how do i beat porn addiction with ocd

Can you find something else to obsess about?

 

It might help to understand why we obsess. It is easy to categorize obsessing as something gone wrong, but, it is not. The disease of porn addiction, which is actually dopamine addiction, is the result of millions of years of evolution. Back in the day, when we were just another mammal on the planet, and not the alpha predator on the planet, obsessing was a valued trait. We obsessed about getting laid, we obsessed about eating, we obsessed about survival. If you look up the opposite word for obsession you find, among others, indifference, apathy, unconcerned. The monkey who went walking in the jungle with apathy toward survival was a walking snack for other predators. So, understand, obsession is an evolved, beneficial, trait, at least it was back then when obsession made survival more likely, and was probably, actually, necessary to survival. Indifference to whether you got laid, ate, or survived, was not a trait found in successful species.

Move forward to now, a few million years later. We are still biologically mandated to obsess about sex. Sure, a lot of us obsess a lot less than others, but every one on the planet is built to want sex, seek sex, and have sex. This is nature's way of perpetuating the species. Nature does this by rewarding thoughts of sex with a dopamine high. We like that high, one of the best feelings we can have. If putting our eyes out gave us that high, there would be a lot of blind people in the world. Now, enter something completely new: High Speed Internet Porn. This is a new phenomenon we have not, really, figured out how to deal with. We can now use HSIP to get something we love, every day, over and over and over, until it becomes an addiction. We use HSIP to obtain dopamine highs, over and over and over. Our dopamine reward systems evolved to encourage thoughts of sex, but it has not yet adapted to the potential that HSIP represents for unending sexual thoughts. Now, as in millions of years after the dopamine reward system evolved, indifference to reality is not a death warrant. We can stay in our rooms all day, totally apathetic to our surrounding reality, and nothing is going to eat us and we are not going to die.

So, how does this information help you? Understanding that your brain has been hijacked by the non stop dopamine HSIP can provide, you can now take steps to hijack it back to reality. This can be done due to brain neuroplasticity. Put another way, porn allowed you to bend your reward pathways to prefer porn, over reality, to get a dopamine high. Preferring HSIP to reality is not an evolved thing. You trained yourself to that, unconsciously, like all of us, but you did it to your self. Good news: you can untrain yourself, or train yourself back to preferring reality. Though difficult, you can bend your pathways back to reward, and only reward, reality, as is actual sex, with a living, breathing, human.

Be warned: Retraining your brain must be done consciously, and it is a process, not an event. It takes time, and for results, like exercise, it must be done every day. Most people who successfully do this take at least 90 days, the hard 90, to reboot. During that 90 you must consciously avoid using artificial sexual stimulation of any kind, because any kind of it gives you what you want the most of anything in the world, but, during the reboot, the thing you must avoid like the plague: a dopamine rush. Understand that going in. If you are a porn addict, you are not really a porn addict, you are a dopamine addict, a porn induced dopamine addict, and the thing you love, and have loved, most, for years, the thing you love most in your life, is that feeling that hitting porn gives you. That is a dopamine high. You love it. During the reboot, you will have to try and learn to hate it. On the other side of the reboot, there is life unaddicted. But, between here and there, there are at least 90 days of hell, when you totally deprive yourself of the thing you love the most. Knowing these things going in will make it easier to get to the other side.

Hope it helps.

Much love.

Will.