Stuck in a porn-watching cycle?
You go to a porn website on your phone or laptop. You watch a few videos. You masturbate. You fall asleep.
The next night you do it all over again.
Does it seem hard to stop?
Some people (usually men) feel like they need to masturbate to fall asleep. It helps them wind down.
You’re not alone. Porn websites are among the most-view sites on the internet.
Is it an addiction?
When you’re addicted to porn, you feel like you need to watch it. When you don’t have it, you get anxious and irritable.
It’s like you can’t go to sleep unless you watch some porn.
If that’s you, that’s at least mild anxiety.
Willpower? Ha! It feels like trying to stop a speeding automobile with your body.
Levels of addiction
Addiction comes in levels. With a very mild addiction, you’d feel like something is missing.
Quitting any addiction can seem hard, if not impossible.
As contrasted to other addictions, quitting or even mitigating a porn addiction is more challenging in many ways. While not physically addicting, porn is certainly mentally addicting.
Further, apart from your browser history or having someone walk in on you, porn is a type of addiction that’s more hidden than physical addictions.
The experience of porn addiction is different than other addictions. Gambling can, up to a point, be dismissed as a game. Gamblers share stories of wins and losses with other gamblers.
Alcohol and drugs are cool to a certain point. People with those problems share stories of when those substances made them act silly.
Smoking, too, builds a form of camaraderie as you puff your way to decreased lung capacity and lung cancer when you stand outside in inclement weather with other smokers.
Not so with masturbation and porn. A person typically masturbates by themselves. Alone. They usually don’t talk about it with others.
What’s there to talk about? I took it out and jerked it.
You hear how natural masturbation is from some corners. That may be partly true. It is common. Visual porn on the computer adds another dimension to it.
Ask yourself this: how natural are fetish videos, gangbang videos, and the rest? Humanity existed for thousands of years without common “entertainments” like these.
Genghis Khan may have had his harems but did he put on a show for others to watch? There’s nothing natural about that. Generations past had to go to an adult bookstore to get access to such videos where they’d be worried about being seen going into those places. Now you can see videos like that while being anonymous. There’s no “walk of shame” into the adult bookstore.
Justifications like the ones above are, at their core, the writings and vocalizations of people trying to make themselves feel better about themselves. Like any addiction, it can’t be good for you. Addictions remove the nexus of control from you to the compulsion. That’s why it’s natural to want to rid yourself of any addiction. The thoughts send you down a rabbit hole. Addictions make you feel weak because you are weak when you’re addicted. It’s natural to want to be strong.
You often realize this gradually
Many men feel like they should have an edge. Masturbation dissipates their masculine energy pointlessly. The Chinese call this energy “yang.” In the West, we’d refer to it as “drive.” In English, we’d call someone with a lot of masculine energy a “real go-getter or someone with “a lot of drive.” In Spanish, we’d refer to him as un ambicioso.
That missing universal drive is there to aid your survival and that of your lineage.
You can also look at the troubles of Bill Cosby or another powerful man who fell and say, “I don’t ever want to go there.” When he was drugging and molesting dozens of women, you have to ask yourself what the hell was he thinking. Cosby had the world. He was a role model to millions. He gave up a lot because he couldn’t get his sexual addictions in check. People don’t just wake up and start doing that to other people. There’s a pathway of decisions that leads you there.
Funny thing, it’s Cosby’s fate to be a role model. Now he’s a role model of what not to be, instead of a renowned educator and comedian.
Of course, drugging and raping women is a lot worse than mere masturbation. Participating in sex trafficking is a lot worse than masturbation to porn videos. Patronizing prostitutes is worse than masturbating at bedtime. All of those other situations involve someone else. Masturbation leads you mentally toward the same place those men go. At the same time, you haven’t broken the law. Whoop-de-doo. While you haven’t deprived anyone of their rights, you’re in the same building, maybe on the ground floor.
Cosby had to start somewhere. It’s easy to imagine him thinking, I’d like the real thing!
You go up the stairs little by little until you occupy the penthouse suite right where Cosby was.
Maybe the “Building of Perversion” isn’t the best analogy. It certainly isn’t a strong as this phrase cautioning one to “watch your thoughts.”
