NoFap is Way More Dangerous Than You Think

Today we're going to expose NoFap and the porn recovery space and really show you why you've been stuck for years trying to quit porn, maybe 2, 5, 10 years of going on streak for a few days, a few weeks, and then eventually coming back to it. Now, to introduce myself, my name is Samir Gardner Gardner. I've helped hundreds of men quit porn and masturbation for good. I've wrote a book and I've been free myself for multiple years. So let's jump into it and let me tell you how you can finally break free for good. So what we need to understand is the opposite approach. The opposite approach is you doing the complete opposite of recovery. Now let me explain why does this work. So here's the problem with recovery. Okay. We see fancy brain scans like these, and immediately we jump into authority bias. Authority bias is a concept that is talked about in the book Influencer by Robert Cialdini, where it explains that humans tend to believe authority, meaning anyone that has a form of expertise or credibility or experience in a certain field, without even questioning them, without even questioning what they say, because it's easier to just trust an authority in that field. And so when we see these fancy brain scans or the fMRI scans, we just think this must be true because they've probably done studies on these. But what we don't understand is sometimes we're only shown one side of the coin and we never get to see the other side of the coin. And that can be extremely dangerous if the information presented is false. Now, of course, if you're listening to this, please don't just believe me blindly with everything I'm going to present, because the information I'm about to present to you is going to completely shock your narrative around addiction, dopamine, and how easy and effortless it can be to actually quit forever. So please do your own research. Don't just say, oh, this looks logical, let me just believe this guy blindly, because I don't want you to do so. You're not going to even understand anything, and you're not going to have any internal conviction anyways. So to prove the authority bias, there was a famous study done in 1961 where they took here the Milgram obedience studies. So that study happened at Yale University, and the purpose of this study was to understand why do ordinary people just obey authorities even when it means going against their own morals. Since just before that there was World War II, and they see many people commit atrocities just by following orders from their superior. So in that study, the method that they use is there were participants that acted as a teacher. There were the experimenters that were in the control of the study, but those teachers, aka participants, would ask questions to the students who were actors. But every time that they got an answer false to the questions that they would ask, it would give an electric shock. And that electric shock, the intensity would increase every single time. Now, the shock wasn't real, but the actors, aka the students, since they were good actors, acted as if it was real and that they were actually in pain. So the teachers, the participants, couldn't tell the difference. So they were just administrating shocks every time that they gave a false answer. And those students, those actors, acted— sometimes they actually begged to stop the electric shocks. And the participants didn't know that they were faking So whenever the participants hesitated to give an electric shock, the experimenter, those that controlled the study, who were in a lab coat acting as an authority, urged them to just continue giving the electric shocks even though the students were in deep pain. They would say things like, the experiment requires you to just continue. And so the results of that study is that they found that 65% of participants obeyed instructions and gave literally what they thought was the maximum shock, 450 volts, even though they knew that it could seriously harm the students. And most participants showed distress and discomfort, but they still obeyed authority. And that study really showed us how people will sometimes believe without even questioning in the first place, just because also sometimes it's just easier to believe in authority rather than trying to just find the answers yourself. Now, here's the problem that we have nowadays. As you can see here, nowadays, authority in our field, the quitting porn, the quitting masturbation, the quitting lust field, is filled with so-called authorities who do have a lot of knowledge on science, biology, sometimes psychology, make videos like these where we get fed one thing. Maybe we get fed knowledge on what is porn and how it might be an addiction. We get fed stories about how it ruined someone's life, like we can see here. And we have people like Huberman, who are known to be authorities in the science field, for example. And so believe whatever they say blindly. And we can just see by the title here, the science behind porn addiction is scary. And here saying that porn addiction ruins relationships. And now that's not the only examples. We have much more. If you just do a simple search, oftentimes the main message is fear. Fear is what has been running us. Now the problem with fear is that it kind of kills a few