How can I turn the good feeling of porn into a negative and dangerous feeling?

I'm not sure if there is a name for this method, but when I got serious about quitting porn, I instituted a penalty that every time I watched porn I had to do this penalty. I love to workout and trying to be as healthy as possible, so for me personally I instituted a penalty that every time i watch porn I have to consume massive amount of junk food, like a minimum of 3000 calories, as soon after watching porn as possible. I did that for 2 days straight and felt sick to my stomach and just awful. On that 3rd day I was going to watch porn, but thought of the penalty and that stopped me. Happy to say I have not watched porn since

 

It cannot be denied that porn makes you feel good, but it only lasts for a very brief moment. It's really not worth it, considering this addiction would cause all sorts of long-term serious health problems.

To turn porn into something negative, I have a method that I learnt from others:

Try to imagine what's inside the body of a person that you get obsessed with. On the outside, he/she may look attractive, but when you visualize what's inside his/her body, you will find internal organs, bones, urine, stool...etc. By knowing this fact, you will find this body you fall in love with, isn't as pretty as you expect. Try to practise this visualization when sexual thoughts come up, and make it a habit.​

Some people may find the visualization too disturbing, so don't overdo it. The main goal is to remind yourself there's really nothing "hot" about the body, what you are in love with, is in fact a pile of stool, bloody organs, and whatever you visualized. This would detach yourself from the sexual arousal, and gives you a negative impression on porn. Hope it helps and good luck with your journey!

 

@Kulturu

To respond to your OP.

It is helpful, and perhaps required, that you understand the neuroscience underlying the addiction.

This gets into the questions of why do we like engaging in certain activities.

To say that you "feel good" when you watch porn is not exactly accurate.

To be accurate, you like the dopamine high you get when you watch porn. You use porn to get that dopamine high. Naturally, as part of an evolved mechanism that encourages sexual reproduction, we all get a dopamine spike when thinking of sex, and nothing is more efficient at making us think of sex than High Speed Internet Porn. This is no tragedy; it is a simple fact.

You are engaging in activity that most here are quite aware of: going up, and comping down, getting high, then losing the high.

You have already identified the solution: quit using. That is simple to say, difficult to do. So, don't just "do it." I have seen guys over the years come here and annouce "I am quitting." Sorry to say, it is almost laughable. You are correct that access to High Speed Internet Porn is more accessible than any other addictive activity. All addictions, by the way, are based on triggering a dopamine high, be it drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, etc: If an activity is addictive, a dopamine rush is involved in it.

Best to anticipate quitting is going to hurt. Let me clarify: Quitting is going to hurt until it does not hurt anymore. The word for that hurt is "withdrawal." You must plan on, expect, and anticipate withdrawals. Your question and your concept of turning porn into pain or literally turning a dopamine high into pain is incorrect. That cannot be done. A dopamine high, no matter how much we may hate ourselves for triggering it, feels great, even euphoric. Dopamine highs, by the way, are not the enemy, and in fact are friends. They are nature's way of encouraging two very important things: reproduction and eating. That is their naturally occurring and healthy functions; it's just that humanity has always found ways to artificially trigger a dopamine high. It's sort of a pastime for humans; inventing their addictions.

So, make a plan now for when you get serious about quitting, be that tomorrow or next week.

First, read everything. Yourbrainonporn.com is very helpful. Take time to understand what is going on in your head, understand the underlying neuroscience of why you "like" porn. Truth, you don't; you like a dopamine high, and are just using porn to get it.

Also, you can throw out the distinction between genres of porn. One type triggers you, a different type triggers someone else, but bottom line, whatever type of porn is triggering you, the type is irrelevant; what matters is that you are using P to get a dopamine high. It is quite simple and easily understood.

Next, put things between your current access to P and the diminished or eliminated access to P you will have during your withdrawal time. I call the withdrawal time "the hard 90" because for many, 90 days of complete abstinence eliminates the problem. By "eliminates the problem" I mean you will no longer suffer withdrawals by failing to give yourself a dopamine high. You can still give yourself that high by various means, but you will not feel "compelled" to give it, or suffer the thought you currently, and falsely, suffer from: I cannot quit. "I cannot quit" is a lie the addiction whispers to the addict. Think of it logically: Can you live without porn? Absolutely, you just have to make the decision to live without it.

