What is happening to my body?

Hi there. I'm curious as to what this community might have to say about what I've been experiencing with my "journey" or whatever you guys call it.

I've been kinda an asexual person my whole life. Went through a hormonal phase during adolescence where I fapped regularly, almost daily, but that ended around the time I turned 20 something. Since then I had only fapped maybe once a week at most. I've never had an issues with sex and I feel that I'm somewhat decent at sex, according to my past partners anyway.

However, I've never really felt any sort of super attraction or desire for sex. I can't say I get horny very often and when I do it's usually during times when I'm under a lot of stress. I realized at some point I've only ever fapped as a form of stress-relief or anxiety-relief. Real sex feels natural, and good. but that was for all the right reasons. I feel like fapping is only ever for the wrong reasons...

anyway, I've been going through a period in my life (age 27 now) where I've been under a lot of stress, more so than ever before. I decided to take a different approach this time. Rather than indulging in drugs and drinking and ignoring my problems, I decided to face them head-on and fight through the pain. I started eating healthy, stopped all drugs and stopped smoking, started going to the gym and overall working on self-improvement. doing all this has completely gotten rid of all my stress and anxiety, despite the unsavory predicaments i've found myself in. The only things I HAVEN'T started doing yet that I would like to is regular meditation and moving breathing exercises (yoga/tai-chi/qi-going/bagua).

Now, I work in an adult video store where I basically spend the whole day selling tokens to old people to go into these tiny dark video booths and jack off to porn and/or have anonymous gay sex with eachother. Some of these people man... some of them come in and spend their whole lives there. I literally have customers that will spend 6-8 hours there during my whole shift and blow over $40 in tokens in a single day. every. single. day. 99% of my customers are balding old men with the lowest self esteem you could imagine (i was gonna make a joke here, but that in itself is a joke. and it's not even funny.)

I see it every day how much this can be a serious addiction for some people. Not me personally, as I've never had an issue with it. But for some people man they're just fiends. so i see it clearly how it is a very real serious issue especially if you get so deep into it that you're spending your twilight years in a little box playing with yourself 8 hours a day.

Now, getting back to me... as part of my self-improvement process, I've decided to do the whole "nofap" thing as I've been hearing about it for oh say 4 or 5 years now. however, it wasn't really a conscious decision as I noticed since I was so focused on these other forms of self-improvement in my life, i stopped fapping naturally as i wasn't feeling stressed anymore. so it was a couple weeks before i noticed i wasn't even thinking about sex or fapping as i was completely stress-free. so nofap was more of a side-effect for me.

now, I never watch porn anyway (Like i said it's not a sexually stimulating kinda thing for me i did it mainly for stress relief. and only a few times a month at that.), but i can't really avoid the porn thing now because my work requires me to troubleshoot the video booths and change out dvds and stuff. but it doesn't give me any stimulation anyway so i figure it doesn't matter.

for the first couple weeks of nofap it felt regular. and easy. nothing different, nothing new. not fapping is pretty easy for me i find. i feel no desire for sex at all at any point. then one day out of nowhere BAM. i get hard as a rock, the hardest i've ever been. This lasted for about an hour and then went back to normal. I didn't touch it, though I felt extremely horny and for no reason. I wasn't even thinking of anything sexual. just the physical feeling of being rock hard alone gave my whole body euphoria.

a few hours later I was back at baseline per usual. I did notice I wasn't feeling stressed anymore, but I attributed this to my other healthy habits as my stress pretty much vanished after i stopped drinking/smoking and started eating right (this was before starting nofap).

so out of curiosity, I decided to break nofap to see if I could feel any sort of sexual stimulation. my dick was able to get hard. i was able to cum, but didn't orgasm. this was new to me, as I had never experienced cumming without orgasm. It worried me a bit, like maybe I was fucking up my hormones with this nofap shit. so I forced myself to fap every day for the next 3 days and i was able to feel orgasm again.

I felt well maybe I'm just overthinking it so I went back to nofap and lasted about a month. no sexual thoughts, no urges, nothing. didn't feel any positives or negatives. just baseline. for a whole month. at this point i was getting pretty worried as I was feeling like I was becoming even MORE asexual than I had already been!

Now this time I tried to fap and I couldn't even get hard. Tried looking at porn but nothing happened. I kept stroking my dick in some meager attempt to feel any sort of sensation but nothing happened. then, out of no where, I came... dick still limp, no orgasm... just some weird sludge that spurted out of my limp dick as if i were popping a cyst... this has never happened to me before. immediately after... uh, cumming? i felt extremely anxious, hands shaky, very stressed. I attribute this to me being worried about what's going on but I haven't felt like this much anxiety since I was heavy into drinking and that was almost half a year ago...

what the hell is happening to my body? what is nofap doing to me? i started feeling fine before i started doing nofap when i was just focusing on other healthy habits but now i'm really worried... is this normal? has anyone ever heard of anything like this? i feel like i've lost all of my libido. i was surfing through life with my libido at a steady 3 out of 10 but now i'm at like a complete 0 out of 10 after doing nofap...

please help

 

Thanks for the responses. In regards to my low libido, this is something that has been going on most of my life. I wish I had higher libido so I could maintain better healthy relationships with people but I find at times I just fall into a rut where I just don't care at all about sex and start pushing people away if they expect too much from me. It's ruined a lot of relationships that could have potentially been very good.

