Nofap & Career Success | How Nofap Makes You a Productivity Ninja.
How does nofap affect our career success?
Do we become more productive once we are in nofap?
If we do, how does it happen? What is the science behind our productivity?
We will discuss nofap and career success in this article.
If you want to read more about nofap, you can click the below links:
1. Burning Desire
First scenario:
There was once a time when you had high ambition, dreams, or goals.
You just wanted to prove to the world that you are something, and you have got it in you.
Most of all, you enjoyed your work the most.
There was a fire inside you, and no matter what you did, you were always competitive.
Second Scenario:
Perhaps you don’t know what you want to do in your life.
Maybe you were not that competitive since childhood, but that was okay because enjoying the process was everything for you.
Maybe you liked singing, or dancing, or writing but you just enjoyed them while doing it.
You never thought it was a potential career opportunity.
Now, after all these years, you don’t find those old activities as enjoyable as before.
Third scenario:
You have a great job. Your dream job, and you work hard everyday to meet your goals.
But, slowly, this job doesn’t make you feel alive anymore.
For some reason, it doesn’t seem very interesting, and you have to push yourself to complete your tasks.
As a result, there is no excitement, no happiness, and certainly no fulfilment like before.
What happened?
Fourth scenario:
You have a daily job that you hate, but you have other goals in life.
To meet those other goals, this job is important for survival.
So, despite the dislike, you continue your job anyway and find satisfaction once you start working on those other goals in your free time.
But, for some time, you are procrastinating on your other goals.
You don’t do it in your free time anymore and keep delaying every day.
You blame it on your current job, saying that it is ruining your life. It is making you depressed.
But, deep down, you know there is something else.
All these scenarios related to a single topic: Burning Desire.
Why do some people lose interest in doing their work?
Why do some people lose their passion for their life?
Why do some people stop dreaming about their goals?
Why does the fire inside us stop burning, and most of all, how to reignite the fire again within us?
2. Two Types of Motivation
External Motivation:
External motivation comes from external sources. It is as simple as that.
If you are motivated by an external reward like money, fame, or respect that can make you feel good, it is an external motivation.
Again, you always don’t need to feel good to be motivated.
Sometimes, fear and anxiety can also motivate you to pursue your goals.
Deadlines, fear of losing your job, life-threatening situations are also external motivators.
Though these motivators are negative in nature, they can harm you more than your benefit.
Nevertheless, external motivation has a significant limitation.
They are short-term.
Perhaps, you watched a motivational speech, and now you are all motivated and excited to reach your goals.
But after a few days, the motivation will die, and your goals and hope along with the motivation will die off too.
External motivation is not bad. Infect, to jumpstart in anything; external motivation is very effective.
But, what creates lasting change in ourselves is Internal motivation.
Internal Motivation
As the name suggests, internal motivation comes from inside us. There is no need for external factors.
There are no external rewards or threats required to do our work.
We do it on our own; why?
Because doing the work itself is the reward.
People who have intrinsic motivation live a much happier and healthier life.
They love what they do.
They are not goal-oriented but process-oriented.
Of course, goals are important, but goals only give you direction, not the reason for your work.
Have you ever been lost in your work for a few hours, until somebody reminds you to eat your food?
Have you ever gotten lost in a conversation until you realize you were talking for hours?
Have you ever listened to a song that puts a smile on your face?
That is internal motivation.
But, what do all these have to do with Nofap and career success?
3. Intrinsic Motivation and Nofap
A. Spike of Dopamine
The pleasure you feel in expectation of a reward is the spike of your neurotransmitter called dopamine.
You must have noticed the excitement and pleasure before switching on your pc to watch pornography or play video games.
In other cases, the excitement of meeting your crush, the excitement of the weekend for the working people, the excitement of ordering pizza, or the excitement of achieving one’s goal.
It is the expectation of a reward that spikes our dopamine.
It is one single neurotransmitter responsible for our motivation, creativity, pleasure, and addictive behavior.
One more thing to notice is that the neurotransmitters spike for a moment and go down until a new expectation is built up in your brain.
Therefore, to make yourself pleasurable for a long time, you have to keep providing your brain with information for a long time.
This is why pornography viewers can’t stop themselves from clicking one clip after another.
Why would they stop?
They are getting the spike, which is making them feel pleasurable for a long time.
And of course, according to the brain, pleasure is better than pain.
