Porn makes every other addiction even worse (my story, from traumatic experience to NoFap)

Hello everyone, I never thought I would be part of this group but life took an interesting turn almost 30 days ago when I had a traumatizing experience and gave up porn and all sexualized content.

I had heard of NoFap and dangers of porn for years but didn't took any of it seriously. Not until I had this traumatic experience. Basically my NoFap started when I hit a rock bottom in my life. So I decided to get an escort and it was one of the worst experiences of my life. After that I was so traumatized that I didn't watch or even think about porn/sex for over a week, later I found NoFap and decided to go all in.

What I realized is that porn has nothing to do with what you actually like in real life. My traumatic experience was with my fetish mature/milf. I thought I really liked it because of all the porn, but once I experienced it in real life, it felt good in the beginning because of the high but it just got more sickening towards the end (+ afterwards scared of STD, HIV etc. despite using protection).

So the big realization is that porn is fucked up. It's not real. It's not your real sexual orientation as many already know. I have never even liked ANY mature women in real life but somehow I went deeply into this FANTASY from fetish porn to actual escorts.

Now after almost 30 days of stopping, I have made huge changes in my life.

I used to eat chocolate bars quite frequently and quit them altogether. Now I see it was partly connected to porn and dopamine high. Chocolate and high sugar foods just started to taste way too sweet and I couldn't enjoy them anymore.

I've cut my caffeine intake 2/3 and only drink the morning coffee. Similar to sugar, this was also connected to "chasing the high" and avoiding negative emotions.

I have stopped using Instagram and removed all sexualized content from my life. This also was part of the problem because "I had to get the fix" in this form.

I have cut alcohol altogether.

It appears to be that my porn addiction made all of my other "addictions" WAY worse. And it makes sense now, meth doesn't really make you too unhealthy either. Meth just makes your entire lifestyle worse and worse. Similarly porn created a huge avalanche of other problems (too much caffeine, alcohol, instagram, sweets).

I discovered porn when I was in my early teens (maybe even 11). For around 15 years I was an addict and didn't even know it. I wish they would regulate / ban porn altogether. This is a drug similar to meth. Young kids need to be educated and protected from this stuff.

I know for certain I will never touch porn again. The escort left me a mental scar bad enough. I just want this poison out of my life.

It's still hard and I have experienced severe withdrawal symptoms and continue to. I couldn't believe porn could have such an impact. I didn't really understand anything until I started to get severe withdrawal symptoms like flu, headaches, painful penis, rash on my face, muscle aches and of course every mental symptom.

I feel like I survived the worst part, but urges to masturbate and urges to think sexual thoughts sometimes still appear but so far I have handled them. Now the problem is that I feel like I start to get arrogant and sloppy. I know I won't touch porn again, but I have noticed I just don't care so much anymore.

This forum helped me immensely during my lowest points. Thank you everyone and I hope you get some value from this post.