Porn Addiction Expert: THIS Is What Porn Does to Your Brain @recoverwithnate

Pornography addiction is not a willpower deficiency disorder you don't just need to quit porn you actually need a new life altogether it is in large part something that shoots straight to the base of your brain stem in the year 2000 the rates of erectile dysfunction under the age of 35 were 0% by 2011 Rose to 30% you are looking at a mass psychological experiment on an entire population without their consent what's Up guys welcome to another edition of the Austin Summers podcast the Mind expanding podcast to get you the girls that you want and today

I am joined with porn recovery coach Nate O'Neal and uh why don't you start by telling people who you are and and uh and what you do just very briefly yeah absolutely so at a high level I'm an aerospace engineer turned uh pornography addiction recovery coach and at a very high level I help people quit Pornography heal trauma and the emotional roots that drive the problem create healthier relationships and connect with a higher sense of purpose um spent the last three years coaching people launched a mentorship program last year that has now helped dozens of

people around the world um from the United States the UK Germany the UAE India uh find an effective and successful Pathway to getting this problem solved for good so at high level That's me yeah and Nate's talked a lot about this for years and one of the things that you told me was my idea about what causes people to compulsively use porn was kind of wrong so I just thought that it was like okay there's this like weird phenomenon where it's like this these pixels on a screen we didn't evolve for it so it's like

an evolutionary mismatch and we just essentially like we're our brains are kind of like the insects that Circle around uh bright lights at night you know cuz it's like they evolve to to fly with the moon using it to orient and then these bright lights are there at night these artificial lights and they're flying around it like [ __ ] retards and that's kind of like how we are it's like we see this porn like oh my God so much [ __ ] ass oh yeah oh oh I'm winning and then you just literally get

sucked into a hole that's part of it but it's not the whole thing so I Thought it was okay so you put in porn blockers you get rid of all the access to porn which doesn't really ultimately get rid of all the access um then you just you know go out a lot meet a ton of girls and then you get sexual satisfaction from the girls and then you also what I found too is that when I have a date coming up or if I'm going to like [ __ ] my girlfriend I'm like I

don't want to watch porn because then the sex is going to be less good and so it was a Combination of like yeah put on porn blockers understand why porn is bad and then like have a good dating life which is part of it but I think what you hinted at and or what you you told me was that that the reasons why people use porn are much deeper reasons and they're using it almost like a way to self sooth so I'm really curious if you're once don't you elaborate on that feel free to talk

absolutely so yeah man there there's so much here to to unpack I Think um one of them is that you know you're hitting on this idea that porn is an an evolutionary supernormal stimuli which it absolutely is it is in large part something that shoots straight to the base of your brain stem like you think about it in a biological sense the only drive that you have that is more strong than your drive to reproduce is simply your your drive to survive it is the second most powerful drive that any human being experiences and it

is the Drive which occupies the predominant bandwidth of your life you know when people are in survival situations that's brief you spend the better part of your entire life working on increasing your odds of of reproductive success let's say um so this is an appeal to a part of the brain stem which is uh arguably the most powerful or close to the most powerful um part of who people are and what drives people's behavior and so there is this evolutionary mismatch in The supernormal stimuli that kind of lies at the core of it but it's

wrapped up and entangled in all these other factors which turn it into something that you know there's a lot of supern normal stimuli out there that not very many people get addicted to then there's pornography which we're seeing is actually something that it's harder to find somebody who doesn't have a problem with it than to find somebody who does and there's cool research actually That's showing that now where well it's cool in the sense that we have numbers to put to it not cool in the sense that it's happening but um over the last couple

years we've seen an increase in self-reported uh addictive relationships to pornography increase from um 11% among men to 63% and that was over the course of about four years so we're seeing this massive Spike and so like what's going on um and the interesting thing is like when you pull on the Threat of this problem it starts in The evolutionary aspect you know it's like you're seeing naked people that's clearly something that is appealing to everybody's brain but why is it becoming such a problem you follow this thread and it goes through basically everything um

if you follow it into a person's life you find that people who develop an addictive relationship with pornography typically have a complex web of uh emotional problems to put it at a high Level a system of broken connections within themselves that pornography emerges as the perfect solution for yeah and one one thing that I realized pretty recently is that you could be the smartest person in the world but inside we're all kind of like [ __ ] four-year-olds and like emotionally like we all have these emotional needs that we're trying to fulfill and you're going

