Discipline and virtue for your success

Greetings retainers!

I have noticed that his section of the forum could use some more attention to discipline and virtue (ironically, isn’t that what retaining is supposed to produce?). I see too many people posting here in a crude and arrogant way, and honestly although even as someone who has been doing and experimenting with retention for at least 3 years - thus understanding where your fire comes from and your strong desire to share your views - I still find content in this section very off-putting due to the presentation and it makes me sad to see a practice that makes me more loving cause such suffering. Also, I imagine someone who has no experience of the benefits of retention reading these crude kinds of posts here: They will likely think we are severely lacking in intellect (or worse) and will be hindered from experimenting with retention themselves as they cannot take us seriously. I would want retention to have the respect it truly deserves.


The purpose of this post is to try to help retainers improve in virtue further, whatever their core beliefs (secular/spiritual/religious), and to hopefully increase the proportion of quality content in this section. I will give some of my secular opinions on discipline and virtues in the context of handling retention, but I do not see why spiritual/religious individuals could not benefit from them.

But first, my views on retention itself, as I haven’t posted them here before, and for the reader to understand where my views on discipline and virtue regarding retention come from. NOTE: I do recognize that it is possible that this is just how my body reacts to retention, and I cannot for sure say that retention needs to be practiced the same way by everyone.

On semen retention:

I believe that the negative effects of orgasm evolved through natural selection as essentially a big and complicated shake to our otherwise relatively stable nervous system to stop being satisfied to our pair-bonded partner and move on to the next partner (eventually) to propagate our genes more efficiently. This is essentially the theory as presented in Marnia Robinson’s book “Cupid’s poisoned arrow”. The symptoms seem to differ among individuals in severity and in kind, and some symptoms are very subtle, such as altered perception and moods. I believe this is why there is so much controversy and variety in beliefs regarding this issue.

Personally, I get a predictable pattern of mood swings that switch abruptly about every 24 hours for 3 weeks after orgasm. My outlook on life, how attractive/pleasant I view women (including my partner when I have one), my motivation levels, my discipline, and more change along with these mood swings. This mood switching always stops after 3 weeks and I become stable regarding this issue.

During the 3 weeks and especially after, a feeling of being able to and interest in doing stuff builds up. I think it has something to do with increased dopamine signaling. If I further increase this dopamine signaling through sensory deprivation and stress-inducing methods (like meditation, abstinence from entertainment, fasting, cold showers), I start getting psychotic symptoms. The nature of these symptoms depends on my environment (particularly my stress levels in that environment). For example, when I lived alone and was on a long streak and doing these practices, I would get significant delusions of grandeur and paranoia (it was extremely distressing and unpleasant). When I live with other people, feel secure, am at peace, am on a long streak and do these practices, I can get major blissful feelings, effectiveness in the world and great trust in myself and my future. This state feels beyond amazing to me and I feel it surpasses any other pleasure in life, but it makes me careless and more disorganized if I do nothing else but retain. It requires proper management to sustain the bliss while keeping myself effective, and to prevent trouble. That is where discipline and virtues come in.


Discipline

As I said, the more or less psychotic symptoms make me more careless and disorganized even at my best. I need to focus my mind on correct actions, question my thoughts to weed out delusions, make actions more intentional and resist impulses. By doing these, I can keep the blissful and effective state up longer. I find that engaging in things that build my discipline, like cold showers, daily routines, exercise, contemplation, meditation, help me in my virtues and my virtues help me in supporting discipline, thus keeping me in the blissful state longer. But discipline (willpower) is not enough when in the higher state. I have written below how virtues assist in keeping the high state.

Virtues

Chastity: Helps me in avoiding the biological response of orgasm. Also helps me avoid lust-related strong distractions that diminish my mental strength, time and focus which end up keeping me away from the other virtues.

Temperance: To control that I do not do too much asceticism or too little. Too much asceticism sacrifices from my true needs and the bliss state becomes unsustainable (though sometimes enhanced for a period of time) and I become ineffective in the world. Too little asceticism and I lose the bliss state.

Charity: Keeps my social needs fulfilled, gives a sense of security and peace. Prevents stress-induced psychotic symptoms like paranoia and delusions of persecution.

Diligence: Keeps my need for being useful fulfilled. Allows me to make a living, leading to security.

Kindness: Same as charity.

Patience: Opposite of wrath. Wrath arouses emotions that make me think without clarity and keeps me from waiting when necessary (some things need to be waited out). Wrath is also a distraction from what is important. Also, wrath is in of itself painful to me.

Humility: A lack of importance of my own perceived superiority. Importance in my sense of superiority arouses wrath when perceiving inferiority and the display of this makes others like me less. Both the wrath itself and the disapproval of others lead to less feelings of social security and peace of mind.

It is also possible to do too much of these virtues as then the others get less attention.

