All users feel something evil has possessed them. In the early days, it’s a simple question of
“I will stop, just not today”. Eventually we progress to believing we haven’t got enough willpower to stop, or that there’s something inherent in porn we must have in order to enjoy life. Porn addiction is like clawing our way out of a slippery pit: As we near the top, we see the sunshine, but find ourself sliding back down as our mood dips. Eventually we open our browser, and as we masturbate, we feel awful.
Ask a user,
“If you could go back to the time before you became hooked, with the knowledge you have now, would you have started using porn?”
“NO WAY!” would be the reply.
Ask the confirmed user, someone who defends internet porn and doesn’t believe it causes injury to the brain or downregulation of dopamine receptors:
“Do you encourage your children to use porn?”
“NO WAY!” is again the reply.
Porn is an extraordinary enigma. As said previously, the problem isn’t explaining why it’s easy to stop, it’s explaining why it’s difficult to stop. The real problem is explaining why anyone does it
after getting insights on neurological damage. Part of the reason we start is because of the other tens of millions already into it, yet all of these people wish they hadn’t started in the first place, telling us it’s like living life in second gear. We don’t quite believe they’re not enjoying it, as we associate it with freedom or being ‘sex-educated’, and work hard to become hooked ourselves. We then spend the rest of our lives telling others not to do it and trying to kick the habit ourselves, often thinking we’re unique in this.
We also spend a significant proportion of our time feeling hopeless and miserable. ‘Educating’ ourselves with the supernormal makes us prefer and long for these cold images, even when warm, real ones are available. Through the constant surge and fall of dopamine induced by PMO, we sentence ourselves to a lifetime of isolation, irritability, anger, stress, fatigue, and sexual dysfunction. Using porn, with its absence of the best parts of sex and connection, we end up feeling miserable and guilty.
In fact, reading about internet pornography’s addictive and destructive capabilities here and on other sites makes us even more nervous and hopeless! What sort of hobby is it that when you’re doing it, you wish you weren’t, and when you aren’t, you crave it? Users despise themselves every time they read about hypofrontality and desensitisation, every time they use behind their trusting partner’s back, and every time they can’t bring themselves to exercise after a daytime session. An otherwise intelligent and rational human being spends all their days in contempt. But worst of all, what do users get from having to endure life with these awful black shadows at the back of their mind?
Absolutely nothing!
You might be thinking
“That’s all very well, I know this, but once you’re hooked on these things it’s very difficult to stop.” But why is it so difficult? Some say it’s because of the powerful withdrawal symptoms, but as you’ll soon come to learn, the actual withdrawal symptoms are very mild in fact. And this is evident when you consider that many PMOers have lived and died without realising they were addicts.
Some say internet porn is free and hence humankind should claim this biological bonanza, but this is untrue—it’s addictive and acts just like any drug. Ask a user that swears they only enjoy ‘erotica’ like Playboy magazines if they’ve ever crossed the line to ‘unsafe porn’. And if they are completely honest, they would confess about the times they had rationalized crossing that line, rather than not use anything at all.
Enjoyment has nothing to do with it either. I enjoy crayfish, but I never got to the point where I had to have crayfish every day. With other things in life, we enjoy them while we’re doing them, but we don’t sit around feeling deprived when we’re not.
Some say:
“It’s educational!” So how has it made you grow as a person?
“It’s sexual satisfaction!” So why does it isolate you and make you feel insatiable cravings?
“It’s a feeling of release!” Release from the stresses of real life? Ok, for an hour, before it all comes crashing back on you? And what stresses has it solved?
“It helps me sleep” So why can others sleep just fine without it? There are
many scientifically demonstrated
methods to
fix sleep, and
more so.
Many believe that porn relieves boredom, but boredom is a frame of mind. Porn will habituate you to novelty-seeking in no time, causing you to become increasingly bored until you finally participate in that wild-goose chase for just the right clip, becoming increasingly wired to seek anything that evokes novelty, strong emotion, and eventually, outrageous shock value.