to either fulfill them in a positive empowering way or you're going to Fulfill them in like a negative disempowering or addictive way and a lot of the actions that we do are almost all the actions we do are an attempt to meet one of our needs and um yeah so what are what are some of the common needs that you feel like people in in porn people that are addicted to porn are are trying to fulfill or soothe or whatever yeah so to start at a a superficial level and work inwards there is the simple

fact that People do not understand what pornography actually is and what technology is that they're interacting with we totally we can get into that that'll require a little bit more explanation but they're ignorant about how their minds are being played by a highly addictive in novel technology and they are not putting up any boundaries against this incredibly pollution filled digital environment that we live in so that would be like superficial reason Number one you're ignorant and there's opportunity like it's like I don't know what this is oh there's boobs and then you're down the rabbit

hole and then you're stuck but then moving inward is like you know we're we're living in a time where a complex web of social cultural and other factors are creating conditions where people are just generally not happy I see the same thing with doing dating stuff so what you want to get into those factors Yeah so at at a superficial level it's like people are chronically bored they have no sense of overarching meaning and purpose in their life they have nothing to connect with that they value more than the temporary pleasure they get from self-destructive

self-sabotaging Behavior people are living with this chronic internal sense of uh like this refrigerator hum of discontent and negative emotion that they cannot figure out how to resolve and pornography comes In as a way to temporarily resolve the short-term discomfort or sorry the the discomfort people are feeling in the short term so people are trapped in these Perpetual self-sabotaging cycles of short-term mood repair that they do not know how to escape from um so the emotional discontent and background stuff like that people are depressed uh one of the most common things that I see people

totally ignore across the board and I think this is a this could go off Into an offshoot of the problems with spiritual bypassing like people are approaching a lot of these problems like why do I feel so depressed and they're looking up like stoicism quotes about how to change their mindset meanwhile they're you know they're sleeping like five hours a night their diet is full of all this inflammatory crap uh they don't exercise and they don't realize that those three things will they're not they not only comprise probably like they I Would say this they

probably comprise about 70% of the emotional quality of your life if you eat well if you sleep well you have a healthy circadian rhythm and you exercise you will eliminate about 70% of the negative emotion you experience well I would I would add on to that and good social life friends family romantic relationships I think if you add that on to it yeah it'd be like I don't know what 90 95% for sure yeah and that would definitely take up a big Chunk of that remaining thing but you have a lot of people who are

they're depressed and they're struggling with chronic physical health issues that they are totally ignorant they're experiencing so people have high anxiety they're tired and fatigued all the time they don't have the energy to go out and actually meet people and work on meeting some of their legitimate needs and so they're stuck in this pit of just feeling terrible and pornography once Again appears as like three clicks I can feel better so there's an emotional coping mechanism relationship that people have with pornography and then there's a lot of stuff where it goes deeper into trauma so

uh by and large I actually this is so crazy because I I started seeing this and now I'm keeping track of it and I'm putting numbers to all of it of all of the people that I've talked to over the last year which at this point measures in I would say Around like 160 people that I've had one-on-one conversations with I have not met a single person who is addicted to pornography who came from a healthy family where there was healthy Attunement between themselves and at least one of their parents across the board the most

common thing that I hear among people who are struggling with pornography in a deeper way is that they grew up in a family where they just felt like they had to keep their [ __ ] to Themselves and one of the things that people also don't take into account is that when you're young and you have a developing mind it is the connection that you have with your parents that teaches you how to process negative emotion and one one of the things that you said is when they have to repress those emotions it actually makes

the emotions more severe and it and it it strengthens those emotions so the emotions that they're trying to avoid The most don't get processed and because they're avoiding them they get worse so this is like uh from ACT therapy like the first step of ACT therapy is accepting your emotions so like people think like mindfulness for example you just have to be like super happy and present no you you're present and you're tuned to your emotions but the emotions don't have to be positive in fact it's very helpful to process those negative emotions and you

need to feel them to Process them absolutely yeah and that's that ties into another core factor which strives porn addiction which is an identity of toxic shame the low self-esteem self-hatred self- aversion constant negative self-criticism rejection of yourself and your emotions that also creates this opportunity or this perfect um sort of void for pornography to come in and help you relieve um but uh yeah the the way that I describe things is like when I see People who struggle with pornography they are stuck with a a mind a series of habits and like a way

