Azzza Introduction

Hi

I am a 44 year old single male, and have been a heavy internet porn user for about 18 years, so I'm under no illusions that this is going to be easy.

I have noticed over the years that there have been times of heavier porn use and lighter use. The lighter times have definitely come when I have been away on holiday or when I have something that I have found mentally stimulating that has taken up my attention.

The internet porn use at the heaviest of times has led to me being late for work/appointments/social meetings and has also led to feelings of depression and social anxiety, which I believe have been indirectly responsible for the loss of at least one job in the past.

The worst period was the past two years, after the loss of my father in the summer of 2015 and the start of a new teaching job abroad from September 2015 through to June 2016. The location where I was teaching was quite isolated with poor public transportation and so a great deal of time was spent by myself at the house where I was living. This led to a period of intense brooding over my father as well as boredom, which inevitably led to an increased amount of internet porn use.

I have not been in any relationship for about ten years and have totally lost confidence in this area. In fact, recently I had been seriously looking up escorts on the internet, but had even been too worried to go through with setting up any meetings due to the likelihood of me suffering from performance anxiety.

Ironically it was whilst looking at an escort website that I noticed a TED talk on this situation, which in turn has led me to trying here in an attempt to reboot. Ironically the post that led me to the TED talk had been set up by one of the actual escorts,

Azzza

 

I'm not yet fully sure what strategy to take. I'm just reading my through the Getting Started PDF.

I think that it's mainly going to be about keeping busy, but not to the extent that I feel overwhelmed as I feel that will do more harm than good.

At the moment I am working part time in the afternoons and a local gym near to me has a very good joining offer that expires at the end of the month. I'm determined to take that up again as it's within my price budget and it would eat up some spare time in the morning, three times per week.

 

Hi DJ

Thanks for the pointers, that's a great list of strategies and I'm definitely taking some of them up, for example, the porn stash on my laptop has been deleted.

I'm going to try the 90 day Hard Reboot. I'm counting yesterday 26th February 2017 as my first day as I made it through the complete 24 hours. I'm not in a relationship currently and so there's no reason for me not to go for the hard reboot.

I'm also going to set up a journal like it says in your strategies list and that gym membership was paid for tonight, with Wednesday 1st March 2017 being my first session.