My #1 Tip: Change Your Environment

I want to give back to this community and to all of our visitors here. I see how many guys are struggling. Some have been suffering for 20+ years, others for a decade and yet others are still teenagers.

I haven't read all of the success stories so I am not familiar with the exhaustive list of tips and advice. But, I will share the most practical advice I can.

I have talked with tons of guys on other forums and have a pretty good idea of what they're suffering with and how to help them. This tactic I am going to share today has worked for me for 30+ days. And I feel confident moving forward that if you do this you will be significantly better off in your progress than if you don't.

My Advice For Victory Over PMO

Environment. You must stop recreating the context that your addiction is occuring in.

You might have a few different environments. I will give you some examples.

Example One: In The Bathroom On Your Cellphone

You have made a habit of hiding your PMO like everybody else. You get a thrill out of the secrecy of the act. Maybe you live with your family or have roomates. You might share a bedroom with your sibling or a roomate.

In this example, you don't have much privacy. The only privacy you can consistently rely on is being alone in the bathroom taking a number two or a long bath/shower. You might even make up a story that you have stomach problems and that's why you are taking more frequent and longer visits to the toilet. Or, you might say you are stressed and need to relax with a long shower.

If this sounds like you, I have some advice. Stop taking your phone into the bathroom! Turn it off and leave it in the other room and/or in your pocket!

Interrupt the cycle by making P inaccessible. You cannot look at P if you are in the company of other people (and you obviously can't MO!).

Solution: Don't bring your phone into the bathroom [or keep it in your pocket and/or turn it off].

Example Two: Alone On Your Computer

In my personal experience, and talking to others, these are the two most common scenarios. So I want to address them upfront.

You might have your own bedroom. You might live in your own apartment or maybe you are married. You might live with a family but due to work/school schedules you know exactly when you will have uninterrupted privacy. You get excited thinking about the possibility of having no visitors and a fast-internet connection.

Solution 1: Don't be alone and on the computer. Leave your bedroom door open at all times. Turn off your laptop and keep it in your desk or closet once the lights go off. If you must use your computer, arrange the furniture so that the monitor is facing the door. This eliminates the privacy so anyone walking in the door can see your screen.

Solution 2: Keep your computer in a communal area. Make an excuse to put it in the living room where visitors, friends and family often sit and talk. Go to a public place (library, coffee shop, university lobby or hall, etc.) when using your computer and always sit so the monitor can be seen by other people around you. Plus, it is very suspicious when a person sits with a laptop in the corner of the room with their back to the wall. If you have access to internet cafes or computer labs, you may exclusively use them for the duration of your first 30+ or 90-days. Only use your computer when you are not alone.

Solution 3: Interrupt your PMO rhythm by only using the computer during certain hours of the day (i.e. mornings or afternoons until sunset). Complete all of your internet based tasks so that you won't need to be browsing when the time comes that commonly triggers you (i.e. before bed). This means prioritizing your computer usage in combination with the other strategies above.

If you follow these strategies, you will be reassessing your internet usage needs at the same time that you are increasingly socializing with others AND stopping a PMO habit.

Problems You Will Encounter
I am not naive about the difficulties you will still encounter even when employing these techniques.

I too attempted these techniques and had relapses. I remember looking at P while in a university computer lab. I remember dimming my screen so low so that other people in-public would have a hard time to see what I was doing. I remember looking at P with the sound muted while in the dormitory with my roomate on the other side of the room. I remember looking at P from my laptop in the living room when my family was present.

This leads me to my next piece of advice. Whenever I looked at P, and especially when I did PMO, I would consider that place to be desecrated or polluted. If you have PMO'd in your room before, it is going to be difficult to sleep, study and hang-out in there and always resist your urges. You will likely relapse if you don't make changes to your environment.

Environment: Change Your Living Space

This ultimately means to move (phone, bed, computer, etc) to a room, house or apartment where you have never PMO'd before.

If you live in a house, you might try to change your bedroom or computer room, to a new room. If you live in a studio apartment, or you cannot move into a new room, you can rearrange the furniture. This has a similar effect of transforming the envrionment with new energy. Change your furniture and replace it with completely new pieces, if possible. If not, you can still move all the furniture around within the room and make it look new.

If possible, you may want to move out into a new apartment or house altogether. You may even want to move into a new city. Do not expect the move to solve the problem - what you need is an additional step. You must vow to not pollute or taint the new living space.

When we enter a new environment we immediately take notice of its energy, aesthetics and mood. Some places are gloomy, others are romantic. What you need to do is preserve the non-PMO sanctity of your new room, house or apartment.

I repeat, this will not solve the problem on its own. However it will make it easier to maintain your streak. In combination with the other strategies (i.e. not being alone with easy access to P, etc.) you will find your reboot and total life transformation becoming easier. You will rewire your brain to the new environment. You will see your environment as contributing to your success rather than challenging you.

Problems: Sure, this has problems too. I remember PMO'ing while housesitting for a friend. However, I was very naive and unaware that I had an addiction back then. That would never happen with all the experiences and self-knowledge I have accumulated since then.

To conclude, I want to say that doing all of these strategies will make it very hard to PMO.

Our brains are not isolated from our environment. We will get triggers from the experience of being in a particular place. You do not want to add extra pressure to your journey by overcoming environment cues that are pleading, begging and enticing you back into your addictive misery. All of the things I have said are intended to support you in overcoming the PMO environment you have unconsciously created around yourself.

