21yr old newcomer: hope you can offer some advice and support :D

Hi there! Newcomer to NoFap and Reddit altogether.

I'm a 21 year old gay guy from the UK and have somehow only just realised I have a problem with PMO - I think I may have had this problem since I was 16 or 17 now and yet it has taken some fairly extreme symptoms for me to realise that I have a porn addiction. So it is sometimes hard when looking back, to know when some of the symptoms started. I hope you guys can be of some support!

I want to share my history of how I got to this point:

Whilst I had masturbated to sexual images on the computer by the time I was 11 or 12, this was never very frequent and I think I had the normal amount and quality of sexual urges throughout my early teens. However, pretty much as soon as I first got a mobile phone which could play online videos (at about 15 or 16) the frequency of porn watching increased, probably once in every three nights - maybe more. Still not awful and I think I was still masturbating *healthily* i.e without porn when I was naturally aroused. Nevertheless I think I was doing it frequently enough and for long enough that by about 17 I think it is probably safe to say that that is when my quality of sexual health (and general mental health) started to decrease.

As a bit of side info I went to an all boys private school where there weren't necessarily the most positive attitudes towards homosexuality and I was fairly sexually repressed. There were certainly people I was at least fairly sexually attracted to while I was there, but there was rarely anyone I thought I "fancied", as in it was always more lust than romantic attraction, (but perhaps they weren't the easiest bunch of guys to make a romantic bond with - I digress slightly.) I didn't come out to many people/ accept my homosexuality that well myself until I was about 18 by which time the frequent porn watching probably already had done some damage - although it is hard to tell in retrospect. But I was certainly not getting attracted to people as frequently as before, in fact very few.

After that it was time for university, and the first time I had my own computer and a bedroom that I could lock without fear of being disturbed. I didn't much like some of the people in my university accommodation, was a little depressed and became slightly socially isolated (I'm usually an outgoing and gregarious person on the outside!). As you can guess - here my porn use escalated, and by this time I was really starting to notice that I didn't find any guys that naturally attractive as I had done in the past, and sometimes tried to force myself to. I think the quality of pleasure I got from masturbating had decreased a noticeable amount by this time too. At this point I should probably clarify that by this point I had still had no sexual experiences with any guys - not even kissing! (And not much more than that now!) I had also started getting bored of just any old porn, and that year I paid for porn for the first time which for me was an exciting novelty. Needless to say the novelty eventually wore off.

Second year of university started off with me having some crazy mental problems that made it much more difficult for me to focus on my studies than before, and porn offered as usual a quick comfort to calm myself down sometimes, although I'm sure it probably actually made it worse. My new novelty and habit that year: cam to cam roulette sex chats. Probably not very good for one's self esteem to be constantly moved on from either. Oh and the other thing - I don't know if any of you know what "Grindr" is? Basically a gay hook up app on smartphones, and I think one would be surprised at the number of people who don't use it as such. Or at least I didn't - I was not convinced that I would be sexually attracted to any of these guys in real life, and I'm too much of a prude for a random hook up anyway. I used it as porn. You're looking at all the pictures of sexually available guys, you get a little high if you find a hot guy, maybe he actually responds to you, maybe he sends you a dick pic. You get the picture. Another extremely unhealthy addiction.

Those two carried on for summer of last year, and my pleasure response gradually weakened towards them. But I still kept using them anyway. This year of university I went on a year abroad to a country whose language I don't speak fluently, an enriching experience, but particularly last term a very lonely one too. I had my first as thus far only intimate sexual experience with a guy, and whilst I enjoyed the intimacy, I couldn't get it up. My porn used absolutely sky rocketed last term, I was spending hours, and sometimes completely missing days of classes. Needless to say I didn't do amazing well in midterms. Grindr, porn, and chatroulette. I thought this was a symptom, rather than a cause of my anxiety/depression etc. My ability to get an erection now was entirely dependent on porn watching, and even then I wasn't finding even the porn exciting very more, and my erection weakened also. I started getting off to some stuff I'm not proud of in order to find that high.

Then one time last term it was like my balls finally caved. Man, that orgasm hurt! And it made me feel a bit ill and generally weak too! And yet - I STILL didn't realise that I had a porn addiction. I mean obviously I knew something was wrong, and that my sexual habits probably weren't very healthy, but I thought I had general depression. I continued to masturbate to porn even when I had hardly any sexual urge to do so - and even though my balls often twinged a bit, and I felt like my veins hurt. It is only now, about 6 months after that, that I've finally recognised this porn addiction and porn induced sexual dysfunction and erectile dysfunction for what they are. And that is where I am now.

And now I want to make that change. At worst I'm hoping to get rid of this porn induced ED and generally get rid of a bad habit. At best I'm hoping that after a reboot, I'll start feeling like a new me/an old self I had completely forgotten. I'm hoping to be shocked by how much my life quality decreased without me knowing just how much. I don't know how likely that is though. No idea how long it will take to reboot either. This is the second time I've tried to abstain in the past two weeks, the first time I lasted 4 days. Couldn't concentrate at all on work today, so in fact I don't know whether it is a good idea to start all this before I finish my exams. But I figured it's gonna be hard either way and at least with the exams I have a distraction. I have watched and read a lot on NoFap and Yourbrainonporn.com and everything described matches up perfectly to my experience. I can't believe I didn't work this out sooner. So here goes.

Wish me luck Fapstronauts: Day 1 almost over!!!!

 

Still early days for us both yet - in terms of nofap and our age! Like we've still got time haha. Yeah I've had that same worry too, and then I get into a whole debate with myself about whether love even needs sex yadayada - very silly of me. Just need to get on with our lives and let it come naturally like it seems obvious but there's just no point worrying about it. I'm just looking forward to getting my libido back for the time being. I really hope it doesn't take too long!