If you’re reading this, that probably means that you want to quit watching porn. Great! Here are some specific tips that have helped real people to stay away from porn. Please note that this is not a step-by-step guide to porn addiction recovery; see the Other Links section at the bottom of this post for some links to programs that may fit that description. This is more of a random collection of tips that individual recovering porn addicts have found to be useful.
- FIRST AID – Manage acute urges by “Urge Surfing”
- Delete your stash and unsubscribe from porn sites
- Begin with the end in mind
- Use a badge and a calendar
- Keep a recovery journal
- Identify, and then stay away from, triggers
- Exercise
- Meditate
- Avert your eyes when nudity appears on TV
- Install web filters
- (new!) Lock up the PC, or move it to a common space
- Help others
- Develop good habits to replace your bad ones
- Join an online porn addiction recovery community
- Join an OFFline porn addiction recovery community
- Write a letter to your addiction
- Consider therapy
- Consider talking to your spouse or partner about your porn addiction
- Be kind to yourself
- If you slip, stop ASAP
- Avoid common pitfalls <– 9 pitfalls listed so far!
- Always remember that it gets better
This is a living document! I will be adding links to new posts as I and others write them. Have any thoughts or criticisms? Please leave a comment below. Do you have a concrete tip that has helped you on your porn addiction recovery journey? Write it up as a new post, and let me know in a comment below, and I might add it to the list. If you do that, please don’t include multiple tips in a single post; make separate posts for each tip, and write a bit of contextual information in each one. Consider linking to this post in your post, as I did with mine. Keep it concrete – don’t say why, say how.
Other Links:
The concrete tips linked above are specific, practical, immediate tips that can help an individual to quit watching porn. They do not compose a comprehensive program for quitting porn, and they are not meant to be persuasive; we assume that if you’ve arrived at this page, you already know that you wish to quit watching porn. Some of the links below are more general. Some are meant to be persuasive, some link to comprehensive porn-cessation programs; others are just miscellaneous links that may be of interest to someone who is interested in quitting porn.
I have a feeling that this list may grow considerably. If I find that the list is dwarfing the list of concrete steps above, I may make a separate page for these, or separate pages for different categories of these.
- Urge Surfing – in case of emergency, listen to this.
- Pornfree Radio – a great podcast.
- Your Brain On Porn video
- UrgeZapper – A really great web app that can help you through acute urges.
- Fortify – A comprehensive program for people interested in recovering from porn addiction. Thanks, /u/ToonTheShed for turning me on to this program. I have not used this program, and cannot personally vouch for its content.
- 12-step sex addiction recovery programs like Sex Addicts Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous, and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous may be helpful for some porn addicts.
- This post about porn addiction recovery is quite long, but also quite insightful.
- If you have a problem with compulsive masturbation, consider visiting the /r/nofap subreddit.
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