in my younger days, I didn’t have performance issues at all. That got boring pretty quickly. In addition to a whole host of issues associated with being closeted, PMO allowed me an outlet for that so I didn’t have to come clean with who I was, as it were. Thankfully, I did manage to get completely out of the closet and sex was new and exciting again. That lasted for a few years of casual and novel sex until I’d had my fill, as it were, and started going on porn binges again after dating my current boyfriend for a few months.
The Challenge: A friend of mine showed me this subreddit 3 months ago and told me he was going to take up the 90 day challenge. I figured he would get tired of it and I’d be able to go back to PMO pretty soon. That never happened. After the first week, we realized we were on to something life changing.
My goal was to not masturbate to orgasm for 90 days, but I did sneak a few peeks at porn while edging. I realize not everyone has the same standards, but I did not get any pleasure out of those edging times – it made my resolve even stronger when I’d have to end the session without finishing. I stopped edging halfway through and I do not miss it.
Let’s get to what’s changed, shall we?
Sex: Holy shit. Rock hard erections at a moment’s notice, any time, any place. Dare I say my dick is bigger than before? That’s what it seems like, at least. There is a feeling of urgency and yearning that I have never felt before with sex except when drunk and hooking up. Orgasming during intercourse is guaranteed and I never have to jack myself off hard for 5 minutes in order to maybe come or maybe blame it on being tired.
Motivation: Can we talk about motivation for one god damned minute? When I started this journey, I was a daily weed smoker and had been for 4 years. I also played an addictive MMO. After I got over the first few weeks of extreme sexual frustration from not fapping, my mind started changing. I realized that things had to change for me. I realized that if I could exercise the self-control to stop masturbating (and obtain a positive result from it), I had the power to stop smoking weed and playing MMOs as well.
Quitting weed was harder for me than quitting fapping, but I knew I had the power to do it and now I am 1 month clean from my final relapse when I smoked the last of my stash over Memorial weekend in a long moment of weakness. Quitting the MMO was easy as hell compared to fapping or weed.
During this 90 days, I’ve taken up a number of new hobbies and picked up old ones that I dropped over the years. I’m back in the gym, reading much more again, taking an active interest in landscaping my yard and now I am working on giving myself the opportunity for a major career change. All this because I quit fucking jacking off to porn. Crazy.
Something I found incredibly useful and motivating during this whole thing was the site Chains.cc in addition to my r/NoFap badge. I created chains for my various goals and it was very satisfying to add a new link each day I succeeded in my goals.
Things I didn’t experience that I’ve seen in other reports:
- confidence boost: I was already a pretty confident person going into this adventure and that hasn’t changed at all, although I am much more sexually confident knowing that I will not lose my erection if I stop stimulating it for a second
- never had a problem finding sex partners prior to NoFap
- brain fog clearing: my brain fog was induced by weed, although my sexual issues were definitely clear up by NoFap
The Future: I do not plan on masturbating to porn again. As I wrote this line, I deleted 25 gigs of choice porn that I have spent years collecting. Maybe I’ll masturbate without porn, but I don’t really see the point to that when sex is 100x better. However, if some day I do masturbate, I will not regard it as failing in my quest. Failure is only failure if you let it control you and don’t learn from it.
Thanks for reading my long ass post. I hope you got something out of it and it encourages my fellow NoFappers in their journey to sexual and mental freedom!
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