How To Quit Porn
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Dr. David Smith - How To Quit Porn (2nd Edition)
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Exercise
Don’t push your body to the limits, but make sure you get regular exercise. The key is to be consistent and regular. Yoga can be beneficial. Even going for a walk, especially in nature, can be beneficial for your mental health. Small things count too, whether it be walking to work instead of driving, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Always remember that the purpose of exercise is to be healthy and fit. It should not be overdone. You don’t want to damage your body. Relapses happen oftentimes due to an excess of stored energy, like in the case of a sedentary lifestyle. The energy in semen is not used and will need to find an outlet. It is best to spend that energy improving your body’s physical health. Sleep In the early stages of recovery, you may feel the need to get as much sleep as possible, even 10 hours a day or more. Listen to what your body wants – trust that it knows what is good for you. This need for large amounts of sleep is often the body’s way of compensating for overstimulation and sexual exhaustion. As time goes on, you will feel even better on just a normal amount of sleep. Some general advice to sleep better: wear an eye mask to block out all the light, use an air filter or some white noise generator if your room is too loud, put sheets under your door to block out outside noise, and/or perform a meditation or hypnosis if you are having trouble falling asleep. Make sure to get into a regular sleep schedule and routine. Make a strict rule of no electronic devices near you or screens before bedtime. Electronic devices make it harder to fall asleep and can cause your sleep to be less deep. Most importantly, never give yourself the possibility to watch porn late into the night. For many people, urges come at certain points in time repeatedly, like at nighttime before bed, especially if they are alone. Unfortunately, a single night of staying up late can ruin a well-cultivated sleep schedule. Think carefully and try to avoid these situations as best as possible. High quality sleep is important for building discipline, energy, and creating semen. This is especially critical when recovering from addiction. Get in the good habit of sleeping early and waking up early. Once you wake up, get out of bed immediately. Lying in bed can set the tone for a lousy day to come. Even more dangerously, you run the risk of having wet dreams if you fall back to sleep. And if you get a wet dream during the night, it can be difficult to wake up early. Give yourself a margin of comfort. During sleep, there is the risk of having wet dreams, or nocturnal discharge. Generally, this occurs during a period of abstinence after sexual thoughts arise. Avoid this as best you can. Don’t hold in pee, let it out. If it is early in the morning, don’t go back to sleep, just get up. Wet dreams usually happen after you have had around a full night of sleep, in the early morning near when it is time to wake up. This is especially true for unnecessary wet dreams. Make the choice to get up once there is light outside. Even if you could sleep a little more, it is not worth the risk. To minimize the occurrence of wet dreams, follow the proper ways of sleeping. Sleep early and wake up early. Wear loose fitting pants and put a pillow between your legs to avoid stimulation. Sleep on your side. Do not sleep on your stomach. Sleeping on your stomach will greatly increase the probability of having a wet dream. Take extreme measures if necessary – go to sleep with a backpack on your stomach if you think you need to. This discussion continues in the following section. Issues with Wet Dreams Wet dreams are a tricky topic. They can make recovery more difficult because of the chaser effect that primes the brain for sexual activity, as well as the loss of energy that results from a release of bodily fluids, which can be as painful and draining as masturbating. When going for a full recovery, they are likely to happen as the brain adjusts to less sexual stimulation, no matter how careful you are. The goal I would advocate is minimization of wet dreams. To a certain extent, you can control their frequency. This is achieved in multiple ways. Avoid thinking sexual thoughts and get rid of them as soon as you realize you have them. The longer you keep thinking arousing thoughts, the more semen you are building up that is ready for release. Wet dreams will often follow the night after almost ejaculating or being exposed to sexual imagery. Wet dreams are your body’s way of maintaining a balance. Wet dreams may happen earlier on as the body starts releasing less and feels like it needs to find an outlet. As the body gets used to storing the energy rather than throwing it away, the problem with wet dreams will gradually go away with time. There will be no excess of semen buildup if you do not masturbate. If you avoid sexual thoughts and go several months, trust that your body has a healthy way to deal with everything. There will be no consequences, only benefits, for not masturbating. Especially for the following days after a wet dream, you may be tired or be especially tempted by going back to porn through sudden urges. Be on high alert, as this can lead you back into past negative behaviors. Wet dreams often prime the brain to have sexual thoughts. Be especially careful in the following 3 days, where strong urges may arise from nothing. You need to avoid this chaser effect. Wet dreams can lead to sexual thoughts and more wet dreams. Having multiple wet dreams in a short amount of time can be frustrating during recovery. As you have more and more wet dreams back to back, without any porn, masturbation, or orgasm in that time, the wet dreams will have a stronger triggering power. In this respect, as you become more successful, the challenge becomes more difficult and you have more to lose. On the plus side, wet dreams can signal recovery, a release of bad thoughts leaving the body. Without giving it too much thought or ascribing meaning to your dream, you can get a sense of what stage you are at in your reboot. The less pornographic and the more realistic and normal, the better. In their