Some say they only do it because their friends and everyone they know does it. If so, pray that your friends don’t start cutting their heads off to cure a headache! Most users who think about it come to conclude that it’s just a habit. This is not really an explanation, but having discounted all the usual, rational explanations, it appears to be the only remaining excuse. Unfortunately, it’s equally illogical. Every day of our lives we change habits, some of them very enjoyable. We’ve been brainwashed to believe that PMO is a habit and that habits are difficult to break.
Are habits difficult to break? Drivers in the US are in the habit of driving on the right hand side of the road, yet when travelling overseas they break the habit with hardly any aggravation whatsoever. And when you get a new job you take on a different routine, so your habits change. These may take some getting used to, but it is nothing like breaking a life long struggle with porn addiction. We make and break habits every day of our lives, so why do we find it difficult to break a habit that makes us feel deprived when we don’t have it, guilty when we do, one that we would love to break anyway, when all we have to do is
stop doing it?
The answer is that porn isn’t habit,
it’s addiction! That’s why it appears to be so difficult to ‘give up’. Most users don’t understand addiction and believe that they get some genuine pleasure or crutch from porn. They believe they’re making a genuine sacrifice if they quit.
The beautiful truth is that once you understand the true nature of porn addiction and the reasons why you use it, you’ll stop doing it, just like that. Within three weeks, the only mystery will be why you found it necessary to use porn as long as you have and why you can’t persuade other users
how nice it is to not be a PMOer!
3.1 The Sinister Trap
Internet porn is a subtle and sinister trap that man and nature have combined to devise. Some of us are even warned about the dangers, but we can’t believe how we aren’t enjoying it. But what gets us into it in the first place? Typically it’s free samples from amateurs and professionals who share. That’s how the trap is sprung. If instead it warned us of the dangers of what we were getting into before even making that first peek, then the alarm bells would scream.
But these bells don’t scream. Perhaps it’s the shocking nature of many clips that reassures our young minds we’ll never become hooked, thinking because we don’t enjoy them, we can stop whenever we want to. Or maybe the seeming innocence of soft material doesn’t trigger any alarm bells, much like a skillful weavings that a con artist can play to direct our mind. As intelligent human beings, we’d then understand why half the adult population was systematically addicted to something cutting down our very potential to perform what we’re viewing. Curiosity brings us closer to the doorstep of addiction, but we don’t dare to click on the thumbnails we’re glancing at, fearing they’d make us ill or send us down into a perilous and immoral pathway. And if we accidentally clicked on one, often our only desire is to get away from the page as soon as possible, while at the same time desperately curious even more.
Once this process has started, we are trapped. From now on we spend the rest of our lives trying to understand why we do it, telling our children not to start, and at odd times trying to escape ourselves. The trap is designed such that we try and stop only due to an ‘incident’, whether sexual performance, loss of a career or relationship, shortage of drive or just plain feeling like a leper. As soon as we stop, we have more stress due to withdrawal pangs, and with the method we relied on to remove that stress now unavailable.
Our resolve for quitting then proves to be shaky. After a few days of torture we convince ourselves that we’ve picked the wrong time to quit, deciding we’ll wait for periods without stress, which upon arriving removes our reason for initially stopping. Of course, that period will never arrive fully, and we begin to believe that our lives tend to become more and more stressful. We leave the protection of our parents, and the stresses of work, homemaking, mortgages, buying shelter, and raising children begins to crowd our lives. But this is an illusion. The most stressful parts of any creature’s life are actually early childhood and adolescence.
We tend to confuse responsibility and stress. A user’s life — like a drug addict’s — automatically becomes more stressful because porn doesn’t relax us or relieve stress, as some try to make us believe. It’s just the reverse, causing us to become more stressed as we continue using, with every guilt laden late night aftermath piling more straw onto the camel’s back. Even users who kick the habit — as most do one or more times throughout their lives — can lead perfectly happy lives yet suddenly become hooked again. Wandering into the pornographic maze, our minds become hazy and we spend the rest of our lives trying to escape. Many do succeed, only to fall into the sinister trap at a later date.
