That makes sense to me, except for all the stuff about breathing. (Whenever anything starts talking about breathing, it loses me.) The stray cat army analogy is particularly appropriate. I've tried giving up MO and PMO before (before I knew about NoFap) and found fighting the urges to be excruciatingly difficult. This time, I don't fight them. My urges are physical more than mental and felt all over my body. I just relax and let them wash over me like waves on a beach until they pass, which they do. That makes all the difference in the world. I don't even dread them anymore. When I feel one coming on, I say, "Here we go on another step in the journey, but I'm absolutely not going to give in and fap." I just see them as one of the things that makes NoFap such an adventure.
Here is another useful reference from Kelly McGonigal on urge surfing https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...mindfulness-makes-the-brain-immune-temptation
As to what @mv8652 said about the breathing: I used to think similarly. However, my eyes were opened when I read and realized that this is the only subconsciously controlled process, that we can influence consciously! Hence giving us a means of taking a bit of control over our subconscious mind. Whenever I feel an urge my heart beat and breathing automatically accelerates for a little bit, even without me noticing most of the time. But when I concentrate on it, be aware of it, I can consciously slow it down and the urge loses power over me.
Okay, I'll try to explain. Breathing is automatic. Artificially altering it takes concentration away from the task at hand, so doing so is just a distraction. It's no different than doing multiplication tables in your head or counting backwards from 100. The idea of urge-surfing is not to distract yourself from the urges and keep them bottled up, but to let them flow. An urge experienced but unfulfilled is several thousand more neurons rewired, but one that is avoided by distraction is a missed opportunity. I suppose that distraction from an urge might be a valid strategy as a last resort when one is seriously in danger of giving in to it. However, do whatever works for you. Please!
Neurons are not "re"wired. The connections just get weaker the less they're used and additional connections are formed. That's what we're trying to do here. Even after years, they will still be there, weakened, but there. The goal here is to train a conscious response. Basically it doesn't even matter if you're doing your math exercise or urge surfing or whatever works for you. I just wanted to explain why controlling your breathing is such a powerful way to control the state you're currently in (mentally/emotionally/physically), because you sounded like that's just "nonsense".
Okay, I stand corrected on the details of the neurons. If altering you breathing works for you, then more power to you. To me it is nonsense. Beyond maybe taking a deep breath to calm oneself down when agitated, it's just O2 in, CO2 out.
