Reducing porn addiction via radical self forgiveness / disconnecting from porn induced emotions

I've been doing a lot of thinking for the past several years of my life about porn addiction and even addiction to fantasy (which is basically your brain showing you porn).

It seems to me that the primary neural mechanism which drives sexual arousal is actually emotion. For young men since when you're young you haven't had a whole lot of sex and there's a lot of old fashioned guilt morals coming from our culture, the emotion comes from novelty and then guilt-based thrill. Once novelty wears off, guilt based thrill can stay in place and fan the flames of addiction for a long time.

One approach I've been trying to take to reduce porn addiction is radical self forgiveness. That is, I *completely allow* myself to check porn sites quickly on my phone whenever I wish, and I try to apply a mindfulness technique. Instead of allowing myself to be caught up in the thrill or guilt of arriving on a porn site I try to remain calm and remind myself: "This isn't something I want. This is gross. Most of the experiences depicted are not authentic. What I actually want is to love a real woman." And then calmly put it away without having actually sought out a specific video for PMO.

I still give in occasionally because I have certain specific tastes which every once in a while I stumble upon a video which presses all of my buttons at once, but even these are losing their appeal over time.

Thus over time the allure of looking starts to go away because the thrilling emotions get calmed down and slowly replaced with a desire for real emotions with a real woman.

Has anyone tried a similar path? I'm starting to practice mindfulness, separate from my nofap journey, using an app called Waking Up by Sam Harris. I think it may help.

I'm thinking something like the above may be more effective long term than being 100% disciplined and never looking--because if you haven't dealt with the emotions themselves when you catch yourself wanting to look---it's more like pushing a beach ball under the surface of the water. Then relapse would be much stronger. This way you practice dealing with the emotions head on and dismantling them at the source. So in a way I am advocating not a lack of discipline but non-naive discipline. Naive discipline would be just resolving to stop looking cold turkey without addressing the emotions and experiences real time as they occur.

 

I think the key is realizing that so many things in the human condition are not black and white or binary, they're a matter of degree. What I'm finding is that if I treat this issue as black and white for myself, I ignore the continuous experience in between and ignore the need to confront the problematic emotions/urges when they occur. Like I said, like holding a beach ball underwater. With this approach, I am slowly dismantling the source of the problem while it happens. Yes, I do still PMO occasionally, but the amount of time I'm able to put between each lapse increases over time. Especially now that I have a real relationship on the horizon, because what I wish to do is save my energy for her and not waste it. I have realized that the sex drive is fragile and not infinite, especially as I age, and if I want to enjoy it the right way, with a real woman, I must store the energy.

I'm definitely not justifying PMO, I'm just observing that for me, this approach has been slowly dismantling what causes me to do it in the first place.

Put it another way; if I had the choice between quitting cold turkey and then some years down the road lapsing with a massive binge, or simply reducing use slowly over time to smaller and smaller percentage with no massive binges, I'd pick the latter.

Obviously as many of you do I recognize that no one approach is a one size fits all; I'm just stating what works for me. It helps me to simply be on this forum and benefit from the mutually shared energy and goal of reducing porn usage in my life, regardless of precisely how we're each going about it.

 

I should give another example from my background. When I was 9, I was randomly obsessed with cigarette smoking even though nobody in my family smoked. I pretended to smoke constantly. This horrified my mom, but instead of coming down on me harshly with judgement and discipline, what she did was buy me a pack of cigarettes and have me try one, safely at home, so that I would realize how gross and unpleasant it is. That fixed my curiosity instantly. I think it just taught me that being gentle and loving with oneself may be more effective than punishment, in the long run.

 

I may be being misinterpreted a little bit here and there. I'm not saying allowing myself to indulge, but simply allowing myself _to visit porn sites_ and then once I arrive at the site, deal with the emotion at that point. In other words, slowly training myself to not be aroused, inspired or motivated to actually THEN go watch a video and PMO. Instead the goal is to allow myself to see the thumbnails---and then calmly talk myself out of it, breaking the mental cycle which results in going further.

i.e. transitioning from landing on the site and getting that thrill or adrenaline rush to landing on the site and reacting: uhh...ew. this is gross. and not getting aroused at all.

 

I've been intrigued by the discipline of taking cold showers lately as well. The initial reaction without training is to vocalize, tense up, breathe hard and flail your arms. But with training you eventually do not react to the stimulus at all. I'm kind of saying the same thing--learning not to react to a stimulus when it happens rather than avoiding the stimulus altogether.

 

Yes, but if I train myself so that my reaction upon landing on the site is the same as viewing a pile of garbage and then I promptly leave having experienced no temptation or arousal, I view this as progress from the past where I'd have the compulsion to visit a site, see thumbnails, and instantly become highly aroused and tempted to go searching further. And then the end result is that ultimately, the compulsion to even visit the site fades after a while because I am dealing with the root of the emotion itself, at its source, when the stimulus is present.

 

This is exactly what I'm saying---I'm reducing the dopamine hit itself, within the brain itself. In other words, the problem is inside my head, the problem is not the porn itself. There's no cause-effect mechanism which forces me to experience a dopamine hit when I view porn thumbnails---that's me producing the dopamine hit. I'm training myself to experience no thrill from landing on the site, making it easier to avoid going further, and further reducing the temptation to even go there in the first place. I'm training myself to enjoy the sensation of storing my sexual energy for longer periods of time. The longest I've gone is probably three to four weeks, hoping to do even better this time.