The only true way to quit porn
I’m going to try and distill 14 years of on and off porn quitting experience into one amazing article here. I hope this helps you.
Especially as men we are very used to not thinking or wanting to think about our emotions that much. With that said, it is vital that you touch ground with how you’re actually feeling after every porn session. Probably not that good on some level. You try and try but fail each time, feeling more hopeless each time.
There is truly a right, and a wrong way to quit porn. If you don’t, or don’t want to address the real underlying issues behind your porn addiction, you are fucked from the start.
Characteristics of failed attempts to quit porn:
- Trying to get through it with ‘willpower’
- Believing somewhere inside of you that you are giving something up, rather than moving toward something much more beautiful
- Being unable to get out of your own head and emotional experience
- Thinking the rest of your life will be as bad as the withdrawal phase from porn
Characteristics of successful attempts to quit porn:
- Not wanting to even entertain the thought of using porn again
- Wondering what the heck made you do it so long
- Genuinely understanding that you never truly enjoyed porn, and that your psychology was broken
- Having true faith that every day you are porn-free, life will continue to get better until your brain is healed
Willpower
The willpower '''method''' is fundamentally, 100% the completely wrong approach to this issue. Anyone attempting this '''method''' is destined for complete failure. This method is what you see from a lot of teenagers in the NoFap community. I was there too, good intention but fundamentally completely flawed idea. Get this out of your head as soon as possible.
As long as you think you are genuinely giving something up, you will always come back to porn. Furthermore, even once you have fully absorbed the theory behind the EasyWay/EasyPeasy method (highly recommended), you might still not feel like there’s something better waiting for you on the other side.
Watch Allen Carr break it down. This advice fundamentally applies to any addiction:
The theory is vital. You are not giving up anything at all. You quite literally will enjoy life in a greater way you could have never imagined if you quit porn.
It’s like living life in HD. Every day that goes by as your brain rewires to real life, real partners and real opportunities become more and more alluring, and you feel your old porn habit dissolve away and you wonder what the heck you were even doing that entire time.
Wow, that sounds pretty good! Why the fuck are you limiting it to some bullshit 90 day TikTok meme challenge then? Your brain more than likely won’t be fully healed after 90 days anyway, so you haven’t even seen how beautiful reality truly can be after that short challenge. If you even make it that far.
Sure some people can use porn '''responsibly'''. They might watch it once a week for a short period of time, it doesn’t occupy any of their mind and they have a successful life otherwise. You’re probably here because you watch it every day for several hours in a deliberate ritual of self-pleasure, while your life crumbles around you, and you wonder why you’re starting to think about anti-depressants.
This is a real, serious issue for you. This is a hard lifestyle change and a conscious choice to shun what has come before in your life. Stop thinking about streaks, stop thinking about challenges, stop thinking about willpower. You don’t do the ‘90 day don’t drink bleach challenge’, or the ‘90 day don’t jump off of a building challenge’, do you?
Get out of your head, can you concieve of a better reality
If you have been using porn for a really really long time, you have forgotten how good real life and real emotions can feel. You just have. Your existence has become so delusional compared to how healthy minds see the world and you don’t even realise it.
It’s that complete lack of energy. That apathy toward doing anything positive in your life. Maintaining your other bad habits alongside your porn habit. Feeling completely stuck in the rut. It’s genuinely a mental illness, like you have dementia for enjoying your life. Don’t worry, it’s fully reversible.
Get out of your head. Not everyone lives and experiences life like this at all. It was never written in the stars that your emotional experience day to day has to be like this at all. You have always, always been choosing to re-engage with porn after every session, no matter how much you hated it in the moment each and every time. But it’s hard because we become trapped by our own thoughts and beliefs on how the world works. Porn doesn’t have to hurt you any more, you could completely stop watching porn from today and for the rest of your life going forward. It’s always been your choice.
I’m a fan of certain methods for getting some real perspective on what life is actually about. A strong meditation practice for a long time also works. Ultimately something that shocks you into rethinking your life and where you’re going is going to be beneficial. I know how hard it is to change your psychology very well. You must persist and realise the futility of this back and forth start and stop pattern of thinking, if you are trapped there. It’s much easier said than done though.
Get serious
If you’re like me, you have been trying to stop this for a really long time now. Each time you fail after a streak though, you feel really bad like you’re a failure, and sink back into more apathy and bad habits, giving up temporarily on giving a shit for a while.
Get fucking serious. You have wanted to quit for absolutely ages. Progress is non linear, it’s true. Failures are brutal. But that pit of despair you are in is a worse hell than being free from this addiction, believe me.
