9 Simple Tips To Stop Watching Porn

Compelling Reasons Why You Should Quit Watching Porn  

Before we start, it’s essential to understand WHY you are trying to quit your pornography use. Yes, you probably have a good reason- but a few more compelling advantages to stop watching porn might motivate you to an even more significant commitment. If you don’t have a compelling reason to quit watching porn, well, these reasons might inspire you to consider eliminating pornography from your life seriously.    

6 Reasons To Kick Your Porn Addiction

Rebuild your self-image: Your self-image is severely damaged not by your pornography addiction but by the negative consequences of the habit. Usually, being addicted to porn usually involves living a double life- having to lie about your problem and hide it from your spouse, friends, and family. 

Bring back happiness into your life: Yes, it sounds cliché, but when you struggle with pornography addiction, your mind is mainly preoccupied with guilt, shame, depression, frustration, pain, and deep cravings. Both the desire for porn and the aversion to it lead to unhappiness. Quitting restores balance to your mind.    

Drive and will to succeed: The time spent watching porn subtracts from the time you could be spending on self-development, improving your skills for your career, or building healthy relationships. Incessant masturbation dulls testosterone level. Studies have shown that high testosterone levels equate to better performance at work, increased focus, and a strong desire and tenacity to succeed.    

Better intimate relationships: Porn addiction destroys relationships. There is no doubt about it. Most women are unaware of their partner’s porn addiction. Lying (not telling the whole truth) to cover up your addiction is enough to destroy a relationship with your spouse or significant other. 

Improved social life: It’s no surprise that your social life probably suffers greatly; you may not even know what it’s like to be social anymore. You may also feel as if you are socially inept. Quitting restores balance to your brain, which is the first step in improving your social life. 

Date a Quality Person: Many guys fantasize about women on their computer screens. They are beautiful women that most will probably never date. When you watch porn and masturbate, you don’t have a clear idea of what a “quality” partner is, what they desire sexually, how to attract them, and how to keep them. Quitting clears all the porn-induced fallacies from your mind.

Misdiagnoses of Pornography Addiction 

Mental health experts have determined that due to the lack of widespread awareness of pornography addiction, a lot of males are misdiagnosed by professionals as suffering from ADHD, social anxiety, performance anxiety, OCD, and depression, among others.

These are all symptoms of a porn addiction. 

Sadly, they are often medicated for these other mental health issues without ever realizing the root cause of their addiction. If you are misdiagnosed, quitting could be the first step in taking back control of this part of your life, and we want to help you do so!

What Is Considered Porn Addiction?

A porn addiction means you can’t break free from the habit of watching porn, even when you want to. The intricate interplay of triggers and responses within the brain compels a person to indulge in this addictive behavior. This relentless urge significantly disrupts various aspects of life, including work, relationships, and daily routines, as the brain triggers arousal, fostering a compulsive need to engage in watching porn.

Why Does Porn Addiction Happen?

Know that just because you do something does not mean that you want to do it or enjoy doing it. Mental health experts describe a neuro-chemical process in our brains called “the reward cycle.” This process keeps track of activities and their contexts, resulting in “positive” brain states.

When you watch porn, masturbate, have sex, or even eat food that has high fat, salt, and sugar content, your brain releases tremendous “feel-good” chemicals. This is why sexual behavior feels fantastic; it’s nature’s way of encouraging these activities.  

But, when we engage in these activities, our brains log the context and activities we were engaged in when (and just before) these chemicals were released. Eventually, these contexts and activities trigger our brains to crave the release of these feel-good chemicals. 

This is why fast-food places have bright colors and pipe their smells into the environment; it’s a trigger. Often, the rewards cycle gets messed up because we “self-medicate” with pornography or food so that the feel-good chemicals cover up loneliness, depression, or something else.

Whenever you encounter a trigger, like a trained monkey, you feel compelled to watch pornography even though you don’t want to. Porn addiction is a vicious cycle that constantly needs feeding.

How Can I End My Porn Addiction?

A big challenge for people with a porn addiction is staying away from porn for a long period. This is a fundamental goal of most people. 

You may be familiar with some of the suggestions here- the only difference is HOW you apply them to your life.    

