I'm 21 years old, male. I started masturbating when I was 13, along with watching porn.
The fapping problem: my first year of doing it was uncontrollable. I was doing it 3 times a day, but over time it went down to once every two days, then once every three days. But there was something worse than that.
I'm an introvert who lives in my own head rather than with the people around me, and I was heavily ashamed of what I was doing because I'm a religious person. My inability to control the masturbation made me go insane with anxiety, and it made me believe that every time I did it, the next day would be nothing but a jinx because God hated me. I held that belief for 3 years until I realized it was fake.
The reason it took me so long to learn anything was that I didn't have easy access to the internet, and I kept all my problems to myself and never told my parents about them.
That anxiety ruined me. I was even scared when there were women around me, because I was afraid I was a pervert or that I would harass them. I'm slowly recovering from that anxiety through self-reflection.
I don't think the solution to my problem is to focus on a hobby, because I have tried many hobbies and failed. I'm a curious person who lives in his head and will touch any thought. I can go a week without masturbating if I don't have sexual thoughts or watch something horny.
The porn problem: I started watching porn a month after I started masturbating, all thanks to my classmates. At first I was disgusted and didn't like it, but I forced myself to watch it because everyone else liked it. Watching porn was unstable. I didn't know what I liked, and I only watched for brief moments; I can't go for more than 5 minutes. Over time, watching it became harder because I started feeling that it was meaningless, and I didn't know why people like it and make art out of it with passion. I'm glad my brothers didn't go through my hell.
Three days ago I started a new approach: believing that my emotions toward porn and erotica are not from me but are just bodily emotions unrelated to me. Its first positive outcome is that I stopped looking at women's bodies, and whenever I feel like masturbating, I don't fight the feeling like I did in the past; I just let it pass.
What I'm asking is: would my approach to stopping fapping help with my anxiety, my social anxiety, my mood, and my self-confidence, and help me know myself better?