The Psychological Benefits of Nofap
If you are reading this article, you already know what nofap is and what are its benefits.
But do you know the psychological benefits of nofap? After learning and understanding these benefits, you may look at nofap with a whole new perspective.
But, there are few among us who are very new to this topic, let us first define what Nofap is:
What is Nofap?
In simple nofap is just the name of a website.
The meaning behind it is that you remain absent from masturbation, watching porn, and orgasm, which is known as PMO.
The people who are in nofap have reported various life-changing benefits from it.
Now, there will be some naysayers who will read half of this article and protest that these benefits are BS and there is no scientific proof.
But, science hasn’t discovered everything yet.
Sometimes, you have to experience on your own, rather than depending on external materials.
There are over 2.2 million visitors on the nofap website and 651k active members in the subreddit.
Don’t believe me, see the chart below:
If you think these millions of people are lying, then there is something wrong with you.
Anyways, this article is not to justify the benefits of nofap.
This article is simply focused to tell you the real psychological benefits of nofap.
Psychological benefits of nofap:
Self-worth
The sense of accomplishment gives great joy to human beings, whether you finish reading a short story or achieving your biggest dreams.
A personal goal that is more challenging to achieve gives more joy than anything else.
Doing nofap is as hard as crossing the Atlantic on a canoe.
Depending on your past behaviour over fapping, your nofap difficulty varies.
If you are addicted to pornography for more than a decade, welcome to hell.
Your self worth will grow during nofap because you are doing something difficult that you purposefully wanted and you are succeeding in it.
You are doing nofap with your conscious mind.
You have the right to be happy; you are not worthless and miserable as you thought; you deserve happiness because you have the capability to change.
You are worthy of this life. This is self-worth.
Why does your self worth increase because of nofap?
To understand why your self-worth increases because of nofap, you need to understand neuroplasticity first and the work of happy chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin in your brain.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize our brain structure by forming new neural connections and strengthening the existing ones.
It is the way our brain gets wired on the things we repeatedly do.
The more neural pathways forms and stronger it gets for that particular activity, the more automatic our behaviour will be towards that activity.
In other words, we will form a habit.
Whenever you repeat the same behaviour over and over again, the subconscious brain assumes that it is important and creates a temptation to perform it again in the future.
On the other hand, the neurotransmitters or the brain molecules run through these pathways.
Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that balance signals between neurons.
The neurotransmitters are responsible for psychological functions such as joy, sadness, fear, pleasure, and much more.
The happy chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, endorphin, and oxytocin release in our brain whenever we perform activities that make us happy.
Depending on the activities, the quantity of chemical release may vary.
The activities which are linked closer to human survival, such as love, sex, food, reproduction, releases more chemicals in the brain than any other activities.
Sure, playing video games makes us happy but being accepted by your crush will give you greater happiness than anything else.
In ancient times, our ancestors had to protect themselves from all the wild animals.
Their lives were always at risk.
When a sabertooth appeared in front of them, they just couldn’t sit lazily and say, they would deal with the sabertooth later.
Two hormones, adrenaline, and cortisol start producing in large quantities in our body which says; red alert, whenever there is a threat to our survival.
Now, of course, in this modern world, there is no sabertooth, but there are other dangers.
The unknown door knocks at your house at 3 am.
The monthly rent you have to pay.
Our brain pays attention to those activities where a large quantity of molecules releases into our body.
Sex releases a larger quantity of brain chemicals because it is related to human survival, your future generation.
Masturbation by watching porn releases even larger quantities as it depends on other factors like fantasy and novelty.
Here is the fun fact; your subconscious brain doesn’t care if the activity is good or bad from where you are getting this big dosage of chemical hits.
It only cares from where it is getting and marks it as important, top on the list, thinking your survival depends on it.
The good or bad can only be distinguished by your conscious mind, the front lobe of your brain.
But, other activities like watching movies, reading a good book, cooking, etc releases chemicals in our brain.
But, these chemical hits are small compared to pornogrpahy.
These small hits of chemical releases are not enough, because you have a habit of big chemical hits.
Moreover, the brain prefers novelty.
The release of chemicals reduces with the same old information.
Therefore, the more new information you have, the more excited and happy you will become.
This is why you go again and again to watch even nastier porn than before to have the same level of chemical hit or even higher.
This is the only way you feel something good about yourself, and that is also for a few minutes.
The good news is when you stop fapping, your subconscious brain cries for the hit again because according to it, your survival depends on it.