way of being in the world which uh in which their only available response to any kind of challenge or negative emotion is one that is self-destructive actually increases emotional distress and takes them in the direction of Shame isolation and disconnection this kind of reminds me of like a lot of people that have dating Issues they they'll bring up a a question or a topic that they think their problem is and it almost is never their problem right and that I think that's kind of like what what porn it's like oh man I just keep watching

porn but that's not really the problem the problem is you have these like you're you've been repressing emotions for like 20 30 years and you know you're using this as a way to self soothe so there's like this subconscious or unconscious Like like you said refrigerator hum of anxiety depression that comes from a variety of sources and they just don't know how to [ __ ] regulate it yeah yeah so I would say this gets into some of the big mindset shifts that I see are extremely important for people to have if they're really serious

about getting this problem solved go off King I'm going to go off King and um one of them is that everybody gets into recovery and this is true for a lot of changes that People try to make in their life but specifically with pornography they just think I need to get pornography out of my life and then my life will somehow be fine and what you inevitably find is you get into recovery and you get serious about figuring out why you can't solve this problem is that you don't just need to quit porn because pornography

addiction and the life that you're living are the same thing you actually need a new life altogether because it is The life that you're a part of that is opening up a space for pornography to come in as the solution which is another big I would say that's the first big mindset shift for people to have is that pornography while it causes damage and has problems associated with it that are very real it the only reason that you keep returning to it is because it's doing something for you it is actually showing up in your

life as a solution to a deeper problem it is not the problem Itself it is not the driver of the car it is just the screaming passenger um and that is a big thing that people Miss is they they just think that porn is the problem and they keep attacking pornography with these really ineffective strategies while neglecting everything in their life that is messed up that is actually creating the conditions for pornography to be a problem and the way that I I framework this is that another mindset shift to Understand is that pornography addiction is

not a willpower deficiency disorder no addiction is you are not struggling with this because you have a deficiency of willpower and discipline funny enough everybody that I've met who struggles with pornography can deploy their willpower and their discipline in other areas of their life to great success so there's not a lack of willpower and discipline but there's this mystery as to why it's not enough to solve this Particular problem and that's because there's no deficiency of willpower lying at the root so no amount of throwing willpower at this problem is going to stop it or

solve it and conversely what is addiction or specifically what is pornography addiction it is an intimacy disorder it is a it is a disorder in a disease of missing and broken connection throughout somebody's life and uh the the sort of categories that I walk people through is that there is the Internal so there's a series of broken connections within yourself it is why you like you were talking about the self-rejection the inability to sit with emotions right this belief that a lot of people have that I had myself uh through my Act of addiction that

good people don't have bad feelings and bad people don't have uh or sorry what is it good people don't have bad feelings and bad things don't happen to good people there is a broken Understanding of what it means to just live a normal human life and people do not understand that a lot of the emotions that they feel that are uncomfortable and negative are actually symptoms of Health not symptoms of dysfunction and there's this quote which is uh the deeper the pain the more Universal something like this so like the things that you feel that

you think that you shouldn't be feeling or that You you know you shouldn't be feeling they're very very common like everyone feels them at some point and yeah the the the way to process them is to process them is to feel them to sit with them to understand them to journal and to kind of piece together parts of your past and realize that that's part of you and uh yeah yeah absolutely yeah the way I wanted I wanted to kind of punctuate what you said before so you were saying like you think if a lot

of People think if they just get rid of the porn then it's like oh everything's fixed but you were kind of hinting at positive sobriety that's a term you used a lot which I I like which is it's kind of like like you everyone's heard the thing about in the Vietnam War where those veterans they were or those Vietnam soldiers they were using like heroin in Vietnam and then they came home and they came back to like a you know a loving Family and like a great social network and like you know just everything kind

of a good job whatever and they completely stopped using heroin because they didn't really need it anymore because they they solved their emotional problems which was probably just like a lack of like peace and and you know sex and other stuff and uh yeah I think a big part of the recovering from addiction is yeah have parts of your life that are awesome like the other you Know the other day I literally had this realization I'm like my life is so [ __ ] awesome I was like I get to like create videos help people

