Never too late to be who you want to be

So I reckon I am older than most Fapstronauts though I think age has nothing to do with destructive behaviours. I have probably been addicted to porn since I was 7 or 8 : I distinctly remember being show porn mags by some of the older guys and being fascinated by it. Hooked from the first sample, my tastes and peccadilloes have morphed over the decades but I reckon I am now ready to make a good stab at begin in control

I exercise, run bike, kayak, go to the gym a few times a week, I am in a running club and a cycling club rarely drink, don't smoke and eat pretty healthy so my overall lifestyle is healthy: my obsessions with porn and chat rooms are a degenerative affliction and are not healthy at all.

SO the plan: just stop and stay stopped with a few mitigations

1) Cold Turkey software on all of my machines with block lists of all my old sites: this software can't be easily removed and the timers are set to block until Dec 19
2) Router at home is configured to use Safe DNS which will block porn sites
3) Mobile phone contract has adult content disabled so I can't get to porn by using my phone data allowance
4) I have enforced Safe Search on Google via the Hosts File but cant do same with Bing so may block the search engine using Cold Turkey: doing similar with Yahoo. I have found in the past that the chimp will convince me to use image search and then it all kicks off again
5) Going to reread the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg: its a super book on understanding triggers and ways to interrupt
6) Even more exercise and cold showers: I have a home gym as well so will use more weights to offset urges

I am a devout atheist and PhD scientist by background so I don't go with belief systems preferring facts and evidence to faith and surrendering to higher powers


Anything I have missed in the above list (save for huge determination, focus, discipline and tenacity !)

 

Thanks for the welcome, and yes, our chimp brains will work around blockers. The principle for me is to put a barrier in place that allows some time for an interrupt. It's based on the science of habit and the trigger-feedback loop of dopamine addiction. It's the anticipation of dopamine that drives us. Buying a little bit of time helps me so I can get up , physically remove myself from my computers and go and breathe.it works a lot of the time but is still prone to failure. I need to work on my conditioned response and rework the reward mechanism so I substitute P/M/O with something else that brings pleasure and closes the loop. I'll use exercise. As for why now! Because I want to change, my father died suddenly a couple of months ago...it is time for me to move on and be a better version of me.

WRT religion, my family are devout Catholics, my mother goes to church every day of the week. It brings her comfort, she always did go daily but it took on more resonance after my younger brother killed himself 15 years ago. Now both my brother and father are dead , religion is hugely important to my mum..it's her conduit. All religions are frameworks that help explain the world and inform people"s behaviour. I have no problems with individuals' belief systems, it's a matter of personal choice

 

As animals we are driven to procreate, its one of the most basic drivers of behaviour. We also have compound brains from our evolutionary past. Part lizard, part chimp, part human .. in nature we would have had to fight to mate, females were scare and highly competed over. The abundance of P tricks our chimp into believing we have huge mating opportunities, it satisfies the same drivers
The route to breaking the habit is to buy time for our higher human brain to control the lizard, negotiate with the chimp and rationalize that P is NOT mating, it's self destructive

 

Thanks for the encouragement and for reading my meanderings.

I totally get that and have done similar in the past: almost as if I intentionally left that back-door so it is acceptable on some subliminal level. "I'll close if after I am done"...then repeat with the next chink in the flaky armor.

Having built up layers of blockers, DNS locks, Safe Searches, plug-ins. blocked Apps and sites (my chimp worked out that by using VPNs I could bugger them all, so I blocked VPNs now too ) .
I reckon it is now a bit like Gulliver and the Lilliputians, where he gets tied down by all those little threads: there are enough of these threads to make reversion really difficult (though not impossible) and the pause it takes for me to circumvent is long enough for me refresh myself and interrupt the urge. I am absolutely clear they don't work by themselves, no more than an alcoholic can stop drinking by not having any alcohol in his house when there are thousands of shops available: but on a similar principle, making it less available helps to buy some time to negotiate with the inner demon: recognize the trigger and try to rework the routine with a different reward.....

it's still Day 1 so WTFDIK !!!