abilities. When you feel fear or when you're filled with fear, you don't think of problem solving. You don't think of making rational decisions. You don't think of analyzing. You don't think of reflecting. Now, all of these 4 components are extremely crucial in order for us humans to adapt to any life scenarios. But when we're constantly emotional because we constantly see this message of fear, as we can see here, then what happens is we're never really using these abilities that we have, that God has given us with our mind, our consciousness. And so I want to give you a logical example here, right? I was reading a book 3 years ago called Irresistible by Adam Alter. And in that book, they gave the story of a young man who played video games for most of his life, right? And he would play, and that would have an effect on his studies. He would play multiple hours a day. He wouldn't really prioritize sometimes his social life or his relationship with his family or his studies. And so his life was going slowly but surely downhill. And sometimes he would find himself binging on video games. Now let me tell you something about me. I used to be in the same exact situations. I still remember I got a Wii at a very young age, towards the age of 9, I believe. I would play for a few hours, and then at the age of 13, I got my first Xbox, and I went from a student who would study and get very good grades to a student that had to sacrifice sleep because he would play so much video games, and my grades dropped by a ton where I would barely pass classes because of that. And I would play 12 hours a day at least during summer break. I didn't have a good social life. I would just spend my days playing video games. I wasn't really invited by anyone. I was rarely invited by friends. I would do nothing productive with my day. I had nothing interesting going on in my life. I would literally just PMO, play video games, and watch YouTube videos on the video games I was playing. And I was actually very good playing multiple games where I would be at a pretty good level competitively. Now, as you can see, I have a similar experience to that guy. Now, Isaac in the book Irresistible, which is a true story reported in that book, decided to go to rehab so that he could learn how to quit video games. And when he was in rehab, they didn't work on his mindset. They didn't work on maybe changing his life, giving him goals, changing his lifestyle, helping him find a purpose or whatever. None of that. It's not to say that those things are 100% efficient, as I don't necessarily believe so, but instead the experts over there, and this is a rehab that costs 5 figures, over $10,000 to go to for a few weeks. They said to him that once your cucumber brain becomes pickled, it cannot go back to being a cucumber again. Now let me repeat, once your cucumber brain becomes pickled, it cannot go back to being cucumber again, which is something that goes completely against neuroplasticity to say that. They say that essentially once your brain changes, it cannot go back to being a normal brain again. So if you take a little peek at video games again, you're going to be susceptible to just binge again. And so Isaac went to the rehab, and for months it was essentially free video games. And then guess what? He took a peek one day, he was like, I wonder what my friends are doing on League of Legends. I haven't played in months, and I just want to take a quick look. Guess what? He binged for so long that he had to go back to the rehab again because his parents found him just binging and essentially being super tired. Now, on my I played a ton of video games for multiple years. Like I said, 12 hours a day, easily to 16 hours a day on summer break. I played every single day, a few hours a day, at least during school. But I never thought that I needed rehab or treatment, even after being told by my own family members that you act like you're addicted to video games. I remember them telling me, and I completely understand them now, but they told me you would rather play video games than eat food. And that was almost true, right? I was literally bringing my Xbox to other people's places so I could continue playing my game. Yes, I was that obsessed with video games. Now, at the age of 16, I came across the concept of self-improvement. And in that concept of self-improvement, the video games is seen as a distraction and that pursuing your goals is something better. So what have I done? I said, you know what, I'm going to reduce my consumption of playing of games and I'm going to pursue this new lifestyle. And look, in the beginning I went back to video games a bit. I played, I reduced it, I played, I reduced it back and forth. I watched a few videos of people saying, You should stop playing video games. It's better for you to just play video games in real life. You could upgrade your character. You could do all of those things. Real life is much better. And so I took their perspective and I was like, you know what, let me just try it. And then a few months later, I completely dropped off video games. You see, I naturally moved on from it whilst Isaac took a recovery-like approach. And this is why I'm telling you that NoFap is not working for you for these specific reasons. Let me give you an example. There's video game addict