B. Change in Expectation
Again, you must have noticed that your viewing time over pornography keeps getting longer and longer over time.
This is because dopamine doesn’t spike much on the same information.
As the information keeps getting older, the spikes keep going down.
It needs new information to get a higher spike.
Moreover, your brain remembers the initial spike you got before. According to your brain, that was very important for survival.
So, your brain wants that pleasure or reward again. You want to experience that excitement once again.
But your old pornography videos or the ‘usual stuff’ are not that exciting anymore.
Now, you need something strong, something hardcore that can create that excitement once again.
So, now you move on to bondage, illegal, taboo, etc.
Sure, it creates excitement and makes you feel highly pleasurable, but this is also for a short time.
After, few days, you need even harder stuff than these.
Your expectation has changed now.
Once a simple clip of pornography could make you excited and pleasurable, but now that doesn’t even interest you.
If that’s the case, how come regular work or other natural interests you had can compete with your pornography addiction? (we will come back to this later)
C. Neurons that Fire Together Wire Together
Our brain is constantly changing. It is not fixed like a solid machine.
Before the recent discovery in neuroscience, people used to believe that our skills and talents are fixed.
We can never improve them after a certain age, nor can we improve our learning.
This is far from the truth.
It is proven that we become better at what we practice with focus regardless of our age.
Though the learning speed of an adult will be slower than a child, the rate is enough to achieve excellence.
Every time we perform specific tasks, certain neural pathways related to those tasks get activated.
If the pathway neurons get frequently activated within regular intervals, the neural pathway becomes stronger and bigger.
What happens when a neural pathway becomes stronger?
We become better at it.
We form habits or addictions based on the nature of the activity.
The neural pathways can become stronger in two ways:
- By repeating the behavior.
- By emotions/ neurotransmitter.
Through these neural pathways, our neurotransmitters like dopamine travel. The higher the spike of the dopamine, the stronger the pathways will become in less time.
Pornography is perfect for this job.
We watch pornography repeatedly. Moreover, the spike in neurotransmitters is way higher than any natural spikes because the brain relates pornography with reproduction.
Once we are addicted to pornography, the neural pathways are so strong that, if we want to quit watching porn, most of us fail because of the cravings and urges.
The stronger the pathways are, the stronger our addiction or habits become.
This is why the famous quote came to light, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”
D. Pruning
If the neurons that fire together can wire together, then the opposite is also true.
Once you don’t perform a specific task, the neurons and it’s pathway start to shrink and become dormant.
Though it never dies but the cravings, urges, or skills go down.
Perhaps, you have noticed that once you stop playing video games for specific days, your skills in the game decrease.
People who have remained in space for a few months find it difficult to balance their steps once they lend back to earth.
People who are successful in nofap lose cravings for pornography, and now all they question themselves is, “why the heck I was watching those stuff.”
Again, once the neural pathways of pornography become stronger and dominant, the other neural pathways that give natural joy like watching the sunset or talking to people, working on your dream projects start to prune.
The grey matter in our brain starts to reduce.
Why will the brain focus on something that is not important?
Suppose you are repeating a certain activity repeatedly, and you are getting huge spikes of neurotransmitters from that activity.
In that case, that means this activity is very important for survival, according to your subconscious brain.
Of course, your conscious brain knows that watching pornography is not important for survival.
So, your subconscious brain starts to prune other neural pathways, and because of this, other activities become less rewarding over time.
Once you start your nofap journey, the good news is that the stronger pathways related to pornography start to shrink, and your dopamine starts to balance back to normal.
Once your dopamine starts to balance back to normal, you find other natural tasks rewarding again.
This reward is intrinsic motivation.
4. Career Success and Small Practice
If you think of nofap as the magic pill of productivity, then you will be disappointed in the long run because the only nofap is not enough.
You can visualise nofap as fertile land, where you can plant any seed you want, and it will grow rapidly.
But, seeds don’t get planted on their own.
This is where small practice comes into the picture.
What is small practice, and why is it important?
As the name suggests, small practice is practicing small but don’t get fooled by the simple explanation of small practice.
Before proceeding on the meaning of small practice, let’s understand why it is important.
Small practice helps in forming habits because to be successful in our careers, we need to form productive habits rather than lying on our willpower and motivation every day.
Successful people have healthy habits, while unsuccessful people have unproductive habits or addiction.
But, forming productive habits is not easy because it demands effort.
People assume that only those who have strong willpower or motivation can form productive habits.
