Full guide to the rebooting and porn recovery process?

I could be wrong, but I am not sure such a thing exists. The overall rules of recovery are mostly the same, but recovery is also a very individual journey. What exactly are you trying to achieve? What caused you to want to reboot?

 

That sounds like a wonderful resource, if it would work. I don’t doubt it exists, but I have not seen such a beast. I can tell you some if the basic things to do, but for me, what I do on day 30 looks a lot like day 0, only I feel a lot better.

I took this from my most-read post, but I’ll elaborate on it for you.

1. If you think it might be a P sub, it probably is. P sub means “porn substitute,” it’s anything that isn’t technically porn, but serves the same purpose as porn. Semi-nude pics on the ol’ ‘Gram, for example, or browsing dating apps. A lot of guys get anxious and ask if the thing they are doing is a P sub and a good rule of thumb for me is, if you’re going put of your way to see something stimulating, it’s a P sub & if you have to ask, you probably already know deep down what it is. That said, one symptom of P addiction is elevated anxiety, so you could be seeing boogeymen in your closet and you need to calm yourself.
2. If you think you might need to reset, you probably do. I think the most common single question on this forum is “Is it a relapse?” and the answer is no, dang it, quit saying “relapse.” A relapse is when you say “forget this noise, NoFap is stupid,” and you binge for three weeks straight before coming to your senses. You know when you relapse, it’s not ambiguous. What they always mean is, “Is it a reset, meaning, “should I reset my day counter?” and the answer to that is usually yes. Your counter is between you and the spiritual deity of your choice, okay, you het yo choose the terms, you get to decide the criteria and when to reset, but typically you’re asking because you were doing some sketchy stuff you knew you weren’t supposed to be doing and you did it anyway, and even if you decide not to reset, you’ll either look at porn or decide what you did counted as looking at porn within 48 hours. This is just the way addicts behave, and recovery works better if we’re honest with ourselves. Again, however, there’s the caveat that addiction makes us anxious so there’s a lot of guys who are like, “I accidentally saw a girl in gym shorts and she was hella hot and i didnt get an erection but later this stuff happened with my body (gross details we don’t need to hear, dear God why?!?), is it a relapse?” Again, IT’S NOT A RELAPSE, DAMN IT but no. It’s not even a reset, because you don’t have total control over other people. You can choose not to go to the gym at peak hours, but you can not decide what other people wear, or how your body physically responds, so wet dreams and other gym rats aren’t a reset.
3. Nature abhors a vacuum. Replace your lost, cheap dopamine from PMO with positive behaviors. So this one was a game changer for me. Porn does something good for you, it supplies dopamine and you need dopamine. The problem is, porn does too good a job at it. It’s too much dopamine, not mixed with other good brain juices, for too little effort & that’s why it messes us up. Cutting out porn is a good thing, but if you do it all at once and don’t change anything else, you won’t have enough dopamine in your system and one of two things is going to happen. One, the usual one, you’re going to reset over snd over and over. Two, you’ll have a lot of willpower, but you will get super nihilistic and wish you were dead. I know this for a fact. What you need to do is find out what gives you dopamine, and use the time you used to spend on porn, doing that instead.
4. That said, don’t try to revolutionize your entire life all at once. One small, positive change, integrate it into your lifestyle, make it a good habit, then pick up another. Otherwise you’ll burn out fast. This one is self explanatory. I don’t know how to expand on it.
5. Start with exercise. I run because I’m a skinny, long legged weed. Most guys lift, because they’re good at it. Most women do yoga, because they’re good at it. We do the things we’re good at. Exercise is an excellent dopamine source. Running for me is preferable, possibly because I’m built for it, possibly because of the oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange, I don’t know. The effects are not always immediate or obvious, but I noticed from my journal that my thought life is much more positive for the next 24 hours following a hard run. Not a light run. Experts say all you need is 15 minutes of slightly elevated heart rate, but it’s better for me if I convince myself I am on the edge of death for a km or so, or totally exhaust my arms with pushups.
6. Fantasy is a P sub. Have a train of thought pre-loaded, so that when an erotic thought comes up, you don’t waste time trying to figure out something to think about instead. Porn makes you into a person you don’t want to be, but you can’t operate out of negation. Again, nature abhors a vacuum. You can’t simply not be something, you have to be one thing instead of another. The cool thing is, you get to choose what to be. Or at least what you try to be. So think about what you want to be, and use the time you would have devoted to erotic obsessing, to choosing what to be snd plans on how to become that. I wanted to be a person who loves more, so I devoted a lot of time to thinking about the definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13. Maybe Stoicism resonates with you, so you should study Aurelius snd think about how to kill Alexandrians who don’t take you seriously. Or maybe you want to be a Michelin rated chef, so you need to devote your time to thinking up a training & career path, and crazy new recipes using exotic animal parts, it’s all up to you. Just don’t think about you-know-what, because that doesn’t help you be the person you want to be.
7. A stray erotic thought is really your brain asking for dopamine. Try and find a way to give it a nice dose from a healthy source, sooner rather than later. So this one can feed into exercise, or thought life, or something else. Lots of things that aren’t porn, or mating-related, give us dopamine. Listening to music, eating, laughing, petting an animal, reading, get yourself a coloring book if you need to, clean your room, do your homework, do something positive with your life. Your brain isn’t really asking for porn. It’s asking for dopamine, because you’re low, and porn is just the fastest, most reliable way your brain knows to get it. If you stop using porn, your brain will learn it’s no longer a reliable source and stop prompting you for that particular stimulation.
8. Seriously, quit social media. When I say you need to laugh or do something interesting for dopamine, I don’t mean social media. Social media is also all about dopamine, only, it’s about giving you just enough to stay on but not enough to make you feel satisfied and ready to move on to some else. You’re never done with social media, you never reach the end of your feed, and it’s designed to never be enough. The engineers who design social media algorithms don’t allow their children to use it, and use it themselves in very limited capacity. It’s brain crack. Don’t use it.
   
