I’m 17 M, been 6 months clean of porn and gave up completely on videogames 2 and a half months ago. Before finding NoFap on the month of October of 2016, I was basically a living waste: always feeling depressed, failing at school, failing with relationships… failing at life. My only life objective back then was getting a gaming PC. Now imagine the emptiness I felt when I got one…
And here’s the main things I learned in 16 months of fighting my 2 addictions:
The moment you remove your escapism habits you’re going to be exposed to reality 24/7, and for this reason you will have to change your life in order to be enjoyable without said escapist habits. It’s going to be hard, but you have to insist or else you can expect to fall back to the arms of your addictions.
Happiness won’t magically arrive once you pass a certain number of days. It might be true that life becomes more stable and enjoyable after you start to see progress with your recovery, but what’s the point of having those horrible clouds off your head, if you’re just going to stand around not doing anything that contributes to your happiness?
Do this for yourself and build self-compassion. If you’re clearing a bad habit in order to get someone or to seek someone’s validation, the moment they leave, you feel like all the effort was in vain, and you got back to your old habits. Building self-compassion is also very important. People with self-respect and self-love don’t go around doing things that they know will harm them. Keep in mind that you’re just human, and you make mistakes just like everyone else. The moment you find yourself with enough self-love and feel that the others’ validation comes second, you’ll be taking a huge step not just in fighting your addictions, as well as growing as a person. This is so far one of, if not, the most most powerful concept I’ve learned in these forums. I even believe this was the one that helped me turn the situation around and come this far. Sadly is something many people here haven’t realized that is hindering their recovery. About this you can check a recent post from u/MightyAslan in here.
Look for the patterns of behauviours that drive you towards your addictions (traumas, mental illness, triggers). It’s even possible that your addictions can be a symptom from a psychological disorder, and who knows if that said disorder is the reason your life is shit. Plus you get extra information to discuss with your therapist, if you have one, further helping you get a grip over your addiction.
So that raps it up for my advice post, I’m sorry for all the grammar errors and rambling, I am in a rush. Wish the best of luck in your recovery. Stay strong, stay committed
LINK – 6 Months in – My advice to you guys
UPDATE – One year down
So, it’s been a year since my last relapse it seems. To be honest I don’t really know what to say and how to say it but I’ll do my best.
Here you guys can have a look at my 6 month report.
I’m 18M and I’ve been in this fight for nearly 2 years. These last 6 months we’re a lot for me: I spent a lot of time ironing out my relationships, finding myself and overcoming personal challenges.
After a while of feeling anxious about what to write in this post, I came to the conclusion that there are way to many ways that can help you in your recovery. And let’s be realistic, I might not know 70% of all of them, and I don’t remenber or am aware of all the steps that I took to get here.
Basically I only hold a small chunk of pratical knowledge in this subject, it would be stupid and arrogant from me to say that I basically know everything about this. And that’s were YOU come in, you should be sharing a little of your knowlegde once in a while. And I really mean just a little at a time, don’t just pull up every advice you can come up with and ramble about it in a single post, like I did in my previous post. Which brings me to my next point:
You’re way to fucking worried with watching porn and you’re way to afraid of failing.
What are your values as a person and how do they guide you to become the best person you can ?
I’m shure one of those values, which I’d say is common to pretty much everyone who decided at some point that they wanted to quit, is the simple value of staying pornfree. Like any other value, it guides us to become our best selves, yet the problem lies in when people retain this value isolated as the ultimate value, as if the only way we had to become the person we idealize is trough staying pornfree. So we become anxious about relapsing and we relentllessly punish ourselves when that happens, but the truth is that we gave in to a relapse because we we’re to tired of enduring this tyranny that we ironically have imposed upon ourselves.
You see, a relapse is a form of failure, but failure is something natural and necessary for growth, it’s trough it that we can learn. The more we fail, the more we learn. But tyrants don’t tolerate failure, tyrants don’t learn.
So take it easy, next time you relapse just think of it as a simple setback from which you can learn and remember that you’re human and you have your limitations. Same aplies to when you are in a streak, you never know if this will be your last try and you will finally kick the habit or if you’re walking into another relapse, but you have to remind yourself that you will eventually learn more and more with time and eventually you’ll kick it. The only things that are usefull to worry about, are those elements you’re aware of that can lead to a relapse, It’s no use worrying about the other ones since you don’t even know they exist (time will reveal them). And with this said, you got to find other values that are just as, or more important than the value of staying pornfree; values that you can stand on to become the best you the world has seen even when the pornfree value takes hits. We’re not in this world to suffer stupidly, actually our suffering is the sign that there are still things we can do to make the world a better place.
The world is still expecting something from us.
If want a better explanation on what I just said, you can check these 2 videos by Jordan Peterson(he is Meta for those who are trying to sort themselves out):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5S6cTQRoU4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMD–3ZveBs
So that’s it, go on with your recovery, pick yourself up when you fall, start by doing things badly and adjust your course mid-flight. And remenber that there is more to life than just recovering from porn addiction, go find what fullfils you as person. I’ll leave with a slightly modified quote from John Lenon:
“Life is what happens when you’re to busy waiting for the counter to reach X amount days.”
;