Too legalistic in my recovery

Think about someone climbing up a hill. Sometimes, they will slip and fall part of the way down the hill. But if their goal is truly to get to the top, why would they make themself start over just from a little slide? Instead, they get back up and keep climbing as soon as they can, so that the top is still in reach.

Imagine if someone didn't meditate one day and said, "Well I guess that's it, I may as well go shoot myself". No! That doesn't make any sense! It's the same thing with relapsing. Something bad happened, there's no reason to make it worse.

Keep that metaphor of the hill in mind when you make a mistake.

 

Need to redefine your definition of relapsing i would say. Instead of "i relapse when I look at anything sexualized.. or eat junk food or forget to meditate every day..." I would say I relapse when I intentionally go to a porn site" and that is it.. Why would you call it relapsing when you eat junk food. its too impossibly strict like you said, we are human and not perfect. don't let your brain rationalize looking at porn. your brain is using all of the things you mentioned.."eating junk food, not meditating etc" as excuses to masturbate and look at porn.

 

Consider this: Legalistic thinking like this has no wisdom in it, it's just strict.

If numbers are going to mean anything, then it's a matter of using it more scientifically. I also look at it as safety nets. Yeah it's good to work on other things like meditating and eating right, but if you fell short of your goal one day and still didn't PMO then you are still good with the streak that this addiction is concerned with isn't it? That's what we're interested in here. And you could have half a dozen healthy living goals, and even if you continually fall short of doing all of them the fact you try I bet will keep you from hitting that bottom line of PMO.

Now if you're a straight up food addict that needs to lose 400 lbs but don't really care about porn, then the food thing should be your bottom line maybe. (though I realize it could be both) But there's also just a question of prioritizing even if you do work on all those things.

 

BTW with reading that's why I started to cut out everything else, even being on this forum and try to push through a book in a few days or maybe a week. Instead of thinking of it like you want to read it everyday for a long time, if you drop other stuff for a little while and just focus on that one thing (which is a good concentration exercise in itself) you can get a good sense of accomplishment but also have a better overall picture of the whole book. When you read only a little bit for a long time you're more likely to forget a lot of it because you go on and do a bunch of other stuff during the day.