I would like people here to especially contemplate on the last two – patience and humility. Don’t let their corresponding vices take away your happiness in your retaining journey.

I probably left some virtues out of the list and this text is clearly not perfect, but I think my views do not necessarily need to be perfect to help someone out.

Good luck with your journey!

EDIT: Some typos

 

I like very much what you wrote.
It is very positive and heart-warming.
I miss such friendly posts here, too.

 

You're welcome, Saul! I hope you find it useful.

I'm Glad you liked it! I will probably write a few more large posts in this section of the forums to further help and share my experiences with hard mode. I will continue to try to practice what I said in this post when writing them.

 

My words...

 

@PeaceOfMindPlz , I feel what you are telling about mood swings, although the exact pattern looks very different for me. There's a certain point of time where my mood switches rapidly towards an angry or depressive state of mind. I've come to the conclusion that this is not what I'm aiming at. Not sure how to get over this point except for the obvious solution.
I'm aiming at being friendly to and useful for others. Not being a hero, just friendly and helpful. Humility and patience, you named it. I discovered that this is in a complicated balance with being sexually abstinent. But I don't understand the mechanics and how I can stay in this balance for longer than a few weeks. At last the aforementioned mood swings throw me out of the balance (is this good English?).
There are many threads in my mind and I'm just at the beginning of disentangling them.

Hope my thoughts are not too far away from yours...

 

The purpose of my post was not to make others do what I do but to help others on their own path. I think humility and patience are helpful whether one is a selfish hedonist, an altruistic hero or something in between. I am certainly not a hero, just some guy who has spent a tonne of time and effort to investigate retention and felt like I wanted to contribute something back to a community that sparked something truly wonderful for me.

Sorry, but I did not understand what you meant. Could you clarify the quotes below for me?

What are you not aiming at, and what is the solution and for what is the solution for?

What is a complicated balance with being sexually abstinent? And the mechanics of what you do not understand?

I might just be tired and not be able to read in between the lines today.

 

I'm sorry, it is my fault. I wanted to tell everything at once... this happens when I'm too excited. Let me try to clarify what I ment

I'm not aiming at being angry and depressed. I try to be long term abstinent, an in the first weeks this works fine and I feel placid and content. But at a certain time it tipps over and I get into this bad mood. I didn't find a way to get over this except to end up the streak of being abstinent.

Um, the balance I mean is between being content, friendly and helpful on on side and being abstinent on the other side. This goes hand in hand with each other. What it makes complicated are two things. First, the above mentioned tipping point, where I cannot see the cause for. Second, this is not simply a case of cause and effect. Both sides seem to depend upon each other, but I don't understand how. And what other influences may be important.
My aim is to understand that all and thus find out how to stay in that balance.

Hope I could make my thoughts more clearly now ... and not too weird.

 

Ah, now I understand! Thank you for clarifying.

Let me give you more details on what I have learned of the 3 week period after orgasm from my body's perspective. It might help you figure out why you feel bad after the first week.
NOTE: It was very, very hard to figure out the patterns and took me along time to confirm it. What I did was I used a journal where I tracked my moods day by day. In addition to that, I led an ascetic life to make sure that any outside influences would not affect my mood. I also kept my diet super stable and held onto lots of routines and so forth. I mainly did these experiments after rebooting (no change observed when returning to PMO). I did this for maybe 1 year (more or less) and found the following after analysis of my entries and confirmed by further experience:

Week 1:
Mood
The mood pattern for me is always like this (see graph below) for the first week (apologies for the low-quality graph. I made it just now). I have yet to experience a single deviation from this pattern and I have over 50 observed samples of the first week. Sometimes a day may deviate if something external has happened in my life to lift me up or put me down (I didn't count those). NOTE: Day 1 means the day immediately after the day I had an orgasm (or multiple). E.g. I orgasm on Monday 9 PM, go to sleep, Day 1 is Tuesday.



How week 1 feels compared to the others
On the first week I feel more passionate and free from most physical pain. Orgasm seems to act as a major painkiller - numbing any physical pains that I have. I might have tight muscles and I wouldn't even feel it! I also feel kind of drugged-up compared to higher streaks: I become clumsier, I can see with less detail and have less awareness.

Week 2
Mood
I cannot really draw a graph for this one but generally, my mood always goes up and down, switching every 24 hours, but the moods are not so severe in intensity as on week 1. Somewhere between 13-15 I also get a mood boost (don't have enough data to give a certain exact date).
Other effects
After week 1 the painkilling effects of orgasm start to go away: If I have tight muscles, I get irritable (if you are like me, this could be the reason why you get so irritable after week 1). The irritability goes away with self-massage of the problem area, stretching it and/or rest. This period is where healthy habits start to become necessary as I can no longer run from my physical problems with the orgasm's pain-killing effects and must face all of them. A positive side to this increased pain is that I know where I am hurting better, so I can fix the issue.

