Yes I know this feeling, I used to think it was much harder and time-consuming to resist the urge then to accept a relapse. This would always frustrate me when I was doing an important project that was due soon. I would want to stay clean but I also didn’t have the time to resist the urges all day. So in the past, I would just give in and relapse.
However, I realized this view was all wrong. I realized that a lot of my “resisting” was just me moving closer and closer to a relapse by edging then stopping then edging again. I would waste the day basically relapsing but not fully so until the end.
It wasn’t until I realized that resisting an urge and only using my willpower is not effective that I was able to learn new strategies that deal with urges much more swiftly and permanently. The biggest one of these strategies I developed was mindfulness. When I get an urge, I write down everything that it is saying and get to the bottom of it and deal with the real issue at hand.
Because often we get urges, not because we want or need sex, but because we have an unmet need that our body has learned to go to ■■■■ to “fix”. When we start to discover what our body actually needs and the arguments our urge is presenting for relapse, we can easily counter-argue it and commit to healthy activities that take care of our need.
This is my strategy in a nutshell that has changed the whole game for me and made urges less of an all-day struggle. Although I should mention, that when I first started using this technique, sometimes it did take all day and I often had to couple it with other strategies.
If you like the sound of that strategy and more I used, I write more in depth about it on my 90 Days PMO Clean After 5.5 Years of Addiction
That’s what’s really worked for me, but obviously everyone is different. Maybe give it a good try for awhile and see if you like it.
Good luck man, hope that helps 