Post Acute Withdrawal PAWS in Pornography Addiction Recovery

Hey there everybody and welcome to this video on pause or post acute withdrawal syndrome and pornography addiction recovery. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. In this video we're going to discuss post acute withdrawal and explore post acute withdrawal symptoms in all pieces of the recovery process. And then we'll finish up by identifying some suggestions for very early recovery. These are things to get you started. Your obviously not going to have all the tools you need for recovery in this one short video. So let's start at the beginning. What is post acute withdrawal? This is the period between when you stop using and when your nervous system has healed itself from sustained high levels of delta phos B which is a chemical in your brain that is released in order to help protect it from your continued overuse of porn. You also need to heal from hormone and neurotransmitter imbalances that are caused as a result of those neural changes. Loss of dopamine receptors due to glutamate toxicity is another thing that needs to heal. And structural changes from bdnf brain derived neutrophic factor has reduced signal strength of the neurotransmitters and that persists for an extended period. So we need to undo all the damage that's been done. That doesn't happen overnight. That's like after a hurricane. There is a period where the city or the county or the state has to rebuild and that doesn't happen overnight. The buildings weren't built overnight the first time, they ain't going to be rebuilt overnight the second time. So what are some of these symptoms? Sleep difficulties. Between the fact that your hormones and neurotransmitters are out of balance and you're craving and you may feel irritable, it makes it difficult to sleep. Energy fluctuations. You may be more easily fatigued and it may take longer to recover from from stress. Well, that's okay. Your dopamine is too low and some of your excitatory neurotransmitters are actually too low during this process because the brain is no longer being flooded with them. So the brain is having to adjust to getting less, it's having to downregulate again. So you may have fluctuations in your energy. You may feel restless. Sometimes when your brain registers that there's not enough of a particular hormone or neurochemical or there's an imbalance somewhere, it triggers the stress response. The stress response makes you restless. It's like it gives you a bunch of energy and you've got to recognize what the energy is available for and do it and or not do it. But in this case, the restlessness often is paired with cravings. You start getting restless and going, I really need to get my dopamine levels up. What can I do? You may not be actually thinking it in those words, but a lot of times that's the restlessness, that's the glutamate coursing through your system going, boss, there is an imbalance here. We need to get it worked out. You may have sexual tension with an inability to achieve orgas orgasm without porn. Now, every person does not have every one of these symptoms. I'm just trying to hit some of the more common ones so you're not surprised by them. And you recognize that this is part of the recovery process and the remodeling process of your brain. You may have overall achiness and increased pain. Remember, dopamine and endorphins are both involved in pain regulation. And dopamine and endorphins are also both involved in the availability of serotonin, which is also involved in pain management. So you may temporarily have more just general achiness and pain. Now, extreme pain, that's something else. But don't be surprised if your arthritis starts to act up or you may have more headaches or, you know, aches and pains here and there. It's okay, it'll get better. And you may have more headaches. Just prepare for it. It doesn't mean you can't address it, but understanding and not getting freaked out and thinking there's something terribly wrong. All right. This is your body rebuilding interpersonal post acute withdrawal symptoms. Objectification. Your brain is craving dopamine and all of the other chemicals in that pleasure cocktail that we've talked about and it's not getting it. So when it sees a porn adjacent stimulus, when it sees women, when it sees men, when it sees lingerie, it may objectify that and think of that not as a person, but but as something to be acquired, if you will. You may be more impatient with other people because you're restless, because you're irritable, because you don't feel well. It may be harder to tolerate other people's bs. That is expected. You are under stress right now, whether you realize it or not. This recovery process is stressful, not only on tangible things, but on your body. And because your body is under stress, you're going to be more irritable, which may mean you're more impatient. Plan for it, prepare for it. Withdrawal from others. You may just not want to be around other people because you don't have the energy to deal with their bs. And some people experience low self esteem during this period. They're not getting that boost of testosterone, they're not getting that boost of pleasure. Pleasure. And they may start wondering about whether they're going to be able to have the rich and meaningful life that they want. Emotional post acute withdrawal anxiety. People's anxiety during this period can range