90 day Reboot Challenge Init

I've been at it for 15 years. I started when I accidentally mistyped a songs website which took me to a porn website when I was in 7th grade and never permanently stopped.

Last weekend I started reading the book Your Brain On Porn. And it jolted me into reality.

One sentence of the book says:

> Interestingly people ( including religious ones ) on the forums we monitor often make rapid progress in rebooting after they they re-frame their porn challenge in biological terms.

That happened with me as well. My spiritual master says that there are three ways in which a commitment can be kept:

1. Greed: you get something out of the task you have set for yourself
2. Love: there's a loved one whom you love and respect, who can hold you accountable if you slip through your commitment, and you'll feel a wound if you go cold.
3. Fear: if you are fearful about something bad happening if you don't end up doing what you set to do.

For years I've gone through extents of a combination of the above three factors. The longest that I went would have been around 4 months in 2018 when I'd been meditating and being of service to others almost daily. But it was just that: a localised period, a short temporary victory.

My mind over the years have made it a habit of not doing things DESPITE knowing that I'm losing something. Because of the reason I've not been either competitive or a hard worker. And a lot of traits have followed suit. Some reasons were responsible for my not being able to quit porn for a long long time. I'd give myself excuses many of us might be familiar with: you've not masturbated a couple of days, that's good! you can ease out for a bit for one day as a reward. Which never was ever one day.

But when I started reading the book, my mind jolted into existence realising what I was doing to myself, my body and my mind! I'd never identified as an addict before because I've never had knowledge to be able to recognise that. The book ( still 30% remaining to read ) is giving me scientific knowledge. I'm reading research papers and long journal articles that are linked in the book to see for myself what research is pointing towards.

I could recognise soooo many patterns that I had ignored for years. For example, some of the triggers over the years for me have been:

1. waiting for code to compile or deploy
2. playing / handling with my genitals
3. too much sugar or carbohydrates in the diet ( makes body and mind feel sluggish and lazy and hence more susceptible to wanting to give up and watch porn )
4. fatigue: whenever my body would be feeling tired, instead of trying to hit the bed, I'd instead turn to porn.
5. failure/stress: I remember spending nights watching porn and masturbating after doing not so well in exams during college days.
6. desire to reward myself for an accomplishment: it would mostly be a coding problem that I'd be on to solve. If I'd solve a tough problem ( or sometimes even a part of it ), I'd give in to watching porn and masturbating as a token of rewarding myself. No doubt my brain reward system got rewired so much.
7. insomnia: On some days when I couldn't sleep I'd watch porn and masturbate so that my body would feel tired after orgasming and go to sleep.
8. shame: when shame comes to mind of not being able to quit, my mind, in order to temporarily not think about anything would take oblivious comfort in porn and masturbating, kicking all feelings and thoughts away, which after I was done, would trigger more shame, and the vicious cycle continued.

After reading major portion of the book, I'm already building strategies to identify all these cues and triggers and what should I do at that point of time as suggested in the book

> You also need to have a pre determined response in mind for when you face one ( trigger ). Choose to do something when a trigger happens: take a cold water bath impulsively without a thought, call a friend, make yourself a healthy snack, run, write, read, walk, go out. Choose a response that furnishes a sense of accomplishment, connection or self care. Once you've identified the trigger and decided upon an alternative reward for that situation, record your plan. I will _______ ( new routine ) when ______ occurs ( trigger ). I will ______ ( new routine ) because it gives me _____ ( reward ). Reward can be related to having more energy, something to be proud of, better health, better mood, satisfaction of taking care of business, increased confidence, improved memory, desire to socialise etc…

I've faced partially flaccid penis when having intercourse with partners multiple times. Although those were localised events. The fact that I knew that those occurrences weren't because of performance anxiety made me anxious afterwards. I never pinned them down to the conditioning I'd give to my brain for all those years, watching porn endlessly to finding a perfect scene to finish to, skipping scenes of foreplay to directly people having orchestrated, highly unreal orgasm, men demeaning women in most of the videos.

I'm done with all of it. I'm so motivated by reading the research that my logical brain, which would often lose to the rewired reward system giving in to porn has been resurfacing and saying 'no' every time the reward system would ask to be shown porn to masturbate to. It's been four days. But I've already been feeling better. I look forward to post here often and engaging with fellow rebooters to keep collective commitment and hopes high.