I recommend implementing one or two of these steps in your life daily. It will take you a week or two to carry out every step. During that time, you will probably still relapse and watch porn, but by the end of 7- 14 days, you will have taken numerous consecutive steps and a handful of coping skills that you have NEVER taken action on before this. Remember that not all coping skills will prevent a relapse, but they will undoubtedly be helpful at some point. 

These essential steps MUST be done to successfully quit porn in the long run. There are no shortcuts around these. Skipping any of these steps inevitably leads to failure.    

9 Vital Steps to Stop Watching Porn

1. Identify your triggers

A trigger is anything that activates your desire to view pornography. There’s a popular acronym used by mental health professionals to help identify triggers. The acronym is HALT. It stands for
-Hungry
–Anger
-Loneliness
-Tired
Mental health specialists identify these as common triggers in battling behavioral addiction. To determine your triggers go through your day and pay attention to the situations and activities that cause you to start thinking about sex, porn use, and masturbation.  

Trigger Exercise: 
What are some of your most common triggers? Is it the things above, or is it specific times in the day, or conflict, or stress? Is it scrolling through social media? It could be anything; take some time to determine your triggers.    

Strategically plan to thwart your triggers:
The obvious next step to creating a porn free life is avoiding triggers. If seeing semi-erotic Instagram profiles is a trigger, delete Instagram. If you cannot reasonably avoid a trigger, plan how you will thwart the trigger’s effect on you. If stress is a trigger, develop effective coping mechanisms that will help relieve the stress or distract yourself until the stressful situation has passed.    

2. Stay the course

Remember, this is addiction treatment where we are attempting to rewire your brain. It took time to wire your brain up this way, and it will take time to rewire it. You will probably fail a lot, and you will find that succeeding is much, much more complicated than failing. 

Rest assured that, with time, the effects of these triggers can and will dissipate to the point where it is easier to manage them. Like other behavioral addictions, though, they may never be completely gone. You may always need to be vigilant and avoid strip clubs or other strong triggers.

3. Create Accountability

A porn habit develops in secret. Hence, developing accountability is an essential aspect of cultivating a porn free life. People and support groups make us accountable to others. The way to develop accountability is to find support groups, an online community or people that you trust.

It is unbelievable how triggers seem to lose power when we confide in a trusted, non-judgmental friend or partner, “This [fill in the blank] is making me want to watch porn.”  Also, it can be invaluable to check in every day and talk about how difficult that day was, what triggers you encountered or discovered, and how you dealt with them.    

4. Keep a Journal

Document your experiences, triggers, strategies, and what works and what doesn’t. Journaling is a powerful way of tracking your wins and losses in this journey to quit porn use. Sometimes, simply flipping back through a journal and reading experiences from previous months is enough to help break through plateaus.   

5. Avoid thoughts/stimuli that increase arousal

The more you feed the lust, the more difficult/impossible it becomes to defeat temptations. Block all means of watching porn. (There are various porn blockers out there). Give trained therapist or someone in your support group access and the ability to block all porn websites, inappropriate pictures, searches for pornographic content, etc. This way, watching porn becomes almost impossible.

6. If Aroused, Avoid The Phone/ Computer 

Instead of the habit of immediately going on your phone, you can:

-Draw the graphic images you are thinking about (this is art therapy)
– Go for a walk (this immediately puts you around others 
-Contact someone who knows about your sex addiction and let them know 
-Meditate
– Play with the zen balls, slowly working them between your fingers (creates instant relaxation, killing the erection)  

7. Use Affirmations

Affirmations are statements repeated to ourselves over and over again to change beliefs in our subconscious mind. They are made in the present tense and repeated out loud until they become a reality. It may sound silly to some people, but studies have shown that statements repeated aloud to ourselves with conviction eventually become beliefs taken on by our subconscious minds.  

8. Find The Gap That Watching Pornography Fills

Chances are porn fills a need. Once you find out the need that porn fills for you and develop a healthier alternative. You can use the time watching porn to do something else, like sports, spending time with your family or friends, learning a new skill or hobby, or pretty much anything unrelated to sex.