initial recovery, many addicts dream of searching through porn websites. Similar scenes or people from porn may show up at the beginning. When your dreams begin to reflect a healthy sexuality, you will see a return to normalcy in other aspects of your life as well. Eventually all the sexual images will go away, and you will have a greater proportion without any imagery at all. This is a good sign. To minimize the occurrence of wet dreams, follow the advice in the previous section on how to sleep well. Cold shower, especially cold water on the genital area, will help reduce frequency of wet dreams. Avoid wearing pants that are too tight. Sleep on your side. Have happy and non-sexual thoughts on your mind when you sleep. After a period of abstinence, just seeing sexual content for a short moment, even if by accident, can trigger a wet dream. Make sure you avoid getting aroused, even in your sleep, since wet dreams reflect the state of your subconscious mind. Be very prepared in days following a wet dream. Go through the day with a strong presence of mind. Wet dreams bring the mind closer to its past state of binge watching and multiple ejaculations. Do everything in your power to resist. The day after will be the hardest, and the difficulty slowly decays over time. Wet dreams are still mostly out of your control, so don’t worry too much. Prioritize the intent to recover and control everything you can. The result will follow. Wet dreams are generally an unavoidable part of a reboot and are a double-edged sword. But do what you can to prevent them, and do not let them ruin your recovery or affect your actions during your waking hours. How to Handle a Relapse For many people who eventually quit porn, occasional relapses are part of the process in the earlier stages. To make progress, you must prepare for, be able to handle, and learn from any relapses. Do everything in your power to avoid relapsing in the first place, but understand how to handle the situation if you do relapse. The very first thing after a relapse is to make sure that you do not relapse again. Make it impossible to relapse the same way. Block inappropriate content, leave your electronic devices, and don’t be by yourself. Be on high alert, as there may still be sexual thoughts on the mind. The next few days you must be vigilant. Relapses are very bad. Try to avoid relapsing at all costs, as this is unquestionably a setback to progress. But don’t beat yourself up after the fact. Not all progress is lost. You still will be closer to recovery after taking two steps forward and one back. Reflect on your past streak – what you did well and what you think you could have done better. Then ignore the sunk costs and proceed forward without any loss of enthusiasm. In the worst times when you are down, things are not as bad as they seem. The challenge is in handling a relapse properly. In porn addiction, the physical and mental aspects are closely intertwined. You have to be successful at dealing with both. Relapses are the same way, where it may be frustrating to have had a moment of mental weakness and know that you will feel the physical consequences after the fact. Relapses can be incredibly frustrating and also physically uncomfortable. After a meaningful streak, it may feel that things were going so well up until that point. Once you felt progress, it slipped away. Take this as a point of motivation. You were close and got a taste of a better life without porn. You should try to achieve a long streak once again and enjoy those benefits. Quickly pick yourself up and don’t be too harsh on yourself. When everything seems negative, try to take a positive lens. The hardest times are often immediately following a relapse. Understand there often will be negative thoughts and mood swings, simply a part of the process. As long as you are seeing improvement, you are still on your way to a better life. Don’t be frustrated if you are doing your best to avoid going back. Many people will stumble. It is important that you don’t fall back into old behaviors. The worst thing you can do is keep watching porn. Focus on moving forward. Your progress does not get completely reset. Learn from your mistakes and see if there is anything you can be doing differently. Understand what the trigger was for the relapse. Study what led up to it and don’t feel a need to punish yourself immediately afterwards. There probably will need to be some decisive action to ensure the relapse does not happen again. This will be something you will need to refine for your individual situation, and it will turn out to be a valuable learning experience. Never let the relapse drag you down the slippery slope. Just because you messed up once, that does not give you any reason to watch porn ever again. Do not seek out any form of porn or porn substitutes in the following days. It requires strength of mind to resist any cravings, as well as proper action to make it impossible to relapse in the same way. If you aren’t careful, it will be easy to relapse multiple times, never getting streaks longer than a few days. Know that initially, urges may increase as you abstain, peaking close to the two-week mark. An impulse to watch porn may increase, but rationalize this, knowing that there is no true interest to watch. Changes in behavioral patterns may feel unnatural or uncomfortable. It requires deliberate choice and conscious effort to make the change, as well as the determination to follow through. You can do it. To summarize, relapsing will lose some, but not all of your progress. Take it as a lesson. Learn from any mistakes you may have made. The best thing is always to avoid relapsing in the first place. The next best thing is to never relapse again. When you are close to relapse, think about what you have to lose and how you will feel afterwards. Try everything you can to not relapse. Dealing with Pain or Discomforts If you are feeling physical discomfort, you have probably had a more serious struggle with addiction. But not to worry. Symptoms will go away, either over time by themselves or with the help of medical professionals. Make sure you understand what the problem is for you, whether it is mental discomfort brought about by an addictive behavior, or an actual loss of semen that has weakened your body. Thinking about it