100 day success questions

Hello everyone,
Thanks for checking out my post. I just needed to post as today marks my 100th day of successfully avoiding PMO! I wanted to thank everyone on this site. We all may have different symptoms and problems to tackle however this community brings a great gathering place to exchange encouragement and ideas.
Currently I do feel like my mind is clearer. I have seen noticable results; my brain fog has lifted noticeably and my depression is slowly lifting. My attitude is changing for the better and I know I am in the right direction for the person I wanna be. However, ive read some other posts talking about how much more energy they have and how it is a complete transformation. While I have seen improvements and dont intend on stopping now, I was wondering how common it is for men to wait for maybe 150-180 days before they see a complete transformation. Overall, I DEFINITELY feel better than where I was 100 days ago but I feel like I still got some way to go before I can honestly say I truly feel like a completely different man. Does alcohol effect recovery as well? Nothing serious but just casual drinking with friends on weekends. Any feedback would be appreciated. My advice is to just say no. You dont need to have a justified reason in your head or an elaborate excuse as to why you need to say no to yourself. Stop BSing yourself and just stop! before you know it youll be at 100 days too. Thanks

 

Hi,
Overall 3 things I did to make it to 100 days:
1. Stop BSing yourself: I do think the majority of men on here suffer from unwanted sexual behavior/complusions/addiction. There is a reason that this behavior has been learned and implemented into your life and it clearly plays a pivitol role in your life. Therefore, your mind and body know that it is important to maintain this behavior and will coerce you subconciously to continue with the behavior. This is going to involve an ACTIVE AND CONSCIOUS effort to fully stop. You ultimately need to make the decision that this behavior is not what you want for your life and it has gotten out of control. You need to make an HONEST set of rules you are going to follow during your recovery. This includes triggers as well. Maybe you need to put a content blocker on your electronic devices, maybe you need to do pushups or situps or watch tv/play video games until your urge to masturbate goes away, maybe you need to keep a fixed amount lf cash on you for emergencies only so you dont go into strip clubs, maybe you need to delete apps and email accounts. Whatever you do, set yourself up for success immediately!
2. Perfection is the enemy of the good: I think a lot of people need to recognize that this is a PROCESS. You are not going to magically wake up tomorrow once you got rid of everything and move on with life. Im at 100 days and I still feel like I have quite a ways to go. During the beginning there were tons of times I caught myself redownloading hookup apps, recreating email accounts, even me naked and seriously thinking about edging. At times like these you HAVE to remember why you are doing this and have a plan to interrupt yourself immediately. For me, my phone was a big problem so whenever I caught myself doing something I immediately put my phone down and got away from it. I went in the other room, I went for a walk, I played a game on it instead, whatever. Implement an emergency plan when you are about to/ in the middle of relapsing and stick with it. Youll come to find that if you gove yourself 20-30mins ot was just a temporary urge and youve moved on. I would go from "How am I gonna get through this urge" to "Im so proud of myself that I didnt relapse" in a matter of 20ish mins from refraining. As you can see my journey had plenty of bumps in the road but ultimately I still stuck to the rules of my recovery and Im a lot happier and prouder of myself as a result. No relapse is worth how I am feeling right now and I know its only going to get better.
3. Be kind to yourself and dont compare: No one knows your body better than you. You deep down inside know what behaviors are problematic and what needs to change. And thats fine. Understand that most of the people on here are in the minds of an addict. I say this because one of the biggest thought processes that used to lead me to relapse was "well most guys jack off and I dont see them having a problem, I dont understand why I cant either." As I look back on that sentence there are a couple problems with that. For one, society in general vastly overestimates how often men are tugging at it. I did an experiement and asked friends as well as random guys on apps just how often they jack off. Their responses?? several of them said "I dont". A few said 1-2 times a week. I can guarantee you most of the people on here masturbate a hell of a lot more than this. My point is, why we participate in PMO and the level we indulge in it has interfered with our lives and caused us problems. This is not purely psychological but rather physiological in nature. We need to give our bodies LOTS AND LOTS of time to recover. We have been overstimulated, our muscles are sore, our brains our tired and our minds are weak. Know this in the beginning and adjust accordingly. Try to scope out what you need to do and then spend the rest of your day taking care of yourself. This is a big task that will take a long time to accomplish and will result in your life being changed. Give yourself time to sleep, time to relax and not think, time to be good yo yourself. In the way beginning (and still even today unfortunately) fatigue has been huge for me. I have gained quite a bit of weight but honestly. why am I gonna go bust my ass in the gym when my body is already exhausted? Its adding fuel to the fire in my opinion and I think eating better food will help me with my weight gain and provide better fuel for my body to recover. When I couldnt think at work, I would go out for a walk. Clear your mind. Sometimes you just need to get out of y il ur own mind on this journey and not be obsessed with it. Allow yourself to rest.
Hopefully this helped

