A thread for the nofap Veterans

I've been on NOFAP for a few years, 3 to 4, and I've never been able to put PMO behind me fully.


When I first started I hit a 179 day streak. That number is stuck in my head, because I know how close I was to 6 months. I was able to continue the streak through one of the worst times in my life( a time during which I allowed myself to be in a terrible slump for nearly 4 months) yet I pushed through it. When things started getting better in life is when I gave into the urges and ended the streak.

I think it was easier at the start to git a big streak for a few reasons. One is that my life was pretty much not great at that time, and I have a ridiculous fear of success, so I didn't need PMO because there wasn't anything to ruin. The second, and more broadly applicable reason, is that I didn't know how difficult nofap would be in the long run. I go back to a quote from Pearl S Buck

"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible---- and achieve it, generation after generation."

I didn't know enough about how hard this would be at the time, nor did I think about my future and that I would fight against pmo for the rest of my life. That made it fairly trivial at the start.


Once I relapsed after the long streak, I learned how hard it was, and how quickly I can ruin it for myself, and it hasn't been easier since.

 

Tomorrow will mark the 6th year I've been on this site. Once, I went on a streak for over a year. What changed? Not a damned thing.

 

Well, my longest streak was around 80 days... This happened a year and a half ago. Since then, I haven't been able to maintain a streak longer than 18 days, in the last 18 months my longest streak was 18 days, and I've been doing pmo or mo 15 times a month on average in the last 8 years. But if I go back to my high school days there were times when I did it like 100 times per month in a year. On average 3 times per day when I was 17 and even more sometimes, up to 6 times. Quitting is hard, especially because pron is everywhere now, on youtube, tik tok, fb, Instagram, everywhere some explicit content of women dressed in a sexually provocative way so it's hard to keep a long streak, even when you go out, away from devices, even on billboards you can't find piece. I think quitting pmo a decade ago would be much easier than quitting it now.

 

I would say I’ve been doing NoFap since late 2013 to early 2014. I’ve deleted my account and have come back multiple times over the years; I can’t even remember my original username, but I can say the atmosphere of the site was night and day different back then; kind of similar to Saturday Night Live where in the beginning days you had your hilarious sketches and cast but as time goes on the show has become less and less funny.

After 19 years of unchecked PMO addiction and unaddressed past sexual trauma from my preteens, my rock bottom was when I was an alcoholic basehead that masturbated to porn 8 times a day while frequenting prostitutes. Currently, after 10 years of this recovery journey, I’m no longer an alcoholic basehead, nor do I visit prostitutes, and I don’t masturbate to porn 8 times a day. Do I have amazing streaks? Nope. Do I think there’s still been amazing progress despite that? Yep. Will I continue on this journey for life? Yes.

Sadly, I see a lot of people falling into the the trap of prosperity nofap. Thats the mentality of thinking nofap is going to turn you into Robert Kirowsaki or Casanova but when it doesn’t people just give up. It’s like an infomercial version of nofap you see at 3AM where the guy says “In just one 90 day reboot, you too will have this amazing life! Call now!”. At some point you have to want to do nofap because it’s simply the right thing to do.

Probably the saddest thing I see though on this site is men working hard to abstain from pmo just so they can graduate to becoming sex addicts who are still incapable of meeting the challenges of intimacy and vulnerability a loving relationship requires. They get obsessed with pickup tactics and how many women they’ve bedded or can bed, all the while no one calling them out on their inability to make a thread about something that actually matters like how to maintain a healthy and loving relationship; despite them talking about how sex is connection they’re unable to maintain any long term connections. Even worse is some men envy those men and then become woman haters because they can’t be those men; It’s truly sad stuff.

At the end of the day I’ve found that love conquers addiction, because love is devoid of pride. If you’re not growing and maturing in love then your addiction doesn’t go away, it simply transfers to something else like sex, or money, or power, or a perpetual state of victimhood.

 

I agree with you 100 %

 

This!

 

I’ve been doing NoFap since 2018 and no longer PMO at all. That habit has been destroyed. I’m usually in monk mode most of the time. Your brain is adjusting to the real you and often times it’s boring or feels lacking. Not a big deal. I think of it as that often talked about second puberty. You are literally having to relearn how to function without the addiction of MO / PMO. However all of the benefits are still there; confidence, attraction, magnetism, crystal eyes, deep voice, straight posture, etc. Remember why you started and keep going. Not all days are spectacular. Some are boring but that’s okay. It’s still progress.

 

This week is 46 months for me.

If I can give my thoughts on NoFap in a simple sentence, "NoFap will win you the battle, but it won't win you the war."

For me NoFap showed me that my addiction was part of the problem but not the problem. I starting PMO'ing because it was the only way I knew how to fulfil my needs as a child of 11. I grew up in a strict environment and was often neglected and abused. Those moments of PMO at 11 were the only way I could feel comforted, loved and wanted. For 20 years my PMO habit kept me stable in times of sadness, fear and stress. Fast forward to today and I can honestly say that I have no urge to PMO whatsoever. The urge is gone and I have not PMO'd in almost 4 years. In short, NoFap worked.

So the question becomes, why do I still feel like s**t? Why do I sleep 8 hours and feel that I have only slept 4? Why is my libido even worse than it was originally?Why do I have an ever looming cloud of depression/anxiety following me all the time? Why do I now isolate and fear going out into the world? I beat my NoFap addiction, I should be out travelling the world and enjoying life? The answer is simple. I never dealt with all the emotions that I blocked out with PMO.

What the NoFap salesman never tells us is that for some of us there will be 2 phases to recovery. The first is the standard NoFap recovery, the second is PAWS. PAWS is the process of clearing the years of emotional debris that has been hiding behind your addiction, and man is it not pleasant. PAWS is why rebooters give up and abandon the path. They spend years applying the NoFap rule of abstinence, not realising the rules of recovery have changed slightly. You are now required to process the emotional junk that you have been avoiding. Its like being deployed to war for 5 years, the war ending, then being deployed home only to believe that you are still at war.

What I am saying is, NoFap is one war, PAWS is another. Abstinence alone will not always fix PAWS, and will leaving you floating in the ether that is "recovery" for a long time. You have to begin clearing your emotional house to truly recover, and unless you face them head on, there is no telling if you will recover and if so how long it might take.

At 46 months I am almost there. While recovery is very slow, it is definitely happening. So to answer the question, I have somewhat quit NoFap. Do I still abstain from PMO? Yes. Does it makes recovery through PAWS easier? Absolutely. However redirecting my focus from NoFap, and realising that PAWS is a different headspace has helped me begin to fully recover.

Hoping someone can take something from this. Also really good thread idea @StonePlacidity