How to deal with addiction of any kind?

It consumes my life. I am a sex addict, and I don't know how to get over it. Tips?

@thegerg: I don't know if masturbation 2-3 times a day qualifies though...

Get professional help.

That's really the best answer I can give you. It's one thing to say, "well, I just drink too much." That's easy, just stop drinking so much. But ADDICTION is a disease. There's no easy fix, and jackasses on a gaming forum aren't qualified to help. If this really runs your life and you think it's a genuine addiction (as opposed to being a case of "I just think I screw too much"), then I strongly advise you to find a professional who is trained to help with this sort of thing.

@MrGeezer: I masturbate several times a day. I am not sure if it qualifies or not.

Didn't you make a similar thread a couple of hours ago? Seek professional help.

@thegerg:

the term "sex addiction." I am not sure how much I do qualifies compared to someone who does it 8+ times a day, ect.

the_plan_man I remember you cooler than this but you are brave. Step one of losing an addiction is admitting you do not have an addiction at all

@LittleMac19 said:

A lefty, so rare.

I don't know either. If I had to guess, I'd wager that's just a case of "stop masturbating so much."

But again...I'm not an expert here. If you think that you have a problem, then seek professional help. If your doctor (or therapist or whatever) says "just stop masturbating so much", then listen to him/her.

I honestly wouldn't qualify that as highly abnormal or even that big of a big deal.

Constant masturbation usually just means you have too much free time anyway...

well i am 34 days into quitting internet porn, and man its been bad some days, at least i have an understanding girlfriend.....one day at a time

Why you quit?

stop thinking about sex all the time. case closed.

Because he wants to? Why not?

Meh...

get a fleshlight.

*cough* "jackasses" ... really?

Thats a giant assumption.

Also I disagree with your larger point.

The way to cure a sex addiction is simple. Just deprive yourself of it.

Now of course the first few days/weeks will be tough but the more you FORCE yourself the better you'll get at it.

Also, in order to help the process you might want to try some natural antidepressants like St.Johns wort and SAM-E to help provide happy brain chemicals.

Masterbation is like a drug and you might find that getting off it will be similar to drug withdrawal symptoms. And that is because masturbation releases large amount of dopamine - but if you do to much of it your dopamine receptors become weakened and more and more of it is needed to get the same high.

I'm in the process of kicking cigarettes. I've smoke since I was around 19, and have quit a couple of times in the past (usually a couple of months, but for as long as 2 years). I'm 35 and have smoked for practically half my life. I'm about a month and a half since my last smoke, and am doing pretty well with it.

I used to think I was psychologically addicted to pot (smoked daily for about 14 years) until I started getting anxiety attacks. As soon as I didn't like the effect getting stoned would have, I quit smoking like it was nothing. Man, I wish nicotine were that easy!

Addictions don't really work like that. You don't just get cured after not doing it for a while.

Damn it seems everybody is addicted to something these days.

Like others said, seek professional help if the statement you made about sex addiction ruining your life is actually true. If you're unable or unwilling to seek professional help, then I suggest that instead of attempting to "cure" yourself, try to just mitigate the effect of your addiction until you're able to effectively end that addiction. When someone is addicted to something, its almost always a physical addiction accompanied by a psychological one. The latter is the one that really gets to you. It reacts violently and makes your life hell when it becomes aware of your attempt to end that addiction. So one way is to just decrease the intensity of your addiction. I tried quitting smoking about a month ago and survived for like two days without smoking (pathetic I know). I realized under the current conditions of my life I won't be able to quit smoking just like that, without any help or improved conditions of life. So what I did is that I cut back on my tobacco consumption as another way to mitigate the adverse effects of smoking. I now smoke about 5 cigarettes a day instead of the previous almost half a pack a day. I'm still hoping that this will down the road lead to me being able to fully quit smoking, but its a place to start at. Hopefully things will work out soon and I will find the strength to abolish this guilty pleasure.

Depends on the addiction. I'm pretty sure that with things that give you a high - all that's needed is some abstinence to re-wire the brain.

And one also needs to be very clear about the pros vs. cons of giving something up.

I find the hardest part of overcoming addiction is finding something to fill the hole (no pun intended, mr. sex-addict), but there is going to be a lot of extra time on your hands if you keep your cock out of them. Take up something you've always wanted to do, before your addiction started.