Why are you not getting those hits, what is wrong? It cries, begs, reasons with you, and creates temptations to watch porn again.
When you don’t watch it for a long time, the neural pathways that have been created because of watching porn starts to shrink, and the temptation for watching porn reduces.
You start finding joy in small activities, like making tea or drinking water, a small hit of chemicals is better than nothing.
I hope you understand how hard nofap is.
So, if we come back to our earlier question, why our self worth increases because of nofap, the answer is:
You become more productive:
You become more productive because now your work gives you enjoyment.
The motivation hormone dopamine releases in your brain, which makes you feel more like working.
As your productivity increases, you work hard, and your self-concept about yourself changes.
This working hard creates self-respect, you value yourself, you start trusting your brain, and because of that your self-worth increases.
You become conscious about yourself:
People who did nofap will tell you the increase of consciousness in themselves.
They no longer escape from reality.
They no longer hide from the problems of their lives under the mask of porn but face it as an open challenge.
The mask of porn doesn’t solve their problems; it just gives temporary relief from the painful reality.
On the contrary, the problem becomes worse with time.
When you start facing problems, you start respecting more about yourself.
Better relationship:
One of the primary reasons for nofap is their degrading relationship with their spouse or girlfriend.
These porn watchers are not satisfied with the real woman, they live in fantasy, and the happy chemicals that release from their fantasies are way higher than sex or intimate relationship.
They don’t know what is wrong with them.
They talk about their erectile dysfunction.
They want to be intimate with their partners, they want to make love to their partners, but they fail to do it.
They question themselves about their love for their partners.
On the other hand, their partner gets unhappy, thinking they are not attractive anymore.
This creates mechanical relationships and leads to chaos.
When you stop watching porn, your intimacy for your love returns.
You give both physical and psychological satisfaction to your partner.
This creates a healthy and lasting relationship.
This creates self-respect.
Self Efficacy
When you use your conscious mind regularly, your willpower increases.
It is confirmed that willpower is a muscle, and the more you use it, the stronger it becomes.
Nofap takes a lot of conscious effort as we talk above the difficulty of nofap above.
It requires higher utilization of your willpower, and this eventually strengthens your willpower muscle.
You face challenges in nofap, you make conscious decisions every day, and this strengthens your willpower.
You are doing nofap because you want to improve yourself.
This leads to other aspects of self-improvement, meditation, exercise, productivity-this is called the ripple effect, and this eventually strengthens your willpower even more.
When you struggle every day and when you put conscious effort every day and improve at least 1%, your self-concept about yourself changes over time.
You start believing the core dreams you have are possible now, the task which seems impossible before looks promising now.
Beliefs begin to pop up in your brain that you can do it.
No matter how hard it seems, you can do it because you have already done something which seemed impossible before.
This is self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy means your core belief in your subconscious mind that you have the ability to complete a task no matter how tough it seems.
Self Esteem
Self-worth and self-efficacy are the two key components of self-esteem.
When these two key components are strong, you have high self-esteem.
Things are going bad, but you know you have the ability to face it, to change it.
You are trying to finish your novel, but it seems various life problems occur that keep delaying your publishing.
This doesn’t deviate you from your goal of publishing your novel.
You know you are going to do it.
What others think of you? Are you really good at what you do? Do they hate you?
What if someone criticizes your work and laughs at you?
Your crush rejects you. Does that mean you are not good enough for her?
Is there something wrong with you? Why are you always unlucky?
These are the questions of low esteem people.
You respect what people think of you, good or bad, but that doesn’t affect you.
You take feedback for your work from people and try to improve it, but don’t feel bad that people don’t like it.
If your crush rejects you, that doesn’t mean you are not good enough for her; it only means you are not her choice.
Everyone has different choices, and you cannot force someone.
One important point to remember is that self-esteem and ego are different.
If you say, what do these idiot people know about writing, after they critique your work then, it is ego.
Self-esteem is not about boasting; it is about accepting reality and working on it for the better.
Nofap helps in building your self-esteem.
But, don’t expect to see a rise in your self-esteem only after a month or two in nofap.
Self-esteem is a big topic which we will discuss in other articles.
Conclusion
I know a lot of you will not agree with what I have written above.
I am not arguing, but if you have good self-esteem, you will seek the truth.
You will try to find nofap on your own. You will not rely on your pre-concept of your subconscious mind and give it a try for at least 30 days.
I mean, what are you going to lose?
Best
Ahbab.
Books recommended for Nofap
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