So I’m a bit overdue for my update.

Things have been up and down, although my sleep has been pretty bad. I need to improve that a lot, and I think it will help me in many different ways. My apartment is a mess with tons of boxes everywhere - I really need to throw away the empty boxes and organize my things. I turn 36 this weekend, ugh.

I slept with a woman the other day, but I don’t think I want to see her again. She was fairly insistent on me not using a condom, but I was insistent that I did, so I did.

Anyway, I wasn’t into her, and I felt very disconnected from it all. I had the same performance that I have traditionally had - lasting an insane 90+ minutes while not really feeling any pleasure, and her being amazed and thinking it’s the best thing ever. I know it was that long because we had started watching the movie Idiocracy and moved to the bdroom around the scene where the protagonist goes to the “doctor” who freaks out that he doesn’t have a bar code tattoo, and it lasted beyond the end of the movie, and through 2 episodes of Rick & Morty that autoplayed in the background. Maybe it was closer to 2 hours? But anyway, it wasn’t pleasurable for me, and she tried to persuade me to stay over which was definitely not happening. I knew I wasn’t really into her - wasn’t into her body type - also, she is separated (but lives alone), so I really shouldn’t have slept with her. She said she wasn’t looking for anything serious so I don’t think she’ll be too upset.

There have been other times since starting this journey, where I was able to come in a normal amount of time, and one time actually, too quickly. The (almost pleasureless) premature ejaculation was around a few weeks or a month after I first started all this, during an upswing. There have been lots of times when I had full upswings, and I felt the full and normal amount of pleasure when I was by myself - this almost never happened until I started doing the program stuff (except for a few times on or right after vacations.) It was mind-blowing and made me see that eventually it will be like that all the time again.

I have ups and downs - although, tbh, I had been fapping almost daily (probably 11 of 14 days) leading up to that date and it seems like after a certain number of days of that, it has a very large negative effect. I was in a depleted and less sensitive state from overstimulating myself, I guess. I think that that is having a big negative impact on my overall progress, so I still need to fix that in addition to everything else I’m juggling. The other huge thing is sleep - I feel foggy (as I did on the date) when I get less than 7 hours of sleep per night. Ideally I should be getting around 8 hours, and I think that would help me make progress faster.

If I did everything great, 8 hours of sleep per night, not fapping, and if I started hitting the gym 6 days per week, I would probably heal in like 6 more months. I’m guessing it will take 2 or 3 times as long if I am less disciplined. Sometimes I feel like I’m not really making progress at all, but I know that I will get there eventually. It would also help a lot if I was with someone I cared about and was attracted to and into.

My gym closed at the end of August, and it took me over a week to sign up for a new gym and start going there. This gym is half the price of my old gym, has more and newer equipment, and is a very short walk from my apartment, right by the office where I work. But there were still about 2 weeks where I didn’t go to the gym at all, and that’s not good. I didn’t lose any muscular size, but I shouldn’t slack off.

I’ve been focusing a lot on trying to get a new job to move back to the city I want to live in, and my business stuff. I’m not going to view this recent encounter as a big setback, but it was disappointing.

That’s the update for now; I will provide another update when I feel like it, maybe later this month or maybe next month.