Week 3
At the third week my moods stabilize even further and become less intense (but same pattern as in week 2). At this point, the pain-killing effects of orgasm start to completely disappear. I am now on week 3. By this point I notice that my energy is a lot higher and am start to get more clarity in vision. Can't really say much else of this week because I don't have enough data to be comfortable sharing with certainty.

Control list

I wrote a list to myself on my phone that I can go through when I am suffering to help me take action to avoid or fix physical or mental pain, and I might as well share it here. It's especially useful on weeks 2 and further (especially when the delusions and disorganization start):

I have a lot more on this list but I don't want to share everything. This list doesn't help me remove all mental pain if I am under a depressive phase from O.

Hope this helps!

 

Oops, sorry! I misread that as ”in the first week”, not ”weeks”. Do you know how many weeks it takes you to reach this tipping point and do you count nocturnal emissions as a reset in your hard mode streak?

 

Thank you for your detailed answer. It helps much. If I understood you right, your mood is on the average slipping down from "good" after an orgasm to "depressed" some time later. It's totally different for me. On the average it goes from "neutral" to "good" and then tipping over to "depressed".

I didn't find any regularity in the time it takes to the tipping point. It is at least 2 weeks, most of the times about 4 weeks, sometimes longer than that. I guess there's something behind that triggers the tipping.

I don't have one, I never had one in my life. But I wouldn't count them as a reset, because I think it is not the release of semen that is relevant but the conscious experience of an orgasm.

 

Yes but it doesn't stay in the depressed state for more than 1 day (except for week 1 as in the graph). The general trend would be more like:
Week 1: Neutral or slightly higher on average, but high highs and low lows.
Week 2: Neutral or slightly lower on average, but low highs and high lows
Week 3: Same as week 2 but slightly higher average
Week 4+: High on average.

I have yet not managed to go without orgasm for more than 58 days (because I was not committed to celibacy before) but I have had many 30+ streaks. Perhaps I do just do not know what happens after a longer period.

I mean I am sure different people have different experiences. Even in the book "Cupid's poisoned arrow" there are very different symptoms in kind and severity according to the anecdotes, so I don't think we should compare each other too much. Though it is very interesting to hear your case!

I have some ideas that may help:

1. Could it still be any physical pains that make you irritable and depressed? For example, yesterday I was really low and irritable from the morning to the evening. I had no motivation to do anything and was irritable. I thought "well heck, might as well go take a walk even though it will suck because I probably have a low day". I went for a walk and noticed how the muscles in my body was tense everywhere. The walk eventually helped with the tension and after that I did my stretching routine (of every muscle group). The irritation and low mood went away and didn't come back later that day. Today I do not feel tense and feel pretty good. This kind of scenario occurs pretty often where I suspect my suffering has to do with the after-effects of orgasm only to find out it was a physical thing.

2. Another thing that may cause me to become low after 2 weeks is that I can totally exhaust myself with the extra manic "energy" I get and forget to rest sufficiently (and take care of my body and other needs). This can affect me on a physical and mental level:
Physical: Lack of rest or food leading to pains that stretching and massaging can't cure. Solution: I eat and rest more.
Mental: I overstimulate myself with intense activities and lose peace of mind and smaller things no longer interest me. I talk a little about this in my NoFap Success Story thread and expand on my theory (on ADHD, but also would apply it to neurotypicals also) in areply to that thread. Here is the link for those: https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?t...of-great-positive-change.351364/#post-3630275
TL;DR for that link: I believe neurotransmitter (particularly dopamine) receptor down-regulation due to over-stimulation causes lower lows and lower highs (closer to depression). Solution: I destimulate myself with meditation/sensory deprivation and avoid stimulating activities until I feel better. This may take a few days of destimulating sessions if I really have overstimulated myself.

3. Were you still addicted to PMO on your long streaks? If so, you may have been experiencing withdrawal or flatline. If not, perhaps you get a sort of withdrawal or flatline from orgasm itself (though I have personally never heard of this).

4. Different psychological reasons. For example, doubts about your decision to abstain ("is this really the right choice?", "am I missing out on something that would make my life overall better than abstaining?"), worry about alienation from your buddies, wrath from your own judgement of others or society for not doing what you are doing. Personally I don't have any doubts anymore or any of those issues, but I used to and back then it made me low sometimes. Btw, not accusing you of anything. I don't know you at all.

Yeah I agree that it has nothing to do with semen. I am a bit skeptical though why an unconscious experience of orgasm would be any different in initiating the post-orgasmic period in the brain. But it doesn't really matter regarding this topic since you don't get them.

 

Aha, I see there is a big point. I followed the link to your journal. It was great to read about your experiences. I think big parts of that count for me, too.