through a lens of potential causes can help you make sense of it. In online rebooting communities, there are surprisingly plentiful threads where people discuss their symptoms, where people have odd symptoms that wouldn’t initially seem related to porn or masturbation, yet these symptoms are shared in common with plenty of other porn addicts. You may find that this explains a lot. Remember that masturbation affects your whole body, and porn keeps it out of whack by encouraging more masturbation. The more you have masturbated, the more energy the body needs to spend to create semen. Over time this can create physical symptoms, weakness in the body, anhedonia, cravings, and/or feelings of pressure in the head (headaches, feeling of fluid moving inside head). These all go away with time. As you get more into your reboot and achieve longer streaks, on average the recovery time and severity of a relapse will get better. In the moment, you may feel terrible and think that you always feel like that, but that biases your mind from making an accurate assessment. Realize these physical symptoms are surprisingly common. Many people do not ascribe these symptoms to the right cause. If these symptoms got worse as your porn use increased, very likely they will go away with abstinence also. As you recover, the trend will clearly be towards feeling better over time. But the process is nonlinear. Some days will be much harder than others. Be strong and develop the ability to handle what is in your control. Realize there is a lag between your actions and feeling the results. When you feel like you have a problem with porn, very likely you are already feeling the physical symptoms from many years of addiction. Even when you quit, this discomfort will not subside immediately. Realize that this is due to the lag, but you will feel better down the road. It gradually gets better, then all of a sudden, it fades away. It seems like a switch goes off as suddenly everything feels like the way it should be. There is always a temporary discomfort when something that has been mentally stimulating for a long period of time is suddenly removed. This can be off-putting in the moment, but take it as a positive sign, knowing you have room to recover and are starting to do just that. Semen retention is part of the recovery from porn addiction. Your body knows how to manage semen, which does not require masturbation on your part. Trust that your body is strong and adaptive, able to handle these difficult situations. Porn is an artificial stimulant that encourages your body to release far more than it naturally would. When this unhealthy behavior becomes prolonged over extensive periods of time, your body overexerts itself, causing you to live in a perpetual state of exhaustion. Then your body tries to save energy, to the point where your brain is no longer functioning properly, instead stuck in a weakened and more lifeless state. While sometimes overstated, semen retention is important for those who have been drained of their vitality. Section 4: The Joys of Freedom Being free is the ultimate noble pursuit in life and the destination when realizing a state of self- actualization. Everything you work for is towards a freedom of a certain kind. We pursue financial freedom, not to accrue an excess of wealth, but to be free to do what we want and not be forced to doing what we do not want. We fight for social freedom – the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We want to have freedom of thought. To be able to think with our own mind, without constantly having thoughts pounded into us on what we should believe. Sexual freedom is just as vital to our well-being as everything else. Contrary to what certain people try to tell you, porn takes away all your independence and ability to make your own sexual decisions, taking away your ability to feel love and keeping you dependent on virtual images with whom you have no interaction with in real life. To be free, you do not want to be held back by porn. Take away the artificial shackles placed upon you and free yourself of the needless burden. You don’t want to live constantly getting urges and feeling forced to satisfy them. Porn addiction is a violation of all forms of freedom and must be dealt with the same intensity as one would respond to any other form of injustice or oppression. Freedom from addiction is a gradual but noticeable change in perception, energy, and attitude towards the world. Those who have had a more severe addiction, spent longer suffering, or have been off and on, may be slower to realize the benefits. If you aren’t feeling the results or changes making a meaningful difference in your life, give it longer. Going back to porn is not an option. Everything will only become worse if you watch porn. Remember that when quitting, you may initially feel worse because of withdrawal symptoms, but these are such a small and temporary effect. A full and lasting recovery may take a few years. To avoid being intimidated by potentially long timeframes, just take it one day at a time, and notice the improvements that you make. This will make you want to continue pushing forward. Thomas Hobbes stated that in a state of ignorance, the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In a default state of nature, that may be the case. Porn actively reinforces the lowest and most primal of human tendencies. It perpetuates an excessive amount of sexual activity, activating certain neural circuits that simultaneously promote crude human behaviors such as anger and violence, while leaving you with a lower state of perception that may descend into derealization and depersonalization. Actively fight against that tendency knowing that you can do better with your life. Thinking in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, only when your basic needs are met can you advance to higher pursuits. To genuinely feel happy and free, and be in a good position in life, requires a minimum level of existence to be met. When you have frequent sexual obsessions and cravings, you will be frustrated that the need of sex will never be satisfied. Rise higher and replace those cravings with real sexual desire, and only then you can be truly satisfied. Live your life on your own terms. Be free from that diseased state of mind. |