uh coach mentor and then I get to go play [ __ ] Ultimate Frisbee and then I [ __ ] get to [ __ ] my hot girlfriend and I get to hang out with my cool dog it's like you know I live in a place where in the winter it's like nice and warm it's like there's so much to be grateful for and my life's so [ __ ] awesome like I Don't really the the the thing for me is like um cuz I actually Nate Nate personally helps me so he like he puts

uh custodio on all my laptops he has all the passwords he sets up my screen time so like I pretty much 99.9% of all porn is like blocked and that's from him like setting up these systems and stuff and I recently I got a new computer and just been sitting here for like 4 days and I checked I was like can I access like porn on on this and I could and I was Like okay turn this off boom I'm going to wait till Nate gets here uh porn is not a part of who I

who I who I am and who I'm becoming and that's just not uh what I want in my life and uh I I won't make this distinction that like yeah I I have dealt with a lot of uh porn use and I have also dealt with a lot of emotional issues I had a [ __ ] crazy adolescence that I don't wish on anyone but um like recently actually did a lot of uh introspection into this or like Processing of it and I feel like I made a huge shift and part of it was um

toward the end of ACT therapy they it's this thing called values based living or like creating values that you live in accordance with and like one of the things is written on my uh whiteboard right now it says how can I become even better so I can give even more so there's people out there that need our help and if I am struggling myself or if I'm [ __ ] up myself it's going to Decrease my ability to give back to other people so that's my like kind of recurring question I ask myself how can

I become even better to give even more it's not about me and it never was it's about giving back to the tribe helping people raising people up obviously there's a boundary I'm not going to like you know take 50 homeless people and put them in my house but you know I'm trying to help the people that I can right the the audience that I have so Um yeah uh the other thing you hinted at was the difference between root cause and a symptom so like this is very common in dating as well it's like people

think the problem is something else rather than what it actually is but um yeah I'm going to let you continue I don't where you left off I think you would ask me about positive sobriety yeah yeah why don't you yeah so to kind of close the loop on that uh because it'll get perfectly blend into this Topic um the porn addiction is an intimacy disorder and it's defined by an environment and a constellation of broken connections or missing connection throughout somebody's life so there's internal that's where shame trauma family of origin wounds all that kind

of stuff comes up relationship with self um you know non-integrated psychology that's where all of that comes into play then it also goes out into the world into somebody's relationships so across The board with people who struggle with pornography they universally see that they have a deficiency of effective dating and relationship skills and they have a deficiency in intimacy skills meaning and what is intimacy like there's there's a couple ways to kind of Define this there's one that people talk about in sex addiction and Recovery groups to make it really simple which is intimacy tells

you what it is to me you see are you capable of communicating who You are your personality your emotional experience in such a way that other people see the truth of who you are because until that happens you will never feel like the the real you is being seen and known and loved by others and that also runs in Reverse until you can provide that environment and you can communicate with another person in a way that reveals the truth of who they are so that you can be the one who is the source of that

acceptance seeing and Loving and knowing then you cannot experience meaningful real deep Connection in your life and people across the board lack those kind of skills so there's a broken system of relationship and connection with friends uh romantic Partners there's a massive skill deficiency as well which obviously that's like your Wheelhouse in terms of the especially the external strategic elements of getting people to understand to be successful in dating and Relationships but then there's a higher relationship or I say deeper relationship of broken connections which is with life itself people lack as you were just

hitting on and with themselves and with themselves yeah people lack any connection to a real sense of purpose and a Transcendent sense of meaning in their life that can carry them through the inevitable tragic and painful experiences that are baked Into The Human Experience and we're living in a Time where there's a lot of absurdity and meaninglessness is the defining feature of being alive today like we have all this stuff yet everybody's miserable we are being killed by comfort and people have material success or they're struggling to find material success but they see other people

having it but we're still sitting with this question of we have all this stuff what's it for and lacking that Transcendent connection to a sense of Meaning and purpose you will constantly feel a deep sense of existential loneliness fear and a self-centered and disconnected relationship with your life out of which you will try to control things from a place of fear and insecurity that will always lead to negative self-sabotaging outcomes and a plethora of negative emotion um and so connecting people with that authentic sense of purpose is by far the most powerful thing like I