About the the shop thing, I've only been working there a couple months. My main job is working in IT, but that's something I can do remotely, from anywhere where I have a laptop available.

Coincidentally, this is a job where I can use a laptop and spend my time there doing other work for clients of mine, so it's not like my mind is fixated on the negative environment as I am free to do other work while I'm there. It really is a stress-free job environment, I'm alone most of the time and just doing my own thing on the computer, which I normally do anyway. I get a few customers (50 or so over the course of 8 hours) that come in, get their tokens, then walk to the back and that's it. The store owner is never around so I'm pretty much by myself all day just doin' my own thing, which i think is nice. most stress-free job i've ever had. I just think it's a good way to earn extra income for the time being so I can save enough to move and go off and travel/ have the freedom to go where-ever I please.

I feel the low-libido and ties to anxiety that relate to ideas of sex I have is more of a deep-rooted issue that I'm not quite fully aware of yet. Like I said, when I DO have real sex, it feels good and natural, and I can get women off easily because typically I only have sex with people who are really into me and I feel an emotional connection with. But at times I have found myself in relationships with women who have a much higher sex drive than me, and I just couldn't keep up due to my lack of of energy and interest. I only ever have sex when I'm feeling good about myself. However, I only masturbate when I'm feeling bad... but now I can't even get turned on when I am feeling good and practicing healthy habits...

My worry is that I'll get to a point where I do feel good about myself and CAN form healthy relationships however my libido will be nearly non-existent. I just feel like it's been getting worse and worse over the past 10 years and I'm still only in my 20s for fucks sake

 

i've come to the conclusion after some light research on the subject that the issue I had with anxiety related to fapping correlates with a sudden increase in prolactin coupled with a generally low level of oxytocin. orgasm causes a sudden drop in prolactin which can simultaneously raise cortisol levels which are correlated with stress and anxiety. Oxytocin would naturally inhibit these side-effects but the only way to increase oxytocin levels is through physical touch via intimacy or sex with another human or through regular meditation and breathing exercises.

like i said i've never experienced anxiety or stress related to real sex with a real person, and I think that may be due to the associated oxytocin release that may have a counter-effect on prolactin levels increasing with orgasm. Naturally, prolactin is the hormone responsible for the immediate drop in sex drive following orgasm. this sudden release may cause drowsiness and lower energy levels as a minor side effect, but over time chronically high levels of the hormone can cause some major side effects. according to my research, unnaturally high prolactin levels are also associated with low libido, chronic stress/anxiety and hypothyroidism. both prolactin and oxytocin are hormones that are present in the breast milk of new mothers. with prolactin being a stress-hormone meant to stimulate growth in a newborn, and oxytocin being an anti-stress hormone which offsets the negative effects the infant could experience from excessive prolactin stimulation on the nervous system. naturally, we can stimulate our own oxytocin levels through intimate physical touch (i.e. just as how the infant sucking on the mother's teet will stimulate it, thus ejecting the milk, or through the act of intercourse as the penis will stimulate the production in the vaginal walls to allow for more efficient sperm transport). This oxytocin release is also attainable through meditation as it is correlated with a reduction in blood pressure and cortisol, and the two have a correlating effect on eachother..

i believe the negative side effects of PMO can be countered through one or both of these solutions. as an experiment, I'm going to start practicing regular meditation and breathing exercises and then try masturbating to see if this has any sort of effect on relative anxiety in regards to the PMO and general low-libido issues i've been having regardless of either my abstinence or indulgence. will report back later.

 

i haven't looked into it that much i've only done light reading on the subject. I'm guessing that the effects of a sudden oxytocin spike from orgasm alone are short-lived.

There's a certain way how brain chemicals work in accordance with environment and mindset (set and setting). They have correlating effects on eachother, and play on each other as a sort of balancing act. one affects the other and vice-versa

If you find yourself in a stressful situation, your brain produces certain chemicals in response (adrenaline, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc/). If you find yourself embracing someone you love, your brain produces oxytocin.

If you find yourself to be a lonely person your brain might trigger stress hormones as a response to a sudden drop in oxytocin that follows shortly after masturbation (as oxytocin peaks during orgasm, the drop back to baseline may cause you to feel depressed as your body re-adjusts and normalizes)

i'm kinda just half talking out my ass here because i really haven't done much research on the subject. but i'm still going to experiment with meditation to see if that has any effect. It's supposed to balance out all those brain hormones anyway and I would consider regular meditation as possibly even a better "reboot" than nofap. this is all just speculation for me right now as i haven't tried it first-hand personally, but we will see...