my story with the addiction..need your help!

Hi to all of you,

I apologize for my English in advance, it's not my native language & I apologize for the looong post.
This is my first one on Nofp, but i've been reading posts and some success stories on this forum for almost 2 weeks, and i think that exchanging experiances with people like me would give me strength to continue my journey with more motivation.

Well first of all, I don't know what's exactly the cause of my pmo addiction. what I know is that this addiction made a lot of negative chances within my life. I used to look at someone's eyes when i find them attractive, i was confident enough to engage in conversations, etc. Now i feel like i'm a totally diffrent person..sad and anxious all the time, when i laugh it's not really from the heart, super self-conscious... also, thanks to it i have now a "dysautonomia" syndrome. I started feeling the symptoms eight months ago: Panic attacks,
Hypertension/Hypotension, tachycardia, severe fatigue, muscle pain, premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction..etc. I've seen tens of doctors, they could not give me a clear explanation about what was happening. My family thinks that i've been sick because i was exhausting myself at work. After reading alot of articles on the internet, i've learnt that masturbating excessively drains neurotransmitters and makes the body in a prolonged fight-or-flight condition. Now the only solution i have is to quit PMO. But it's more difficult than i expected! i bet the majority of you on this forum already know that.
i don't even feel pleasure anymore when i PMO. I don't know why i keep doing it!

I would have never imagined myself as someone addicted to porn and this kind of stuff before. But i do have the will to stop, and i don't care about how many times i relapse. The best record that i've ever achieved is 16 days without PMOing. Lately things got much worse. I'm doing it 3 times a week, and the dysautonomia sympotoms got worse than ever. Now i'm using a calendar, i've started NoFap 18th of April, so i wrote a big 1 at that column in the calendar. then, next day of abstaining i wrote a big 2 etc. Writing those big numbers on my calendar keeped me motivated and helped me achive 9 days of not PMOing, but since then i've been relapsing. I did it today also. I feel miserable. Oh and i use also Porn filters on my computer. I'm using K9 along with Microsoft family filter. It helps also.

Other than that, i like this forum, and people here are helpful. My goal is to achieve 180 days of NoFpping and once i do it , i will share my success story with you guys!

Et voilà! any advice that could help with the addiction is welcome

 

Hi Limeaid, and thanks for your reply Maybe you're right. I should be searching new ways to deal with this addiction. But most importantly, i figured out that I should make radical changes into my life and that's what I'm trying to do now. Lately I've started going out more and meeting new people. Also I've stopped tracking my progress on the calendar. I feel like it reminds me everyday of my addiction and it awakens my urges sometimes! Aside from that, I think the best strategy to overcome PMO addiction is to find something else that makes your mind preoccupied all the time. In fact that's what I did to achieve 16 days. I was having lot's of events going on and I stayed too busy to PMO.

Anyway, what I really want to know now is how long will it take to overcome the addiction phase ? I mean will I be able again to use my laptop without thinking of browsing porn sites ? what's complicating things is that my work requires me to use it all the time :/
Also I read lots of posts here talking about cold showers.. is it really effective to reduce urges/thoughts?

Thank you so much