If I Had to Start Over: The Basics of Overcoming Pornography Addiction

Step into your freedom instead of trying useless methods

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An army armed with sticks will not see victory.

They will not win even if they have the moral high-ground, the best training, good intentions and determination made of steel.

What you use in your fight matters.

A monkey with AK-47 is much more intimidating than David Goggins with a rock.

If you are stuck watching pornography every single day (or every week) and nothing you try works, you’re not using the right tools.

I’ve been there. It felt like I’ve done all I could think of. And I still relapsed when the urge came.

Fast forward years after seeing victory, studying what works, helping men and learning how addiction works, I began to see the same patterns.

A man who has his life in order, doesn’t struggle with lust. A man who doesn’t have his life in order, struggles not only with lust but with self-control in multiple areas.

Overcoming lust is overcoming yourself.

Here’s what I wish I knew 10 years ago.

Step 1: understand that you’re fighting your own hijacked brain

Your brain is not neutral in this fight. It is actively working against you.

Because your brain has learned, through repetition, that lust works.

When you feel hopeless, it relieves the pressure. When you feel like you are failing, it offers an escape. When the day is heavy and you don’t know what to do with what you’re struggling, your brain has a ready answer: fire up the website you’re not suppose to open.

Your brain knows exactly what will make you feel better. It doesn’t care that the relief is temporary, immoral and it leads to other problems.

The reward system in your brain has been trained to see lust as a solution.

That is why quitting by deciding to stop always fails. Lust isn’t a bad habit. It’s a coping mechanism that functions as a distraction in a desperate moment.

You are fighting a brain that has built an efficient system for managing your discomfort using lust.

Your primary goal shouldn’t be to “stop watching porn at any cost” but to restore your brain’s reward system and train it to use healthy solutions.

Practical application: read through this again until understand the principle of how your brain works when it comes to lust.

Step 2: commit to the fight towards a new lifestyle, not just the streak

A streak is a byproduct of a chain of good choices.

Chasing the streak without changing your lifestyle can lead to a decent streak. But once you encounter big enough problem in your life relapse happens again.

Commitment means declaring a fight against your own desires. Against the ones that feel obviously wrong, and more importantly the ones your brain tells you are harmless.

Watching YouTube until midnight. Checking your phone while at work. Allowing yourself imagine engaging in lust.

The small compromises your brain whispers are too minor to count are not. They train your discipline more than saying no to temptation to lust.

Everything counts. Every tiny decision is registered by your brain. It’s testing the strength of your commitment, looking for the path of least resistance and waiting for smallest opportunity to find the easy way out.

If we didn’t have this mechanism in the brain to pursue comfort, discipline would be effortless.

Practical application: decide to remove the tiny compromises you know are bad choices.

Step 3: look out for the spike of negative emotions, not for a temptation

This is the one we rarely see coming because we aren’t as fluent with our emotions as ladies.

Negative emotions is the ground where temptations and urges prosper.

You fall because, hours or days before, something happened that put you in a negative emotional state.

You felt unworthy. You felt like you were falling behind. You felt disrespected, disjointed, unseen, afraid or anxious.

The list can go on much longer.

Lust fires a massive amount of dopamine making us feel pleasure and achievement. There’s no way to experience such a high naturally. But that’s the reason why it works an escape mechanism.

Addiction, at its core, is a mood-altering activity. And the key word is mood.

A man in a genuinely good emotional state does not relapse. He has nothing to escape from.

Start paying attention to your emotions.

Most men, when they look honestly, can trace temptation back to a moment where they felt something they didn’t want to feel, and didn’t have a way to deal with it.

Practical application: Learn to notice danger signs before temptation begins. Namely, when you feel negative a wave of negative emotion. Then find ways to deal with them in a healthy way (journaling; exercising, going for a walk, meeting a friend).

Step 4: build small positive habits

Bad habits are the reason why you feel bad about yourself.

We all have values and standards. It doesn’t matter how you justify a tiny compromise, it’s still a compromise of who you believe you are. It always hurts you.

Every time you open YouTube before your work is done, every time you reach for your phone before you’re out of bed, every time you choose the easy pleasure over the harder but the right option you are training your brain that your values don’t matter.

A brain trained to ignore values and standards will fall to lust when enough pressure rises.

If you want to feel good about yourself, you’ve got to get into good actions.

You rewire a brain trained on instant gratification by doing what you don’t feel like doing. The good habits give us rewards later in life, hence delayed gratification.

It is through habits so small and consistent that your brain begins to learn the healthy pattern.

Small enough to do on your worst day, not on your best one. Defined enough to know when you’re done and when you’re not. Trackable so you can distinguish between feeling like you’re doing better and actually doing better.

When you begin to act in accordance to your values even if everything in your life is falling apart, you feel like you’re moved forward. You’ll gain self-respect. Most importantly, you’ll be training your brain to seek delayed gratification and self-control.

When you’ve done a few tasks you didn’t feel like doing, even if temptation suddenly appears, you’ll notice you’ve got enough strength to resist.

Practical application: decide on 3 to 5 tiny habits you’re going to do from now on. Tell a friend about it and ask him to keep you accountable.

Step 5: stop seeing yourself as a man who struggles

At this point the fight changes.

You’re starting to see yourself differently. More disciplined, consistent.

Temptations seem different because the man fighting it has changed enough that lust no longer fits who he is becoming.

This is the shift most men are waiting for someone to tell them about. You do not fight your way to freedom and then discover your identity. You take on the identity first, and then the fight changes because of it.

God does not see you as a man defined by your worst moments. He sees you as a son, freed by Christ and called to holiness. You didn’t earn a new identity. The cross made it all possible.

Your identity in Christ is not something you grow into after you’ve had enough clean days. It is the truth about you right now as you fight. And the reason why you overcome.

Throw off your old sinful nature and your former way of life, which is corrupted by lust and deception. Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes. Put on your new nature, created to be like God-truly righteous and holy. (Ephesians 4:22–24, NLT)

When you throw off your old nature and put on the new, you will begin to see yourself as a man who is free. And this guaranteed to lead you to make different decisions.

Those decisions begin to agree with who you are.

Practical application: Pick a letter from apostle Paul, read and write down every identity statement that he uses to describe you, the believer. Then read through the list every day until you believe it.

The man on the other side of this

When you thinking as a free man and acting in accordance to your potential becomes natural, you outgrow your struggle with lust.

You commit. You learn to name what you’re is running from. You build the small habits that train your brain toward your God-created potential. You takes on the identity God already gave you and live from it.

It’s not how you stop watching pornography This is how you conquer lust and make yourself reach your God-given potential.

If you need help working through what this looks like personally for you, reach out to me at vitus@righteouslegacy.com