Solving the problem of porn addiction is a riddle. It is complex and difficult. But once you see the answer, it’s simple and fun, and you wonder why you didn’t think of that! EasyPeasy contains the solution to this puzzle, leading you out of the maze, never wandering in again.
All you have to do is follow every instruction to the letter. However, if you take
a wrong turn by jumping chapters, or
blazing through the book at lightning speed without carefully making a deliberate effort on your first time reading, then the rest of the instructions are pointless.
Anyone can find it easy to stop, but we must first establish the facts. No, not facts designed to scare you, there’s already more than enough information out there. If that was going to stop you, you’d have already stopped. But why do we find it difficult to stop? Answering this requires us to know the real reason we’re still using porn, boiling down to two factors. They are:
- Nature and internet porn.
- Societal brainwashing.
Porn users are intelligent, rational human beings. They know they’re taking enormous future risks so they spend lots of time rationalising their ‘habit’. But porn users in their hearts know they’re fools, knowing they had no need to use porn before becoming hooked. Most remember that their first ‘peek’ was a mix of revulsion and novel curiosity. They then specialise in locating, filtering and bookmarking sites, working hard to become hooked.
Most annoyingly, there’s the sense that non-addicts — most women, older guys, and people living in countries where high-speed internet porn is unavailable — aren’t missing out on anything and find the situation laughable. By dismantling these factors in the next chapters, you too will understand the sinister trap!
Internet porn works through hijacking natural reward mechanisms designed to keep you reproducing for as long as possible. Internet porn’s instant and highly accessible form keeps the brain’s reward mechanism producing dopamine for significantly longer than normally possible. Scientifically, this is called the Coolidge effect, which you might already be aware of.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with feelings of wanting, with actual pleasure produced by opioids. More dopamine, more opioids and more action. Without dopamine, actions such as eating don’t feel pleasurable and aren’t completed, with high fat and sugar foods producing the highest chemical release.
Dopamine is also released in response to novelty. With a seemingly infinite amount of pornography available this floods the limbic system (reward circuit), so the first time you see porn you act, orgasming and triggering another flood of opioids. Incentivised to get as much dopamine as possible, the brain stores this as a script for easy recall and strengthens neural pathways through the release of a chemical called DeltaFosB. Now, the brain calls up these pathways in response to cues such as sexy commercials, alone time, stress or even feeling a little down and suddenly you’re ready to take a ride on the ‘water slide’. Every time this is repeated, more DeltaFosB is released so the water slide is greased, alive and easier to ride down the next time.
The limbic system has a self correcting system to trim the number of dopamine and opioid receptors when frequent and daily flooding of dopamine is detected. Unfortunately, these receptors are also needed to keep us motivated to handle daily life stresses. Nominal amounts of dopamine produced by natural rewards simply don’t compare to pornography and aren’t as efficiently absorbed by the decreased receptors, leading you into feel more stressed and irritated than normal. This process is known as desensitisation.
In this cycle you crossed the ‘red line’ and triggered emotions such as guilt, disgust, embarrassment, anxiety and fear, which in turn raise dopamine levels even higher and cause the brain to misinterpret these feelings as sexual arousal.
As time passes, not only is the brain desensitised to previous clips it’s seen, but also similar genres and shock level. This lower motivation triggers feelings of lower satisfaction as our brains engage in constant rating, pushing you to find clips to satisfy the hunger. So you seek more novelty, clicking on the amateurish, shock inducing clip on the homepage you confidently said you wouldn’t on your first visit.
“For in the dew of little things the heart finds it’s morning and is refreshed”
— Kahlil Gibran
A fleeting feeling of security is all that’s needed to get through a rough spot in life, but will your desensitised brain be able to catch that drop of destresser that a non-user’s brain is able to use?
