A survey on YOUR sexual abstinence practice. Wanna take part?

I created a survey about sexual abstinence practices. It is designed to be as encompassing as I could manage (though I am sure I missed some potential aspects).

I created it strictly to satisfy my own curiosity. I will post the results here after about a month, some time in February, 2023. (The results will not be published until after the survey is closed, so as to not skew the data.)

It consists of 21 questions, so it should only take 5-10 minutes to participate.

The survey is intended for the practitioners of some kind of abstinence practice - nofap, tantra, semen retention, etc.

Thanks for taking part!

What works for me...

After not-ejaculating for two months (many years ago), after 213 days of nofap, I have some good news and some bad news for you. However, whether the news is good or bad, depends on your current position in life, your goals, and your personal ideology.

I can't claim to know that any of this is universally true, it all comes from my own experience, my reading-list and my biases. I won't bother to preface every single sentence with a disclaimer. When I say "you", it is just a figure of speech, a generalisation of my own experiences. **Your experience may differ.** If some part of this seems to work for you, great! Embrace it, leave a comment, move on. If you disagree with something, fine! Leave a comment if you like. Find your own path!

On to the list...

1. You can experience bliss, right now, as soon as you let go of some misconceptions and do a few simple exercises.
2. You do not have to change your beliefs to experience bliss.
3. The simpler, the better!
4. SMILE! As much as you can. Even if you don't feel like it. *Especially* when you don't feel like it. It will improve your mood.
5. The most fundamental, most important practice, is breathing. There are many different breathing techniques.
6. Do one minute of very deep breathing, slightly forceful, in through the nose and out through the mouth.
7. DO IT RIGHT NOW!
8. RIGHT NOW, I SAID!!!
9. LOL.
10. You will experience resistance. (Trust me. You will. It's the one thing I believe is absolutely true for everybody.) Your mind will tell you that this is all just imagination, it cannot possibly help you in the long run, you're not worth it, and so on. This is probably one of the most widespread experiences.
11. Regular exercises and long walks improve the mood much more than I ever imagined.
12. Engage the muscles! Specifically, the belly and inner thighs.
13. Make [PC muscle exercises](https://www.wikihow.com/Do-PC-Muscle-Exercises).
14. Meditation is a great tool. The more regular, the better.
15. Yoga will teach you to be mindful of your movements - i.e., co-ordinate breathing with muscle-tension and thinking.
16. In order to visualize "energy", you do not have to believe in it.
17. Cold water seems to help regulate dopamine, relieve anxieties and improve mood. (I cannot do cold showers, sadly, because they give me cramps. I do cold half-showers, and they are helpful, too.)
18. Nofap / SR are great supporting practices, as they will give you more discipline, more confidence, and great insights into yourself.
19. The less social media, the better.
20. Have a backup plan for when you "fail". Knowing how to get back on track is more important than never getting off track.
21. View it all as one big, fun experiment.
22. Journalling can help keep you straight and honest. If you strive for physical changes, take a photo every day.
23. View input from others as inspiration, not binding instructions.
24. That goes for this posting too, of course.
25. Always remain skeptical of all methods, especially if you feel like they are silver bullets and can help all of humanity. Chances are they are not, and they can not. Silver bullets do not exist. Be content if you found something that helps you. It's more than most people ever get.
26. If you find something that seems to work for you, try it for a week, then two, then commit to a longer experiment.
27. Always try out new things. Always improve your own method.
28. Find your own path.

Sidenote:

Self-hypnosis, NLP, and other such stuff have helped me a lot.... but I had to get ready first. It's hard to know when it's time to delve into such things. I'd recomment you avoid the rabbit-holes that can come with them - specifically the pickup/PUA/seduction communities, which are rife with misogyny, inceldom and just plain B.S.

 (First posted on reddit.)

The rules I try to follow

For whatever it might be worth to anybody else, here are some rules I try to implement in my own life:

• Don't obsess over what you can not change.
  
• Judge ideas and actions, not people and personalities.
• Rather than "good" and "evil", try to use more nuanced metrics, such as "more or less useful", "more or less harmful".
• Try to see both sides.
  
• Be mindful.
• Breathe deep.
• Synchronize movements to the breath.
  
• Be open to bliss.

As a meta-rule, I try to see these "rules" as practices, rather than precepts.

This meta-rule is probably the most important of them all, because it helps me not measure myself against an ideal that is impossible to reach.

They are general guidelines for a life that makes myself and those around me happy. Needless to say, I don't always adhere to them - I try to get better.

(No?) nut november: Day 18. Simple habits, hard to establish.

 As a long-time meditation practitioner, I marvel from time to time why meditation is so surprisingly hard to establish.

