Thinking about P is as bad as P, so why not P? Just relapsed on day 42

Thinking about it is not just as bad as doing it. Your mind was tricking you. Here's the thing. I'm Catholic. Masturbation, looking at porn, deliberately arousing yourself outside of marriage, deliberate thoughts to arouse are a sin. To be forgiven of serious sins you need to confess to a priest.

In the past when I've relapsed I started having sexual thoughts and said to myself...ah...I'm already in sin, why not just go all the way, I'm going to hell anyway. But this was a trick...because other times I just said...I won't do ANYTHING. I will just let these thoughts pass. They DID, and then later on I realized that these were not deliberate thoughts but just urges/temptations.

Looking at porn is worse because you are refreshing your memory so to speak. I looked at porn in high school, but in my early 20's I joined a Catholic monastery. A few years in the monastery and those pornographic images I had seen in high school faded so much as they really didn't have any effect on me.

 

You can control what is happening in your head - that is what meditation teaches us.
Although i would suggest thinking of something else rather than nothing at all, since it is easier. In other words distract yourself, give your mind something else to do.
Reading may not work because your mind is able to process information faster than you can read it. So it is bored and looking for something else. It also means your body is not doing anything with its energy.

Some people also suggest to not fight the feelings and feel them fully, knowing that it does not mean you have to act on them.

 

Has happened with me a lot of times since I have joined nofap. If u even think about porn u are not going on the right track bcoz process of rebooting is getting off porn from ur head completely.many times I have noticed whenever I let the thought of porn take over I end up masturbating.

 

Thinking about porn can lead to you wanting to watch porn and masturbating. I try to just think of something else entirely when it comes up.

 

Go a step further; don't just think of something else, think of something that triggers a conflicting/suppressing emotion. That's been working for me lately. Any random stray thoughts that come into my mind that are erotic in nature (P/M,)I change the thoughts to something that triggers a nurturing response in me. What I am learning is that I'm battling myself and I can be very sneaky lol. I need to keep on making different things work and not use the same thing over and over.

 

One thing that I learned while quitting smoking is that urges will invariably come (even 15 years after quitting, I still get the occasional urge). The trick is to acknowledge them, and hold on for the next 15-30 seconds. After that, the urge starts to decrease and will shortly after vanish.

I presume it is the same with P. When you get a craving, acknowledge it, say to yourself, "not now, maybe later" and go on to something else. When you make such a choice, you acknowledge that the addiction has a power over you, but you are capable of deflecting it for a short while. If you deflect for a short while each time, a lot of "short whiles" together make for a very long while.

Good luck, brother.

 

Hey, you're starting over and that's good. I've relapsed many times with a variety of rationalizations. I think you hit the nail on the head when you recognize that it's an urge, it's your body wanting that dopamine hit, waiting to avoid some negative or hard feeling. It's an avoidance of reality mechanism that we've learned to engage because it's easier than engaging with the hard things in life. It stops of from feeling the things we don't want to feel. Recognizing that urge and then recognizing what feelings we want to avoid and confronting those is important.

We can even do substitution for P to avoid things. Yesterday I used being on this site as a substitution for P to avoid certain feelings. Today I was more proactive and spent less time here and more time dealing with what I was avoiding.

You got this, you can do it!

 

What about thinking about sex with girls that you know or are acquainted with? Does that count?

 

That's a really good question. The funny thing is that I haven't fantasized about a girl I actually knew IRL for years. That was back in my middle school/high school days before my porn use seriously escalated. If it makes you want to masturbate then it's probably not a good idea to fantasize about them.

 

I think that at some point, you almost need a complete shift in strategy. For example, getting through days 1-30 is all about: No, I'm not going to do this no matter what. But after day 30, that militaristic defiance starts to wane quite a bit, you get comfortable, almost complacent. I think at day 30, and probably again at day 60, you almost need to have a back up strategy, a completely different strategy. Because the dopamine will find a way. The dopamine will find cracks in the facade and force its way through. When every cell in your body is screaming for just one more hit of whatever your drug of choice is, i.e. pmo, you really need to bring out the big guns to get through it.