Let’s not start the cult of /r/nofap here. And no, you are not suddenly more charismatic and confident. You are just not reeking of cum all the time, something achievable with regular showers as well.
No fap is retarded, but watching less porn isn’t. You can do pretty much anything you can imagine to excess.
The no fap community is definitely overexxagarating the pros of not masturbating, but in it’s core they are supporting a healthy cause. Never been an r/nofap guys but they definitely helped me a bit to stop my porn addiction.
If it just takes a month to break, it’s not an addiction. It’s a habit.
Really hate the way that the word addiction is watered down by people who just look at porn a lot.
Didn’t take me more than a month to quit smoking, is that just a habit rather than a real addiction in your eyes?
You’re going to have a tough time arguing that compulsive behavior that the individual has difficulty stopping and often performs when they otherwise didn’t intend to isn’t addiction, just because they found a way to stop.
I’d like to agree with you, but I don’t think there are fixed periods where stopping something turns it from being addiction into habit.
Addiction is an inability to stop using a substance or engaging in a behavior even though it may cause psychological or physical harm.
I think porn can come within that definition, just as much as smoking or drinking can be called a habit.
And I’m saying that what’s described in the OP is a habit, not an addiction.
‘Addiction’ is very overused when it comes to porn because people don’t have any concept of what addiction actually is. Half the time the harm doesn’t come from looking at porn, it comes from the purity culture that we’re inundated with in western society. Being abused by puritanical ideology does not make looking at porn an addiction. Neither does having a strong sex drive that makes us want to engage with sexual content.
Porn addiction is real, and watching porn can have more harm than just puritanical bullshit. Most people that I’ve watched looking at porn don’t just find a video a watch it start to finish. They watch multiple videos, fast forwarding to their favorite parts. Delayed gratification is good for you. Also, porn doesn’t accurately depict what sex is like. It can give you fucked up expectations of what sex should be.
If you watch so much porn that you can’t have an orgasm without watching it, if you are only aroused by porn that can’t exist in real life, if you stop having sex with a partner to instead only masturbate to porn, if you find yourself constantly watching porn even at inappropriate times, if the amount of porn you watch decreases your quality of life… That’s addiction.
I think that masturbating is healthy and good for human sexuality, but I think a lot of people could benefit from masturbating differently. Try reading or using your imagination or even just masturbating meditatively, focusing on sensations.
