My first three months

hello,

I'm 40+, married with children and I'm addicted to porn. Here are some random ramblings about my first three months of nofap.

I've had problems with PMO for a few years now. I saw some adult magazines as a kid but started using it more in the early 90's when I got my first Internet access at college. Only perhaps 7 years ago things really took a turn to the worse. I started spending lots of time in a couple of chat rooms and watched a lot of P at the same time. My main problems were spending way too much time in the chat rooms, not sleeping enough and losing my energy at work and at home. I also had an appetite for new kinds of P. I guess I watched pretty much everything that is legal. Vanilla sex with my wife just didn't feel that special and eventually I started having DE and ED. For some time I guess we both enjoyed me taking longer but once it started to take an hour she wasn't very happy. Nothing very unusual I reckon.

I joined nofap about three months ago after multiple unsuccessful attempts to stop over the years. Usually my attempts lasted for a couple of weeks, then I thought I could do it just once but it was never just once. I had heard about nofap before but then I thought who would really want to do that, P is the best thing I know... One morning I was just so sick of my situation, how tired I was and how I felt I was wasting my life. I read the materials on site and noticed how I'm not alone with my problems...

The first weeks were really difficult. I tried to recognize the things that trigger me and tried to stay away from them. Seeing a woman in underwear on TV or on a billboard, being alone at home or awake when everyone else was already sleeping had been enough for me. Now I needed to make constant effort to stay away from these situations... I ended up eating a lot of candy to get some comfort and have gained a few pounds since starting on nofap.

After some weeks it started to get easier. My erection was getting stronger and I was no longer way delayed, I even felt that I was too quick for my taste but the feeling of really having sex together instead of just going through a mechanical chore made it worth it.

While she used to complain a bit about my problems I never told her about my addiction. I just joked about how I was getting old and how I should soon start eating Viagra. Now that things have been getting better she has never asked me if something has changed. I guess she has known about my M habit, but perhaps not about its extent and especially the scope of P I have been interested in.

Things have been getting better and our relationship has become so much warmer over these three months. Perhaps it is partly because of better sex but I believe it is also because I can see her as a real woman again and she can see the spark in my eyes.

I didn't install any software to block P from my computer, I knew that I would be able to work around it anyways somehow. I even have about 1 TB P left on a couple of hard drives. I'll format them at some point.

Going through the process and reading the younger guys experiences have left me wondering how I can protect my kids from this... just blocking the bad parts of internet is not going to work. Talking about it is how it should be done but are they really going to understand what I'm saying?

I'm not sure I could have gotten this far without all the materials available on this site and on yourbrainonporn.com. Getting a better understanding of how dopamine works in our brains, how the death grip affects us and all other things have opened my eyes. I've tried to help others where I can. Once I'm strong enough I might even go to the chat room where I used to hang out and offer my help to others who spend way too much time there. But I'm nowhere close to that yet.

So far things have worked out quite well, I hope things will only get better.

 

One more month done, still going pretty strong.

I did have some doubts at some point, mostly about our sex life getting a bit boring again and my fear of getting drawn into a world of strong fantasies but that didn't take too long.

 

To be honest I can't really recognize a period I would call flatlining. Maybe I was just happy not to be triggered by various images and not to have urges for PMO. Not having sex for a few weeks has not been unusual in our marriage, so maybe it just happened without me paying extra attention to it or maybe I was just lucky enough to have a short flatlining period. During the first weeks of nofap everything sex-related was secondary to sticking to nofap.

Had I kept a daily journal of how I felt and what I did I would have a better answer. However, the computer where I could have kept it and the time to do it without other people seeing it was just too dangerous in the beginning... so many times I just went to do this one thing once everyone else had gone to bed and I ended up PMOing for two hours.

What I can say is that it has definitely been worth it.