urges how to stop

I get in front of a mirror and see the mess reflected in it.

 

Advice from my limited personal experience:

Notice the tension and agitation in your body and mind and learn to relax that. If you can learn to notice an impulse at its arising you can cut it off by not giving in to it’s attempt to move you. It’s not necessarily easy but the more you’re relaxed before an urge arises the easier it will be to not allow the urge to grow and compel you.

 

Reminding self about the negative outcome. For me that is usually enough.
Meditation is fine too i think, it empties mind, and urges may float away,
though i seldom use it as an urge-controller.

But well, if you cannot yet control your mind, you could try slap your fingers, or "knock your nose",
you know indexfinger-thumb (don't know english term)

However, of course, something like previous poster said, you need to develop awareness of own mind and body. Learn to recognise wrong things, learn to act before things are worse.

 

cold showers work great, your mindset has a lot to do with it to, if you think you will fail than you will, if you are in this for the long haul you will succeed.

 

Stop disassociating with your urges and seeing them like some negative phenomenon that you have to beat. Your urges have an origin. They come from a part deep within your psyche that believes porn is amazing and worth it.

Imagine you want to win a football game. You don't care about the fact that the enemy team doesn't want you to win, you don't care about the pain, you don't care about failures, you just want to win the game. That's how the lust inside you thinks which still wants porn. Winning the game means achieving PMO. "Urges" are simply the attempt of your lust to win the game. So of course you can play ball everyday and try to keep your lust from winning. But that's a stupid long-term strategy. It's hard, your lust is just as strong and intelligent as the conscientious you (the you that first decided to quit porn). It's inefficient and it has failure programmed into it. You can't always win against yourself..

If you want to truly stop your urges you need to stop wanting to win the game. You need to unite the teams and decide for a direction. Porn or no porn. That takes a lot of self-reflection and breaking of delusions. Your lust is in love with porn, when you're in love you wear rose-colored glasses, meaning you downplay the downsides of porn and you up-play the upsides. Get real about porn. That will help tremendously to stop wanting it.
There's a simple test to see whether you still really want porn or not. Open a porn site and look at a porn video and then see whether you are seriously considering to fap. Whether any part of you still thinks it's worth it. If that's the case you know you're not there yet and you haven't dealt with all your positive beliefs about porn.

I know many people here will want to lynch me just for suggesting that test. But the truth is if you still want porn it doesn't matter whether you consciously open a porn site to see where you're at or whether you wait until your unconscious overwhelms you at a later point in time. The situation is the same, you still want porn and so you still haven't dealt with your problem, no matter how many days you managed to keep the enemy team from winning.

Once you managed to change how you think about porn you'll be free. You'll be immune to triggers. Your urges will be almost non-existent. There will be no more mental battles. You'll still have an addicted brain which takes a lot of time to heal, but it stops being a struggle. When you do it right quitting porn is easy.

 

Thank you for making the point very clear... and I don't lynch you for your suggestion.
In some cases, perhaps maybe with assistance, I think it might be a very good one but I like to add to it.
It has something of A Clockwork Orange, but the essential ingredient is not the sickmaking drugs, but the ability to feel your human heart.

So, I would say, if you feel the urge (or underlying distressing emotion causing it), this is what you can do:
1) accept it as it is, not by acting out, but by giving it space, slowing down, being curious about the truth of it and feeling it in your body and perhaps inquire further into the body-heart-mind experience of it (without going into the story)
2) if you have the impression that you can't do that or you discover you're just trying this method to get rid of the urge or emotion, you're in fact not accepting the reality in you as it is -which is mostly the case- the fight will just continue and nothing really gets solved. In that case, just take 1 more step and stop again; this could be opening a site and then leave your keys and mouse alone and just have a deep look, feeling the truth and energy in your body, in your open heart... if you can...

What attracts is a messed up mind which is like a sponge.
But you could discover that there is truth that never gets messed up.
So we can take firm confidence that truth cannot be destroyed.
If we're courageous enough to really open up and feel what is there, inside.

 

Listen to a shit ton of music

Edit: Okay this probably doesn't make sense without context.

Basically, when I listen to music, I literally can't have sexual thoughts or even urges. I think it's because music works differently in the brain and requires a lot of attention, leaving none for PMO. Plus, whatever it is I get out of PMO seems to not seem so relevant when I'm rocking out to Blink 182 or something like that. I'm more interested in finishing this song than I am finishing myself.

Recently I just turn on youtube and just let it play not caring what artist or song actually comes on. Anyway, it works for me, and I kinda see it as a big deal, so it might you work for you, too.

Oh and one more thing, let's say there is a song that evokes strong emotion from me and I relate it to someone I know and love/like. Whether or not I keep on listening to music or MO doesn't seem like that big of a deal anymore. Just a thought.