Dopamine flooding acts like a quick acting drug, falling quickly and inducing withdrawal pangs. Many users have the illusion these pangs are the terrible trauma they suffer when trying or being forced to stop. In fact, they’re primarily mental since the user is feeling deprived of their pleasure or prop.
4.1 The Little Monster
The actual chemical withdrawal from porn is so subtle that most users have lived and died without realising they’re drug addicts. Many users have a fear of drugs, yet that’s exactly what they are, drug addicts. Fortunately it’s an easy drug to kick, but you first need to accept that you are, in fact, addicted. Withdrawal from porn doesn’t cause any physical pain and is merely an empty, restless feeling of something missing, which is why many believe it’s something to do with sexual desire. Prolonged, this feeling becomes nervousness, insecurity, agitation, low confidence and irritability. It’s like hunger, for a poison.
Within seconds of engaging in a session, dopamine is supplied and the craving ends, resulting in a feeling of fulfillment as you whiz down the water slide. In the early days, withdrawal pangs and their subsequent relief are so slight we’re unaware of them. When we become regular users, we believe it’s because we’ve come to enjoy them or gotten into the ‘habit’. The truth being that we’re already hooked but don’t realise it. The little monster is already in our brains, so every once and a while we take trips down the water slide to feed it.
All users begin seeking porn for irrational reasons. The
only reason anybody continues using porn, whether they’re a casual or heavy user, is to feed that little monster. The whole conundrum is a series of cruel and confusing punishments, but perhaps the most pathetic aspect is the sense of enjoyment a user gets from a session, trying to get back to the sense of peace, tranquility and confidence their body had before becoming hooked in the first place.
4.2 The Annoying Alarm
You know that feeling when a neighbour’s home alarm has been ringing all day — or some other minor persistent aggravation — then the noise suddenly stops and marvellous feelings of peace and tranquility wash over you? This isn’t really peace, but the ending of an aggravation. Before starting the next session our bodies are complete, but then we begin forcing our brains to pump dopamine and when we’re done and it begins to leave, we suffer withdrawal pangs. These aren’t physical pain, merely an empty feeling. We aren’t even aware it exists but it’s like a dripping tap inside our bodies.
Our rational minds don’t understand it, but they don’t need to. All we know is that we want porn and when we masturbate the craving goes. However, the satisfaction is fleeting because in order to relieve the craving more porn is required. As soon as you orgasm, the craving starts again and the trap continues to hold you. A feedback loop, unless you break it!
The porn trap is similar to wearing tight shoes just to obtain the pleasure of taking them off. There are three primary reasons why users can’t see it this way.
- From birth, we’ve been subjected to massive amounts of brainwashing telling us internet porn is simply another modern development that replaced the print version of porn. This fallacy is packaged with the truth that masturbation isn’t harmful, so why shouldn’t we believe them?
- Because physical dopamine withdrawal involves no actual pain, merely an empty insecure feeling inseparable from hunger and normal stress, this feeling manifests into a porn session as those are the very times we tend to seek internet porn. We tend to regard this feeling as normal.
- However, the primary reason users fail to see internet porn in its true light is due to it working back to front. It’s when you’re not consuming it that you suffer the empty feeling. Because the process of getting hooked is incredibly subtle and gradual in the early days, the empty feeling is regarded as normal and so isn’t blamed on the previous session. The moment the browser is fired up and you begin your session, you get an immediate boost and become less nervous or more relaxed, so internet porn gets the credit.
This ‘back to front’ reverse process makes all drugs difficult to kick. Imagine the state of panic of a heroin addict without any heroin; now picture their utter joy when they can finally plunge a needle into their vein. People who aren’t addicted to heroin don’t suffer that panicked feeling.
The heroin doesn’t relieve the feeling, it causes it. Similarly, non-users don’t suffer empty feelings of needing internet porn, or panic when they’re offline. Non-users can’t understand how users possibly obtain pleasure from two-dimensional videos with muted sounds and abnormal body proportions. Eventually, users can’t understand either.