from performance anxiety. Am I going to be able to have meaningful or pleasurable sex with a person in the future? They may have anxiety about other what others would think if they found out about the porn addiction. Or if they are in. In an intimate moment and they're not able to perform. There may be a lot of anxiety there. And there may be a lot of anxiety about whether they're even going to be able to recover. If their libido is for real life. People is ever going to come back, as I mentioned already. But I'll underscore here, there's going to be more anger and irritability. I have been working in addiction recovery for 25 years and I have never met somebody who didn't have some bouts of anger or irritability. And it can be generalized. You're just angry at the world. You wake up in the morning and you're just ticked off. Okay? That is your brain in stress mode saying we need to fight or flee. And you going, well, what am I fighting and what am I fleeing from? I just, I just gotta wait it out. And you may have a low frustration tolerance during this period. Don't be taking on complex tasks. That's not a good thing to do because you are more likely to have difficulty concentrating. And when things start to become difficult, even if they're not going bad, if they start becoming difficult, you may just not have the ability to tolerate that frustration. So you just get angry and go, whatever and tip over the chessboard. You may experience guilt for using. You may experience depression. And depression is a sense of feeling hopeless and helpless. We already talked about not having energy and not everybody feels depressed, but most everybody experiences a lack of energy. But if you feel depression, that's expected. As I mentioned, dopamine, endorphins and serotonin are all impacted in the addiction process. And they all become somewhat deficient when you're no longer flooding the system until that remodeling happens. So you may experience some temporary but notable depression. And you can talk with your doctor about whether there are options for you. In most cases. There are. How shall I say this? Antidepressants have the Benefit of helping you get through these moments for some people, not for all. But antidepressants often suppress libido and may have extended effects even after you stop taking them, especially, especially sexual side effects. So talk with your doctor about the risks and benefits if you're depressed and you're thinking about taking antidepressants. Now, there are other treatments out there like transcranial magnetic stimulation, that works really well. And ketamine, nasal ketamine, that works pretty well for some people. So there are options besides your antidepressant drugs. Don't lose hope that you have to sit in the depression for an extended period. There are options. You may experience grief when you're going through this. You may start recognizing that you've lost a lot of time to porn use or you've lost a lot of relationships or whatever. And you may have to grieve those losses. And as I mentioned, because your do dopamine is low, you're going to have low motivation. You're going to likely feel relatively apathetic or about most things for a period of time. And being aware of that is part of the battle. Recognizing, hey, I don't feel really motivated, but I'm going to do it anyway is important in, in recovery. As your brain heals, you'll start to get that motivation back. Cognitive post acute withdrawal is brain fog. It may be difficulty with sustained concentration. You can focus for like two seconds and then it's out the window. And that could be your mind wanders. That could be you blank out, or it could be you start having intrusive thoughts about porn. Recall is often a whole lot slower during post acute withdrawal. You have memories, you have knowledge back there. You're a really smart person. But it's really hard to get all that knowledge from out of the storage cubes in your brain dirt. When you, when you have brain fog, it will improve, but until it does, it's important to cut yourself some slack. The more stressed you become when you can't access that information right away, the longer it's going to take to access that information. And, and by getting increasingly stressed, you're actually undoing some of that remodeling that your brain's doing because you're putting too much stress on that stress response system. Your attention, your ability to focus on one thing and not get distracted by anything and everything may be really bad. And that's okay. Make a, make adjustments. If you need to focus and have sustained concentration while you're at work or while you're at home, be in A room where you have as few distractions as possible. Chunk the material. If you know that you can't sustain your concentration for an hour, how long can you sustain it for? Can you do five minutes, ten minutes? All right. If you can do that, then take a break and then do 10 more minutes. It's better to chunk it and have little breaks in between than not do it at all. And processing and understanding information actually may be a lot harder. You may be sitting in a training and everything they're saying is like. You hear the words but it's not clicking at all. That's brain fog. Your brain is not in a learning place right now. Take a lot of notes so you can go back and review at your own speed. When you can concentrate and focus. Pessimism and