So just over one month ago I quit porn, the reason being erectile dysfunction. I am a healthy individual, 23 years old, not overweight in the slightest, I exercise regularly, I’m not on any medication, but about a year ago I started developing issues getting erections when I was with women. I was starting to panic as the problem which I thought was just some occasional anxiety seemed to be becoming more common. I noticed about eight months ago I stopped having erections in public at all, something which I hadn’t been without since before I hit puberty, and that was when I realized there was something seriously wrong with my brain. I could still maintain a firm erection while watching porn, and I still got morning wood nearly every morning, but without porn, using just my imagination, it was difficult to attain and maintain one, and with women I could hardly remain hard enough for a oral at this point (at least without, you guessed it, imagining a porn scene I’d watched).
I knew ultimately what the problem was, I was watching more and more porn, I was a multiple-times-a-day fapper and with my other outlets (such as real women and my imagination) not arousing me enough to even excite me anymore, I was increasing my porn use, thereby exacerbating the issue further. I knew I had to quit, I tried for about three months failing multiple times, but my relapses were becoming spaced farther and farther apart, and it was when I noticed that I was starting to get erections in public again, and that I could easily get fully hard using just my imagination, that I decided I needed to really commit to this for good, and I haven’t watched porn in about 35 days. I’ll have you know I still fap about 4 times per week (never more than once in a day though), that is a huge difference compared to something like 14/week as before. I figured if I were to cut fapping completely I’d keep relapsing into porn out of sheer desperation, every time I felt an urge to watch porn I fapped to my imagination instead, that really helped me get through this experience. Maybe nofap is something for the future, but I’m just glad my Johnson is now fully functional again.
My girlfriend was thrilled when my member started working again, I had told her the ED was because I was stressed at work and perhaps depressed too (honestly the ED itself was making me depressed), she knew I watched porn but not multiple times a day every day, frankly it’s shameful to even recollect that I had sexually neglected her for months just because I could watch something “hotter” on the internet, and I really owe her a lot for not being hard on me when my dick wouldn’t work (no pun intended). We’re having sex regularly again, and every week it seems my libido is increased, there was a flatline for about a week and a half or so where my dick was practically vestigial but after it passed it felt like my brain had “healed” in a sense, that was right before I started getting public erections again and started seeing significant progress. I am glad it didn’t last as long as two months (or more) like some people seem to experience, everybody’s biology and psychology is obviously different regarding the length of flatlines. I think they are the most discouraging thing about quitting porn, but honestly if you’re reading this and still hooked on porn, your flatline might be short or you might not even get one, you don’t know until you try, so don’t give up.
I just want to say thanks to this community and to everyone else on the internet for helping people like me through this, I also want to say to just ignore the people trying to discourage you, because they really don’t understand and are just trying to excuse their own porn addiction, in the end there is absolutely nothing “normal” or “natural” about modern porn and you are not being “weird” for cutting it out of your life.
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