WHY YOU RELAPSED?

Thats very good that you both are working on it. The toughest thing isn't the addiction or leaving it itself, it is the changing of that mindset which thinks pmo is a good thing, and I m talking when the urges come up, I find it funny and very sad at the same time that we make a good progress all the way to rewiring and suddenly a day comes where our own mindset betray us by making us believe that its nothing, its a thing of the past, and thinking about pmo feels just like enjoying a movie, and then my friends if we act on that, we put ourselves on the very same path we chose to leave.... What a pity!

 

Bro I would relapse out of having a problem in the belief system of NOFAP. I would think in my head: ''Succesful people have sex with beautiful women everyday, and they are not having the dopamine problems that we have'' or something like that and I would just be like ah fuck it, I'm not seeing a girl today, if they can lose their seed everyday, I can too.

I don't think it is only a dopamine thing, dopamine is very important to have. This is widespread knowledge that it fucks up your dopamine receptors, which is sort of true, but I think it is way more related to the deep down guilt and shame you have for yourself. Self-love is the most important thing ever and when you masturbate you sort of lack that self-love, the strength to abstain from your little demon voice and to stop objectifying women as well.

I am now on day 15 of nofap and I have seen the fucking light again. I have easy fun conversations, I make jokes with the waitress, I can think more clearly, I am more productive, I start going to the gym more often, I look people in the eye more.

2 weeks ago I was angry at people around me, I was bitter, I was not looking people in the eye, my eyes were droopy etc!

 

Hello everyone,

I too have struggled with P for years, over 30 to be honest. Like you I have had many reasons I went to, Boredom, Stress, excitement, sexual desire after seeing woman in real life or even virtually and so many more to be honest. The key for me to pushing yourself through the struggles is having a plan and not setting yourself up for failure. I know you can't plan for every situation, but you can learn from every situation regardless of whether it was good situation or bad.

You may think how do I create a plan? Identify your triggers for one. By the looks of a lot of threads on here a lot of you have started that process. Now analyze those triggers. Let's use stress, why do I use P because I am stressed? It can honestly be many reasons and different for each person. But for me it came down to I used it when I was stressed because I was too lazy to find a healthier outlet to relieve my stress. I have Computer job, I am computer programmer, I watch so many movies and TV shows, I watched social media and so on. Basically, I have so much access to not just P by the literal definition of going to specific websites to look explicit images or videos, but I sexualize any women I have seen ANYWHERE. That sad part is I didn't even realize I was doing it. My brain was making subconscious decision kind of like if you have ever been on auto pilot while driving home from work and not even remember driving half the roads. You are so programmed to do, and you cannot stop. Well, if I say you cannot stop then you are screwed right?

WRONG

If you let P control your mind by giving into even the slightest urges, then you continue to be able to make conscious decision when it matters. It may not be at first, but I promise you it will catch up to you in then end at least it always has for me.

So going back to make a plan. If you know that watching TV, movies, sports and even listening to Spotify can cause you trigger take it away. Yes, that is right it has gotten so bad for me I found myself on Spotify starring at album covers, hoping the blockers and filters I put on my phone wouldn't take screenshots at that moment. Now I just hold myself accountable, not by shear will by having a plan. I don't put myself in place to fail I put myself in place to succeed. I have programs on my computer that eliminate photos completely from the internet, unless I whitelist pages such as college homework and what not. I don't want TV and movies, because I don't need to. I don't watch sports because I found myself getting pissed off at my team when they lose. This put so much hardship on my marriage. But yet I am still luck enough for my wife to be working through this with me.

I will be honest, the only way I could truly even start my journey towards being the better me is by posting in here. For me it has only been 3 days since I started posting on here, so what do I know. I am just still learning, but I am going continue share my experience as I go because also helps clear my mind.

I will leave you with this, identify your triggers, remove any triggers that you don't need in your life. If you have to do something that triggers you that you can't remove create a plan of how you will react in certain situations. If you do get triggered learn from it and try to avoid letting it trigger you again. I challenge you take away as many triggers you can, to allow yourself a chance to recover.

 

You relapse because you fail to identify your REAL enemy which is unbalance between pleasant and useful.

Pleasant is opposed to useful.



Let's have a look to the recovery diagram to any addiction. As you can see relapse and lapse are part of the process. (relapse is pmo like you used to, lapse is pmo just a few times or less than you used to).

