Starting off with easy mode as a viable strategy?

It is not willpower which enables one to go NoFap forever, but the self-consciousness of his daily thoughts and actions. That high level of self-consciousness is not built in one day, so it is totally fine if you relapse in hard mode. As long as you keep trying, learning from your mistakes, and don't forget about NoFap every single day, eventually you will find yourself being able to break free one day.

I agree you can break your goal into tiny steps, but I would still suggest sticking to hard mode. There's no need to give yourself much pressure because of relapses, just try to break your own streak record on every attempt. You can even record your progress, e.g. recording the number of times you fapped in each month. In this way, you can still see yourself making progress even though you relapse a lot, e.g. finding yourself fapping less per month.

 

Instead of coming on here and being dismissive towards those with a different view or approach to you, how about you just go your way and report back how it went? For many on here P and M are so intertwined that doing one leads to the other anyway so it's more helpful for them to just not do either. Maybe there are studies that show M isn't harmful but those studies weren't done on long-term porn addicts who have a lifetime of M'ing way beyond what would be considered a "normal" rate, you can't equate the two. If you think just quitting P is the best route for you then you do that, what works for one person doesn't always work for another.

 

I have reservations about taking the gamification metaphor too seriously in general, but even putting that aside what 'mode' you are in says nothing about any kind of strategy.

It seems to me the more difficult the 'mode' the more strategy you need, what this basically amounts to is if there is no strategy it can be more realistic to try to maintain abstinence to less things, P only instead of PMO.

Willpower is not any kind of strategy. Even having a bag of tools is not strategy. That would be like saying you're playing a game and you have some kind of gun to shoot things and that constitutes a strategy. Yes what to take out first might be a part of an overall strategy but for any serious gamer it should be obvious that's rather simplistic. Quitting porn first is a goal, strategy involves a somewhat detailed plan to achieve that goal, the goal itself is not a strategy.

 

If that works for you then go ahead, nofap is a very subjective thing, with only 1 rule(not watching porn). I alredy tried what you are gonna do and it didnt work for me because i would normally ending watching porn again because the fantasy in my head didnt satisfied enough, thats my experience, but maybe you go better than me.

 

Sorry here's something that should be more helpful and practical: Focus on the timing of things to figure out strategy, either short term of long term. A typical one is time of the day when a person is vulnerable, like at night or first thing in the morning. If it's a repetitive pattern then that's something you can work with, so anything like not having your phone in the room, a bit of exercise to tire yourself out or say a custom alarm with a reminder NoFap message of some kind - but I actually recommend getting your sleep hygiene dialed in so you never need an alarm to wake up - but it could go off with the reminder shortly after you wake up. Even longer term patterns can be tracked and you can slowly identify the factors that would tend to make you relapse then think about how to address those, if you don't know at least you'll have identified them, maybe come on the forum and ask for ideas and so forth.