Can you go back to like 'vanilla' sex again?

Hey man. First off I want to say this seems like textbook 'desensitisation'. Your brain has become conditioned to only get sexual pleasure from pornography. Porn is 99% an extreme exaggeration of normal lovely sex you have with a real person!

Don't despair. Your brain is highly plastic. Remember you conditioned your brain before, so you can condition it again! This time for your benefit. Just leave porn and masturbation for a while. Let it go. Try to engage only in real sex and your brain will slowly be able to heal

 

Yeah, just quit PMO long enough and you’ll be fine. Long enough is different for everyone so we just go with 90 days, that oughtta do it.

Better than de-escalation and regaining sensitivity, though, is rejecting the pornified concept of sex in the first place. If you use sex exclusively as a recreational activity, you can get bored of your partner and of it in general. Then you have to seek novelty to make it “better.” If you use it as a bonding activity, making it about your partner and your relationship instead of about yourself and fun or ego boosting or whatever, you won’t escalate on it and it won’t get old.

 

I believe it’s possible to go back to a more vanilla taste but it’s not going to be possible if you keep going back to chocolate and sprinkles. Given you’ve escalated past vanilla it sounds like you’ve been in this pmo trap for a while. You’re not going to get out overnight. It’s gonna take time and you have to be cool with that amigo.

 

i dont think its possible. i think our neural networking is wired up and its our central nervous system and amygdala that keeps stimulating that network it will continue to hold presidence in your brain but it will take years many years to remove probably only due to hormone decline . the likelihood of it just happening is slim because well it got there in the first place meaning there are obvious biological underpinnings and environmental factors that develop and nurture it .humans are pretty fucked in this regard live breed die complicated it is not we think we want all the answers spiritually emotionally whatever. we try to attribute meaning. but at the end of the day we dont have the answers we live breed die.

so life is about the experience of life . and the quality of your life on this forsaken crater

i think the problem with porn is and life in general is we can never stop time and go back we can only ever move forward
there are limitations to our existence here and for many people we are living unfulfilled lives work sleep eat listen to fucking politics of the day we fight and argue over maniacal bullshit because that's how shit life actually is . so you want to go back to vanilla

i dont know but as mentioned before you need a positive reaffirmation to provide enough fulfillment that porn is not necessary

but again we have limitations

life seems to be about breaking limitations . but it only takes a life sentence to get anywhere if at all

 

real sex now thats a good one. its interesting because for most that's probably the whole issue not enough sex

 

Yes. It takes time but it's absolutely possible.

 

Yes without a doubt you can. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise.

I was so deep into porn, severely desensitized, escalated into very extreme things that are so far out of touch with my natural tastes, and just by reducing porn a little my tastes for normal things fire up so quick and I get horny just from seeing attractive women in public. I haven’t even accomplished a crazy streak and I find my tastes normalizing so quickly.

 

Yes. You will be fine. I'm 41. I was good up until I hit my 30s and it was at that point that I realized watching porn was affecting my ability to get a full erection and eventually enough research led me to places like this where I could study the science of it and how it affects our brains.

Best advice I can give here as I've gone through exactly what you're going through -

* If you decide to go hard-mode that's fine, but after a good 7-10 days of cold turkey and doing nothing, I'd actually recommend masturbating once a week (no more than that); doing that helped me avoid long flatlines - the key is not thinking about or watching porn when masturbating - think about a realistic scenario with a girl you actually know IRL. Try to keep it as vanilla as possible - even just thoughts of her wearing clothes if possible if you can get off to that - you want as little dopamine flow as possible but it's healthy for your prostate and sex drive to get off and re-sensitize to normal things / scenarios.
* Thought-control. Try really hard not to think about sexual stuff while you're rebooting - I mean when you're going to sleep, just idle around the house, etc. if you catch yourself starting to think about sexual stuff, immediately change those thoughts and busy yourself with something else - you need to keep your mind off sex as much as possible - this is what helps the dopamine receptors re-sensitize. They are overloaded and basically beaten down at this point and in order for them to repair / re-sensitize they need to be left alone.
* Obviously don't watch porn, but take it even further when possible - if you're on the web, or watching a movie and see a hot girl wearing very little, etc. try not to look at her. When rebooting, I would actually put my hand up to block the view of the girl in ads, etc.
* Start working out if you don't already. Get into lifting weights - this boosts testosterone and self-esteem.

All of these don't have to be permanent, but these specific steps are what helped me. Now I have no trouble getting erections with my wife, sex feels good again, etc. You'll seriously want to have a friggin' party after you get to the other end of this tunnel, dude - you won't believe how good sex feels again once you haven't cum for many days. Just seeing your wife / gf start taking her clothes off will get you rock hard - this addiction crap happens to us because of the gradual changes to the brain and the reward circuitry - it happens so slowly that by the time we realize something's changed, a bunch of things are affected including other things - I noticed I wasn't enjoying my hobbies as much due to how de-sensitized I was in general. This stuff all comes back once you abstain for a while.

 

Not only does this help with re-sensitizing, this is also tremendously helpful for people who have escalated to extreme stuff in porn.

When you do this, your re-wiring your brain to much more natural things sexually, and this helps your brain reverse the conditioning of your brain associating taboo/forbidden/shame/guilt/fear/shocking with orgasm, and instead wires back up to natural things. You’ll start to feel disgusted with what you were watching in porn, because it was all fake and porn induced and not really part of you, and natural things will seem out of this world again.

 

For me it helped to focus on oxytocin instead of dopamine. Gentle kissing and feeling genuine love with a partner is the way to go. With P we seek chemical cocktails of dopamine and adrenaline as a way to fill the long term oxytocin void which we get from intimate relationships. P escalation is just a way for the body to compensate for a lack of intimacy chemicals in the brain.