Progress thus far

Hi all,

As my profile indicates at this point I've been completely off porn for 23 days now. It,s short, but I already perceive some improvement. That's when I first came into contact with a few articles linking sexual dysfunction to porn.

The problems I'd been experiencing are the following:
- severly decreasing ability to get turned on and maintain an erection by "normal" sex acts / increasing dependency on fantasizing about hardcore and extreme porn scenes.
- loss of sexual pleasure sensation (many years ago)
- a few instances in a row (a first) of being unable to stay hard with an attractive girl, I believe because her overall vibe did not match at all what I had come to expect from porn.

On a side note, I reflected on the fact that my perception of sex and what turned me on about it had slowly but surely changed over the years: while what used to turn me one was the idea of pleasuring a woman, now what actually turned me on were scenes of women being degraded. This tends to create an even greater disconnect once I get with a real woman because, well... I'm not about to replicate whatever sick stuff I've seen in porn, so my actual sex life doesn't resemble what turns me on.

Anyway, the point is, it's been 23 days without porn now, and in fact, you could add almost 2 weeks to that, since in the 2 weeks prior to starting no porn, I had been on a trip outside the country and without access to porn. It was fortuitous, but by the end of the 2 weeks I was already starting to notice changes, even though I wasn't really looking for them. I however used porn once I came back and just before finding documentation that made it seem plausible that at least part of my issues were caused by porn.

I haven't stopped masturbation, but I have been diligent about using much lighter stimulation. Also, I force myself to do it while thinking about girls I know and had sex with. No porn surrogate.

At this point I think it's safe to say that I do observe changes.
- erections are way better: bigger, harder, and happen more spontaneously.
- I have no issue fapping without any porn already, while that had become nearly impossible for me before, and that even with a lighter touch.
- I get more and more turned on at the idea of normal, casual sex.
- I get increasingly frequent glimpses of sexual pleasure, too.

I am very encouraged by the changes I'm seeing within just a few weeks. While I thought that porn wasn't really an addiction for me, mostly just a habit with consequences I was ignorant about, I do find myself sometimes craving it a bit. But the urges are pretty easy to control. When I do get them, mostly at bed time, I resort to fapping, but with the discipline described above. After that I forget about it.