kind of hit on Earlier that until something is more important to you and is more rewarding for you to be a part of than temporarily improving in your mood through these strategies of short-term mood repair and self-sabotage like pornography or video games or whatever it is you like until you have that those things will always be the most motivating thing in your environment um and this is where the positive sobriety thing comes in where Negative sobriety is what most people try to do when they're embarking on any pathway of transformation whatsoever it's the first wrong

move that everybody makes which is if I want to change something I change by depriving myself of of the thing I'm trying to quit or of fighting against the thing I'm trying to change that doesn't work it never works and especially when somebody struggling with addiction you know as we just kind of charted out you have this whole Environment and you know system of broken Connections in your life that are creating massive amounts of negative emotion and you think you're going to be successful by just removing the one thing that is providing you with relief

so you're going to you're going to remove the relief and leave yourself with all of the pain and think you're going to be successful F it's ridiculous that you you will never and this is a deeper thing as well with the the Meaning in life aspect that our culture generally lacks an understanding of how change happens people do not understand how to change and that's another thing we could get into but uh so b b basically what I'm hearing is the main things that are going to get people out of pornography addiction and keep them

out of it is creating an awesome life that they want to be a part of uh having a sense of meaning and purpose in their life and those those are two those are Like the two main things it sounds like those are two by far the most powerful things yeah so kind of outside in from a superficial or I wanted to say one other thing and it's that I think what's powerful about this is that when you start resonating with empowering things you naturally feel like a separation between you and the thing that was pulling

you down I think that's like one of the most important distinctions I found is that it's not just about like You know setting up all the systems so you don't fall off track it's like why don't you start resonating internally with the person you are and the person you want to become so that way you naturally separate and detach from the things that are holding you back and you naturally gravitate toward the things that are um you know empowering you and making you live a great life and that's the differ between uh push and pull

motivation like extrinsic and intrinsic Motiv motivation so if you have that intrinsic motivation like who's the person I want to become I want to become a person who gives a lot who shares with people who has an abundant you know dating life and abundant social life I want to be uh someone that's super healthy someone who's vibrant who gives a lot of energy and in order to be that porn doesn't fit into that game plan so it's not a part of who I am and who I want to become yeah absolutely if you Hit on

something that uh is like um a specific element of what it means to find a sense of purpose in life so the way that I break it down with people is that every single one of us has an internal purpose and an external purpose and the two go together so external meaning and purpose would be is there there's a really simple way to to kind of test to see if you have this in your life is there something that you would want to exist even if you Didn't and do you spend a a significant cont

or a significant amount of your time every day or most days each week contributing to that thing in a positive way that is external the internal is where we get more spiritual and psychological where the purpose that I feel as your as you like you were talking about is there's a version of me that I need to become I am being drawn forward by some kind of inspiration or a sense of higher potential for who I Could be how I could contribute the the way that I could affect the world in a positive way that

requires me to become a different version of myself a higher version of myself that is an internal purpose and all of us we have a sense of that right like uh with dating is such a I think is such a powerful example because if you lack the skills to go up and start a conversation to move an interaction forward in a way that is win-win for you and a girl that You're interested in you can't set up a date you can't create healthy relationships what you are struggling with in a very deep sense is a

a core part of your psychology that is cripplingly underdeveloped and you feel that pain that constant sense of pain and insecurity is the psychological spiritual message that there is a part of you that needs to grow or you in a spiritual sense maybe not in a phys awesome summers.com ausome summers.com For how to how to it was a good setup um yeah and so even with my clients there's a fantastic book called king warrior magician lover that I use as a framework that inside of every man there are four core archetypes which are the building

blocks of your psychology the King which is do you know how to lead do you have a vision most importantly that is positive that you can lead others towards that is that kind of higher purpose element uh the magician which is Your ability to encounter the unknown or chaos and turn it into something positive can you go into pain negative emotion discomfort and come back with something something valuable to give others then there is uh King warri there's the warrior right do you have you integrated your capacity for aggression um every single man right the

way that our biology is wired for us to express aggression is primarily physically if you have not contacted and Integrated your capacity for aggression you are you will be a doormat for other people you can't say no uh you're afraid of conflict um you're afraid of other men it creates this massive amounts of problems for people psychologically and then the other one that we're hitting on is the lover which is can you or is your sexuality integrated into your personality and into your psychology in such a way that you can be effective in dating in