negativity is common. When we're stressed. Our brain is wired to pay more attention to the vipers than the bunny rabbits. So you may start paying attention to all the things that are going wrong when you're feeling angry and irritable and bleh. It's not uncommon actually. It's very common to look for reasons to look for things in the environment that support how you're feeling. If you're feeling bad, you don't want to find things. A lot of times you don't want to find things that are going to make you feel better. You want to find something that gives you a reason to say, yeah, that's why I feel like crap right now. So you may become more pessimistic and negative. It's important to get a handle on that early in the process and look at the big picture. Yeah, that's crappy. Let me find something that's good. Find some balance. Embrace the entire thing. Dreams. You may start having a lot of dreams about sex or porn. And a lot of people that I've worked with who have pornography addiction, their dreams are actually about watching porn. Or in their dream they're. They either see themselves watching porn or in their dream they're watching porn, but they're not actually having sex with people in real life anymore. So that's normal. That's your brain going, this is what you need to do to start feeling better. And your higher order thinking is going, now, now, that's immediate reward. I want long term benefit. And you may have jolts of craving, intrusive thoughts or ruminations about porn or even about things that just make you angry. It's more difficult when you are in early recovery to manage your intrusive thoughts. Be patient with yourself when it happens. Notice it. It's kind of like stepping on attack in your bare feet. It's really unpleasant. Notice it and then decide what you're going to do next. Pull the tack out. Environmental post acute withdrawal is basically sensory sensitivity. You become more sensitive to sexual stimuli, as I mentioned before, more aware of it and maybe more triggered by it. And you may become more sensitive with your senses. Smells, sounds, sights may become overpowering. You're stressed out, so things may feel like they're amplified and it's just overwhelming. You can't take the noise at the mall or you can't take the noise of your kids running around and screaming or something. On the opposite end, you may actually, because your dopamine is low, you may actually not feel much and it may seem like the world is lacking in color and sound and it's not vivid anymore, it's just all dull. That's okay. It's going to happen to a lot of people in early recovery and it improves. As your neurotransmitters balance out, you start to see color and hear sounds the way you used to. So I told you we'd end with some suggestions. Physically, do what you can to improve your sleep hygiene and I have videos on that on the YouTube channel. But doing your best to regulate your circadian rhythms and get good quality sleep is one of the best things you can do to allow your body time to focus on restoration and remodeling. Nutrition, those hormones and neurotransmitters and neurons, those are made from something. And that something is what you eat. What you eat are the raw materials that are broken down in order to sustain life. If you eat like crap, you're not going to have good materials. It's like having really cheap concrete to build a skyscraper. It may hold, it may collapse, I don't know. So do you really want to do that or do you want to make sure that you've got the best materials going in as possible? Now, that doesn't mean go absolutely rigid crazy on your diet, because that's no fun and that's going to make recovery even more unpleasant. What I'm saying is try to eat colorfully. Try to. And skittles and condiments don't count. Try to eat more fruits and vegetables in your diet. The colorful ones actually have anti inflammatory components that can help reduce the inflammation in your body and speed the healing process. Red peppers, yellow peppers, even green peppers, I don't like them, but whatever. Hot peppers, those can be good though. You can get those in a rainbow of colors, carrots, melons, apples, bananas. There are a lot of things I know. Some people don't love broccoli like I do, but eating some of your cruciferous vegetables can be helpful. Eating spinach, nice green spinach. Eat it raw. It tastes more pungent in my opinion when you cook it. But if you eat it raw, it tastes better. Or you can do something like take fresh kale leaves and bake them and make kale chips. They taste a whole lot better that way. Again, my opinion, but I digress. Do a few things to improve your nutrition, but also make sure you're getting in the foods you like. If you love pizza like I do, fine pizza, but you're gonna have onions and peppers and tomatoes on it. Light to moderate exercise can be helpful now, some people find going to the gym to be too triggering. You don't have to go to the gym to exercise. Some people find going to the gym to be motivating and inspiring. You need to figure out what works for you. Light to moderate exercise helps reduce your cortisol levels, which takes turns down some of the temperature. Remember hot and cold chemicals and makes it easier for your brain to heal and remodel itself. Intense exercise, like hit or intense weight training, some people find that it feels extremely beneficial and other people find that it's too exhausting. You