number 1, and then there's video game addict number 2. Okay. Let's say they're the exact same. They play the same time, 12 hours a day for the past 6 years. Let's say they both have no social life. They have the same lifestyle, they have the same personality, they have the same environment, they have the same beliefs, same childhood, same everything. And then suddenly they decide to quit. They're like, I need to quit now. I need to make a change in my life. You have these two. Now the no recovery approach, aka what I call the effortless approach, it goes on and naturally does what a human will do to leave a behavior. So it's tries different things, maybe sets goals, or he changes what he values in life. He doesn't really have a stress or fear of relapsing. He doesn't think he's an addict. He never really came across that concept. He never really considered himself to be an addict, just someone that played a lot of video games. He doesn't think his brain will just crave dopamine suddenly, and he doesn't think that he will just lose control and binge because he never came across these recovery ideas. And he doesn't think of playing video games as uncontrollable urges that will just overpower him, right? This is a natural approach of what I call the effortless approach. Now the other side, we have the recovery approach. He stays inside in home, he plays video games and he is like, now I'm gonna watch a video on how to quit video games so it can motivate me because video games has been ruining my life. He's constantly worried about relapsing. He has a self-image of an addict. He thinks that he's driven by dopamine. He thinks that he will lose control and just binge against his own will without even wanting to. And he thinks that he will have strong, uncontrollable urges to play. This is the fear-based approach. This is the recovery approach. This is the NoFap approach. You've been fed these ideas of watch videos on how to quit porn, watch out, you might relapse again. These other people have been relapsing left and right, and you constantly see stories of other people failing. You get told that you're an addict, so you adopt the self-image of an addict, which is extremely self-destructive because you act according to how you see yourself. And an addict oftentimes means that you're going to be limited in what you can do. He thinks that he is driven by dopamine and not by his own will, and he thinks that he's just going to lose control and binge against what is morally right. And he thinks that we will have strong, uncomfortable urges to just go back to porn. So you see that all of these ideas were just fed by NoFap, by the porn recovery space. I've now talked over the past 4 years of being in this space to people on countless times that I've left porn and masturbation without ever watching a single NoFap video. You know what they told me when I asked them, how did you quit porn? They simply said, oh, I just started a business and I realized it would be better for me to use that same mental energy and focus focus and just put it towards my business instead of porn. Another guy told me, I got closer to God, I realized it would be better for me to drop it off. But because they didn't have that fear, they didn't think that they were addicted. They just thought that they would be maybe doing it too much and that would be like an immoral thing, or maybe something that's just distracting them now. Because they naturally changed as a person, their values changed, what they pursued in life changed, and they didn't go with this approach of let me learn about how to quit porn. I think it fed these ideas that, oh no, you're an addict, oh no, you're going to struggle this for a long time because that's been a part of your life for so long. Oh no, you're going to constantly relapse. Oh no, you're driven by dopamine. You don't have true free will because dopamine is just going to overpower you. Sometimes you might binge and relapse against your own will, and you're going to constantly have strong urges that you're going to have to fight off. They didn't get fed those ideas. So guess what? If you don't have limiting ideas in your mind, then you won't use them as excuses, or they just won't limit you to think. And as we saw, to problem solve, to make rational decisions, to analyze, is this good or is this bad? Should I continue doing this or not? Reflect, oh yeah, if I quit porn, maybe I'm gonna be able to do this thing in my life. Oh yeah, maybe if I quit porn, my business is going to be better, I'm gonna make more money. Oh yeah, if I quit porn, my relationship with God is gonna be much better. Because when you take that approach of recovery and you're constantly worried about relapsing, constantly worried about your addiction, dopamine, strong urges, binging, what happens is you don't analyze, you don't reflect, you don't problem solve because you're in fear. Now let me talk about Japan and SSRI, aka antidepressants. Japan in the 1990s didn't really know about depression at all. They had some cases, but it wasn't really popular. If people were facing problems in their lives or they felt low, or sometimes they had mood swings, they just thought that it was part of life. Or even if they felt really down, they just thought that these are normal life occurrence, normal life