It will be difficult. Very difficult. I had the thought when I quit that if I had to feel like dying, every day, for the rest of my life, I would feel like dying, every day, for the rest of my life, if that is what I had to feel to quit. Good news, which was not widely known when I quit; it only takes a few months of pain, it will not be for life, and once you have fixed it, it pretty much stays fixed without much effort. The word "relapse" is thrown around here a lot, but I have known of no person who truly quit that went back to the activity. Once you go through the withdrawals, you never want to go through them again.

Back to putting things between yourself and P, make some plans. Get porn blockers. Use servers that will not allow you to access porn. Plan on the withdrawals, and make plans on what activities you will do when they are painful. You probably need to access humanity a bit more. P use is a solitary activity, so make plans to become more social than you probably are now. Part of divorcing P is to reengage with reality, and that means other people. You need to think of some diversion techniques. See, once you truly give up P your addiction will punish you, talk to you, lie to you, joke with you, threaten you, to get you to go back and get that super dopamine high that P allows you to give yourself. You need to plan now on how you are going to divert that 2 second sexual thought in your head from becoming a half hour dopamine drenched sex opera. When you are quitting your brain will want you to trigger on anything; it wants the dopamine high you will be denying it, so plan on things to do, things to think, when that happens, that do not give you a dopamine high, at least not in that way. Work outs are good. In the quitting time, avoid ANYTHING sexual that gives you a sexual thought, which will lead inevitably to a dopamine high. In the quitting time things must be avoided that society does not deem sexual or porn, so, Victoria's Secret, SI bikini issue, R rated movies, of course social media that involves sexual content; all of it must be avoided to the best extent possible.

If you are serious and do this, you should see serious improvements by around 3-4 months. Quitting is not gradual; you can have a good day followed by a bad day, then a good day and a bad day. But, over time, you will experience more and more good days. It is helpful for you to understand that Porn Addiction did not simply happen to you, it is not a disease you caught. You trained your brain to expect that dopamine high over years. Quitting involves training your brain NOT to expect it. That takes time, effort, and will be painful. If you are not willing to pay the price of pain, don't even start. There is no easy way out, just a painful one, but the pain does go away.

Once it is gone, you won't miss P so much.

Much love.

1ANDDONE

 

I don't recommend trying to create an aversion around it, because sex is naturally pleasurable and most people here don't even want to completely give that up anyway.

In fact thinking in black and white terms will rarely lead you to long term success. Think about this for a second: If you want to get away from porn, but not real sex then you need to make a distinction. Making distinction is not a matter of just finding something aversive. It's also not realistic in that you have to create the aversive conditioning, whereas sex being pleasurable is PROGRAMMED biologically, it occurs on two totally different levels. Sex drive is both nature and nurture whereas your attempt at creating aversion towards it will only be nurture.

What we CAN do is cut through the porn narrative, but that's just a part of it. Still this is important or else it may impact things like having a good love life and a healthy relationship. If you are accurately reading people you might find that not only are most porn fake, the models obviously hate being in that situation when you look at the subtleties of their facial expression, or it's just kind of dead, it's people who are actually in pain in spite of the acting. I know you may be just focusing on abstinence early on but this is something you can keep in mind, it is actually just part of human nature anyway and you're not going to get very far in a real relationship if you can't read peoples emotions like that.

 

Unfortunately I don't have experience on that. You may try to visualize the true nature of the hentai, i.e. it is just an image formed by a number of LEDs on your computer / mobile phone screen, they are just "dots of light of different colours", so why do you want to have sex with the LEDs? (or it's just pieces of paper in case the hentai is a book.)

Easier said than done, you need a lot of effort and time to practise. In order to form a new mental habit reacting to the hentai or porn, you need to practise from time to time even if you are not having urges, so the habit kicks in automatically when urges come. Good luck!

One more note, the main purpose of the visualizations is not to demonize the human body, but to pinpoint your own obsession. You can still love and care about other people, and you can still have natural sex life with your partner, but you will switch your focus more on the inner connections between human beings, instead of just the physical body.

 

If you were disciplined enough to enforce the self-punishment of eating the junk food, why weren't you disciplined enough to just simply not watch the porn, without need of a punishment? It's you engaging in self-administration in either case.

 

Well a thing that has greatly lowered my sexual interest in porn is understanding the diversity of women. Some women are homosexual and are not interested in men. And some women were born male and undergo gender-changing surgery to look identical to females. Whenever I think of porn, I think of a transgender woman and I do not have much of a sexual urge with that thought. With an understanding of the diversity of women, I respect women more and see them less as sexual objects.

 

What about people addicted to trans porn? Also doesn't work with hentai. Not sure it's a good thing to do.