Who here has poor impulse control?

I do and I agree with struggling with the balance thing. It’s either I’m bored af from abstaining or I’m hopelessly addicted to my vices.

 

HAHAHAHAHA you have ADD.

Seriously. You described me to a t, and every single one of those characteristics have been attributed to my ADD. Consider yourself fairly well controlled despite evidence to the contrary, citing all the times you don’t give in? Yeah, your impulse control is excellent thanks to a lifetime of coping, but normal people don’t have as much impulse to even deal with in the first place.
Gets worse after a few days of no PMO? That’s because ADD is a dopamine deficiency, PMO is a dopamine overdose. When you abstain a few days, your brain starts freakin’ out, knows it needs the dope, begs for it in any form possible. It’s not its fault either, dopamine is not evil and most people get plenty of it from normal interactions and activities throughout the day. A person with ADD has fewer receptors, and those get occupied by cortisol and other neuro-chemicals that fit those receptors better. That means you spend more time feeling stressed and less feeling satisfied than your average human being. If they were somehow transplanted into your body, they couldn’t handle it, they’d be a wreck, they’d be astonished you have the personal discipline and mental fortitude to live the way you do.
I don’t know about you, I don’t know if ADD has a link with metabolism, but I also straight up forget to eat. Odds are you are hard on yourself because you have to be, in order to function in some semblance of normalcy, especially in this modern environment where televisions, social media, advertisements, algorithms, everything is designed to exacerbate your symptoms and make even people who don’t have ADD behave as if they do, with ultra-short attention spans, and easy distractibility. And finally, I also have a thing about never spending money, because I know otherwise I’d always spend the money and then I wouldn’t have any for things that are worthwhile, and by the way, I developed all of these idiosyncrasies long before I was diagnosed with ADD. People with it are prone to addiction, roughly 30% of addicts, from drugs to gambling to sex (porn being considered a variation of sex addiction) have ADD. You probably also struggle with time management.

It’s okay, you don’t have to do anything about it. I don’t, for reasons I won’t bore you with. Just in answer to your actual question, yes, I deal with all of that and I have that unifying yet powerfully unsatisfactory answer as to why.

 

Well, I’ve been addicted to porn and weed for the past decade and it’s been unfulfilling. It’s the reason I joined the forum.
I’m gonna be sober and try to accept the boredom of life without these vices and seek doing productive things to be fulfilled. I think vices are short term distractions from an unfulfilling lifestyle. So I’m gonna make a change.

 

I supposedly have ADHD-PI, once called ADD, and I struggle with impulse control. I remember being taken to a counselor when I was 12 or so and he said "you're impulsive and that's dangerous." They ended up sending me to a shrink who diagnosed me with ADD and prescribed me Adderall. What did I do with it? Abuse it, of course, because that's what impulsive people do. I've mellowed out with age and I don't abuse drugs anymore.

 

You’ve hit on the problems with the diagnosis. There isn’t a blood draw, spinal tap, CT, or MRI that can show ADD. It’s just a cluster of symptoms, and it’s even normal behavior. Everyone loses focus, everyone procrastinates, everyone gets caught up in what they are doing and loses track of time. It’s just, supposedly, people with ADD do it more. However, if you have it you’ve always had it and you’ve learned to compensate, so you can generally do a lot of things really well and the things you don’t do well, you have justifications for. They get you either way, it’s like a witch hunt. If they decide you have ADD, you have ADD and there’s nothing you can do to prove otherwise.

I don’t care if you or I or anyone has it, or if it’s even a real thing. I’d always thought I had personality quirks, but nobody’s perfect and that included me, and there were some things I needed to work on. Turns out a lot of people have to work on the same things, so instead of patting us on the head and saying “Well bless your heart, I’ll pray for you,” they say “Unacceptable” and shove amphetamines down your craw. The only reason I mentioned it at all was to say, you’re not alone and it seems like you match this, so if you do have it it might explain a lot and you can take comfort in the fact that your flaws aren’t just because you’re a terrible human being, some could be attributed to the fact that you’re fighting up a steeper grade than normal. It’s why you got addicted to porn while your friend just uses it once or twice a week.

And because I have poor impulse control. Not about certain things. I have a rule about never buying stuff at the checkout aisle, for instance, or not starting a new book until I finish the first one. I never thought I had poor impulse control, I actually think of impulsivity as a vice and have a lot of contempt for it. But I have blind spots, like responding to message boards, and I do hate that about myself.

 

By taking too much...

 

I have terrible impulse control so much so that i have been diagnosed with adhd. adhd cause poor impulse control .

i also have very high testosterone it was something like 1100 ng dl when i was 30 so it must have been wtf knows what when i was a teenager probably 1400 1500 . which has been shown to cause impulsive behaviour as well. very hyper restless teenager

so yes being impulsive is a life long struggle for me.

 

I have terrible impulse control with junk food, and especially pmo.
Luckily my spending habits have been knocked to the curb, but as I get older, it gets harder to control myself.
I go to therapy and meditate and work out to help keep my urges under control

 

The key is motivation. But sometimes it is present and strong but it can evaporate in any second. It's hard to build it. Some people say you need "big why" but it's easier said than done. When the mood is "wrong" (it's hard to explain), the frontal part of the brain stops thinking and urges rule.

 

Ain't that the truth.
Lately, my reward center and my decision making center of my brain have been at odds and my constant urge for addiction has been winning.
My moods definitely are an indicator of the likelihood that im gunna relapse.

I spend most of my money on junk food.
That's what fucks me up.
I don't open the app for Amazon if i can help it, stay away from my favorite websites where i buy media like movies or CDs, and that for me makes it easy