changes. But now the problem was that for the pharmaceutical industry, they couldn't at that time sell antidepressants. Now because of Japan not really using depression to describe mood swings or other mental health issues, they couldn't be sold on antidepressants, obviously. Why would they buy them if they didn't really know much about depression in the first place? They were not really educated on that. So drug companies decided to educate the public in Japan. So in the 1990s, Japanese started getting educated, and the drug companies use this catch slogan where they would say "Koroko no keisei." And what does that mean? It means that your soul can catch a cold, which made Japanese understand that their soul, aka like themselves, could catch depression essentially. And of course, with the help of more education and educating especially experts because they have the authority, then experts could educate their patients. So now depression was framed as something common, temporary, and could be fixed with medication. And they made them interpret mood swings, feeling negative, overall feeling low, as them having depression. So by the early 2000s, the sales of antidepressants just started rising in Japan, as they were also one of the last rich countries not using antidepressants at that time. So here's what I want you to be aware of. Of. What we probably think is we're addicted for life. It's going to be extremely hard to quit. We've been doing it for so long. Our brain is rewired and damaged. Relapses proves that you're weak, that you can't quit porn, that you need more willpower or more help or more recovery because you're powerless. But what we don't know is that, for example, the DSM-5, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, does not even recognize porn addiction as official diagnosis, nor sex addiction. We also don't know that our brain is always changing. If we simply go and study the concept of neuroplasticity, we'll understand that our brain can always change, and also that our brain changes doesn't compel us to watch porn again or repeat the behavior again, but instead it simply removes the resistance that is there initially when you do a behavior for the first time. So that the next time that you do the behavior, you don't have to think too much about how to do it, and instead save all of that mental energy so that you can habituate that behavior. And what we don't know is we're not broken, we're not addicted, we're not monsters, we're not weak or powerless. None of that. We just took a fear-based approach. We just were fed the wrong information, that information fed with fear, with limiting beliefs that we are addicted, that we don't really have free will, that we can't choose properly or rationally instead of naturally moving on and just problem solving, analyzing, reflecting, and finding a way naturally. And an interesting study that really drives this point home is the Rat Park study. It was one of the most famous experiments about addiction, which was done in the 1970s. Because in earlier studies, as we can see right here, scientists would just put a rat inside of a small cage alone with just two different water bottles. For example, one will be plain water And one will be water laced with morphine, a drug. And so the rats often chose the drug water until they overdosed or died. And this was used as evidence, and it still is to this day, sadly, to prove that drugs are just irresistibly addictive. But the rat park study came in to challenge that narrative. So they built what we call a rat park, which was a large stimulating cage with toys, food, other rats they could socialize with and mate with, just like in a normal natural environment for rats. And they compared them to cage rats, as we can see here. And in this study, they found that the rats that were isolated would, would drink 16 to 19 times more of the drug solution, of the drug water, compared to the rats that were in the rat park in the natural environment. Environment. And they even took the isolated rats that had drank that drugged water and put them in the rat park, and they ended up reducing the intake by about 75% just because of the environment. So as you can see, here's the study. And I want to point out an ex-opiate user story in Alfred Lindsmith's book, Opiate Addiction. That story is very interesting because there was an ex-opiate user that claimed that she was heavily addicted to opiates. Opiates are known as painkiller drugs that a lot of people get hooked on and sometimes overdosed on. And she said to the doctor that after the surgery, if she's in pain, please don't give me opiates because I don't want to get withdrawals again and go back into my opiate addiction because I used to be really, really addicted and it ruined my life essentially. Now I'm just paraphrasing what she said. So they did the surgery. But towards the end of the surgery, she actually was in a lot of pain. So the doctor did something since opiates are known to be effective painkillers. And most people that consume opiates recreatively use them in like pills versions or powder versions. And so the doctor simply took a liquid form of opiates. So she couldn't know that it was opiates and gave it to her and she consumed it, completely relieved the pain. She felt good, not in pain anymore. And she