I decided to sum up the past year of nofap and share what I’ve managed to do.
Over the past year I did four challenges in total. They lasted two and a half months, one month, a full three months, then a month’s break, and in about a week I’ll hit three months of the current one. It was a time of intense work on myself, physical as well as mental. And I’m damn pleased with the results. More and more often I manage to find inner peace (which is also down to finding a girlfriend and reading books to get to know myself). I spend less time at the computer, which means I need less sleep. I’ve managed to gain confidence; I forced myself to go out whenever I was invited, which led to finding my other half, and I can see that it was worth making the effort to beat my addictions. If we don’t want to change ourselves, nothing and no one will do it for us. It’s the same with happiness: until we accept ourselves in every respect, it will only be an illusion, and at some point it will come back twice as hard and knock us flat.
My perception of women has changed. I need far less to get aroused when it comes to physical contact; touch alone is enough to get me going. I don’t even feel like watching videos. Looking at pictures alone never did anything for me (maybe at the very start of my fapping); it was always too weak a stimulus for me to feel even slightly aroused. Sometimes one video at a time was too little. After such a long period of giving up everything connected with porn, I’ve managed to reset my brain to the point where I feel aroused just thinking about meeting my girlfriend, and if I happen to get a racier photo from her, it’s hard to control myself, that’s the effect it has on me. One photo of hers does more to me than many a video did a year ago. In general I feel more emotions. Before, there were only two emotional states: stable or bad. Now happiness has been added to them. The only emotions I used to feel strongly were anger, rage and fear; now they’re more like echoes, and I’m no longer so impaired when it comes to feeling emotions, especially the positive ones.
One more thing I wanted to say, about addictions: for me, dropping everything at once didn’t work in the long run. I could quickly go back to one of them, and then I’d use that to justify going back to the rest. Now I’m only quitting smoking; when I’ve dealt with that, I’ll look for the next thing I can change for the better, but not everything at once.
It won’t always be easy, and a firm resolution to improve isn’t everything.
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