Olympic No Fap Challenge
Olympic challenge
God, through his grace, has allowed me to overcome my addiction for a year and a half now, and in this year and a half I have noticed four very distinct phases of recovery. Each phase has forced me to do things differently.
This has given me an idea for a new no Fap challenge. I am calling this the Olympic Challenge because in the Olympics there are 4 awards given. The honorable mention, bronze, silver, and gold. Each award represents a distinct challenge that I faced in my no PMO journey.
So I Challenge you all to the OLYMPIC No Fap Challenge.
Honorable mention
If you watch the Olympics there are three medals given out of dozens of teams. Sometimes a fourth person does something really well, and even though he does not win a medal he deserves an honorable mention. The first challenge is the honorable mention challenge.
We want to do two things on this challenge. We want to find a mentor and we want to figure out our non-pornographic triggers.
This challenge is not about winning, this challenge is all about setting ourselves up for success.
Galatians 6:1 tells us “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness”
If you are reading this then you are overtaken in a fault. A mature Christian is supposed to restore you. But they cannot restore you if you do not share your fault with them. My no PMO journey started when I confessed my addiction to my pastor. But I spent three months building a relationship with him to the point where I felt I could share this very personal stuff with him. There had been times before this where I had confessed to people cold turkey my addiction but I had not built the relationship up to where they would be there for me. This time I did.
The Bible tells us that we are to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2) Forbear one another (Ephesians 4:2), to confess our faults one to another (James 5:16). If we track down someone we can do this with, we are setting ourselves up for success. We are preparing to fight our addiction 2 on 1.
I would say from the testimonies I have heard and read about people getting involved in porn the vast majority of people get involved because of isolation, or because of bad influence. A mature Christian who becomes a mentor would combat either one of those problems.
The other thing we want to do is figure out is our triggers. Anything that draws you to porn must go away. We live in a very sexualized culture so there are things that trigger your porn addiction that you are not aware of. I recommend a 3 day fast to figure out what those triggers are. Fast from food and media, only taking in water for three days (If you have a medical issue then adjust to what is appropriate for you). At the end of those 3 days when you go back to normal media you should be very sensitive to things that make you want to look at porn. Get this stuff out of your life.
This challenge is not about no PMO, its about preparing for your no PMO challenge.
Seriously if you can address the non porn things that bring you to porn then there is that much less stuff you have to fight when you go for your no PMO challenge.
And if you have a mentor right there with you, you will double your strength.
Ecc 4:9 Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.
Ecc 4:10 For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.
Bronze Challenge (the 90 day challenge)
The 90 day challenge is the most common no fap challenge out there. The reason being that in about 90 days your sexual drive should reboot to something much more manageable.
Generally this challenge says no masturbation or porn for 90 days. I have even read testimony where married men decide with their wives that they will not have sex in their marriage for 90 days so that they can totally reboot their system. So if you are a single guy and you are thinking about how much easier this is for married men, rethink that idea. Perhaps the single has it easier.
What happens is that viewing porn and masturbating causes the brain to release dopamine (one of the pleasure chemicals in the brain), so our brain gets really used to this dopamine bath because with porn we can continuously douse our brain in dopamine every time we look at porn. Well after we get in the habit of dosing our brain with dopamine daily or several times of day, the brain decides to fight for that dopamine, and when we give up PMO then the brain makes several withdrawal symptoms happen because it wants the dopamine. A good article on the subject can be found here http://bigthink.com/going-mental/is-your-brain-addicted-to-porn
Generally it takes about 90 days to get your brain off the dopamine addiction. Personally it took me a 110 days. I believe the longest it should take is about 120 days, and the shortest should be around 80 days.
I think its unwise to set the bar too high. Edging is unwise, but edging does not mean you have failed. Thinking about sex is unwise but it does not mean you have failed. Seeing something that makes you want to look at porn is unwise but does not mean you have failed.
In several Olympic running events if you cross the line you have failed. In our case, looking at porn or masturbating is crossing the line, and you have to start over. But edging, thinking about sex, seeing something that makes you want to look at porn, or even accidentally catching a glimpse of porn only means you are getting close to the line. Think of those things as warning signs instead of failures.
As time goes on you will experience less and less warning signs as you learn to stay away from them.