thanked the doctor saying, thank you for not using opiates as I requested, I didn't want to fall back into the addiction, but she didn't know that she actually just consumed opiates. But simply from the fact that she didn't know, simply because of that, she never experienced withdrawals. She didn't feel sudden urges and temptations to go back to taking opiates, and she was completely clean, which shows that you need to be careful with the information you feed yourself, because a lot of quitting and recovery is a placebo problem that we really need to be careful off. And there's more studies that shows that humans naturally move on from drug usage themselves. So for example, the Vietnam Veteran Studies done by Lee Robbins in the 1970s to 1990s, where they saw that US soldiers reported that almost half of the US soldiers in Vietnam tried heroin, tried this hard drug, and over 20% of them became dependent on that drug according to criteria. And so that caused a lot of fears because they thought that the US soldiers will come back to America and will come back as junkies that were like addicted to drugs. So Lee Robbins and her team followed the US soldiers when they returned home, and they tracked their drug use essentially during the war and again after coming back to the US. And they found out that only 1 to 2% of them remained addicted long-term. Most of them simply stopped after getting back to the US. And that shows that as humans, we naturally move on from things if we don't have this recovery-like approach, this fear-based approach about around drugs as they didn't have that. And they naturally moved on as they had responsibilities, as they had families, and they decided it would be better to not keep this habit in their lives. And there's more research, surveys, studies, and evidence that I want you to look at. Gene Ehrman's work with his book Addiction: A Disorder of Choice in 2009 is a great way to completely change your mind around these ideas. And one of the largest here, the National Epidemiology Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions in the US. It's one of the largest US surveys ever done on alcohol, drug use, and mental health. They found that many people that met the criteria for dependence eventually quit or reduced use without any treatment at all. So what can you do? Look, if you consume this content, these NoFap strategies, these recovery videos talking about the science behind porn addiction, or these porn recovery coaches' content, be careful because there is this concept of self-fulfilling prophecy. If the only information I feed myself is information that could limit me, then I would act according to that, as this is the only thing that I believe in, and that there's no way for me to ever quit porn. So for example, let's say I'm in school and I believe that I'm a terrible student, that my brain doesn't work, my teachers have said that I'm dumb, and that I got told that I have ADHD, that I won't be able to focus, and I have all of these beliefs about myself. Guess what? It's going to be very hard for me to act against those beliefs because because that's what I believe in. I don't believe in anything else. Sure, I can use willpower and discipline, but I know that at one point I'm not going to be able to pass that because I have physical limitations that will block me from doing so. And these are what we call self-fulfilling prophecies, as they may not even be true, but you follow them and you get the results that comes from them, right? And so a lot of this is just placebos. You need to be careful because this is a placebo problem. People that don't believe in these ideas of recovery, addiction, dopamine, and don't take that approach and actually move on. And those that do take that approach take longer to recover, take years of constantly trying and fighting and not making progress in their own lives towards their own projects because they believe that they're being held back by this addiction. They think that they're dopamine junkies and that they can't do much else and that they basically lost their free will. And this is extremely self-destructive, so be careful of that. So here's my advice to you: take a break from NoFap content. Take a break from watching videos on how to— take a break from trying to be on a NoFap streak, trying to quit porn and counting your days and making it the center of your life. And instead, I want you to start letting go of that. Don't make it part of your identity anymore. And you'll see that you'll naturally move on and that those chains that came from your worry, from these ideas of addiction, from dopamine, from urges, from losing your free will, from losing control over your own self, from doing things against your own will will slowly but surely start to disappear. And now you'll just be faced with making proper analysis, problem solving, finding a way out naturally, and focusing on more important aspects of your life. Maybe that's going to be you deciding to go and focus on fitness, on business, on faith, and things that are way more important. And this is my advice, guys. Please be careful with what you feed yourself with on the internet, because again, it can simply be a placebo problem that you have and not a porn addiction problem. Be careful of the false information that you consume.