We talk about internet porn being relaxing or satisfying, but how can you be satisfied unless you were dissatisfied in the first place? A non-user doesn’t suffer from this unsatisfied state, completely relaxed after a no-sex date, while the user isn’t until they’ve satisfied their ‘little monster’.
4.3 A pleasure or a crutch?
An important reminder — the main reason that users find it difficult to quit is due to the belief they’re giving up a genuine pleasure or crutch. It’s essential to understand that you’re giving up
absolutely nothing whatsoever. The best way to understand the subtleties of the porn trap is comparing it with eating. The habit of regular meals causes us to not feel hungry between, only aware of hunger if the meal is delayed. There’s no physical pain, just an empty insecure feeling recognised as hunger. The process of satisfying our hunger is a very pleasant experience.
Pornography appears to be almost identical, but it’s not. Like hunger, there’s no physical pain and the reward mechanism behaves in similar ways, but it’s this similarity to eating that tricks the user into believing there’s a genuine pleasure or crutch. Although eating and porn appear to be very similar, in reality they’re exact opposites.
- You eat to survive and energise your life, whereas porn dims and cuts down your mojo.
- Food genuinely tastes good and eating is a genuinely pleasant experience that we enjoy throughout our lives. Porn involves self-sabotaging the happiness receptors and thus destroys your chances to cope and feel happy.
- Eating doesn’t create hunger and genuinely relieves it, whereas the first porn session starts the craving for dopamine and each subsequent session. Far from relieving it, it ensures suffering for the rest of your life.
Is eating a habit? If you think so, try breaking it completely! To describe eating as habit would be like describing breathing as a habit — both are essential for survival. It’s true that people have the habit of satisfying their hunger at different times with varying types of food, but eating itself isn’t habit. Neither is porn. The only reason a user fires up the browser is trying to end the empty feelings the previous session created, at different times with varying escalating genres.
On the internet, porn is frequently referred to as a habit and for convenience EasyPeasy also refers to the ‘habit’. However, be constantly aware that porn isn’t habit, it’s
drug addiction! When we start to use porn, we have to force ourselves to cope with it. Before we know it, we’re escalating into increasingly bizarre and shocking porn. The thrill is in the hunting, not the killing, with dopamine rapidly leaving the body after orgasm, explaining why users want to ‘edge’ (delaying orgasm) through flicking between multiple browser windows and tabs.
4.4 Crossing the red line
As with any other drug, the body tends to develop immunity to the effects of the same old clips, our brain wanting more or something else. After short periods of watching the same clip it ceases to completely relieve the withdrawal pangs that the previous session created. There’s a tug of war occurring in this porn paradise: you want to stay on the safe side of your ‘red line’, but your brain is asking you to click on the forbidden-fruit clip.
You feel better after engaging in this porn session, but you’re more nervous and less relaxed than someone who never started, even though you’re living in a supposed porn paradise. This position is even more ridiculous than wearing tight shoes because as you go through life an ever-increasing amount of discomfort remains after taking the shoes off. Because the user knows the little monster has to be fed, they themselves decide the time, which tends to be on four types of occasions or a combination of them:
Boredom / Concentration — Two complete opposites!
Stress / Relaxation — Two complete opposites!
What magic drug can suddenly reverse the very effect it had minutes before? The truth is that porn neither relieves boredom and stress nor promotes concentration and relaxation. If you think about it, what other types of occasions are there in our lives, bar sleep? If you have ideas of toning down to other types of ‘realistic’ or ‘soft’ genres of porn, please note that the content of this book applies to all porn — print, webcams, pay-per-view, chat, live shows, etc. The human body is the most sophisticated object on the planet, but no species, even the lowest amoeba or worm, survives without knowing the difference between food and poison.
