Relapse in Nofap? Here’s How to Stop Feeling Bad

You were on a streak. Everything was working perfectly. You believed you had permanently beaten porn and masturbation addiction.

But then something unexplainable happened. For some reason, you found yourself looking at porn. You knew it was something you should avoid but you couldn’t help yourself.

It then dawned on you that you had relapsed. At first, your mind couldn’t understand what relapse meant. It felt like you were dreaming.

But then you came to your senses and realized the tragic truth. Your nofap streak was over. The streak you believed would last for the rest of your life had become history.

Instantly, a dark cloud came over you. It sucked all strength from you. It became hard to tell how you were feeling. All you knew was that the feeling was horrible.

Don’t worry! I understand your situation. You did well to search for this article. I have been in your shoe and I have good information to offer you.

Not only will you find a way to feel better after a relapse but you will also find a permanent solution to your addiction to porn and fapping.

I have walked the path of porn addiction for over 10 years but I managed to break free. If you follow my blueprint, you will have high chances of permanently recovering from porn addiction.

I wrote my journey to freedom from porn and masturbation in the eBook that I have linked to. Make sure you read it as a motivation to prepare for the work that awaits you.

Why you feel Depressed after a Nofap Relapse

High expectations! The number one reason why anyone feels like crap after a relapse is because they had high expectations.

Anytime failure comes, it hits hard people with high expectations. Crashing a Toyota is not as sickening as crashing a Bentley.

If in your head you valued nofap as a Bentley, when you crash, you feel the pain of crashing a Bentley. Does that mean that you are not supposed to have high expectations?

Certainly not!

The best thing to do when setting goals for your no fap journey is to have multiple goals. Instead of aiming solely on stopping porn and fapping, why not aim to abstain for a number of days that you have been able to achieve before.

Make sure you have several small goals. That way, if you fail with one goal, at least you will have others to look forward to.

With small goals, you will feel less anxious. The good thing is that the small goals you set will eventually lead you to achieve the big goal that you are looking for.

Read Also: Does Porn Addiction affect your Mental Health?

Beating porn and masturbation addiction is not a simple task; it takes a lot of learning to get over it.

My Experience

During the period I was struggling to overcome porn addiction, I failed so many times until the day I narrowed down the goals I wanted to achieve. Instead of aiming to quit watching adult content and wanking entirely, I decided that I would limit watching porn and fapping to night hours only.

It doesn’t look like a good goal to set but trust me it helped me a lot. I accepted that I was hooked to watching porn and fapping and I wanted to be as gentle as possible on myself.

Anytime I would feel urges to fap during the day, I would convince myself to hold on until night hours. I found it a lot easier to convince my mind to postpone the addiction to later hours.

Before long, I had mastered the art of postponing the urges.

When the goal of fapping only night hours was successful, I added another small goal. I limited myself to watching only two porn videos for any given fapping session.

I was not to watch porn for more than 10 minutes. Normally, I would fluctuate with how much time I spent watching porn.

Sometimes I would watch for over an hour. On average I was spending about half an hour on each wanking session.

Remember by that time I had already accepted in my mind that I was a porn addict and I wasn’t trying to kill it with a silver bullet.

Limiting the time I spend watching pornography to 10 minutes was easier than I thought. I would look for categories of porn and would turn me on quickly.

I would then not hold myself whenever I felt like finishing off. My wanking sessions became shorter and they were limited to night hours. That meant that on average, I would only fap once a day.

Interestingly, on some nights, I never had the urges to watch porn. That automatically translated to a no fap day for me.

On some days, I would get urges during the day which I would postpone to night hours. By the time night hours would come, sometimes I didn’t have the urges anymore.

I started celebrating the little successes I was seeing and they motivated me to take up bigger goals.

As it is said, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step’. It can’t be more accurate than that.

More stories about my journey to beating porn and fapping are in my eBook.

How long does it take to recover from a relapse?

Typically it is going to take you between three and five days of not fapping to feel better after a relapse. If you had a really long streak of nofap, it will take you longer to feel normal after a relapse.

Unfortunately, whenever you relapse in nofap, it takes several days to recover. Most relapses end up in binging. The binging makes you feel sicker than if you just had a normal relapse.

But just as I have advised you, cut down your goals into small bits. Check out this YouTube video about mini habits to give you a better understanding of what I am talking about.

Whenever you relapse, make sure you don’t force yourself back on track. Normally, your body becomes lenient to urges to watch porn after a relapse.

Forcing yourself to get back on track will fail and it will worsen your bad feelings. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, allow yourself to flow with the urges for a few days.

I have written a comprehensive article on how to permanently kill nofap urges. In the article, I go into detail on how to get rid of the urges to fap for good. It is the exact method that worked for me.

Recovering from bad feelings will take you a while but the golden rule is to take things slow. If it takes several days and you still feel bad, don’t worry.

Focus on minimizing your goals and managing your urges.

How to Recover from a No Fap Relapse

Recovering from a relapse in nofap heavily depends on making the right decisions immediately after the relapse. Recovery is quicker when you have the right mindset and are willing to change how you normally operate to favor the recovery process.

Steps

  1. Accept that you have relapsed. It is important to acknowledge that you have relapsed. How will you start a recovery process to a failure you don’t acknowledge?
  2. Write down how you feel after failing. Take your time and express your deep feelings about how you currently feel. Be as honest as possible.
  3. Document the events leading to the relapse. These events will help you figure out where the fault was and gives you a good foundation to avoid the same mistake in future.
  4. Narrow down your goal. Whatever goal you had set, consider trying out a smaller goal until you master it before repeating the current goal with which you failed.
  5. Declare what you expect from your new resolution. Be careful not to set exceedingly high standards that are beyond attaining.
  6. Come up with a simple tracking system. Make sure the system is simple enough that you can do the tracking entirely in your head without needing to write down. Normally, people count days but I would advise that your system have an end. If it is counting days, say you’ll count up to a certain date and once you are done, even if you relapse, you’ll still be happy with your achievement.
  7. Give yourself a treat. Instead of punishing yourself for a relapse, why not console yourself with a treat of your liking?

Best Solution for Feeling Bad after a Nofap Relapse

I have given you a step by step guide on how to recover from a relapse in nofap. But I have not given you a permanent solution that will ensure you never relapse again.

As long as you are in nofap, you will always end up in a relapse no matter how long your streak is. Nofap cannot give you a permanent solution to porn and masturbation addiction.

After all the toiling I did in nofap, I got to a point I couldn’t go on anymore. I couldn’t imagine that I would have to keep up with the tough work of nofap just to avoid watching porn and fapping.

I began searching for a better alternative that guaranteed freedom from porn addiction. It was not an easy task looking for an alternative which I didn’t know if it existed in the first place.

Luckily, after several trials and errors, I stumbled upon a strategy that eventually gave me permanent freedom from porn addiction.

I will not go into details about the strategy in this article because I have already written extensively about it in this other article.

Make sure to check it out and follow through. You’ll have better chances of permanently beating porn addiction using my method compared to using nofap.

I too failed with nofap but succeeded with the alternative. Why should you fail?

Just as a side note, it will take you a bit of time to master the strategy and it will cost you some money. Be open to invest in it because that is the price you have to pay for your freedom from watching pornography and masturbating.

Good luck!