I get why daily workout is hard. It's work. It makes you sweat. You have to suffer for the good bits. I find myself doing streaks of daily workout, which then get interrupted by work stress, sickness or a few days of low energy - and then weeks of just nothing. Then I get terrible back aches, and I get back into the habit (unless the back ache makes it completely impossible, which sadly only occurs more frequently with age).

Even nofap... on the surface it seems like it's just "doing nothing", but to resist your urges and go against the spur of the moment - I think this is quite an activity. There is an effort.

But meditation, qi-gong, breathing deep and with intent - all of those are next to no work. You don't have to do hours and hours either. Just sit in your bed for 10 minutes each day. Still... there always seems to be an excuse.

I meditated an hour each day before work, for a year. It was good, but I stopped doing it because I found out that sleep is actually more important. I meditate (informally) each night before bed anyway. So why not just sit up, fold my hands (which I know from experience is a good thing), and turn it into formal meditation? Just a few minutes each night.

Just thinking about it, already calms me down.

This is an honest question, by the way. I'm not being rhetorical here. I've heard the same experience from a few people. I'm actually more fascinated by this, than I am complaining about it. It makes me wonder what is going on there.

The same with breathing deep. I need to make time for that, remind myself of it, make a conscious effort. My body never simply does it all on its own. It never became a habit.

Somehow, insanely useful, insanely simple, almost effortless practices have a weird tendency to fall by the wayside for seemingly no reason.

The buddhist explanation is that the monkey mind just doesn't want to shut up. I don't believe in buddhism, but I think that there might be some anxiety around being completely "alone" with your own mind. That there really is an ego-part that is afraid it might vanish in silence. All the things that you hide even from yourself, might crop up when you close your eyes and just sit. All the fears might take a hold of you. Our stories might be the only thing that keeps us from disappearing.

However, as i said, I have been meditating for years. My own experience tells me that this never ever happens. It never feels anything but blissful. So why does experience - personal, up close, real experience - never trump that resistance?

(No?) nut november: Day 17. Theory and practice.

 Sometimes I wonder about our apparent attachment to ideas.

It is insane, and it makes a whole lot of trouble - from relationship fights, up to wars between nations.

There was a time when I was quite into zen, and tried to actively disengage from all concepts. I also meditated regularly.

This worked rather nicely.

Still, I find myself attached a lot to theories these days - or to debunking other people's theories, which amounts to the same thing.

What happened?

Well... life happened. You find some things interesting, some things matter to you, some things seem unbearably wrong and stupid and destructive. The global climate of partisanship got a hold of me. Social media impacted me, the pandemic, climate change, national politics... all the things that affect us all.

Last night, I was lying down to sleep. Lots of good ideas for my novel seemed to float around in my head. My breathing exercises went great. I felt wonderful.

I thought: I want to put more focus back on practice. Not theorize about the outcome so much. As far as I remember, when I steadfastly refused to think about where the practice might lead me, I felt liberation, relief, bliss.

Maybe our need for theory comes from a lack of trust in our practice.

Good old buddhist saying comes to mind: You can choose to be happy, or choose to be right - but not both at the same time.

Then again... theorizing is so much fun. Oh crap!

 

(No?) nut november: Day 10. Research and religious nutbaggery

 First, this is completely OT. It has zero to do with abstinence and NNN.

Second: Confession time! I have a weird love for religious nutbags, occultism, esotericism, all that stuff. I love religion in general (as an atheist and skeptic myself), but specifically, I love when it's obviously ridiculous, alarmist, and stupid.

Obviously, my novel deals with just those topics, plus femalde dominance and tantra. So I get to do a lot of fun websurfing under the guise of "research".

Anyway, here are some fun links that I found just today:

• The chakras are demonic doorways!!!111
• Yoga poses are hindu worship and forbidden to christians - also see this kialo discussion
• Christianity and yoga don't mix - also, Christian yoga is a thing, albeit a rather dull one.

 

My obsession with semen retention

Being chaste feels good for me, at least for a while. It creates heightened horniness (duh), and if you know to "transmute" this through tantric exercises, then that can create a truly wonderful state of bliss. It gives me a sense of being in control, able to overcome my urges. After about a week, it always feels like this is it. I'm going to do this forever. But this never lasts. Inevitably, the elevation passes, life just gets in the way, and the "streak" is over.

Obviously, while I get on another one of those chastity binges, I tend to hop onto reddit and peruse r/semenretention.

I have a love/hate relationship with that forum.

My love is that I feel for those guys. They honestly try to improve themselves. I imagine that many come from a place of despair and self-loathing.

Based on my experience, I conclude that 60 days days of not cumming, and 90 days, or even 213 days of not wanking, do not reliably produce any better performance, increased attractiveness, better skin, or really any change at all. It did not do that for me. Back when I did that, I didn't even know any of the claims of semen retention, so I'd say that it was a pretty good experiment. If girls had suddenly started swooning over me, you bet I'd have noticed.