I feel bad about watching porn

[Bob Seeker]

I get afraid that I am overstimulating myself, and cheapening sex in my own mind, building unrealistic expectations of women, and distracting myself.

I sometimes have free time to do something more important to me but watch porn and then don't do it. 

These things don't agree well with my values. 

I don't have women in my life and am not in a position to do pickup rn. I'm 23 and hustling for money, living with fam.

I mean it seems so impossible to not watch porn/masturbate that it's not even worth fighting, but this is bugging me.

It also helps me fall asleep if I do it at night, which is sometimes hard, anticipating another long day ahead.

Any advice?

 

Edited June 30, 2021 by Bob Seeker

[Preety_India]

@Bob Seeker

Watch it occasionally but try to restrict yourself as much as possible.

Sometimes use your own imagination and masturbation with a sex toy or your hands.

It's important to control your horniness and erotic instincts and preserve it for your future partner..

Because too much porn caused loss of interest in women and less attraction to the normal female body due to over stimulation and excessive dopamine and the risk of addiction..

Also porn changes your brain chemistry to like porn only by acting on your receptors so you begin to lose interest in real life romance 

In the past whenever I watched porn, I was less likely to ask sex from my ex boyfriend and the sex didn't feel good in terms of stimulation.

 

Porn kinda inhibits the real sex instinct and makes sex look boring 

So I don't watch porn anymore. And because of that I have started getting interested in men again.

Control the porn habit and keep it minimum 

Don't try to achieve maximum pleasure through it so some part of you is always craving for experience with a real woman .

 

[Preety_India]

@Bob Seeker also sex is sacred so don't ruin the experience for yourself by over indulging in porn.

Then sex becomes a commodity Rather than a bond 

 

[Nahm]

On 6/30/2021 at 7:29 PM, Bob Seeker said:

I sometimes have free time to do something more important to me but watch porn and then don't do it. 

Something else isn’t more important to you yet. When it is, you’ll naturally change the way you’re thinking, or rather, what thoughts you’re focusing on and why. Might question ‘when did fear & feeling bad become the priority?’. ‘What did I experience which led me to even start thinking this way?’. Much more so ‘what can I let go of, what can I set free, what can I unfetter of?’ 

When how you feel is more important to you than even what you think, do, or say, everything changes in accordance with good feeling, and everything in your life flows of the goodness accordingly. 

Whatever it is / was, it is not your fault. Moving on = healing. 

“The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it”
- Omar Khayyam

[Leo Gura]

The solution is too obvious.

Drop your guilt and enjoy self-love.

[StarStruck]

The problem is ambiguous feelings.

One part of you wants to stop (your super ego) because it sees the downsides.

The other part (your id or animal instincts) want to continue with old patterns.

You need to develop a stronger ego so it can mediate between the super ego and the id. Eventually you want to be come the master of your own life.

The trick is this: you need to make a deal with yourself that works, and I don't have a blue print or magic pill. Everybody is different. If stopping porn full stop is difficult try stopping 1 week and add 1 week to your streak and build the muscle.

Your mind is your mental gym. It is really about consistence. Find a rhythm or new baseline of behavior that you can stomach.  

Edited July 1, 2021 by StarStruck

[tsuki]

9 hours ago, Bob Seeker said:

I sometimes have free time to do something more important to me but watch porn and then don't do it. 

These things don't agree well with my values. 

Your values are not a mental construct that is built on a whim with reasoning. They are ingrained into your being as your schemas and patterns and reinforced via repetition over years. "Values" in this sense is a reverse-engineered description of what you stand for as a person.

If you truly understood that masturbation was wrong for you, you wouldn't do it. It has to serve a purpose in your life, like for example, blowing the steam off after a stressful day, but you can't admit that to yourself for some reason. Do not underestimate your patterns.

Generally speaking, the less you involve moral judgments into self-improvement, the smoother it goes, so stop moralizing at yourself and learn to respect your history.

Edited July 1, 2021 by tsuki

[Matt Skinner]

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

The solution is too obvious.

Drop your guilt and enjoy self-love.

Where do you draw the line between an enjoyable activity being harmless, healthy self-love vs. sneaky, long-term self-harm?

For instance, I enjoy using cannabis quite a bit, and using it makes me feel good, similarly to using porn. But in the long-term, I’ve realized I’m better off keeping cannabis use to a minimum.

I guess it’s just about finding the sweet spot of moderation for each activity? I know you advise against cannabis, and I would agree than frequent porn use is generally healthier than frequent cannabis use.

Perhaps porn and weed are too different from each other for this comparison, idk.

Edited July 1, 2021 by Matt Skinner

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Matt Skinner said:

Where do you draw the line between an enjoyable activity being harmless, healthy self-love vs. sneaky, long-term self-harm?

For instance, I enjoy using cannabis quite a bit, and using it makes me feel good, similarly to using porn. But in the long-term, I’ve realized I’m better off keeping cannabis use to a minimum.

I guess it’s just about finding the sweet spot of moderation for each activity? I know you advise against cannabis, and I would agree than frequent porn use is generally healthier than frequent cannabis use.

Perhaps porn and weed are too different from each other for this comparison, idk.

They are different because your body does not have a natural craving for weed. But it does for sex.

You can ignore weed pretty easily. You cannot ignore sexual craving without massive development of your consciousness.

There is no clear line. Exquisite balance required.

[martins name]

You don't want to masturbate because it drains your life force.

You don't want to deny yourself pleasure which is deep and profound human need.