The reality is that during this 90 day challenge your mind will finally be able to process everything you have been putting in front of it for years. I don’t know how much of the 90 day challenge is about fighting lust, dealing with dopamine withdrawal, and just processing all the things that I saw that I knew wasn’t right to look at.
That said the gist of the bronze challenge is to get past the dopamine withdrawals which should take around 90 days.
Silver Challenge (Day 91-365)
Its really really easy to believe your porn problem is your only problem. There are tons of articles throughout Christian websites trying to guilt you into not lusting. But to be frank, if lust was the only wrong mindset you had then you would be able to easily deal with lust. The truth is that you have many wrong mindsets but lust hides those mindsets from you, and those mindsets feed your lust.
Truth is during the 90 day challenge you are going to on some level deal with those mindsets. But on the silver challenge you are going to define the mindsets that kept you addicted to porn.
For me one of the biggest things keeping me addicted to porn was envy. I envied all the people who could legally have sex in marriage, when I could not. In many ways I had to get past the 90 day challenge to deal with this.
Furthermore some of the underlying problems that will keep you addicted to porn will not necessarily be sin. One of my greatest problems was isolation. Another problem was curiosity. Another problem was a wrong view on intimacy. Another problem was a wrong view on physical touch. None of these are necessarily sins, but I was viewing all these things from the world’s perspective instead of God’s. As long as I viewed these non-sin things from the world’s perspective I was bound by porn.
Another problem was greed. I mean there are all these beautiful women in the world with different looks and different figures, and God wants me to just have one. Porn in a way gave me more than what God wanted to give me. Then I figured out what intimacy was and figured out porn with its millions of women gave me a fraction of what God wanted to give me with one. Seriously a good understanding of intimacy really really helped me with my addiction.
Really my silver challenge started on day 110 as my bronze challenge ended. I can remember it clearly. I got really angry. I decided that anything everyone ever told me about sex was a lie because I was not in a place to properly understand what they were saying.
If you went to the deep jungles of Africa where they have never seen a light bulb or car and explained to them how a computer worked, and how a computer could make a car work better, would they understand it, or would they not have the perspective to understand it?
I simply realized my perspective made it impossible for me to understand what they were saying so I, in anger, rejected everything ever told to me about the subject because there was nothing I could do about.
Everything but one thing. Marcy Aiken wrote in her book “The Crooked Stick” that God made sex to bring two people closer together than anything else could. So I made it a point that as a single person I will get as close to people as I can, because marriage and sex is about being closer to one person than anything else in the world. If I am not close to people as a single person then what’s the point of sex making you closer than anything else in the world?
Anger and grief are two great emotions to have during the silver challenge. The Bible says to be angry and sin not (ephesians 4:26). So anger is not a sin. Anger can lead to sin but it in itself is not a sin. In my case anger helped me deal with sin. Shouldn’t you get angry at sin in your life?
Greif is also a powerful motivator. Several times my heart was broken as I realized how broken my worldview was. That brokenness empowered me to change, instead of holding on to my old way of thinking.
Personally I feel that even though I grew up in a Christian home and was trained up as a child to bounce my eyes away from immodesty it was inevitable that I would become addicted to porn because of some of the world views I had.
The silver challenge is about tracking down and finding any world views that make it inevitable for you to fall back into sin.
Reading your Bible and praying is a must for this challenge. You want to figure out where your heart and the Bible do not align and then let the Lord change your heart. It is a slow process. You are looking for blind spots in your life. This challenge is given 9 months because it will take at least that long to figure out all the areas where you think wrongly just on sexual matters. As you find these areas your battle with porn will become much easier.
I kid you not, you will read something, and it will stick in your mind for 5 months before God shows you what your wrong mindsets are. Not because the idea is a hard thing, but because God’s mindset on the matter is so different than what you have always believed that it takes God 5 months to gently switch your mindset, and then you have an aha moment. And once you have that aha moment your battle with porn becomes much much easier because at this point in time you are not experiencing the dopamine withdrawals you are simply trying to look at the world like Christ would have you look at the world.
The silver challenge can be summed up this way, you have a lot of wrong mindsets. You look at a lot of things in the wrong way. Because you look at things the wrong way, especially sex, it is inevitable you will go back to porn even after the 90 day challenge. But God has a better way to look at things. You are taking 9 months to take God’s Word and figure out where you have mindsets that disagree with God and change them. Once changed porn becomes DRAMATICALLY easier to deal with. Some of these mindsets will change in the 90 day challenge, but most mindsets will be defined in the silver challenge. Having the right way of thinking is not enough here. You must define the right way of thinking about things for this challenge.
