Ready to Quit Watching Porn? 5 Tips Before You Start Your Porn Reboot
It’s the end of December and the energy of the new year is right around the corner. People are talking about their big plans for 2023, and you can sense the excitement of long-held aspirations and positive intentions. This is a great time of the year to reflect on changes you want to make.
For many of you out there reading this, this might also be a wonderful time to reflect on your relationship to porn. Maybe you’ve been thinking about quitting, or watching it less often. I wanted to use this opportunity, here at the end of the year, to talk about some tips that can help you make the most out of your porn reboot process. Whether you are getting ready for your first 30 days free from porn, or simply re-committing to an intention that you’ve already made, these 5 tips will help you make the most of your recovery process.
5 helpful tips to set your reboot up for success
Let’s say you want to do a 30-day porn detox or “reboot”. Understanding that there are always challenges to any major behavior change, how can you set yourself up for success? And what are some of the things you should do before you begin? There are five key tips that I want to write about today.
And as with almost everything that I write about on this blog, it is not just about porn. This really applies to all of the different kinds of habits and lifestyle choices that you might be wanting to set up in your life. For example, relationship to food, or work, or anything you might have compulsive habits around.
1. Connect with WHY you want to quit
So let’s dive in straight away with tip number one, which is to connect with why you want to quit. And here in particular I’m talking about really being aware of the consequences of the behavior that you’re engaging in. Take some time and reflect on what are the ways that your porn consumption is holding you back in life. What are some of the consequences that you’ve noticed in your life? For example, when I was watching too much porn, I was noticing a growing sense of perfectionism with my partners because of my addiction to porn. I was just expecting them to have bodies just like the porn stars I was watching, and I could tell that it was holding me back from deepening the intimacy and committment in my relationships. Another consequence I was noticing was how much time and energy porn was costing me. I was losing energy that I could have been spending on other habits and activities that would be more meaningful to me.
Another way of looking at this first tip is to reflect on this question: where will this pathway lead you if you don’t make a change? If you continue on the road that you’re on, what’s at the end of this road? Where is it going to take you? I call this the default future, which is where you will be in 10 years or 20 years if you don’t make a change. In my life, I could see that I was headed down a road of loneliness, isolation, and deepening addiction to lust and sex, without having any depth of connection with my partners.
The final aspect of this first tip that I’ll talk about is to reflect on the ways that your actions are not in integrity with your values.Maybe one of your values is respect but the porn that you’re watching is disrespectful or degrading towards women. Reflect on whether you are in alignment with your values. Are you living from a place of integrity? Or is your porn habit causing you to be out of integrity? So many of the people I work with talk about feeling out of integrity when they watch porn, either because they need to lie to use it, or because the content of what they are watching doesn’t feel aligned with the values they hold.
So this is the first thing to do before you start your reboot period: to connect with why you want to quit, particularly focusing on some of the negative aspects of the behavior, or the consequences. How is this behavior holding you back? Where will this lead you if you don’t make a change?
2. Identify where you hope to go in life
Tip number two flips this on its head, and it’s to connect with the positive aspect of the life that you want to be living. I’ve talked about this previously, where we look at how it’s important to shift to approach oriented goals rather than the avoidance oriented goals. Instead of looking at what you want to get rid of, to ask what what is it that you want to bring in and cultivate? What do you wish to see? What is that dream vision of your life?
I recommend taking some time to do life envisioning practices where you look at what your dream life looks like five years from now, 10 years from now, and 20 years from now. Get very detailed on this. How are you spending your time? How are you spending your energy? Who is in your life? What are the kinds of people that you’re surrounding yourself with? What is your relationship like with your partner? And importantly, in this envisioning practice, to reflect on the question of how do you want to be feeling in the future?
When it comes to problematic porn use, the consequences are often on the emotional level, where it affects how we’re feeling. For example, we can start to feel like we don’t have enough. We can feel ashamed, insecure, and alone. For this envisioning, to ask instead, how do you want to feel? Most men want to feel a sense of inner peace, or want to feel like they are living with purpose and being of service in the world. There are so many beautiful qualities of mind and states of being. You should be able to identify, at the end of your life, what’s most important? Do you want to spend your life just watching more porn and having more meaningless sex? Or do you want to be living a life of integrity, purpose, and inner peace?
So that’s the second tip, is to connect with the positive aspect of the life you want to cultivate, and identify where you want to go.
3. Understand that relapses will happen
The third tip to do before you start your reboot or before you start any major habit change, is to know that relapse will happen. That you will not be perfect at all times. In other words, focus on progress over perfection.
Know that relapse will happen from time to time. There are days where you are challenged by the circumstances. Maybe your car gets a flat tire, your coworkers does something awful, and on top of that, you forget to send an important message to your client. Those difficult days can make us want to escape, and sometimes we give in. But that’s ok, you don’t have to be perfect.
Remember that we are rewiring our minds. Every moment of an intentional action or decision helps to cultivate those new neural pathways. The total days that you spend free from porn is more important than the streak that you have going. So let’s say you want to do a 30 day reboot. Yes, it would be beautiful if you could do 30 days straight. But 28 days out of 30 is much better than not doing it at all. So just know that if or when you relapse, it doesn’t mean you’re broken, it just means that you’re trying to work on changing a habit that is very deeply ingrained. You don’t have to be perfect, just make progress.