It’s cliche, easier said than done, but never give up the fight. Always reevaluate how you are approaching this issue.
![A line graph generally increasing positively but with a squiggly line to show that progress is chaotic sometimes](/_astro/healing.Ibsjofwy_2uROw8.webp)
Do you really enjoy porn?
Ask yourself: do I really enjoy porn? Like really enjoy it?
Remember the only reason you even see value in pornography is because of how warped and perverted your mind has become due to constant exposure over a long time to it.
If you could go back in time and prevent yourself from ever becoming a pornography addict, you would say yes in a heartbeat. Given you are where you are now, all you can and should do is begin to unpick the horrible prison you have built in your mind.
Do a cost benefit analysis in your head. It’s pretty simple:
Advantages of porn:
- percieved: The long feelings of dopamine release, pleasure and eventual orgasm (that you have conditioned yourself to enjoy that isn’t standard psychology by any means)
- reality: There are no actual benefits to pornography and you can enjoy real life in a far more rich and meaningful way like other people without the mental illness that is addiction
Disadvantages of porn:
Seriously, the ONLY '''advantage''' of porn is the percieved enjoyment you get from your sessions. You know that you are wasting your time, killing your soul, have ED, have no energy for work and play, can’t enjoy anything else in your life, can’t communicate effectively with other human beings, genuinely haven’t smiled and felt good about it in ages. You know. You know the truth on some level. You cannot name another percieved or real advantage of pornography, because there are none. Porn fundamentally works on the same brain pathways as a drug like cocaine. You are a drug addict.
And you have felt that way for so long, and your soul has been hurting for so long that you can’t see a way out of the pit of despair. This is real fucking shit. It’s about as real as it gets. You might have started using other substances just to feel anything.
Do you really enjoy this existence? If so, choose to keep watching porn.
Or you can be brave, and change your emotional state of existence once and for all and take the leap of faith into a porn-free life, rediscovering pleasures and simple joys that you never thought were possible, or that you’d see again.
Practical non-advice
Porn blockers
If you need a porn blocker to filter your internet, you fucked up. Before you know it your ritual will involve disabling your porn-blocker every time you want to watch porn. You haven’t addressed the reasons why you watch porn, you are using a technological '''solution''' that won’t do a damn thing for you.
Oh noooo, I’m using a device without my pwecious filters on it!!! I am going to relapse!!! NoFap advice pwease!!! Stop it.
If your psychology is genuinely like ‘if I see porn, I am going to relapse’ then you have already failed, because you don’t think you’re in control, you think some sexualised pixels on a screen still has control over your own agency to make your own decisions not to commit disasterous self-harm.
Counting streaks (days free from porn)
If you’re in the 90 day TikTok challenge mindset, you fucked up. If you can keep track of days in a responsible way where it’s no big deal and just out of personal interest to see how you are feeling on a given number of days porn-free, all the more power to you, it’s harmless.
Some people believe counting days leads them to fail more often. What the fuck are they on about? It’s your decision to watch porn that leads you to relapse, not keeping track of a number of days. It’s absurd the mental gymnastics that people undergo when they are disappointed in their own actions, finding some weird rationale for why they failed rather than the actual cause.
No phone in bed
This might be good advice for other, unrelated reasons. Again though, it’s your choice every time to watch porn. Are you gonna spend the rest of your life running scared just because you are on your phone in bed? Are you gonna rewapse?
Into the unknown
Once you fix your psychology, being porn-free is easy. It’s the easiest thing ever. You will make inside jokes that only you know about, trying to make light of how brutal this addiction has treated you over the years in the past.
If it took a decade to engineer the greatest addiction prison in your mind, don’t be surprised that it takes more than 90 days to rewire your brain. The highest estimate I have heard is three years for a full rewiring. This shit takes so much time.
But it doesn’t take effort. There is no effort involved in choosing not to sabotage your happiness. Once you have married both the theory of quitting porn addiction (the EasyPeasy method) with the emotions of not wanting to be a slave anymore, there is nowhere left to run for this addiction. It’s game over. You couldn’t be a porn addict anymore, it’s impossible.
Every day of freedom that goes by, you will feel slightly different each day. Some days you feel terrible like you’re detoxing from a hard drug. Other days you feel elated and on top of the world. The trend is gradually positive, and upward. It’s like becoming high on life and letting your old rules about how you thought the world worked dissolve each day, as your old self slips away into the ether.
If you can embrace who you are becoming and not be scared of the change, you are going to do just great.