Reflection on 90 days of hardmode

It is tough to share meaningful qualitative feelings about how life can change after a reboot. It is even more difficult to separate life improvements that are reboot related from other successes that we'd all like to believe are caused by nofap, but in reality could have a significant causal nexus. Nonetheless, I feel obliged to take a stab at doing both despite an inherently imperfect memory and unavoidably biased outlook. To that end, I will stick with several points that I feel have been most beneficial for me recently. If you'd like to know more, don't hesitate to ask. For a more detailed and 'in the trenches' report, please see my first success recap at the link below or my whole journal in the reboot log section.

First 30 days success story
Sands of Time Journal

More than anything else, my reboot thus far has opened doors for me to a more successful and fulfilling life overall. It is hard to walk through a door that you can't see for lack of experience. A reboot can shine a light on those doors if you let.

Porn aside, at day 90, I can say with a straight face that I have successfully combated a 20 year MO addiction. It was nigh impossible for me to imagine early on that I could have a nice strong libido, but no significant urge to MO day in day out. Yet that is exactly the point I have reached. When I look at the coming month of December, I don't feel the same sense of disappointment that I felt starting out looking at the next 60+ days without orgasm. Instead my cravings and my desires have shifted intentionally to a passion that I have for lifelong learning. I won't bore you with those details but feel free to check my journal if you are curious.

For December, I decided to continue my journey by tailoring my own version of Monk Mode to fit my current lifestyle and to take one more step in a very positive direction by mindfully avoiding fantasy and managing ogling to the extend possible. Those are two doors that I would have claimed to be bolted shut at the start of reboot, but I feel confident that I can tackle successfully now (confidence coming from the fact that I can see a clear path to achieve both goals and can visualize the steps needed to get there).

Of late, mindfulness has been a very successful technique for avoiding the intentional entertainment of long-running fantasies. The successful part has little to do with fantasy and much more to do with recognizing the general applicability of mindfulness as a life enhancing practice. I was able to use the idea as recently as last night to recognize when and why my thoughts drifted away from my studies and bring them somewhat gently back in line.

I think I have said enough for now and I'd encourage those of you to be the judge of whether or not you think I have changed appreciably in the last 90 days. Remember, you are the author of your own experiences. Make it a story worth reading!

 

Thanks Lazarus. The mindless web browsing counter was rather misleading. I'd often forget to reset it and it looked like I had made it far longer without browsing the net than I actually had. Of the roughly five challenges that I embarked upon in November, that was the one that wasn't successful at all. One of the mistakes I made was trying to level up a bit too fast and I bit off more than I could chew. Rather than establishing a day counter, I believe I have a different sort of idea to tackle the web browsing problem. Since you are considering it as well, I'll elaborate. From reading a text on Happy Chemicals, a technique for eliminating bad habits was suggested that gave me a sort of ah ha moment. Simply put, a habit like mindless web browsing should fall to a crowding-out technique. In chess, there is a similar technique the is affectionately referred to as a the Grandmaster squeeze. For lack of a better description, you basically beat your opponent by choking the life out of them slowly. This never needs to happen at lower levels of chess because novices blunder pieces about as often as they move. Similarly, many less pervasive (maybe better to say less ingrained) bad habits can be beaten pretty easily. My caffeine counter is a simple example where it is well known you can just drop it cold turkey and the success rate is pretty high. PMO is much harder, but it still has simple roots in many ways and does lend itself to day counting.

My plan is to use the new habits I am developing to crowd-out any mindless web browsing. My life priorities will thus gradually shift away from the habits I don't want (which naturally include the mindless browsing). Concomitantly, I am excited to have a large handful of self development books geared towards discipline from which I aim to steal some clutch tactics that will help me in my journey. In short, I am making a futures trade in Chicago and instead of betting on the weather, I am betting on the contents of books that I know little about. The book I read on mini-habits was simple, but over the last week or so it is has proven powerfully effective for me (I expected it to work well, but not this well and not instantly!). I repeatedly find areas of my life where I set goals that are too far out of reach and fail when my ambitions exceeded my abilities. Now that I am aware of this, I can combat it directly.

In addition, I am also using several tools that are helping me to chip away at the mindless web browsing. My current December challenge is Monk Mode and I intentionally chose to completely eliminate all TV shows and movies partly because I understood their relation to mindless internet browsing. They are more similar than different and I want to test the resistance that develops when I let go of both simultaneously. The TV and movie elimination is also well within my grasp. I don't think I'll fail it and it will be one of several stepping stones that can help me beat mindless browsing long term.

I have thought about sicking something like K9 on it, but it would probably turn out like the scene in Rambo First Blood where the police send the dogs after Stallone (in that it didn't turn out well for the puppies).

 

Learning to express yourself not only helps others but it frees your body and mind. It is amazing how beneficial it can be to put your thoughts and feelings out there for the world to see. Writing them down brings them to the forefront of your attention and helps you acknowledge what is happening in your life. It also helps you move past your demons. It lets you look at it all more objectively and when you make your ghosts visible you find they are not nearly as bad as you originally thought. I have seen people anonymously share some pretty incredible experiences here and I have a great deal of respect for them (many things they noted, I am not sure if I would have had the courage to post).

For an introvert like myself, this may be the best way to get my thoughts out there. Keeping everything bottled up probably isn't healthy for anyone.