Through natural selection our minds and bodies have developed techniques for rewarding actions that multiply and sustain humanity. They’re not prepared for supernormal stimuli that are bigger, brighter and edgier than anything found in nature, since even the most muted two-dimensional image causes us to become aroused. But repeatedly look at the same image and you won’t be. In real life, checks and balances ensure you do something else but internet porn has no such limiter, causing you to spend your life in a virtual harem!
It’s a fallacy that physically and mentally weak people become users, the lucky ones being those who found their first instance repulsive and are cured for life. Alternatively, they aren’t mentally prepared to go through the severe learning process of fighting to get themselves hooked, fears of ‘getting caught’ or not being technical enough to operate browser privacy settings. Perhaps the most tragic part of the whole business relates to teenagers — skilled in finding material and covering their tracks — who start in increasing number.
Enjoying internet porn is an illusion. Jumping from genre to genre, merely keeping our novelty ‘monkey’ within the ‘red line’ of ‘safe’ porn genres in order to get our dopamine fix. Like heroin addicts, all they’re really enjoying is the ritual of relieving those pangs.
4.5 The High From the Dance Around The Red Line
Even with the one clip that’s lingered on, users constantly teach themselves to filter out the bad and ugly portions of porn clips. Even if it’s solo, they still filter on the body parts that appeal to them the most. In fact, some take pleasure in this dance around the red line, finding excuses to declare they like the ‘soft stuff’ and are unaddicted to supernormal stimuli. But ask a user who believes they stick to a certain actor or genre,
“If you cannot get your normal brand of porn and can only obtain an unsafe genre, do you stop masturbating?”
No way! A user will masturbate to anything, escalating genres, differences in sex orientation, look-alike performers, dangerous settings, shocking relationships, anything to sate the little monster. To begin with they taste awful, but given enough time you’ll learn to enjoy them. Users will seek empty fulfillment after having real sex, after a long work day, fever, colds, flu, sore throats and even during admittance in hospitals.
Enjoyment has nothing to do with it; if sex is wanted, it makes no sense to be with your laptop. Some users find it alarming to realise they’re drug addicts and believe this will make it even more difficult to stop. In fact, this is good news for two important reasons.
- The reason why most continue using is because although we know the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages, we believe there’s something in porn that we actually enjoy or that it acts like some sort of prop. We’re under the illusion that after we stop using there will be a void, certain situations in our lives never being quite the same. In fact porn not only provides nothing, it subtracts.
- Although internet porn is the most powerful trigger for novelty and sex-based dopamine-flooding, because of the speed you become hooked, you’re never badly hooked. The actual withdrawal pangs are so mild that most users have lived and died without realising they’ve suffered them.
Why is it then that many users find it so difficult to stop, going through months of torture and spending the rest of their lives pining for it at odd times? The answer is the second reason, brainwashing. The neurotransmitter addiction is easy to cope with, most users going for days without online porn on business trips or travel, unaffected by withdrawal pangs. Their little monster is safe in the knowledge you’ll open your laptop as soon as you return to your hotel room. You can survive your obnoxious client and your megalomaniac manager, knowing the fix is there for your taking.
4.6 The Smokers Analogy
A good analogy is that of the cigarette smoker. If they went ten hours of the day without a cigarette they’d be tearing their hair out, but many smokers will buy a new car and refrain from smoking in it. Many will visit theatres, supermarkets, churches and being unable to smoke causes them no problems. Even on trains and airplanes there have been no riots. Smokers are almost pleased for someone or something to stop them smoking.
Users will automatically refrain from using internet porn in their parents’ home during family gatherings and other events with little discomfort. In fact, most users have extended periods during which they abstain without effort. The neurological little monster is easy to cope with even when you’re still addicted. There are millions of users who remain casual users all their lives and they’re just as addicted as the heavy user. There are even heavy users who’ve kicked the addiction but have an occasional peek, greasing the water slide to be ridden down at the next dip in mood.
