Since the dawn of the internet, online content has been a method of satisfying consumer’s desires in an effort to capture attention and generate revenue.
One of our strongest desires is our desire to procreate; our sexual desire.
And the porn industry has taken full advantage of this.
Not just the porn industry, but even normal social media such as Tik Tok and Instagram can be seen manipulating this desire to keep your attention locked onto the platform.
Our sexual desire is extremely important: it is the reason that our species has survived evolution and is the basis for beautiful relationships.
The problem is that our sexual desire was always meant to be expressed with another human as part of a real interaction.
Not through a screen.
Not while watching other people.
Not with your hand.
When you choose to release your sexual energy unnaturally, it can have detrimental effects on your ability to build loving, healthy relationships in the future, and it’s a guaranteed path to mental health problems.
Porn is especially harmful because it trains you to be stimulated by watching other people have sex, instead of with someone you love.
And yet, it’s incredibly addictive. The dopamine spike after an orgasm creates a positive feedback loop, which is why you seek out porn as a form of pleasure.
That’s why it’s such a widespread issue, and why so many men are suffering.
You have likely heard about the negative effects of porn before, and if you are reading this article, you probably want to stop.
But most people don’t know how to stop.
They expect that, after hearing about the negative consequences of porn and masturbation, they should be able to abstain from it for the rest of their lives.
And for that reason, ‘NoFap streaks’ has exploded in popularity as a metric for tracking your success in abstaining from porn and masturbation.
But trying to stick to a ‘NoFap streak’ is one of the best ways to ensure that you will become demotivated and relapse indefinitely.
Because this culture of ‘NoFap streaks’ also implies that if you break your streak, you lose all your progress.
And that’s absurd.
That’s like telling an obese person that if they cheat on their diet for one day — even if they have been eating clean for 50 — they lose all their progress.
Or like telling a skinny person that if he misses one day of the gym, he will never gain muscle.
It’s counterintuitive and it’s destructive for motivation.
If you want to see long-lasting, permanent progress, the best way to approach NoFap is to choose a time interval (e.g. a week or a month) and focus on reducing the frequency that you masturbate within that time frame.
If you currently masturbate 6x a week, next week try and bring it down to 4, and then the week after that, 2.
Or If you choose a month as your time frame, you could go from doing it 25x a month to just 15x the next month, and then 5 the month after that.
This concept is like ‘progressive overload’ in the gym.
Increasing the difficulty slowly will make it much easier to adapt to the changing circumstances and make it much more likely that you will stick to it long-term.
Even though you are still occasionally masturbating, within a few months, you can go from doing it nearly every day to just 1 or 2 times during that month.
And this will get you 99% of the benefits of completely abstaining.
You don’t need to be on a 120-day streak to feel better and improve your mental health.