9. Porn lied. It lied to you about sex. It lied to you about women. It lied to you about men. It’s hard because you’re not even aware of what you believe that comes from porn, but you need to work on figuring out the truth. I’m into fiction on an advanced level. It’s fascinating, to me, that we pay other people to lie to us, and I’ve spent years going back to the question of why. One thing that’s intriguing to me is that we know it’s a lie, but we believe it anyway. In this forum, for example, in Off-Topic, there’s a thread about how the Middle Ages were the best time in history, and the op bases this hypothesis primarily on the film Braveheart. We know it’s fake, but it’s such a compelling story he believes the parts he finds most important are more or less true, and it blows my tiny mind. Porn is like that for us. We know it’s fake, we know it’s staged, but for some reason we’re convinced that it has some kind of truth buried in it. Otherwise it wouldn’t hold our interest. What we think is true about it elides me, because it’s intensely personal, and probably individual. I think for me, it might be the lie that relationships like this exist, that somewhere out there, gorgeous women are willing to have sex with the first half-decent seeming guy that falls across their path. But that isn’t true. That isn’t really how women operate. Not in my experience anyway, not in real life. I have never, ever, in all my born days, had a woman flirt with me like they do in porn. It’s helped my recovery to remind myself that, not only have I not experienced this, such a thing is as likely to fall across my path as the Borg, or inheriting six billion dollars from an unknown relative, or going back in time in a DeLorean.
10. No, you can’t stop just the P, the M, or the O and expect to reboot. That’s your addiction talking. Don’t be stupid. This is one where a lot of guys try to compromise and they decide M isn’t really the problem, it’s just P & O, or P isn’t really the problem it’s just O, or O isn’t really the problem, it’s just M so O is ok if their girlfriend, or even a prostitute, does it for them. And I want to go at ‘em like Smith vs. Rock, because that’s some asinine horse dung right there. These things come in a package. If you look at P but try not to M, you’re going to get crazy & change your mind. If you try to M without P, eventually you’re going to need the extra visual stimulation to get the high you’re used to. If you try to O without P or M, the chaser is going to get you, and you’re going to stay in that entitled P mindset anyway. Guys have been trying to find ways around it, snd independently discovering there is no way around it, for line a decade now; the only way is hard mode, for at least 60 days if you’re in a relationship and until you do get in a relationship if you’re not in one already. Do yourself a favor and skip the dog & pony show: go straight for hard mode. Or, if you’re the type who thinks he’s special, learn the hard way. It doesn’t hurt me, so knock yourself out.