It is possible to stay true to both these profound desires at once. The answer is to deeply go into orgasmic pleasure trough chakra meditation. Imagine the deepest orgasm you can and then fill your body, and especially lower abdomen, with this feeling. Create anticipation with the in breath and cathartic release on the out breath. 

Do this for however long you like, 20 min minimum recommended.

If you practice this you can become very good at this. You will bring passionate and intimate energy to your life 

I've written a detailed description for how to do this:

https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/60536-technique-transcend-masturbation-by-opening-the-pleasure-chakra/

[Gabith]

I try to stop porn because I think it's bad for the bain and confidence I usually watch porn 1 to 3 times per month
I feel a little bit bad too when I watch porn, I know it's not natural

what are the benefits of stopping porn after 6 or more months ?

[Matt Skinner]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

They are different because your body does not have a natural craving for weed. But it does for sex.

Right

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

You can ignore weed pretty easily. You cannot ignore sexual craving without massive development of your consciousness.

True! And yes balance is key, everyone’s slightly different.

Question though—I’ve had past issues with cumming/arousal during sex with girls I thought were kind of average or even above-average attractiveness. In high school there were times when I would close my eyes and pretend my girlfriend was a super hot pornstar to help my finish because I felt like I couldn’t otherwise. The NoFap movement (Gary Wilson’s book, etc.) led me to believe there was legitimacy behind the idea that porn had significantly desensitized my arousal capacity with real girls. The thing is, I did find that remaining celibate for even a week+ made it a lot easier to cum. It’s just that the nofapping was consistently difficult.

I guess my question is…do you think my issue is likely rooted in something deeper than just desensitization? (Performance anxiety, psychological issues, or even the girl really isn’t attractive enough.) And that ideally a healthy guy can jerk off to porn regularly and not have issues finishing in bed? I suppose the answer is obvious, since plenty of guys do just that. I’ve never understood the stereotype of guys cumming way too fast, that almost seems like a luxury to me.

[Vynce]

Increasing your baseline consciousness will get you off porn long-term instead of forcing yourself to quite for 7 days and relapse afterwards. 

I was in this downwards spiral of "wanting to quite" and "relapsing because of boredom and cravings" for many years, which lead to guilt and self-hate. 

What solved this problem was a massive shift in consciousness mostly through hardcore meditation - 1 hour a days for 5 months. 

I can get horny and still think about porn, but it isn't as appealing to me anymore. If you tasted the sweet flavour of true mental freedom through consciousness work, porn "tastes" like a soggy toast for your mental taste buds. 

Don't try to quite porn. Upgrade your consciousness. Your cravings for porn will dissolve in the process. 

[WaveInTheOcean]

2 minutes ago, Vynce said:

Increasing your baseline consciousness will get you off porn long-term instead of forcing yourself to quite for 7 days and relapse afterwards. 

I was in this downwards spiral of "wanting to quite" and "relapsing because of boredom and cravings" for many years, which lead to guilt and self-hate. 

What solved this problem was a massive shift in consciousness mostly through hardcore meditation - 1 hour a days for 5 months. 

I can get horny and still think about porn, but it isn't as appealing to me anymore. If you tasted the sweet flavour of true mental freedom through consciousness work, porn "tastes" like a soggy toast for your mental taste buds. 

Don't try to quite porn. Upgrade your consciousness. Your cravings for porn will dissolve in the process. 

truth spoken

[Preety_India]

1 hour ago, Vynce said:

Increasing your baseline consciousness will get you off porn long-term instead of forcing yourself to quite for 7 days and relapse afterwards. 

I was in this downwards spiral of "wanting to quite" and "relapsing because of boredom and cravings" for many years, which lead to guilt and self-hate. 

What solved this problem was a massive shift in consciousness mostly through hardcore meditation - 1 hour a days for 5 months. 

I can get horny and still think about porn, but it isn't as appealing to me anymore. If you tasted the sweet flavour of true mental freedom through consciousness work, porn "tastes" like a soggy toast for your mental taste buds. 

Don't try to quite porn. Upgrade your consciousness. Your cravings for porn will dissolve in the process. 

Good advice

 

[TheAlchemist]

Shed the stories from your mind. The stories are the real addiction. The stories about how fapping is bad, how fapping "drains" you and how it makes you somehow a worse person. The next time, after you watch porn and fap, when you feel the most disgusted with yourself, do the most difficult thing. Go in front of the mirror and tell yourself how much you love yourself, and really try to feel into it. If it clicks for you like it did for me , you might just erupt into laughter when you realize how utterly absurd it was to carry all that self-hate just because you jerked off. And then when you keep doing that, the elaborate stories you tell yourself will fade away and it will become a total non-issue. 

[Bob Seeker]

Thanks everyone for the awesome response. A lot of great stuff to consider here.

[martins name]

@TheAlchemist wow this is great advice thank you

[RickyFitts]

Masturbation is a natural thing, after all, we're sexual beings so of course we're going to have these urges. What I would suggest is that if you feel like doing it, do it mindfully, really pay attention to how you're feeling. We can actually learn a lot about ourselves through sexual activity, we can see (for example) where we might be energetically blocked or holding back, or how certain feelings might also arise when we're in that state of arousal.

Edited July 2, 2021 by RickyFitts
confusing punctuation

[Leo Gura]

23 hours ago, Matt Skinner said:

And that ideally a healthy guy can jerk off to porn regularly and not have issues finishing in bed?

I've never had that problem.

The hotter the girl the faster you will cum. Only natural.

Girls cum a lot more with high value guys too. If you develop your value really high, she'll be cumming for you like crazy.