If you would like to talk with me personally for more advice, feel free to send me a private message.

 

I work in education, as well. I think having a job where you are forced to socialize and more importantly, to be responsible for others, will help significantly. It gives you an anchor to hang your identity on; you are not just doing this for yourself, but for others as well (i.e. your students).

I know a guy who is counselor at a rehab, because he had gone through previous drug addictions himself, and the nature of the job (i.e. being an authority figure) makes him very responsible for keeping his life in check. And another friend of mine is a personal trainer. And these jobs are paramount in keeping them honest in order to serve others.

For example, you know as a teacher the consequences of going into work as a PMO Zombie. You will be exposed in front of the entire room that something isn't right. Even if the students don't understand what the cause is, your co-workers might become suspicious over time about your weird personality (i.e. mood swings, anti-social, timid, avoid eye contact, etc). I also worked in an office and had people point out these traits about me. I used to make up an excuse that I was just unhappy with the work environment and was suffering as a result of that.

I am glad changing the furniture has a similar effect for you. I suspected it may have only been my own personal eccentricity so I'm glad it resonates with someone else too.

 

I think if I were to try to teach someone to self-coach, I would say to ask themselves several questions. Such as,

1. What is your living situation? Who do you live with?

2. Where and when was your main PMO environment? Alone in bathroom on phone, at night on laptop in the bed, at the computer desktop on weekend afternoons?

Then you want to make a plan to take away the opportunities. We want to disassemble the PMO environment. If it were polite to use the bathroom with the door open, I would say to do that! But instead, we should keep the phone outside. But we can keep the bedroom door open and we can turn off electronics and keep them far away or in a different room when we must be alone, such as when going to sleep.

There are dozens of possible environments, I read a story about a guy who would PMO in his car naked. I think that's a situation that needs a different solution than what I am proposing. But luckily there's many other resources here from the community that are suitable for all situations.

 

I am very glad to hear that. I am sharing because nothing else worked for me over the years. Addiction makes us too clever: K9 Web Protection? I was never willful enough to randomize the password, so when I got urges I would just login.

Mental strength, positive affirmation and new hobbies? I was busier and more resilient but still needed to return home at night and had ample opportunity to relapse. Even during relationships, I would find time to PMO when she was away.

Something worth mentioning that I forgot in the main post, is about new electronic devices. These also get tainted like our environments do. For example, I happen to have two phones. Phone A was old and I always used for PMO. Phone B was brand new and I didn't want to risk anything by visiting P. So I realized I always triggered PMO by taking Phone A into the bathroom. I made a determination to not take Phone A into the bathroom. But then I started making excuses to do so. So I made a stronger resolve to keep Phone A turned off during the day and put it on the shelf.

Basically, I could use Phone B for everything. And I had not spoiled it yet by using it for P. So the momentum of its non-PMO history was an incentive for me to stay on track. I transformed a potentially dangerous object (high-speed internet access smartphone), into a positive tool for my success. To this day, Phone B (I am using it to login and type right now) doesn't give me any triggers.

My laptop has been used for PMO and my mind knows it is very easy to open a private window and begin searching. So I am required to over-write that trigger by the non-PMO sanctity of my environment. I have changed my bedroom and bathroom and these new spaces have not been tainted yet. So no matter how many urges I get to use private browsing on my laptop, I have a greater incentive to not spoil this new room with the addiction.

There is a hierarchy at play that we can emotionally-mentally tap into and use for our advantage. We just need to recognize it so that we make it subservient to us and not vice versa. I admit that this might not work for everybody because it requires a degree of superstition that skeptical or more aggressively addicted types might not find appealing. But I want to share because it has helped, and is helping, me.

 

I think what I wrote needs to be used in combination with other methods. Because I was aware of this dynamic years ago but successfully PMO'd everywhere I went: Hotel rooms? Check. Visiting girlfriend's parents for the holidays? Check. Visiting a new country? Check. And so on.

I used to tell myself, "This time, I will not PMO no matter what! I want to keep this new space clean and P-free." And then I got urges and did it anyway.

What is different now is my awareness is greater and my knowledge of how severe the addiction is is greater. YBOP is an amazing reasource for scientifically understanding that P shrinks the grey and white matter in the brain. It causes brain damage similar to substance addiction. These facts alone should frighten us.

In the past, I would last for a few days and then relapse in the new environment because I wasn't strict enough. That's why I would endorse literally unplugging your desktop or router and physically putting your laptop or cellphone in the closet in a luggage set or whatever. Keep them physically far away and inaccessible to your immediate urges. Make multiple lines of defense that you need to go through when the urges come.

Most likely, you will have time to think about your actions while going through the work it takes to get out all your devices again. And in this interval, you can say to yourself, "What the hell am I doing? I obviously hid these things and turned them off for a reason. Snap out of it."

 

I did something similar. I always buy a bunch of weights and equipment and stick them in my apartment, even small studios. Whenever I have a few minutes, or even an hour, they are staring at me to pick them up. In addition to this, I go to the gym. But having iron available to me at all times made a huge difference.

 

I don't recommend reading motivational self-help books. Instead you need to read the science and data. There is lots of good information on this website:
https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/too...e/desensitization-a-numbed-pleasure-response/