need to figure out what works for you interpersonally. Communicate with others. That doesn't mean you have to go out and be the life of the party all the time, but communicate with others about the fact that you don't have to get technical. You can tell them you're going through something or you haven't been feeling well and you're more irritable. If they know ahead of time that you're irritable, you're fussy, you're going through something, they're going to give you a wider birth generally than if you don't communicate with them and if they know, then they won't take it as personally. If you start getting snitty with them, they may just be like, hey, check your attitude and help point out what's going on. Or they may be supportive. I don't know about your friends, but communicating with them to give them a heads up is always helpful and have compassion for yourself and others, but definitely for yourself during this process. This is going to be a hard process. This is not going to happen overnight. So have compassion with yourself. There are going to be days where you feel good. Great. Embrace them. There are going to be days where you're depressed. Okay, you feel depressed. Yeah. It feels like this has been going on forever and it'll never end. That's the way it feels. Let's look at the facts. But have compassion with yourself and don't tell yourself you shouldn't feel some way. You feel how you feel and you've got to adjust accordingly. Just like the weather. I can't control the weather. If it's sunny, I can do certain things. If it's rainy, well, I may have to change my plans. But I'm not going to get all fired up, twisted up in a knot because I can't go out running because it's pouring down rain outside. Doesn't. It's not a good use of energy emotionally. Avoid dis. Dirty discomfort. That means avoid getting angry about being angry or getting depressed because you felt bad for so long. Dirty discomfort. It means being unhappy about your unhappiness. Doesn't make any sense. Just accept it. Okay, I feel depressed. Okay. I woke up this morning and I am in a God awful mood. Well, it is what it is. How can I best adjust for the day? I'm probably not going to be making plans to go out with friends and if I have plans I may cancel them because I'm in a mood and that's okay. But avoiding that extra energy of being distressed about your distress is another way to reduce the load on your stress response system and give your body. Allow your body to use its energy for remodeling. Embrace serenity. The serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. You're not going to be able to speed this process up a whole lot as if you are doing things that are healthy. If you are following a lot of these guidelines, you. You're doing everything you can and it's going to take time. But what you can change are some of the things that we're talking about. And you can change some of your behaviors and make it easier for your body to focus its energy on remodeling instead of reacting cognitively. Monitor your progress in recovery. We always talk about progress, not perfection. Perfection is an illusion. It. You're never going to get there. Progress. Are you doing better today than you did yesterday? Okay. And if not, accept it and ask why. Get curious about it. Why am I feeling? Why did I feel okay yesterday and I feel bad today? There may be a reason. There may not, but okay, then look back over a bigger time frame. Over the past week, over the past month. How's your sleep been, for example? Pick two or three things, two or three behaviors or symptoms, and monitor those and look for progress. If you notice yourself on a backsliding trend, not just one day, but on a backsliding trend, get curious. Talk with your sponsor, talk with your counselor. Environmentally, create an environment that is as relaxing and non triggering as possible. That means eliminating as many of the triggers as possible. The computers are part of our daily life, so you probably aren't going to be able to eliminate that. But there are things you can do to make the computer less associated with pornography. Pornography, for example, having a picture of your mom or your grandma as your desktop on your desktop or your screensaver or something. You see that, it's like, oh yeah, maybe, maybe not. Like after surgery. Be patient and don't expect too much too soon. Work into recovery. Work slowly to avoid overstressing the system. Recovery is stressful. Change causes crisis and crisis causes change. So this recovery is a change for you and it is going to be stressful on your body, on your mind, on your mood. So give yourself compassion and do it slowly. Don't try to change everything in a week. Pornography addiction and compulsive sexual behavior disorder impact the nervous system and the brain through a variety of hormones and neurotransmitters, which have many different impacts on all of the pieces of a person's life. Physical, interpersonal, emotional, cognitive, environmental and spiritual. As the nervous system heals and the hormones and neurotransmitters rebalance, the person may experience a variety of symptoms. We went through those symptoms. It's not going to be a walk in the park, but recognize that those symptoms will improve. Pause post acute withdrawal syndrome or symptoms get less intense and less frequent over time and that's what you're looking for, an improvement in your quality of life.