Porn has never been more readily available than it is now. The explosion of the internet has led to nearly 70 million search queries for porn every single day. With the surge in pornographic material and availability, porn addiction is also on the rise.
Porn addiction can negatively impact all aspects of your life, compromising your health, relationships, and financial standing. While some evidence suggests that porn addiction does have underlying biological causes, it’s also a mental dependency.
Here we’ll discuss how to mentally overcome porn addiction so you can reclaim your life.
How Porn Addiction Can Damage Your Life
Many people ask where you draw the line between addiction and a healthy interest in pornographic material. The biggest factor is how your porn habit is affecting your life. If watching porn is taking precedence over other important commitments at work and home, it’s a warning sign that you may be addicted.
Porn addiction can negatively impact your physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing. Watching countless hours of pornographic material can cause vision problems, neck and back pain, and weight gain. Emotionally, you become increasingly detached from loved ones and unable to form lasting bonds or relationships. Porn addiction can also take a mental toll the same way as substance abuse or depression. You may start feeling lonely or sad due to increased isolation. You may also experience low self-esteem, shame, and guilt. In time, many porn addicts feel both trapped by their addiction and completely dependent on it, like a drug.
Understanding the Hold Porn Addiction Has On Your Life
Before you can embark on the road to recovery, you must first identify the root cause of your porn addiction. Most addicts use porn as an outlet for other traumatic events, mental health issues, or emotional stress. Identifying this can help you choose the most effective path to success.
Therapy is one of the fastest ways to discover why you feel compelled to watch porn. For most addicts, it extends far behind sexual satisfaction. Stress relief is cited as one of the main reasons people become addicted to porn. Unhappiness in a relationship, depression, and physical dependency are also common causes. Once you figure out why you watch porn and what you get out of it, you can find healthy ways to cope and overcome the hold porn addiction has on your life.
The online therapy program Stop Together can help you not only identify the cause of your addiction but offer a variety of treatment methods for a multi-faceted approach to healing.
Ways to Mentally Overcome Porn Addiction
In order to successfully overcome porn addiction, you have to not only determine the driving force of your addiction but also which methods work best for you personally.
Identify Your Triggers
Every porn addict has certain triggers that cause temptation and the urge to view pornography. For some, it’s provocative images on TV or in movies, photographs in a magazine, or seeing an attractive person on the street. For others, it’s extreme stress.
Identifying these triggers can help you better handle urges as they arise. But identifying your triggers isn’t enough. You also need to test yourself against these urges. You might be wondering why you can’t just avoid them? Life is unpredictable. You will eventually face unexpected temptation. By testing yourself in stressful situations, you can build up the fortitude to resist.
Keeping a trigger journal is one such way to keep track of how often you encounter temptation, where and when it occurs, and the feelings you experience.
Mindfulness and Meditation
Mindfulness and meditation are two more helpful tools for recognizing, accepting, and controlling your reactions to stimuli. Though often overlapping, these two practices are different and both offer individual benefits for mentally overcoming porn addiction.
Mindfulness involves being aware of “something”, while meditation is about being aware of nothing. Mindfulness teaches you to acknowledge your thoughts and feelings, experience them, and then let them go. Meditation focuses more on learning to quiet your mind and slow down your thoughts. Both can be useful tools in navigating the thoughts and feelings you have in relation to porn. These techniques are also helpful for stress reduction.
Reduce Stress
Speaking of reducing stress, given that many people turn to porn for stress relief, finding alternative outlets is another way to break the mental hold porn has on you. In addition to meditation and mindfulness, yoga, painting, playing a musical instrument, and exercise are all beneficial forms of stress relief.
You can also adopt a better sleep routine by reading before bed, lighting soothing candles, or using essential oils. Studies show that stress and sleep are closely related, with insomnia sufferers at higher risk for experiencing stress, anxiety, and even developing depression. By adopting healthy nighttime rituals, you can fight the urge to view pornography. This is especially helpful for addicts who turn to porn as stress relief before bed.
Find Alternative Activities
Porn addicts spend countless hours a day viewing pornography. When it comes time to break the habit, filling these voids of time can be difficult. The old saying, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”, holds true here. Without porn to occupy your time, you’ll need alternative activities that offer the same pleasure that porn once did.
Taking up a hobby like journaling, exercising, or even volunteering are all viable options and can take the place of porn. At first, these activities may not seem as satisfying but in time, you’ll learn to find the same level of joy in emotionally fulfilling activities as you once did in viewing pornography — minus the shame and guilt.
Gain Support From Loved Ones
Accountability is another big part of overcoming porn addiction. While most addicts are embarrassed by their addiction, sometimes, including loved ones in your recovery process is the key to success.
It can be extremely difficult to tell your significant other that you’re addicted to porn. Couples counseling can help you work through any issues that arise following your admission. Once you admit out loud to others that you have an addiction, it’s more difficult to relapse. Your loved ones want what’s best for you and will hold you accountable. This can help give you the mental fortitude you need to break your porn addiction once and for all.
Seek Professional Help
When these techniques aren’t enough to kick your porn habit, it may be time to seek professional help. Both in-person and online therapy can help you come to terms with your addiction and find useful tools for recovery.
Are you ready to break free from the hold porn has on your life? Are you seeing the negative impacts it has on your relationships, demeanor, and career? Poor addiction is as dangerous and damaging as any other addiction. Knowing the warning signs and understanding the root cause of your addiction are the first steps in living a life of mental clarity.