What are practical strategies that consistently helped you get over your p addiction?

I've been on this journey for quite a while, and tried quite a variety of strategies along the way. What I noticed helped:

• Having a public journal/audience, helps keep me accountable. Also important posting daily updates.
• Gamifying the process, like awarding my self daily points for completing NF related tasks.
• Spending time mediating, reflecting about the lowest points in my life, using that as motivation to get better. Having rules where I have to review my past failures, read past notes to keep the pain fresh in my mind.
• Documenting all my relapses, so I know exactly why I relapse and in what context. This helps me predict moments of weakness and be much more prepared.
• Make strict rules for myself, which I try to follow religiously (being a bit general here, sorry). Other simple rules like no laptop, phone in bed, no sleeping in, cold showers, no time alone in the room, no incognito tabs...
• Change passwords to no pmo slogans to act as daily reminders. Have other daily reminders, both physical and digital to remind me about my journey.
• Continuously experimenting with new practical strategies, until I find smth that works
• Almost every day asking myself what will be different next time.
• Trying to quantify my journey, track all my streaks, relapses, urges, triggers, thoughts, exercises

As a one time event, it has also been helpful recognizing that I have an addiction and educating myself on the dangers of PMO. Now I am 1000% committed to the NF journey. I am looking for practical advice that has helped. Obviously a strong mental framework and will power is necessary, but we can't always rely on motivation and willpower. We need a consistent practical system. Remember we don't raise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of the systems and processes we have in place.
I am interested in a holistic approach to quitting porn. Please share your experience.

 

Thank you for your answer. To clarify,

• Holistic= Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts.

So a holistic approach would be a general approach with a lot of interconnected parts that help achieve the same goal. For example if you want to get in a better shape it would be to exercise daily, track your diet, get good sleep so your body can recover, join a run club or a social group practicing the sport, track your progress, follow nutritional/exercise posts/journals and so on. Basically not relying on just one aspect at a time, but trying to get all the variables in place.

With p it would be various strategies that tied together are much more powerful than each one on its own. Its a sort of 1+1>2 example. Inputs far outweigh the outputs, if there is synergy between them. Several strategies I could think of I already outlined above. Generally I would divide them in several categories.

• Education: being aware of the dangers of p, acknowledging you have a problem/addiction, and committing to quit p.
• Mind: willpower, identity, motivation and mental frameworks. Building discipline. Personal reflections/ journaling could fit here.
• Environment: installing add blockers, not spending time alone in the room, shutting of internet before sleep. Identifying other week environments and assuring you're never in one of them. If you end up being in one, add additional friction, like adblockers, or other rules you can set for yourself, until urges cool down/dopamine passes and you have time to reason logically.
• Accountability: this one is very important, a bit tied to social aspect too
• Social/Emotional: making sure you are in a strong position, have a loving community/ special other, don't feel lonely/stressed.
• Gamification: set daily/weekly/monthly challenges/quests, wining points, and making the process fun. Similar to DailyCounter on NF, but DC is very limited, so you could make your own counters that track different metrics through the day and win points off of that.

As you can see there are multiple factors that help quit p, and all of them together are much more likely to succeed than each one individually. They also nicely fall together under the umbrella of habits formation, building and maintaining good ones and quitting bad ones, but specifically applied to quitting p. I'm curious what other strategies people are using that have proven practical overtime. Particularly interested to learn from seasoned users who manage to pull pass weekly streaks. What has helped you stay on track? And what has most often brought you to failure?

Thank you, as you can see I've been fighting this addiction for a while, and accumulated a bit of knowledge overtime. Most of the quotes are either from other users/readings I have done, or a general synthesis from others contributions, so most merits go to them.

Please share your thoughts!

 

I think what you are trying to say through being conscious is being very intentional in all the actions you take through the day. Put it another way: following your brain not your dick. I strongly believe a system can help with getting more intentional, in fact its also a part of my system. And its something you can get better at with daily practice. The hard part tho is staying rational when the urges come in, or the dopamine hits when exposed to triggers. Dopamine can make a rational brain very irrational, talking from personal experience here.

I would put this in the mental dimension of quitting p, although it could easily stand on its own since its such an important concept in general. We very rarely sit down and actually make conscient decisions, most of the time its just habits and instincts (to borrow from the 'Thinking Fast and Slow' book), which works fine on some things, but not when you want to bring a change to your life. You can't let life push you around, you have to be the one in the driving seat.

 

Hey friend, wow, I did in fact read through your posts 1-2 weeks ago, and actually linked and referenced them in my [journal page12, day12] here , all very good advice. I should definitely review them now.

You should definitely do that, and I would gladly help, as you can see this is also what I'm trying to achieve with this thread. To synthesize together practical advice.

Towards the end you're touching on intentionality which I also discussed above, very good idea worth expanding. Like how do you lead a more intentional life.

I largely agree, but note that @FoundTheFreedom is already 70 days in his streak. I managed to pull a 90 day p-free streak over the summer, probably what I consider my biggest accomplishment in fighting this addiction. But now I'm at day 1. Can relate a lot, that once you're in the flow you don't even think about it. The problem is getting yourself in the flow, you need at least 2 weeks to build momentum. And once you are there you need to be very careful not to fuck up. I fucked up in a very stupid way, being on my laptop, alone, late at night and triggered. Also being an arrogant fuck. Perfect recipe for a relapse.

Perhaps we had different experiences with p, but p and my excessive p consumption has certainly impacted my life in a meaningfully negative way. Its also created a very strong link in my mind which has proven very hard to break at times. Maybe people have different degrees of addiction to porn, mine at its peak is certainly one of the most severe ones, and gets better as the p-free days pile in. Being intentional is a very powerful concept, but very hard to achieve when getting started with this addiction.

My question is how does one practically quit when he is at the peak of his addiction, and once in a strong position, say 30+ days in, how does he avoid being exposed to triggers/escalating to p, and in general do stupid mistakes?

Thank you for your input, I greatly appreciate, and feel free to provide more thoughts!
P.S. sorry for the lengthy post, but I had a lot of thoughts pile in.