 

Hi,
While i personally believe in God i think everyone should be able to recover regardless of spirituality. For advice that everyone could follow, from a spiritual standpoint I would say first be honest with yourself. Recovery is unfortunately an all or nothing process. As explained earlier, ive had bumps in the road myself to get as far as i have now so im not trying to say recovery needs to be perfect, im merely trying to say you either need to be 100% committed or forget it. Lets take alcoholism for a moment. you cant be in recovery from alcoholism but still have a drink with dinner. yes, there are plenty of nonalcoholics that are able to do this however we need to understand that we are not in a normal mindset and we have special rules we have to follow if we wanna reach what we belive to be is "normal" for us. You cant be in recovery from this but have ur weekly jack off session on sunday to treat yourself or still look at that one special magazine/website you have cause its got a "special spot" in your life (or in reality your addiction). You need to be CONSISTENT with yourself that at the end of the day, no matter how strong or hoe many urges you have to act out, that the end goal is to be done with all this and change your life. Im on day 101 and I STILL have moments that come up out of nowhere where i get unusually horny and wanna relapse. However, since time has gone on and ive restrained myself several times at this point, i utilize my emergency plan i came up with and in a matter of minutes the moment is done and i carry on with my recovery. In short, youre either committing to the process 100% or youre not. No in between bull$h*t as those things are merely strings that keep us in the cycle and keep us attachedz to our addiction.
The other thing i wanted to add from a spiritual standpoint is have faith in your journey. In the beginning i couldnt even fathom what "the end" would look like. I had no clue what days my urges would come back, how much progress i would make day by day or what else would change as a result of me starting this. And i think thr important thing is, you dont necessarrily need to know what the end looks like. Theres that quote "you dont need to know what the end of the staircase looks like in order to take the first step" that i utilized and still do to this day. In the beginning, you need to act like you are in full on crisis mode. you need to act like you are a firefighter and you just arrived on the scene to a tremendous fire. Do you think when firefighters first get to the scene of a fire, they sit their and think about what caused it first before they go in? NO!!! they realize there is a fire and they need to get in their and put it out now!!!! Once the fire is out that is when the investigation begins. Think of this the same way. You dont need an elaborate reason as to how or why this all started in order to get started. That is something to discover later on down the road. Right now, our bodies and minds are in a loop of addiction and they are overstimulated and exhausted. We need to mentally abstain from indugling and allow our bodies to recover and heal from what weve done. Yes, we are sexual beings, but we are NOT sex machines. Sex takes energy and work and if we overdo it our bodies become exhausted. dont sit around and wait until u have an elaborate hour by hour plan for your recovery. No ones recovery is perfect and you dont need to have everything answered in order to start to heal. I hope this helped

 

Yep. and you have to come up with an emergency plan that will force you to stop in the middle or before a relapse will occurr. put ur phone down, go outside in public if u have to, go on a walk, go in a different room, u need to psyche yourself out and do something different. Right now we are not in the mindset to engage in any type of sexual activity in a healthy way. our bodies and minds are overstimulated and exhausted and we need lots of time to recover. Recovery is an all or nothing process, no cheating! either your in recovery or your not. At this point in the game u need to act like a firefighter that is at the scene of the fire. you cant be worried about asking questions and finding clues about how it happened, you need to get in there and put the fire out. same goes with this problem. dont wait for an elaborate game plan to be created and dont wait until all of your questions have been answered to start recovery. Its a journey you need to stick with and find a way to stick with...answers will come up as the process moves forward