If you struggle with habitual engagement with porn and masturbation, these insights can come in handy.
Contemplate their importance or relevance and see how you can integrate them in order to remove this addiction.
Here are the insights:
Cravings always pass. If you can get through the bubble during heightened cravings, they will eventually disappear. Breaking habits is often about learning to surrender to the feelings within this bubble knowing that they will be gone in a short while. It’s not about fighting these feelings.
PMO addiction is often solved somewhere else. In a lot of cases, you will be engaging with porn and masturbation, not to get it specifically, but because you have learned to use it to escape something else. Often this habit is reflective of a disconnection or avoidance or fear of another area in your life.
Move the energy. Physical movement helps to move the physical and mental energy of cravings.
Surround yourself with others who are on the same journey. It can make a tremendous difference to stay accountable with other guys who are dealing with this struggle and addiction.
Raise your awareness. If you do engage with PMO whilst trying to remove it, use this as an opportunity to increase your awareness during that time and watch the entire process unfold, to gain a greater understanding of what drew you in, what you were thinking and believing, if it leaves you as satisfied as you thought it would, as well as any other insights that come up from your active observation.
Build a new understanding about what porn and masturbation actually are. Instead of just seeing PMO as some fun way to feel good, start to understand the type of industry you are supporting, the type of people you might be supporting, what it means to masturbate whilst watching other people have sex, how it changes what sexually stimulates your brain, how it changes your brain chemistry, as well as how it actually affects the rest of your life and behaviour. This is about seeing these things for exactly what they are and not the fantasy in your mind about what they are.
Observe the effect of no PMO. When you don’t engage, pay attention to how good a few days PMO free makes you feel. Use this as a way to start building the understanding that life is both good and safe without this habit.
Don’t engage with guilt or moralising around PMO. This journey is not a question of wrong and right, but rather learning about that which either takes you further or closer to the type of life that you want. It’s just about seeing in plain sight how this habit affects your life until you realize that it needs to go. If guilt does arise, simply observe it whilst reminding yourself that you are neither wrong/right for engaging/removing PMO.
Don’t suppress sexual desires. Sexual energy is normal and healthy. This is not about suppressing but rather channeling the sexual energy more constructively, to get you more of what you actually want.
Notice the effects on other areas. Start to build deep awareness around how PMO might be affecting your dating confidence, relationships and sex life. In almost every case, engagement with PMO will have some sort of affect on your experience and interaction with real women.
Avoid too much streak building. This can be a useful tool, but it is not the root solution. Streak building often is a way to avoid genuine internal identity shifting and emotional transformation, and rather keeps guys trapped in obsessing over willpower and pure effort.
Become stimulated by real human connection. Start to connect more with other people and practice being very present and stimulated by the engagement with other people and women. You want to start to understand and feel how much better real socialising/sex/connection is, compared to porn.
Avoid too much caffeine. I mention this because I have found in my personal experience, that a lot of caffeine often greatly increased my libido during the day, which made it much more difficult to fight cravings.
Practice prolonging the time between cravings and engagement with PMO. Going cold turkey on this habit will unlikely be effective, and so you can have much better results by training your mind slowly to delay the gratification between when cravings first arise and when you actually act on it. What helps, is to learn to enjoy simply feeling deeply into the physical cravings until such time that you don’t always feel the need to use the feelings to go act on them. Start slowly and build up the distance of this gap.
These are just a few insights of many that you can start contemplating and using to break free from the addiction to PMO. These are insights that I developed over many years whilst struggling with and studying PMO and habits in general.
And remember, if you keep going, you will get there!