Another thing to keep in mind here is that your relationship to your relapses is actually more important than whether or not you relapse. For most people struggling with addiction, every time there’s a relapse, it brings on shame, self-judgment, and criticism. Instead, can you get to the place where if you do relapse, it’s just, “Oh, that wasn’t skillful and I’m not happy I did it, but it doesn’t mean I’m a horrible person. Let me pick myself up and get started again.” That is where we want to get to. When a relapse happens, we don’t beat ourself up and fall into a spiral of shame and acting out. Instead, we treat ourselves like we would treat a friend.
So just know, relapse happens to everyone in some way or another. You will not be perfect. Be kind and gentle to yourself when you do relapse and focus on progress over perfection.
4. Remove triggers that you know are going to make it harder
Tip number four, when you are getting ready to start your reboot, is to remove triggers that you know are going to make it harder for you. This is being smart, and understanding that willpower is not enough. We have to be smart about setting up the proper conditions in our life that will support our recovery. This is something sometimes called behavioral architecture or a stimulus control. Rather than focusing on self-control and willpower, we focus on stimulus control.
Can you identify the triggers that make you want to act out, and can you remove or avoid some of those triggers so that you have some more breathing room in the beginning of your recovery? In the long run, our goal is to get to the place where even in the face of a trigger, or a challenging day, we have enough inner discipline and enough willpower, and we’ve healed enough of the past trauma, where we don’t need to escape into addiction. But in the beginning, it’s important to be smart and give yourself support and breathing room.
Dr. Anna Lembke, a Stanford School of Medicine researcher, whose lab focuses on dopamine, talks about this strategy in her book Dopamine Nation. In her book, she calls these blocking strategies, and says this about this technique,
It’s about intentionally and willingly creating barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice in order to mitigate compulsive over consumption.
Doing this makes it harder to consume your drug of choice, to relapse and over-indulge. If you are doing a porn reboot, often the triggers are around visuals. So maybe consider removing certain types of social media, or unfollowing certain accounts or profiles. Maybe taking a break from social media altogether.
Another tip that I really love is to remove your laptop and your phone from your room. This is something I tell all my clients to do, and I think it’s so powerful, even if you’re not working on healing your relationship to porn. Keep your laptop and your phone in the living room or kitchen. You could also leave it in the car, or at work. Not in your bedroom and definitely not by your bed. Having your phone or laptop by your bed is one of the easiest ways to just get sucked back in to the habitual use of digital media and porn. Finally, if you have any paraphernalia that you use to masturbate to porn, just get rid of it. If you use any towels or socks, or whatever you use to enjoy porn, throw it out. Get rid of everything you can think of. This all boils down to making it harder to use your drug of choice.
Just remember, we can’t rely on willpower alone. We can’t just grit our teeth and try harder, because willpower is a limited resource. We have to be smart about our recovery, particularly in those first 30 or 60 days. It’s not cheating, it’s just being smart about your recovery.
5. Get accountability and support
The fifth and final tip, before you start your reboot, and before you start any major habit change, is to get accountability and support. One of the most powerful and effective things you can do for changing a habit is to get real, tough, honest accountability. Again, knowing that relapse and self sabotage will happen, it’s important to have someone or something external to you that can help you get back on track with your recovery and your goals. This is another example of being smart about your recovery.
Is it possible to do it all on your own? Yes, it’s possible. But it is so much easier and more effective when you get accountability and support. This also has the added benefit of comitting yourself to practicing vulnerability. If you are getting support and accountability for something like this, by necessity, you have to open up about your struggles. And that is a huge part of recovery: letting go of shame, being vulnerable, and being honest with yourself and other people.
One way to to get that accountability and support is getting a coach, someone who is there to check in with you each week or every other week just to ask about how are you doing with the goals that you made for yourself. A men’s group is also a great idea. Just getting someone, somehow, to call you out on your bullshit, knowing that you are going to make excuses and lose your internal motivation, so why not give yourself this support as you build your life of recovery?
An important side note: It’s very hard to get real accountability from friends because they often can’t hold you accountable in the same way a coach or men’s group would. It’s not worth it for a friend to risk ruining the relationship in order to call you out on your bullshit excuses and self-sabotaging behavior. Friends can be helpful a little bit, but to get real accountability, it’s better to have someone external, like a coach, a men’s group, or a therapist.
So those are my five tips before you start any major habit change. The first one, connecting with why you want to quit. What are the ways it’s holding you back? The second one, flipping that on its head, what’s the positive aspect of the life you want to cultivate? What do you want to move toward and what’s important to you in life? The third one, understanding that relapse will happen. When you know that from the beginning, then it doesn’t derail you as much. You can simply focus on progress over perfection. The fourth one, removing triggers that you know are going make it harder. Focusing on stimulus control and creating a supportive environment for your recovery. And then finally getting accountability and support. The support can also look like having a game plan, having a roadmap that walks you through your recovery step-by-step. This is something I also offer in my unhooked online course. It’s a 30-day guide to breaking free from porn.
If you want a roadmap to recovery, click the link above and learn about how to break free from addiction at the root source, and create a life free from craving. Finally, if you’re interested in one-on-one coaching, visit my website, jeremylipkowitz.com/intro, and sign up for a free discovery call to see if coaching is a good fit for you.