Writing down wrong mindsets and then the right mindset next to them will be a testimony to your success and I would ask as you find them post them. Or send me a message on my website.
Gold Challenge
If you are anything like me your porn addiction has forced you to run to God time and time again begging him to take away this sin. Or out of guilt you spend extra time in your Bible. Your porn addiction can turn your walk with God into a long conversation about forgiving you.
Then when you start getting this stuff straight in your life your Bible reading and prayer life switch into help me do right, and what wrong mindsets to I have in my life, and what are the right mindsets. And eventually God corrects the things that were wrong in your heart and mind. Like for me it was envy, isolation, greed, lust, curiosity about wrong things, etc.
Well once you are through this storm your walk with God is fundamentally different. It’s no longer about praying to God to forgive you for looking at porn, because it’s been more than a year. It’s no longer about God showing you why you are so tempted, because God has shown you why you are so tempted and you are nowhere near as tempted as you used to be. Because God dealt with your addiction the pressure on you is nothing like it once was so the things you always used to pray about and study about are dealt with. So where is your walk with God?
This is where I am now. The pressure that used to bring me to prayer and Bible reading are gone, so I am learning to enjoy God. I am not praying because I feel bad about pmo. I am praying because I want to talk to my savior. I am not reading my Bible just because I feel bad about PMO. I am reading my Bible because I want to enjoy my savior.
The truth is I do not read my Bible or pray as much as I used to because the foundation of why I used to read the Bible and pray are gone. The foundation before was my addiction. So I find myself with a need to build a new foundation. The way I figure it, when I die and go to heaven I will walk with Jesus. When I am in heaven I will not talk to Jesus about how sorry I am for PMO because there I will not be tempted. I Figure when I walk with Jesus in heaven that I will just enjoy his company.
So that is what I am doing now. Just learning to enjoy God’s company. This is the Gold Challenge. Building a new foundation for your walk with God where your walk with God is simply about enjoying God.
God, through his grace, has allowed me to overcome my addiction for a year and a half now, and in this year and a half I have noticed four very distinct phases of recovery. Each phase has forced me to do things differently.
This has given me an idea for a new no Fap challenge. I am calling this the Olympic Challenge because in the Olympics there are 4 awards given. The honorable mention, bronze, silver, and gold. Each award represents a distinct challenge that I faced in my no PMO journey.
So I Challenge you all to the OLYMPIC No Fap Challenge.
Honorable mention
If you watch the Olympics there are three medals given out of dozens of teams. Sometimes a fourth person does something really well, and even though he does not win a medal he deserves an honorable mention. The first challenge is the honorable mention challenge.
We want to do two things on this challenge. We want to find a mentor and we want to figure out our non-pornographic triggers.
This challenge is not about winning, this challenge is all about setting ourselves up for success.
Galatians 6:1 tells us “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness”
If you are reading this then you are overtaken in a fault. A mature Christian is supposed to restore you. But they cannot restore you if you do not share your fault with them. My no PMO journey started when I confessed my addiction to my pastor. But I spent three months building a relationship with him to the point where I felt I could share this very personal stuff with him. There had been times before this where I had confessed to people cold turkey my addiction but I had not built the relationship up to where they would be there for me. This time I did.
The Bible tells us that we are to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2) Forbear one another (Ephesians 4:2), to confess our faults one to another (James 5:16). If we track down someone we can do this with, we are setting ourselves up for success. We are preparing to fight our addiction 2 on 1.
I would say from the testimonies I have heard and read about people getting involved in porn the vast majority of people get involved because of isolation, or because of bad influence. A mature Christian who becomes a mentor would combat either one of those problems.
The other thing we want to do is figure out is our triggers. Anything that draws you to porn must go away. We live in a very sexualized culture so there are things that trigger your porn addiction that you are not aware of. I recommend a 3 day fast to figure out what those triggers are. Fast from food and media, only taking in water for three days (If you have a medical issue then adjust to what is appropriate for you). At the end of those 3 days when you go back to normal media you should be very sensitive to things that make you want to look at porn. Get this stuff out of your life.