Everything begins with thoughts. You’ve got to get those thoughts and drive under control to be the strongest man you can be.
Beyond that, there are even more reasons to avoid porn.
Put your brain back in control
This is the first step in breaking the cycle. If you can’t really stop, at least think about what you’re doing. Be mindful. Are you adding views to a video and thereby encouraging someone to make more of them? Are you masturbating to the porn video because you’re worried about not being able to fall asleep? Helping yourself all starts with understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Put your brain back in control. Read Jenna Jameson’s 25 Good Reasons Why No One Would Want To Become a Porn Star. Once you’ve read that, peruse other resources on Antipornography.org. There are also 10 Techniques to Stop Watching Porn from SOSPorn.org.
Of course, you can find people who say porn is a good thing, even a benefit to society. They’ll point to examples of some porn actress who used it to start a business empire. As noted above, some people try to justify everything. They’ll say that women aren’t exploited. How can they be when they make twice what men make? It’s someone’s choice whether to use porn. Yadda-yadda-yadda.
Legislating behavior has a mixed record. The better question is, what about you? Is porn right for you? Do you want to diminish your drive, warp your outlook like Bill Cosby, and maybe even send off a creepy vibe to others? If you don’t care about yourself, do you want to stimulate a market for those productions?
Education about your addiction can only take you so far, however. In recent years, there’s been a push among hospitals to have a smoke-free campus, but before that recent push, around 8 percent of nurses and 2 percent of doctors smoked. If any group of people was exposed to why smoking isn’t a good decision, it’s them. At its heart, it’s a stress-management problem. Much of the same could be said about any addiction.
Mitigating your porn addiction
If you feel like you’ve got to masturbate, what if you could do that without watching a video? That would be better. You wouldn’t be adding any direct encouragement to a bad situation by increasing the number of views on Pornhub. You wouldn’t be adding any trackers to your computer from a porn website, for example.
If you pay for porn, stop it now. Vow to not give them any of your money. There are better things to spend on, like paying down debt, saving it, or giving it to a poorly run charity.
You read that right. Even giving it to a poorly run charity is better than spending it on porn, provided the charity isn’t an outright scam, and then maybe it’s a wash.
At the very least, tell yourself that you’re only going to look at the free stuff. You don’t want to give them any credit card numbers. Make it a rule for yourself: “I don’t pay for porn. I don’t pay for sex.”
When you watch the video, and it features a “plot” where a stepbrother and stepsister are copulating, think it through. Pretend it’s real life. Think about what happens to their relationship. What happens to their long-term happiness? By asking yourself questions and questioning the plot, you engage your brain, making it into an instructional video.
When your brain is engaged, the videos become darkly funny and then heartbreakingly sad.
How about when the stepmom has sex with her stepson? How does that work out long term? Can you imagine them arguing about something later, and they bring up their encounter?
Same thing with the female boss coming on to her employee. How should he handle that? What will that do to the company when all this comes out? How many people are going to lose their jobs?
The key is to put your brain back in control, so you’re not mindlessly watching this drivel that exploits your sexual impulses by serotonin release.
Putting your brain back in control is a time-honored way of breaking any compulsion from alcohol abuse to picking your nose.
Get serious about your compulsion. Call it out for what it is: an addiction.
Take a look at adopting a 12-step program. Modify it for your needs. Twelve-step programs have been used for generations to overcome addictions by millions. Try undergoing the steps yourself or with a group near you.
Don’t give in to dehumanizing porn
You were meant for better things. You were meant to be in a relationship with a real woman working together to have the best future you both can have. You’re supposed to have each other’s backs as you navigate the challenges of life.
That’s the goal, anyway, and those are good things. Keep your drive intact to get them for yourself.
You don’t have to masturbate before bed. Other ways to wind down before bed:
- Think of what you have to be grateful for.
- Bedtime yoga (more vigorous exercise can make it harder for you to fall asleep).
- A relaxing cup of herbal tea with CBD.
- Read a book.
- Take a bath or shower.
- Follow some of the other hundreds of suggestions for sleep on this website.
For even more help…
Check out Stop Together – low-cost online therapy.
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