Here are common needs fulfilled by porn:   

-Physical Needs- porn can help us sleep or relax when stressed  
-Social Needs- perhaps you do not have a healthy sex life (i.e. sexual dysfunction, lack of sexual satisfaction from your partner etc.), and watching porn meets the need
-Emotional needs- maybe you have low self esteem and feel bad about yourself, and watching pornography makes you feel attractive and desirable  

We spend time watching porn because it fills a need, find out what that need is, and start meeting it, then quitting porn becomes easier!  

9. List What You Want In Life 

Watching porn takes time AND energy. That time and energy can easily be devoted to something else. When a mental health professional meets someone with a substance addiction or other behavioral addictions, they advise replacing a bad habits with a healthy habits that tie into a healthy activity and the overall life you want/desire.

We have quite a few clients in their 20s who have no friends, hobbies, or social activities. With a lifestyle like that, it’s no wonder they spend all their time on pornographic websites- it’s their pastime!  

Take some time and decide what are some things you’ve always wanted to do in your life. List them out.     

Dealing With The Behaviors That Contribute To A Relapse    

A mental health professional will tell you that one of the most frustrating aspects of overcoming addiction, especially an internet pornography addiction, is the relapse. Everyone wants to win, beat it, be strong, and get to a certain marker, whether it’s a week, two weeks, 30 days, or forever. 

The reality is that relapses happen. 

Anyone who tells you that there’s a way to quit porn in which there is no chance of relapse is either lying to you or has never been truly addicted to porn. If you have relapsed so often that you think it’s inevitable, please don’t lose hope. It takes time!

There are potential mental health issues and negative consequences of certain behaviors that you have, however, that, if not addressed, will sabotage all your efforts.

Social Isolation:  If you have a small social circle that you are not close to or lack a significant other, you’re in a prime position for a relapse. A common trigger for compulsive porn consumption is being alone. If you’re alone, you don’t have reasons to avoid porn. An active social life keeps you occupied.    

Emotional Issues:  Watching porn leads to various emotional issues. For instance, you may be hiding your addiction from a spouse, which leads to feelings of guilt and shame, which are connected to low self-worth and negativity, which in turn leads you to more porn.    

Lack of Preparation:  What have you done to prepare yourself to end your porn addiction? Apart from reading this blog, what else have you read? What online resources have you consulted? How will you stay accountable? How will you deal with withdrawal? 

Resources and information are needed to battle behavioral addictions. You must be mentally prepared to deal with the emotions, withdrawal, easy access to pornography, and various unseen circumstances that will come out to sabotage you.    

Lack of self-discipline:  Developing self-discipline is crucial for abstaining from pornography or masturbation for an extended period, say, seven days. Successful self-discipline in quitting porn means committing to a specific timeframe with no excuses—no justifying a “cure” after two weeks or turning to porn after a job loss or a night out—no excuses allowed.

If you recognize self-discipline as a primary hurdle, use your chosen timeframe as the initial step toward reclaiming control. Porn addiction often lies at the core of an individual’s problems, making self-discipline key to overcoming these challenges.  

Problematic Relationships: If you are married or in a relationship, constant conflict can lead to a relapse, especially if you do not know how to resolve conflict properly. Post-conflict, most men look for coping mechanisms, and porn relieves the tension brought about by conflict. If you do not develop a means of dealing with conflicts in your relationship, it will sabotage your addiction recovery journey.

Conclusion: You Can Beat Your Addiction!

You can and will break free from your porn addiction with the above plan. Here’s a final recap of the tips above to inject into your daily life, doing so will help you overcome your addiction:
-Exercise   
-Use Meditation & Prayer    
-Socialize with friends    
-Rest    
-Practice A Good Diet    
-Stay in touch with a recovery group
-Use pornography blocker(s)
-Leverage online communities
-Social support is essential to your recovery. Look for people and things that inject healthy beliefs into your mind. 
-Reading. This is the information age. Read information on quitting porn, improving your self-esteem, personal growth, living a happy, healthy life, and having healthy sexual relationships. Whatever you want is literally at your fingertips.

Remember, you beat this addiction; we are here cheering you on!

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