This challenge is not about no PMO, its about preparing for your no PMO challenge.
Seriously if you can address the non porn things that bring you to porn then there is that much less stuff you have to fight when you go for your no PMO challenge.
And if you have a mentor right there with you, you will double your strength.
Ecc 4:9 Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.
Ecc 4:10 For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.
Bronze Challenge (the 90 day challenge)
The 90 day challenge is the most common no fap challenge out there. The reason being that in about 90 days your sexual drive should reboot to something much more manageable.
Generally this challenge says no masturbation or porn for 90 days. I have even read testimony where married men decide with their wives that they will not have sex in their marriage for 90 days so that they can totally reboot their system. So if you are a single guy and you are thinking about how much easier this is for married men, rethink that idea. Perhaps the single has it easier.
What happens is that viewing porn and masturbating causes the brain to release dopamine (one of the pleasure chemicals in the brain), so our brain gets really used to this dopamine bath because with porn we can continuously douse our brain in dopamine every time we look at porn. Well after we get in the habit of dosing our brain with dopamine daily or several times of day, the brain decides to fight for that dopamine, and when we give up PMO then the brain makes several withdrawal symptoms happen because it wants the dopamine. A good article on the subject can be found here http://bigthink.com/going-mental/is-your-brain-addicted-to-porn
Generally it takes about 90 days to get your brain off the dopamine addiction. Personally it took me a 110 days. I believe the longest it should take is about 120 days, and the shortest should be around 80 days.
I think its unwise to set the bar too high. Edging is unwise, but edging does not mean you have failed. Thinking about sex is unwise but it does not mean you have failed. Seeing something that makes you want to look at porn is unwise but does not mean you have failed.
In several Olympic running events if you cross the line you have failed. In our case, looking at porn or masturbating is crossing the line, and you have to start over. But edging, thinking about sex, seeing something that makes you want to look at porn, or even accidentally catching a glimpse of porn only means you are getting close to the line. Think of those things as warning signs instead of failures.
As time goes on you will experience less and less warning signs as you learn to stay away from them.
The reality is that during this 90 day challenge your mind will finally be able to process everything you have been putting in front of it for years. I don’t know how much of the 90 day challenge is about fighting lust, dealing with dopamine withdrawal, and just processing all the things that I saw that I knew wasn’t right to look at.
That said the gist of the bronze challenge is to get past the dopamine withdrawals which should take around 90 days.
Silver Challenge (Day 91-365)
Its really really easy to believe your porn problem is your only problem. There are tons of articles throughout Christian websites trying to guilt you into not lusting. But to be frank, if lust was the only wrong mindset you had then you would be able to easily deal with lust. The truth is that you have many wrong mindsets but lust hides those mindsets from you, and those mindsets feed your lust.
Truth is during the 90 day challenge you are going to on some level deal with those mindsets. But on the silver challenge you are going to define the mindsets that kept you addicted to porn.
For me one of the biggest things keeping me addicted to porn was envy. I envied all the people who could legally have sex in marriage, when I could not. In many ways I had to get past the 90 day challenge to deal with this.
Furthermore some of the underlying problems that will keep you addicted to porn will not necessarily be sin. One of my greatest problems was isolation. Another problem was curiosity. Another problem was a wrong view on intimacy. Another problem was a wrong view on physical touch. None of these are necessarily sins, but I was viewing all these things from the world’s perspective instead of God’s. As long as I viewed these non-sin things from the world’s perspective I was bound by porn.
Another problem was greed. I mean there are all these beautiful women in the world with different looks and different figures, and God wants me to just have one. Porn in a way gave me more than what God wanted to give me. Then I figured out what intimacy was and figured out porn with its millions of women gave me a fraction of what God wanted to give me with one. Seriously a good understanding of intimacy really really helped me with my addiction.
Really my silver challenge started on day 110 as my bronze challenge ended. I can remember it clearly. I got really angry. I decided that anything everyone ever told me about sex was a lie because I was not in a place to properly understand what they were saying.
If you went to the deep jungles of Africa where they have never seen a light bulb or car and explained to them how a computer worked, and how a computer could make a car work better, would they understand it, or would they not have the perspective to understand it?
I simply realized my perspective made it impossible for me to understand what they were saying so I, in anger, rejected everything ever told to me about the subject because there was nothing I could do about.
