Get educated, get tools, and learn to love withdrawals

Hi Johnf, thanks for posting. I wish I had an easy out here, I wish I had a cure, or a certain way out of porn addiction. I do not. Understand what withdrawals are. They are physical, mental, and emotional pain created when unnaturally high dopamine levels--caused by porn abuse--cease or are seriously lessened. I am sure I lack sufficient education to explain withdrawals in a way more sophisticated than that, I just know for most of us quitting, those of us addicted, they happen and they hurt.

I am a bit tongue in cheek when I say "learn to love withdrawals." By that I mean accept the inevitable. You cannot fight them, they will happen, and the withdrawals must happen to get clean. It is a stage for most of us we must pass through to get back to normal, normal being normal dopamine levels, not hyper dopamine levels brought about by hypersexualization, aka porn.

I think if anyone can get 30 days clean they will find that going on becomes significantly easier, but you must expect to suffer before you get there. What I am trying to tell you is that you need to plan on hurting for the next 30 days, expect it, want it. I think you know this. Don't start this hoping the pain will go away and asking how long it will go on for, how long it will last. For me, quitting meant I essentially had to tell myself that if this was the pain I had to live with to quit porn, I was willing to feel it every single day of my life, for the rest of my life, if feeling it meant giving up porn. It will go away, but when quitting you have to do something that is counter-intuitive: you have to want the pain of withdrawals more than the dopamine high porn gave you. I said "want it more" not "like it more," because I promise you it will hurt. All of us got here by abusing our brain's reward center for years; none of us should expect to get clean overnight or without suffering a bit on the way to clean. But clean can be done. In two days I will be 8 months clean. Some days it still hurts, but not many and not as much.

I hope this helps. Thanks again for posting. Reading posts and replying are a tool I use to stay clean.

Good luck on your journey.

PS: People debate the "real sex during reboot" question here, but so long as you are thinking of the person you are with when having real sex, not porn, then I think it is fine, even helpful. I had to learn the hard way that I could not imagine porn while having sex--that is just a porn substitute. You are trying to rewire back to rewarding real sex with a normal dopamine release, so that is a pathway you wish to enforce, and ultimately, the only pathway you wish to use.

Peace.

 

Hi Johnf, when quitting the brain will trigger on other things than the hardcore stuff we end up at. Before addicted, vanilla porn did not trigger me. When quitting I joke that a toaster would trigger me. Edging and YouTube are porn substitutes, just a way to release dopamine other than porn. I am sorry there really is no middle ground here, but in the quitting phase, YouTube, Craigslist, bikini models, etc., are just porn substitutes, and are just a way of getting a dopamine release. Do yourself a favor and quit them. Until you do you are still on the porn roller coaster. It's a great ride for a while, but you need to go hands free for a while, if you will forgive the pun.

 

" It is a crazy addiction to break , it is my life style that I need to change to stop that dopamine release."

Yes, exactly. For a while, for about 30 days, you need to change that life style. You need to bring your brain back to balanced, your dopamine levels back to pre porn levels. This won't give you superpowers, but it will make you...normal. Normal is cool, it is not high, but it is moving from moment to moment not having to fix, not needing porn. From there you can go forward to define who you want to be. From there, porn will not define who you are. From there you will no longer be a man seeking porn you will be a man seeking...(fill in the blank).

I hope you get clean.

 

Hi johnf, yes, I think in the first 30 days you should try and avoid any hypersexualized thoughts or images. I know, sucks, we love women, but the reality is for an addict coming down, they are just a means to get a dopamine fix. Ultimately, rewiring to real women (not porn)is the goal, but in the reboot stage, my opinion, try and think like a monk for about 30 days, meaning avoid indulging sexual thoughts. Once you get your dopamine levels down for a while, it will become easier and a lot of guys report 90 days porn free, and they reach a tipping point where it becomes much easier to exist without even being temped to experience porn.

Good luck on your journey.

 

It's not that looking at women is bad, it is that for the porn addict, we don't just look at women we look at them, we allow it to go to a dopamine release. That spout has to be turned off for a while.

Give it a rest, mate. Think of anything other than sex for about a month. Yeah, I know, most boring month in the history of humanity, but if you want to get clean of this thing, you have to come down, not stay up. It took you years to get here, you can be free in a few months. Not such a bad trade.

Peace.