To the possible causes for the tipping mood:

Exhaustion. I've never thought about this, but this could be the main cause. Sounds very plausible. I'll try to avoid this.

I've thought very much about this question last year. The conclusion was that you will never succeed in being abstinent if you fear to miss out something. Touchstone is: imagine other people having lots of sex and masturbation. What are your feelings?

 

I am glad that you took the time to read the thread and that you could relate to it.

Exhaustion is quite sneaky: It can show itself through seemingly unrelated symptoms and especially hides itself under the ”I can and will do a lot” mindset I get from retaining. Sometimes in this mindset I will flatout ignore the exhaustion and keep going. It really takes some training of executive function to manage for me.

Indeed. This was exactly what kept me from commiting to celibacy. As long as I had even the tiniest doubts, I just couldn’t commit to it (even with the knowledge that it was ”divinely” blissful and beautiful before) and would eventually seek out and be open to relationships. I needed to be 100 % sure and had to let life remind me what sex and relationships do to me and my social relationships, and to also call me to celibacy strongly through the little tastes on successful streaks that kept reminding me of what abstinence felt like when I was truly practising it.

 

You chose the word celibacy. What exactly do you mean by this word, in contrast to abstinence? Is there any difference for you at all?
And if I may ask, is being completely abstinent a valid goal for you, do you take measures to achieve this?

 

Sorry, I realize now how this may have been confusing. I usually define celibacy as abstinence from romantic and sexual relationships. In this case though, when I said "celibate" I meant more like completely abstinent and celibate.

Depends on what you mean by completely abstinent. What I personally am aiming for is abstinence from sex, masturbation, nocturnal emissions, voluntary sexual thoughts, voluntary sexual speech (with the intent to arouse or disturb others). Being completely 100% abstinent from sexual thoughts and subtle sexual arousal may not always be possible because I choose to live in a very sexual society and have female friends, but the thoughts and arousal can at least be significantly reduced below a point where they don't bother me. Same goes for sexual dreams, though I believe to have a good method for avoiding orgasm in my sleep if I happen to have a sexual dream. If it happens though after like after 100 days or something, I just have to deal with some issues for 3 weeks and move on and keep abstaining. If I get stuck in a wet dream loop, I'll have to think of something. Of course mistakes may happen here and there but the point for me is to keep trying (just like with PMO) and it will get easier. I consider this very much a valid goal for me. I don't believe sexuality is a need - more like a reactionary want. In my case, from previous experience, the desire for sex diminishes just like the desire for porn diminishes when abstaining from it long enough.

What measures I take to achieve this:
-Commitment to celibacy and sexual abstinence: No outside pressure to have sex due to being in a relationship. The commitment also helps in when presented with an opportunity for sex or romance (which usually leads to sex), the answer is always no and there is no ambiguity. I have other reasons for my celibacy but I'll try to stay on the topic of abstinence.
-Cultivating discipline and virtue, and avoiding vices
-I do my best to not look directly at the female body parts that I find arousing.
-I avoid the company of people who often use sexual language with the intent to arouse or disturb others
-For nocturnal emissions I protect myself by applying a cold water treatment I designed for myself to desensitize my nerve-endings without the use of sexual pleasure. I do this almost every night (except when I'm not sleeping at home) to keep my nerve endings desensitized in the long run. I've been doing this for maybe 1.5 years and it has worked well for me. I have also trained myself to sleep on my side as I notice wet dreams always have occurred for me when sleeping on my back (or stomach but I don't really do that ever).
-I focus more on friendships to avoid loneliness. I am actually moving to a commune with people I know in a week so I won't be living alone.
I guess I do more things but the above are all the main ones I could think of right now.

I have a lot of experience with most of these measures I listed above but the decision to commit to celibacy and the moving to a commune are fairly new, so you might want to take that with a grain of salt.

 

I understand what you mean by celibacy. It's different from what I understand by abstinence because it includes also that parts of sexuality that are happening in the mind.
My kind of abstinence is much less strict.
Would you say you reject (your) sexuality or you embrace it?

 

No problem, man! I do understand that my ideal is very strict. I do not judge people for doing otherwise.

My attitude towards my sexuality is ”I accept it is as it is as a set of biological processes” but I can control it, and by controlling it I gain way more than not controlling it, therefore I choose to control it. Also part of my attitude is that others also benefit from their interactions with me more when I do this vs when I don’t. I’m not sure if I understood and answered your question correctly.

 

Yes, that was exactly what I ment by my question.
To control sexuality does not necessarily mean to remove it completely out if your life. I am very curious... you don't need to answer if you don't want to: Why did you decide to go that far?
I gathered the experience that it is much easier to achieve, but similarly successful with respect to my goals to restrict acting out my sexuality to a certain, defined level.
The job for me now is to fix this level. At the moment I couldn't write this down as clearly as you wrote down your measures.