I was part of this community many years ago when i had PIED. It took years of work but eventually things got better the longer I stayed away from porn and i was finally able to have sex again. I’ve had many partners since then but realized I’ve been using porn again and i feel its having a negative impact on my life again. Some days id spend over an hour browsing and i feel it’s contributing to my anxiety and depression symptoms since this has started to become a daily habit. I recently became sober as i was abusing alcohol, im currently 41 days alcohol free. This has led me to examine areas of my life where I feel i need to make improvements and i realized that I’ve been building up old porn habits that i had in my past. Im going to aim for 30 days of no PM(O-only allowed if it happens with a real woman) to start and see if it is benefiting me.
Welcome back! I'm in a somewhat similar situation. I stopped P for a long while which cleared up my PIED and had several other benefits. But after a few years, I decided to watch it "just one time", then that turns into two times and three times etc. Watching P every day reduced my quality of life by, say, 80%. Watching it only sporadically reduced my quality of life by, say, 5%. For me, I still want that 5% improvement. Better sex with women, better focus, etc. Now I'm 37 days off P, and I'm ready to go the rest of my life without P.
Welcome back @Movingforward33! First of all, congrats for your past achievements! I hope you can get inspired from your previous successes and you can learn from your mistakes. How could you beat your addiction back then? What sort of self-care activities did you have (e.g., meditation, cold shower, work-out...)? Did you take any medication? I wish you a lot of strength!
yes I hope to live the rest of my life without it too, just like alcohol. It’s done more harm than good in my life and has been a huge time waster.
back then when I originally went through this, working out was a huge help. I’m going to start a new workout routine soon. And I’ll be picking up some new books to read to keep me occupied on my down time. Today is day 2, I found myself automatically getting urges to watch P throughout the day when I was alone and at one point picked up my phone to search before I reminded myself that I no longer want P in my life. Will keep going.