Everything but one thing. Marcy Aiken wrote in her book “The Crooked Stick” that God made sex to bring two people closer together than anything else could. So I made it a point that as a single person I will get as close to people as I can, because marriage and sex is about being closer to one person than anything else in the world. If I am not close to people as a single person then what’s the point of sex making you closer than anything else in the world?
Anger and grief are two great emotions to have during the silver challenge. The Bible says to be angry and sin not (ephesians 4:26). So anger is not a sin. Anger can lead to sin but it in itself is not a sin. In my case anger helped me deal with sin. Shouldn’t you get angry at sin in your life?
Greif is also a powerful motivator. Several times my heart was broken as I realized how broken my worldview was. That brokenness empowered me to change, instead of holding on to my old way of thinking.
Personally I feel that even though I grew up in a Christian home and was trained up as a child to bounce my eyes away from immodesty it was inevitable that I would become addicted to porn because of some of the world views I had.
The silver challenge is about tracking down and finding any world views that make it inevitable for you to fall back into sin.
Reading your Bible and praying is a must for this challenge. You want to figure out where your heart and the Bible do not align and then let the Lord change your heart. It is a slow process. You are looking for blind spots in your life. This challenge is given 9 months because it will take at least that long to figure out all the areas where you think wrongly just on sexual matters. As you find these areas your battle with porn will become much easier.
I kid you not, you will read something, and it will stick in your mind for 5 months before God shows you what your wrong mindsets are. Not because the idea is a hard thing, but because God’s mindset on the matter is so different than what you have always believed that it takes God 5 months to gently switch your mindset, and then you have an aha moment. And once you have that aha moment your battle with porn becomes much much easier because at this point in time you are not experiencing the dopamine withdrawals you are simply trying to look at the world like Christ would have you look at the world.
The silver challenge can be summed up this way, you have a lot of wrong mindsets. You look at a lot of things in the wrong way. Because you look at things the wrong way, especially sex, it is inevitable you will go back to porn even after the 90 day challenge. But God has a better way to look at things. You are taking 9 months to take God’s Word and figure out where you have mindsets that disagree with God and change them. Once changed porn becomes DRAMATICALLY easier to deal with. Some of these mindsets will change in the 90 day challenge, but most mindsets will be defined in the silver challenge. Having the right way of thinking is not enough here. You must define the right way of thinking about things for this challenge.
Writing down wrong mindsets and then the right mindset next to them will be a testimony to your success and I would ask as you find them post them. Or send me a message on my website.
Gold Challenge
If you are anything like me your porn addiction has forced you to run to God time and time again begging him to take away this sin. Or out of guilt you spend extra time in your Bible. Your porn addiction can turn your walk with God into a long conversation about forgiving you.
Then when you start getting this stuff straight in your life your Bible reading and prayer life switch into help me do right, and what wrong mindsets to I have in my life, and what are the right mindsets. And eventually God corrects the things that were wrong in your heart and mind. Like for me it was envy, isolation, greed, lust, curiosity about wrong things, etc.
Well once you are through this storm your walk with God is fundamentally different. It’s no longer about praying to God to forgive you for looking at porn, because it’s been more than a year. It’s no longer about God showing you why you are so tempted, because God has shown you why you are so tempted and you are nowhere near as tempted as you used to be. Because God dealt with your addiction the pressure on you is nothing like it once was so the things you always used to pray about and study about are dealt with. So where is your walk with God?
This is where I am now. The pressure that used to bring me to prayer and Bible reading are gone, so I am learning to enjoy God. I am not praying because I feel bad about pmo. I am praying because I want to talk to my savior. I am not reading my Bible just because I feel bad about PMO. I am reading my Bible because I want to enjoy my savior.
The truth is I do not read my Bible or pray as much as I used to because the foundation of why I used to read the Bible and pray are gone. The foundation before was my addiction. So I find myself with a need to build a new foundation. The way I figure it, when I die and go to heaven I will walk with Jesus. When I am in heaven I will not talk to Jesus about how sorry I am for PMO because there I will not be tempted. I Figure when I walk with Jesus in heaven that I will just enjoy his company.
So that is what I am doing now. Just learning to enjoy God’s company. This is the Gold Challenge. Building a new foundation for your walk with God where your walk with God is simply about enjoying God.