Thursday, August 21, 2008

False Start / Day 2

I looked at porn at the beginning of this week.

I've decided to take the advice of someone who commented a few weeks ago. He suggested that I taper down off porn.

Thats what I was doing for masturbation for 3 weeks, where I was going without Wednesday through Sunday and then allowing it Monday and Tuesday.

I think I'll do the same thing for pornography.

As of now, I'm trying to do both of these. So I'll avoid masturbation and pornography Wednesday - Sunday.

I feel like I could quit porn if I allowed myself to masturbate whenever I wanted but then I don't really get the benefit of having a heightened sex drive and more desire to pursue my goals.

I'm clean since yesterday

I don't have time just at the moment but later today I'm going to post some stuff on meditation and motivation.



Edit:

When I think about the hardest things I've accomplished in my life it seems that the primary motivating force behind them was always one of 2 things:

1. The Pursuit of Freedom

and

2. Attempting to Prove Something to Myself

To a lesser extent other factors were involved too like the pursuit of reputation or fear or avoidance of something but nothing drives me like these 2 things.

The pursuit of freedom is this craving for opportunity and choice and open spaces and action and... the desire to be involved in whats happening in the world. To feel confined, like the times I've been seriously injured and forced to stay in bed for long periods of time, I would get this feeling that I had to take action and get out into the world or I would just go crazy.

Attemping to prove something to myself is often fueled by this angry/energy-packed desire to break down limiting beliefs about myself or the world. When I used to live next to some hiking trails on a big mountain, I went out everyday, trying to mountain bike up this big hill and I kept trying and failing everyday until I eventually had the strength to make it without pushing my bike. The need to prove to myself that I could do it, drove me to push myself and innovate ideas on how I could do it. Eventually when the day came that I was finally able to make it, it was because I had learned to chant "I can do it, I can do it, I can do it" as I pedaled towards the top and that was all I needed to make it.

Another thing thats helped me is meditation.

Napolean Hill and Deepak Chopra have suggested something similar when it comes to motivating yourself. They both suggest clearing your mind or meditating, and then releasing your desires.

The way it was described is that your mind is like an ocean and your thoughts are the waves... When your mind is running, your ocean is full of big waves and no thought can really be significant relative to all the other things going on. It's like dropping a refrigerator into a stormy ocean, not much happens.

But if you calm your mind and allow the waves to subside into stillness and then drop a thought (your desire) into the ocean, it becomes the sole focus of your entire brain and your subconscious is able to receive the message without interference.

Ideally you want to communicate what you want with your subconscious mind so that you automatically find yourself pursuing your goals. It's like wearing your clothes. You've communicated with your subconscious mind that you want to wear clothes when your in public and you find yourself wearing clothes when your out and about without even thinking about it.

This is really important because whenever you are doing something that you don't want (like looking at porn), its because you have 2 competing forces within you.

One wants to look at porn, the other doesn't. If your looking at porn on a regular basis, the part that wants to look at porn is winning. That part of you wants to look at porn more than the other part of you wants to avoid porn.

So the idea is to increase your desire to avoid porn until its stronger than the part of you that wants to look at it.

The way you do this is to release your desire while your mind is calm like I already described.

Now I want to try something different.

I want to fuse my desire for freedom and my desire to prove something to myself with my desire to quit porn.

The way I'm going to do this is I'm going to come up with a reason for how quitting porn will create more freedom in my life and I'm going to stir up that part of me that wants to prove something to myself by taking note of the fact that I haven't been able to quit yet. More specifically, I'm going to call myself out on this and give myself a deadline.

I haven't looked at porn in 2 days. If I'm not able to go 100 days this attempt, then I'm going to have to admit that I can't quit. Forget tapering off porn. I'm going to have to publicly admit on this blog that I cannot succeed and that I need help. At that point, I must get professional help because I obviously am not capable of beating this.

I'm going to tell my friends about this attempt.

THERE, I challenged myself.

As for tying freedom to quitting porn.... The one thing about porn that ties it to freedom is how much time it consumes. When I masturbate, it doesn't take me that long to finish... When I look at porn though, it literally can last for hours because I'm just unwilling to re-enter the real world and kill my rush.

At my worst, porn consumes a few hours 3-4 times a week. Thats like 8 hours out of my week... With that extra time I could dedicate more of my energy towards meditating, working out, socializing... or pursuing my other goals... On top of that, it often kills my desire to go out and hang with people. I tend to just not care about anything after watching porn.

So what I'm going to do is strengthen this belief through NLP... and then I already feel the effects of challenging myself to make this the attempt that I make it to 100 so I feel I've done enough in terms of tying that need to prove things to myself desire with the desire to quit porn.

Lastly I still have some homework to do...

1. Release my desire to quit porn while meditating.
2. Come up with a reason that porn sucks that will weaken the part of me that wants to look at it.
3. NLP that reason so that it becomes a stronger belief.

I'll leave that for tomorrow.

2 comments:

  1. Hi there

    I just came across your blog and read through the recent posts with interest, and much respect for what you are doing here.

    In your observations about the drives behind a porn habit, and the huge challenge of quitting, you hit many nails right on the head.

    It is really useful to focus on what a bad habit stops you from doing - the goals and aims that it gets in the way of. So often, we focus only on the thing we must stop doing. Then we are in cold-turkey, white-knuckle territory, and that's an amazingly difficult way to quit long term.

    For porn addicts, two profound things that the habit removes are time and self-esteem. We can all list the things that we would achieve if we had more of both of these things. Really facing up to achievement in preference to the comfort zone of porn is a big part of recovery - that's a tough trip!

    It's also clear that you are learning from every attempt, every effort to overcome the habit. Slipping is such a horrible, hopeless feeling, and it's easy for us to lose sight of what we learned and feel completely back at square one.

    Slips and learning is part of the recovery process, and it can be such a long journey. We often get hooked up on the ideal of recovery, hoping for a life-change experience completely free of old urges and lows. Then when we do slip up, we feel even more of a failure.

    So your 100-day plan makes sense to me; you're putting in the goal-orientated groundwork. If it doesn't work out, you'll learn some more and seek a different route... you'll still be on the recovery journey.

    I look forward to following more posts, and do feel free to contribute your thoughts at my blog for quitting porn addiction. Your input would be most welcomed.

    Best,
    Jason

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  2. Hey Jason,

    Thanks for commenting. I like your website. I'm definitely going to be reading the stories when I get some time.

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