The mind is the most important part of the body. Make an effort to be a positive person with a healthy mind (and body) and you will succeed.

It doesn't. Sex addiction interrupts normal daily routines. People spend the majority of their days watching porn and masturbating/having sex.

If you are a teenager, masturbating 2-3 times a day is normal if you have the free time.

Hell, if I have the free time, I can masturbate 2-3 times in one day and I just turned 27.

2-3 times seems perfectly normal to me.

willpower /thread

Its only a problem when it happens in public without you realizing its occurring.

@foxhound_fox: Well, I am 21 and it does consume quite a bit of time when I get in my room, including college homework I should be doing or doing something more productive. I was late for a meeting once, because I was in the bathroom "whipping off."

Okay, maybe not in EVERY case. But it has been well established that in a HUGE number of cases, once you have become an addict (and I mean an ACTUAL addict, not just someone with low self control), there's a very good possibility that you'll be addicted your entire life. That's the insidious thing about addiction. Even if you do practice abstinence, your brain DOESN'T "rewire" (and I'm saying that this is very often the case, I'm not saying that this is the case for literally every single addict). You can be addicted to a drug, and then abstain from it. And even if you abstain from it for the next 50 years, you've still got the brain of an addict. There is no going back to not being an addict, you're just an addict who isn't using.

And again...this may not be the case for EVERYONE. But it's definitely the case for a hell of a lot of addicts, so I think it's irresponsible to say something along the lines of "you can cure addiction by abstaining." The only one who should be telling that to an "addict" is a trained professional who has personally dealt with the guy and knows the extent of his addiction.

Also, I'd like to point out something else. In many cases, even though abstinence doesn't cure the addiction, the addict still needs to abstain. This may be the case for alcohol and tobacco and heroin. But SEX addicts? That's a funny situation and I honestly have no idea how that's handled. The difference between cocaine and sex is that sex is a natural part of a healthy relationship. So I can easily see how it would be problematic to say, "you're a sex addict, so just abstain from sex." What, abstain from sex FOREVER? That's a tricky situation, because it's easy to see how that could potentially result in more problems than it solves. So in the specific case of SEX addiction, I'm wondering how trained professionals actually handle this.

Okay, well here we are obviously talking about masturbation.

Now, if one feels that this habit is impeding the quality of their life then they are obviously doing too much of it (as is the case with the OP.)

Nobody is talking about never masturbating or having sex ever again - just bringing it to an acceptable level - whatever that may be is up to the individual.

As for the other parts of your post I'll assume you have statistics to back up your assertions.

It may be the case that people often relapse - particularly when they are feeling down or life gets tough. But the ACTUAL CRAVING aspect of an addiction CAN be cured in a relatively short period of time.

(For masturbation addiction I hear the required abstinence time is only about 3 to 6 months.)

Except that you WEREN'T talking about just masturbation. You specifically said that you were talking about "things that get you high". And yes, it is very bad advice to recommend curing an addiction to "things that get you high" by simple abstinence. You don't know the guy's specific problems, you don't know the extent of his problem, you don't know in what context he faces the problem or how it even IS a problem.

And what are you not getting here? Sure, the strong craving can go away in a relatively short period of time due to abstinence, but you are aware that a single incident can result in a total relapse? That's precisely the reason why many ADDICTS cannot EVER use again. Even if they spent 20 years being casual users without becoming addicts, they can't EVER go back to being casual users once they passed that threshold and became addicts. This is precisely why you see so many alcoholics refusing to have a drink after years of being sober. The ADDICTIOn is often still there. If they have a drink, they don't go back to being a casual user, they go strait back into ALVOHOLISM.

Like it or not, that is often the reality of adiction. Many addicts simply CAN'T just stop for a little while and then go back to normal use, it is fundamentally impossible. Addiction rewires your brain and many people can NEVER can go back.

You're equating the addiction with the use of the "drug", and that's wrong as hell. If you can fail to understand such a simple concept as people being NEVER able to go back to the way they were before becoming addicts, then you have ****-all justification to give people advice on the matter this casually. This shit is a DISEASE and it often NEVER goes away, whether they abstain or not.

Alright, maybe I got a bit carried away with the whole drug thing.

But back to masturbation, I just did a bit of research and it seems as if the jury is out on whether or not one may need to PERMANENTLY abstain from masturbation in order to clear an addiction to it.