El_Mero_Mero
All Star
Read this. This why i do it, don't know about everybody else.
Dopamine is the chemical your body historically created to regulate your instinctual behaviour. Your brain is essentially doing the following:
Food? Good, that keeps me alive, here, have some dopamine so you'll enjoy food!
Sex? Great, that spreads my genes and ensures my survival in the species, have some dopamine!I could give more examples but I'm sure you understand how dopamine was essential from an evolutionary point of view. Problem with evolution is that it's rather slow and the world evolves quicker than our bodies does. So fast forward to 2012 and here you are, sitting at your PC watching porn and masturbating - both of which triggers dopamine creation in your brain. When it comes to dopamine creation your brain can't tell the difference between a real woman and a digital women, nor does it know the difference between masturbating and real sex. Add on top of that how easy it is to find porn and how common masturbation has become and you get a ton of dopamine shot into your system every day. Your brain gets used to this and feels good when it has dopamine, so naturally it will regulate your instinctual behaviour to generate more. Well it just so happens that in the current world your brain has been trained to get the easiest dopamine from porn and masturbation, so that's what you end up doing.Therefore, stopping porn and stopping masturbation are both essential to recovery from your dopamine addiction. You can stop one and not the other and it'll still help, but they are so intrinsically linked that it doesn't make much sense, if you do one you will do the other, without fail.The goal of nofap is two fold.Overcome the excessive dopamine addiction in general.Rewire your brain to want dopamine from real human contact and real (sexual) relationships instead of digital ones.And here's the real kicker - this is not all limited to porn and masturbation. The 2nd goal of nofap is solved by not watching porn and not masturbating, the first one may as well be, but there are other things that trigger dopamine and instant gratification type of entertainment is one of them. Every time you browse play a game instead of doing your homework, writing that paper, going to the gym or learning that new language. That's you triggering dopamine along brain paths that aren't beneficial to your life. You're wiring your brain to prefer coli over the gym. To prefer playing WoW instead of talking to your friend in real life. To prefer x over y. Think about how you normally spend your day and consider if maybe in addition to no porn and no masturbation, maybe you should flip that y and x so that you prefer gym over coli.
I'm watching a show right now, but Ima actually read this and give you my thoughts on it by tomorrow.