As said previously the actual porn addiction isn’t the main problem, it’s simply acting as a catalystThe America First movement willt to keeping our minds confused over the real problem – brainwashing. Don’t think the bad effects of internet porn are exaggerated, however; if anything, they’re sadly understated. Occasionally, rumours circulate that the neural pathways created are there for life, with the right mix of chance and stimulus sending you down the life-ruining water slide again, but these are untrue. Our brains and bodies are miraculous machines, recovering within a matter of weeks.
It’s never too late to stop! A quick browse of online communities will show you people of all ages rebooting their (and their partner’s) lives. As with anything, some do take it to the next level, practicing semen retention, Karezza and through differentiation of the sensory and propagative sides of sex make their partners happier than ever before.
It may be of consolation to lifelong and heavy users that it’s just as easy for them to stop as casual users, and in a peculiar way it’s easier. The further it drags you down, the greater the relief. When I stopped I went straight to
zero and didn’t have one bad pang. In fact, the process was actually enjoyable even during the withdrawal period.
But first, we must remove the brainwashing.
Chapter 5 Brainwashing
This is the second reason we start using. Understanding this brainwashing fully required us to first examine the powerful effects of supernormal stimulus. Our brains simply aren’t prepared for the creation of an ‘online harem’, allowing us to flick between more potential mates in fifteen minutes than our ancestors had in several lifetimes.
There’s been much misguided advice in the past, one example being that masturbation leads to blindness. This, along with other scare tactics, clearly overdid it. Misconceptions such as these were right to be overthrown by science. But the baby has been thrown out with the bath water; from our earliest years our subconscious minds are bombarded with sexual messages and imagery, magazines and advertisements loaded with innuendo. Some pop videos are extremely suggestive, but don’t despair, make it a game to identify what components they’re using — is it shock value, novelty, colour, size, taboo, nostalgia, etc. Such a game can even be taught to pre-teens as a way to educate them.
At its core, the message is
“The most precious thing on this earth, my last thought and action, will be orgasm.” Is this exaggeration? Watch any TV or movie plot and you’ll see the mix up of the sensory (touch, smell, voice) and the propagative (orgasmic) parts of sex. The impact of this doesn’t register on our conscious, but the subconscious has time to absorb it.
5.1 Scientific reasoning
There’s publicity the other way: sexual dysfunction scares, loss of motivation, preferring virtual porn to real girls, YourBrainOnPorn.com and various internet subcultures, but these movements don’t actually stop people from using. Logically speaking they should, but the simple fact is they don’t. Even the health risks listed from peer-reviewed studies on YourBrainOnPorn.com aren’t enough to stop an adolescent from starting.
Ironically, the most powerful force in this confusion is the user themselves. It’s a fallacy that users are weak-willed or physically weak people. You have to be physically strong in order to cope with an addiction after you know it exists. Perhaps the most painful aspect is that they place themselves as unsuccessful losers and insufferable introverts. It’s likely that a friend could be more interesting in person if they hadn’t put themselves down for seeking self-pleasure.
5.2 Problems using willpower
Users quitting using the willpower method blame their own lack of willpower and ruin their peace and happiness. It’s one thing to fail in self-discipline and another to self-loathe. After all, there’s no law that requires you to be hard all the time before sex, properly aroused and able to satisfy your partner. We’re working on an addiction, not a habit and at no point do you argue with yourself to stop a habit like golfing, but to do the same with porn addiction is normalised — why?
Constant exposure to a supernormal stimulus rewires your brain, so building a resistance to this brainwashing is critical, as if buying a car from a second hand car dealer — nodding politely but not believing a word the man is saying. So don’t believe that you must have as much sex as you can, all of it being exceptionally good, using porn in its absence.
Don’t play the safe porn game either; your little monster invented that game to lure you. Is amateur porn certified by some authority? Porn sites gather data from their users and use it to cater to their needs, and if they see an uptick in a certain category they’ll focus on it and get content out ASAP. Don’t be fooled by educational intent or ‘safe’ female-marketed clips. Start asking yourself:
“Why am I doing it? Do I really need to?”