 

Sera, don't go back. I am here to tell you you can beat this. What will happen, if you can keep going, and I know you can, is that you will reach a tipping point. That is the place where you become indifferent to porn, where you want NOT to watch it more than you want to watch it. Eventually those reward pathways simply will not reward porn anymore. Even if you see it, it will not interest you, it won't be fascinating to you. It takes us a long time to get hooked, it will not take as long to get clean, I promise you, but it will take a few months, and during that time you will be challenged. I think the exercise is great, and though I don't do meditation myself, I think the breathing exercises are fantastic too. Quitting porn is like a distance race, you have to simultaneously push yourself while pacing yourself; it is a difficult balance, but I have absolute confidence you can do it. I see a lot of people here who cannot make it two days, let alone ten. If you have made ten then you are person who, though it is difficult, can make twenty, and when you make thirty I promise you, it will get easier.

Keep going. Porn is not an option.

Thank you for posting. Reading posts and replying are part of my recovery. I am 8 months clean. In four months I will be clean one year. In forty years, I will be forty years clean. I am never going back, NEVER.

Peace.

 

Thanks for all the positive posts.

Today was an easy day. I did not even want to look at porn. It just simply never occurred to me.

I want everyone reading this to know that I...want you to be clean, I want you to overcome, I want you to take off those shackles to porn and I want you to walk this world free, like me, like others, like many others. Many here have become clean. Many here have stepped off the roller coaster. Take time to study your problem, don't grope about in the dark, turn on the light. There are many here who have gone free. Find them. Ask them how. You are not the first to become addicted to porn, you won't be the last. This is the biggest growing class in the history of humanity. We need teachers. I am asking you all to teach.

How do we help ourselves? We help ourselves by helping others. That is how you help yourself. My advice: Help yourself.

Good luck on your your journey. 8 months clean here. I am NEVER going back. Never. You will never see me post about a relapse. Ever. That is a personal commitment. Sooner or later you will or you won't make the same commitment.

Peace.

Will I Am.

Shout out: aron, jilted. You helped me get clean, you helped me stay clean. That's the way it is.

 

Hi Mark, thank you. This thread is only kept relevant because people read it and respond to it. On a personal note, thank you for writing. Reading and replying to posts are part of my recovery, my way of keeping clean, so thank you for helping me.

You are absolutely right that when thinking about sexuality, feeling sexual, we feel more alive. There is a reason--really only one reason--why we become addicted to porn, and that is because we love the feeling it gives us, and that feeling is a dopamine high. It is not a false feeling, it is a real feeling, but it is a real feeling brought about by artificially heightening our dopamine levels though hypersexualized thoughts, via porn. None of us, when we first start the process of becoming addicted, understands why we love it, because all of us begin this process in ignorance, but the reason we become addicted is dopamine, the best drug in the world. In school they teach us drugs are bad, but they never teach us that porn is a button we push to get a dopamine high. A dopamine fix feels good, it literally makes us feel more enlivened. In a sense dopamine is a survival chemical, the more of it we have the more we feel alive, the less of it we have the more we feel...not alive. Obviously, feeling "not alive" sucks. That is the feeling of repression you mention. Gary Wilson asks, rhetorically, "why would any porn loving guy give it up?" It is a great question. Why give something up that makes us feel so good? It begs the question: "How does feeling good feel, and why would we ever give it up?" Different persons--not only men, but women also, suffer this--have different answers. For many the answer is practical--porn abuse makes having satisfying sex difficult. Translation, erectile dysfunction. The second answer is because porn abuse has taken them to porn so far from their actual sexual tastes, preferences, or orientation, they become seriously concerned they are not who they believe themselves to be. Translation, they start with vanilla porn and end up at BDSM or transgender stuff, and this disturbs them enough to say "I want to quit." Lastly, and this fits us all, is the addiction model; we simply do not want to be a slave to the compulsion any more and certainly not for the rest of our lives.

I am 8 months clean myself. I don't want to be high anymore. I am looking out a window as I write this. The sun is up. I notice the beauty of is shining on trees. I am calm, I am contented, I am happy. I am not high, I am just happy. I do not feel the need, the compulsion, to look at porn today. I can still notice the beauty of a beautiful woman, but I don't take it to a sexual place. In fact, I have a very beautiful woman in my life and my sex life with her is all I need to feel good about that aspect of my life. Instead of watching porn, I am going out in the world and experiencing it. I am going to run at least 5000 meters today. I am going to engage in reality. Reality is not always easy and in fact it is often difficult, even painful, but it is real, and when I see beauty in reality--and it is everywhere--then the beauty I am seeing is real. The pain I will feel at the end of that 5K is also real. I choose reality.

I invite everyone who reads this to turn off your computer and step out into the world, find something, anything, other than porn that interests you, makes you feel more alive, even just challenged, and do it. Break the chains.

Mark, thanks again.

Peace.