– First, I read somewhere that your human brain (neocortex, cerebrum) is where you think. But what you feel is governed by your mammalian brain (limbic system). This explained to me why even not wanting to watch porn, I felt that’s what I wanted.
– Second, I learned that in order to recover you have to form new habits, new pathways in your brain. One day, that second idea got very clear for me. I understood that in the past, when I was abstaining and felt all that sexual energy inside me, I thought that masturbating (to porn) was the only way out.
After years of reinforcing that neural path, for me it was an automatic thought. But, and this is what I grasped, in order to recover I had to form a new pathway: When the sexual energy arises, I have to use it to do something else.
With this idea I thought about the tools recommended in order to cope with “excess of energy.” None of them sounded like a good idea to me. I didn’t fancy any of them.
That’s when the earlier idea came to my rescue. I was in a situation where I knew with my reason that I had to go out and do some exercise or something because the risk of relapsing was very high, but didn’t feel like it. In that moment I understood that “not feeling like it” was my mammalian brain/paleocortex talking and that I had to act even without desiring to.
I called a friend and played some tennis with him. It was very good, and I felt excellent afterward.
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