Hello everyone,
History
Time to tell my story. I am 25 year old male who has suffered from POIS since I am 15/16 year old (can't remember exactly when it started to happen). Since then, I have always been more fatigued and less motivated in everything I do. Grades started to drop and I needed at least 9 hours of sleep to function normally during a day. Over the years, my social skills started to diminish and I became a lot more insecure. I experienced brain frog and my memory worsened. I sometimes preferred to stay nights at home instead of hanging out with friends. I could never explain why I felt that way. Since I was 19/20 years old I started to feel I was losing my friends due to my insecurity, but in reality this was not the case.
Since I am 22 years old, someone from a project group at Uni told me about NoFap and that you could get "superpowers" from it. Purely out of curiosity, I started to try it out. Around 9 days in and I felt the happiest I've been in around 6 years. I had a smile on my face that lasted the whole day. From that point I thought that I've been a porn addict all this time, since I watched porn a lot. I think I watched porn and masturbated on average maybe 1-2 times per day. Sometimes I masturbated 4-6 times a day. I started practicing nofap, but when I relapsed I would always feel the same symptoms again. I just thought it was because of my excessive masturbation history and porn addiction that I would have these symptoms.
One year later, the nofap went with ups and downs. Granted, the amount of masturbation went down immensely. Sometimes I had a streak of 7 days and sometimes of 100 days. But I had always the same symptoms after I orgasmed. I got a girlfriend for the first time and started having sex for the first time. However, the same symptoms after sex started happening again. I was really confused why this happened. After a few weeks I started googling and found out that it was POIS that caused these symptoms. I was happy and devastated at the same time. Happy, because I found out that it was an actual disease and I was not going crazy. Devastated, because it is something that you cannot easily get rid off.
Another year went by. I was still happy in my relationship, but POIS symptoms were still there. I started reading something about breathing techniques and realized I've been a mouth breather all my life. I thought myself to breath through my nose (both in and out). POIS symptoms reduced drastically since then, from a 5-7 day cycle to a 3-4 day cycle. However, I still need at least 10 days to fully recover since then.
Present
One more year passes by. POIS is still present, but I have noticed that symptoms after sex start to diminish. This happened during the last months of my relationship, which ended half a year ago. I haven't had sex since then so I cannot tell if this is still is the case. All my memories of the past years still seem vague. I can't really remember anything from 17-21 years old. But I feel my memory is slowly getting better. I feel at my best when I haven't been working out for a few days and have been abstaining from orgasm for at at least 10 days. When this is the case, my brain functions really good and my memory/focus is 1000x better. I am still practicing nofap, although I relapse every 30-60 days. Often times this is when I'm drunk. When having a orgasm when drunk, however, symptoms are less intense than when I'm sober. Overall, I feel soooo much better than before doing Nofap, also because I barely watch any porn (1-3 times every 1-2 months) nowadays. I do not dare to think where I would have been now if it weren't for that random guy from my project group who told me about nofap. He might have just saved my life.
Symptoms
My symptoms comprise of fatigue, increased irritability, social distancing (comes in handy nowadays haha), brain fog, depressed feelings, tone in voice becomes worse, increased vulnerability to stress, sense of fight or flight, bad focus, bad memory (especially short-term).
When do symptoms appear
After orgasm. I noticed approx 8 months ago that symptoms after sex started to decrease. I also notice POIS symptoms after working out in the gym, but not as intense after orgasm.