The reason, relapse and lapse are impossible to avoid is because your pmo addiction is NOT the enemy, this is just the manifestaion of something deeper, which is pleasant.

The reality is you let too many pleasant things in your life compare to the numbers of useful things in your life, so your life became unbalanced.

The recovery diagram from above works only if you add more useful thing to your life (to your ritual).

So if you fully understand what I just told you, you will understand the WHY behind all those advices that you can read here in this forum:

• go to gym: useful for the body
• read: useful for the mind
• meditate: useful to clear your mind and avoid stress
• have a walk in a park: useful for your body and it has been proven that natural surrounding refuel the body
• go out with friends or subscribe to an social activity: useful for your social development
• stop social media: just pleasnt thing, nothing useful
• stop pmo: just pleasnt thing, nothing useful
• stop video games unless you want to be pro gamer: just pleasnt thing, nothing useful
• etc

Because you decreased the numbers of useful thing in your daily routine and increase the number of pleasant things, you fell in an addiction.

Imagine that you are a balloon. The balloon is attached to earth with useful. The wind is pleasant. If there is not enough useful things and too many pleasant things, the balloon will eventually fly away. And because the wind will keep blowing and making the balloon fly away, it will lose contact with earth (just real life) and it will live in the far away from earth (pleasant world) which has no end.

You need to REBALANCE your life in order to keep your balloon attach to earth. Adding more useful things to your life will help you to MODERATE your pleasant things. Losing moderation on pleasant things lead to addiction.

It won't happen overnight, give yourself time. If you lapse or even relapse, don't feel terrible, it is ok as long as you keep adding useful stuff to your life. The addiction will decreased naturally.

Adding useful stuff to your routine is THE REAL FIGHT you should focus on. A no pmo streak is secondary.



BONUS 1: Start today just by asking this question before any action you take: What makes this action useful ? or is it only pleasant ? And everytime it is only pleasant, it is a bad and you should think about a way of reducing it.

BONUS 2: Don't believe personal development coaches, they just want to make money. You are supposed to develop, it is nature, if you don't, it is beacause something (for us pmo) poison your brain so it fails to develop. Get rid of the poison, add more useful things to your daily routine and you will see, you will develop, grow and find solutions by yourself cause it is just NATURE.

 

Bro, you are absolutely right on point, this is what I meant (even slightly) by my previous post than this on this thread, that we work ourselves hard all the way to the rewiring process untill one day comes and we give in to the pleasant stuff to get behind in our progress. Adding more useful stuff like the necessities that must be done or u were doing before this addiction helps a ton.. Like they provide a sense of relief and calmness to me I cant describe. I still need to have proper understanding of why and how my relapses do happen... Because I dont relapse or lapse out of stress or frustration, no cuz I am aware at that time, but during the happy moments I just let myself slide thats i need to control

 

It's not. There are many things that can be both pleasant and useful, food being one simple example that comes to mind. It seems to me if you seek the right things with the right mindset, most useful things can be (at least mildly) pleasant.

 

Yup, u r right he should have enlongated that sentence by adding ''during recovery to rebalnce'' or something like that. And I would haven't taken that literally, cuz even popular therapeutic approaches like CBT, provides a worksheet on which we have to write what we will do based on usefulness and just pleasure, so that we can ascertain where our time goes, work best aginst procrastination

 

Well, why did you relapse? I guess it's your belief in if Nofap is even worth it right? Otherwise you wouldn't have asked your second question.

Up to you if you wanna stay addicted to porn, have low self-esteem, objectify women, social anxiety etc.

 

Instead of asking these questions, meditate on why u lapsed, visualize what u did that triggered u and the way u relapsed, see it, try to feel it, learn from it. It will be a little tougher if you've got back brain fog but it will diminish after 2 or 3 days by only doing what I said and continue as u were... But have complete abstinence from sexual stimulus for these days.. COMPLETELY otherwise u would relapse again, and it would take longer to feel right again

 

Well my friend, getting busy at school is okay but also find something that can only for 5 min but it can give a sort of enjoyment other than social media like mine one is coding i cannot do it everyday since my half of the day as like you is spent in the school and coaching lectures but still at 4 times in a week i used to do the coding
Good luck and i hope that this can help you

 

perfect that's enough to make the journey free of boredom you can try other new things like new sports all my intention of saying is just make the journey enjoyable so that it can become effortless

 

you can try any type of other things like writing your name on a page with the hand that you don't use for writing