This is, again, far from the truth.
Anyone can form habits with small practice.
5. Small practice and Intrinsic motivation.
To form a new habit, we need to repeat the same behaviour after regular intervals.
The more we repeat the behaviour, the sooner our habits get formed.
Ofcourse, focus plays an integral part in forming habits. Thus, mindless repetition is as useless as not doing them at all.
But, repeating the same behaviour after a regular interval seems impossible to most of us.
Some start with high motivation and continue to work on their projects for a few days, weeks, or months, but they stop sooner or later.
They join the gym to lose weight and become engrossed with it for a few days or weeks, but they quit eventually.
They buy guitars and practice rigorously, but sooner or later, the guitar goes in the attic.
There are many examples.
Why does this happen?
Because extrinsic motivation never lasts long, as we discussed above.
Once our brain gets familiar with the routine, the dopamine starts to spike less.
Once there is no motivation, our daily practice depends on our willpower.
But, practicing something for 1-2 hours everyday that we are not motivated enough is a big task for our will.
So, rather than accepting that we cannot practice for that long, we make false promises as we will start from tomorrow, or from January first or after the trip from Iceland.
In simple terms, we procrastinate.
But, what if we don’t need to practice for 1-2 hours?
What if we just need to practice for 5 minutes or 10 minutes?
Sure, practicing for 5 minutes is not a big deal. It’s small and easy.
If you keep your everyday goals small, a few amazing things will happen:
- Once you meet your small goals, like reading three pages everyday, intrinsic motivation will kick in. Why?
Because intrinsic motivation comes from action and not from thoughts or any other external push.
The feeling of joy, the slow rush of happiness when you work on your goals, is intrinsic motivation.
- Once you meet your daily goals, this will give you a sense of accomplishment. This sense of accomplishment will push further to do the bonus practice.
There are thousands of times where you don’t feel like going for your daily workout, but once you are there in the gym, you become the crazy maniac who wants to burn all his fat in a single day.
- The bonus practice will help you to form your habits rapidly, but the trap is that you start to increase your daily goals.
If reading three pages every day is your daily goal, and your bonus practice is between 20-30 pages, you should never change your daily goals to 5 or 10 or 15 pages.
Once your daily goals increase, there will be higher chances of skipping.
Once you skip, the process of breaking the habits starts.
It is always the start that is difficult, not the process.
But, if you are a pornography addict, no matter what strategy you use, there will be no intrinsic motivation once you meet your daily goals.
Nofap and career success are related because it boosts your productivity.
But, the benefit of nofap doesn’t end here in forming habits, but also in the other areas.
Books recommendation for nofap and career success:
2. Mini habits by Stephen Guise
3. The talent code by Daniel Coyle
6. Other benefits of nofap in career success
Relationships
As discussed above, nofap improves your emotional state.
You find joy in more minor activities like talking with other people or sitting under the sky.
Nofap improves your relationships as well.
Once your relationships are improved, you can focus more on your work.
Self-Image
Once you start your nofap journey, you begin to develop respect for yourself.
This happens because you are not surrendering to your impulses and taking the necessary steps to improve your life.
You are doing something challenging, and you are doing it with your conscious mind.
This is enough to develop self-respect.
Self-respect helps in forming self-discipline because our brain wants to protect self-respect.
Again, self-discipline helps in forming self-respect.
Thus, the cycle of self-improvement continues until, someday, you succumb to your urges and fail.
Self-respect and self-discipline help in increasing your productivity and leads to career success.
Willpower
Of course, your willpower increases during your nofap journey.
If willpower is a muscle, then exercising your muscle everyday will strengthen it.
Nofap journey is a conscious journey where you have to utilize your will every day.
The stronger willpower you will have, the better your productivity will be.
If you want to know more about small practice and how to quit pornography addiction, you can visit the following links:
Nofap Strategy – How to Quit Pornography Addiction
Form Productive Habits that Stick Permanently | Small Practices
Conclusion
Nofap and career success are interlinked.
No matter how many books you read, no matter how many self-improvement programs you attend, you will eventually fail if there is no intrinsic motivation.
Most of you will not believe what you have just read, but that is up to you to decide.
Again, you can try nofap for 21 days only and see if your productivity or joy increases.
There is no harm in quitting porn for 21 days, at least.
If you see any changes, you can let me know at ahbab@basicideaz.com.
I will wait to hear your side of the story.
Best
Ahbab