No, of course you don’t!
Most users swear that they only watch static and soft porn and therefore are fine, when in actuality they’re straining at the leash, fighting with their willpower to resist temptations. If done too often and for too long, this depletes their willpower considerably and they begin failing in other life projects where willpower is of great value, like exercise, dieting, etc. Failure in these areas makes them feel miserable and guilty, cascading into using pornography again. If this isn’t done, they’ll vent their anger and depression onto loved ones.
Once you become addicted to internet porn, the brainwashing is increased. Your subconscious mind knows the little monster has to be fed, blocking everything else. It’s fear that keeps people from quitting, fear of that empty, insecure feeling they get when they stop flooding their brains with dopamine. Just because you’re unaware of it doesn’t mean it’s not there. You don’t have to understand it any more than a cat needs to understand where the hot water pipes are: the cat just knows that if it sits in a certain spot it feels warm.
5.3 Passivity
The passivity of our minds and dependence on authority leading to brainwashing is the primary difficulty of giving up porn. Our upbringing in society, reinforced by the brainwashing of our own addiction and combined with the most powerful - our friends, relatives and colleagues. The phrase ‘giving up’ is a classic example of the brainwashing, implying genuine sacrifice. The beautiful truth is there’s nothing to give up; on the contrary, you’ll be freeing yourself from a terrible disease and achieving marvellous positive gains. We’ll begin removing this brainwashing now, starting with no longer referring to ‘giving up’ but to stopping, quitting or perhaps the true position,
escaping!
The only thing that persuades us to use initially is other people doing it and feeling that we’re missing out. We work hard to become hooked, yet we never find what they’ve been missing. Every time we see another clip it reassures us there must be something in it, otherwise people wouldn’t be doing it and the business wouldn’t be so big. Even when they kick the habit, the ex-user feels they’re being deprived when a discussion on a sexy entertainer, singer or even a porn star comes up during parties or social functions.
“They must be good if all my friends talk about them, right? Do they have free pictures online?” They feel safe, they’ll just have one peek tonight and before they know it, they’re hooked again.
The brainwashing is extremely powerful and you need to be aware of its effects. Technology continues to grow and the future will bring exponentially faster sites and access methods. The porn industry is investing millions in virtual reality so that it will become the next best thing. We don’t know where we’re going, unequipped to deal with present technology or what is to come.
We’re about to remove this brainwashing. It isn’t the non-user who’s being deprived, but the user who is forfeiting a lifetime of:
- Health
- Energy
- Wealth
- Peace of mind
- Confidence
- Courage
- Self-respect
- Happiness
- Freedom
What do they gain from these considerable sacrifices?
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, apart from the illusion of trying to get back to the state of peace, tranquillity and confidence that the non-user always enjoys.
5.4 Withdrawal Pangs
As explained earlier, users believe they use porn for enjoyment, relaxation or some sort of education. The actual reason is relief of withdrawal pangs. Our subconscious mind begins to learn that internet porn and masturbation at certain times tends to be pleasurable. As we become increasingly hooked on the drug, the greater the need to relieve the withdrawal pangs becomes and the further the subtle trap drags you down. This process happens so slowly that you aren’t even aware of it, most young users don’t realise they’re addicted until attempting to stop and even then, many won’t admit it.
Take this conversation a therapist had with hundreds of teenagers:
Therapist: “You realise that internet porn is a drug and the only reason why you’re using is that you cannot stop.”
Patient: “Nonsense! I enjoy it, if I didn’t, I would stop.”
Therapist: “Just stop for a week to prove to me you can if you want to.”
Patient: “No need, I enjoy it. If I wanted to stop, I would.”
Therapist: “Just stop for a week to prove to yourself you aren’t hooked.”
Patient: “What’s the point? I enjoy it.”
As already stated, users tend to relieve their withdrawal pangs at times of stress, boredom, concentration or combinations of these. In the following chapters, we’ll target these aspects of the brainwashing.
[Spoiler/]
