Tips and Strategies for Overcoming the Addiction:
- Delete all pornography. All downloads. Clear your browser history. Remove your bookmarks. Delete your dating apps and unfollow sexual pages on social media. Don’t just leave it in the Recycle Bin. Purge it from your computer. No matter how extensive your collection is, or how long it took to collect, get rid of everything.
- Change your environment. If you usually watch pornography in your room, re-arrange your furniture. Re-arrange your desk. Move things around to change the cues in your brain.
- Use a pornography blocker and an ad blocker - don’t rely on it; use it as a reminder that you don’t want to watch pornography. Every blocker has loopholes you can get around, so don’t rely on it. Use it as a tool to help build your self-control while your brain repairs its willpower.
- Get an accountability partner - have someone who is going through the addiction as well who gets how difficult it is and will not judge you. Don’t go through this alone. Speak to someone and support each other out of the addiction. Encourage each other, help each other through urges and work on your strategies and methods together.
- Keep a journal and record your progress. It will motivate you at times when it seems painful, and you want to quit, or you feel like you haven’t made any progress.
- Engage in regular exercise. Exercise distracts your brain from urges, improves self-confidence and fitness, helps improve your mood and even enables you to heal from sexual dysfunction faster. It provides a good source of dopamine to counteract the urges to go back to PMO.
- Try out cold showers. They help build your willpower and improve your mood - after you’ve got out of the cold water!
- Get outside in nature, walk through the park, breathe the fresh air and get some sunlight on your skin. Your brain will heal much faster, and you’ll experience the benefits sooner.
- Get outside and socialise. Spend more time with family and good friends. Interacting with others will heal your brain, as well. If you suffer from social anxiety, find a straightforward interaction which you can do and make a game of it. For instance, try making eye contact and smiling with as many people as you can who pass by you on the street. You’ll notice that you start getting better and your natural charisma will come out; you’ll start saying ‘Good afternoon,’ and ‘Hi there’, to people. As you keep going, even working up to a conversation will become more comfortable!
- Meditation and prayer help repair the control centre of your brain. Many people who have rebooted swear by their new practices of meditation and how it has improved their self-control.
- Engage in exciting, meaningful and productive habits and activities. You could learn a language, musical instrument or skill. Start cooking more. Work on personal projects and make use of your creativity. Read books you’ve always wanted to. You’re showing your brain that you can enjoy other things, and with time, you’ll gain more pleasure from them than you ever received from PMO. You’ll also heal and experience the benefits of quitting faster.
- Go easy on yourself. Don’t beat yourself up if you fall, pick yourself up, learn from your mistakes, refine your strategy and keep going. Appreciate that you’re on this journey and making a difference to improve your life.
- Learn more about what’s happening in your brain and how addiction works. Learn about the withdrawal symptoms and what to expect, so they don’t lead you to relapse. Thousands of people who learned this found it much easier to understand their triggers and urges and were able to succeed.
- Keep yourself inspired regularly. Read success stories of the thousands of people who have succeeded in quitting pornography.
- Recognise that you don’t need 90 days of constant willpower, you need to build the habit of choosing to say ‘No’ every time the urge comes. This realisation makes the journey more bearable. It’s not as much of a fight.
- Get over the shame of what you’ve done and your previous lack of self-control. Find a way to come to terms with your past and remove the guilt and shame. Shame increases the addictive tendencies and encourages binging. Be compassionate towards yourself, and look forward towards the future instead of back at the dark past you’re leaving behind.
- Prepare yourself from urges before they happen. Decide what positive activities you will engage in instead of giving in to the urge. Figure out your reasons why these activities will help you at that moment. Think about what situations you can do them in - can you do them when you’re tired? In the shower? At work or at school?
- Make a list of all the reasons why you want to quit PMO, and the reasons why you want to be free, and have the list ready to consult whenever the urges come.
- Don’t ignore your urges. Always take immediate action by acknowledging them. Say this to yourself, ‘Here are cravings. They came out of nowhere, and they have no real power over me. I am not my thoughts; I did not summon them; I do not want them, and I do not have to act on them.’ Within 15 minutes, the urge will go away, and you’ll be fine until the next urge comes.
- Recognise that you’re stronger than the urge. Always. No matter how long it takes, you can overcome it.
- Some people do this every time a sexual thought like a pornographic flashback comes into their mind;
- They envision a large, red X over it, and imagine hearing loud, ambulance sirens.
- They do this immediately, and the process becomes automatic with habit.
- For insistent images, they go further and imagine the red X exploding.
- Do you keep giving yourself an excuse like ‘I will do it one last time’ or ‘Today is the last time’? Change it to ‘Just today I am not doing it’.
- Live as if porn didn’t exist. Completely forget about it. Don’t spend your day fighting urges. Don’t ‘try hard’. Be OK with the idea that you will never watch porn again in your life.