relationships which is even in A bigger sense like are you capable of passing on the torch of life and Consciousness and if you do not have these four things like inside of every person is an internal drive to what we would call actualize in Union psychology these archetypes and most people like we do not have Pathways available to us that are helping people to make this transformation and so people sit and struggle because they don't know how to actualize that sense of internal purpose Yeah and I think I think that's a really key point is

you need to have something that you do that allows you to develop that so what I've called game is like it's the gym for your personality in your dating life right it's like when you go out and you're gaming you're talking to a bunch of girls you're able to practice all those skill sets you can incrementally increase them and then like you said for the uh the warrior it's like dude as you were describing That I was smiling CU I was just thinking about the ultimate frisbe tournament I went to it's like dude I was

getting some D's where like me and this guy are like shoulder toosh shoulder like laying out to to get the disc and it's like yeah it it teaches you how to be assertive it teaches you like no you when that at least for me when that disc goes up in the air it's [ __ ] yours right it's it's mine I'm going to get it I'm going to do whatever It takes to get it I don't care if 's you know conflict or adversity or like there's some danger that's the goal that's what I'm getting

at so yeah I think it's important to have like and what would what were the other two and what what's like a prag pragmatic thing that you could do to to cultivate them so the the four or king warrior magician lover um the king archetype is so one thing that's kind of important to notice to not is that while we describe them as Separate they are interconnected right so as you improve your capacity to you know manifest the king so to speak you will also Advance your your lover archetype generally speaking right so you know

the king aspect really is again do I have the capacity to lead you know think like Aragorn from Lord of the Rings he is like part the defining uh cultural symbol of the king at least for in like a pop culture of Our Generation for the last 30 years or so um do you Have the capacity to uh stand up for what's right to understand and discern what is true to to uh cultivate a vision for the future in a path that moves forward in such a way that everybody around you is lifted up by

it I I have this uh video I'm going to make soon uh I'm gonna call it like [ __ ] the daddy something was it whatever basically it's like you first need to get good at managing yourself or leading yourself if you're not good at leading yourself no [ __ ] girl is going to want to go with you right you're like if your life is in shambles you can't even like lead yourself no girl is going to go with you and if no girl is going to go with you no [ __ ] guys

is going to follow you either and then like at a certain level like as you gain in proficiency and leading you get more and more responsibility and eventually you're like the daddy of an organization or the daddy of a country or the daddy of the World you know so it's like yeah it can be cultivated over time but the it first starts with leading yourself I think absolutely yeah yeah there there's an element of the king which is also put it to put it simply do you have your [ __ ] together are you capable

of creating healthy order and structure in the world and environment around you get your [ __ ] literally get it together put it in a ball get your [ __ ] together uh but yeah I mean if you do Not have the ability to create positive order in the world around you you have an underdeveloped King archetype in your psychology and what was the last one uh so king warrior magician lover the magician is really I would say purely spiritual that is meditation uh diving into uh you know integrating like Shadow work kind of thing

um so meditation Shadow work uh confronting your past and your trauma um can you confront difficulty in your life or do you run Away from things that are scary it is a the the magician would be like walk I mean to use like Jordan Peters and be like walk into the darkest part of the forest that you least want to enter that is where the magician emerges and I think it's important for people to know that like a spiritual work and inner game work however you want to Define it is very individual some things that

work for some people are like Gang Busters or for another Person just like not great at all so you have to experiment see what works with you for you try different forms of therapy try therapy in real life group co uh you said you like group therapy and group coaching yes I'm with respect to addiction specifically it's it's never something that is going to be resolved in isolation uh it's another thing talking about a system of broken connections you're addicted because you lack connection and and especially with Porn you when you use porn you feel

like you want to like be alone like you just feel like you want to shelter yourself from everyone else and that's precisely the literal worst thing for you to do right yeah addiction you the things that people should see as fuel for addiction is isolation shame and Secret so like as soon as you bust a nut you should just be going outside shaking people's hands meeting people high-fiving no I mean honestly me wash Your hand first but yeah can I ask you this is this is a question i' I've I've wondered for a while because

uh there's like there's a sex Reddit and uh like you know people discuss certain certain things like remember some guy posted on there he was like yeah I have erectile dysfunction I'm only like 22 and I was like oh bro you should like check out nofap like it' probably be helpful for you or just like find out like you quit porn and I got banned from the sex Subreddit for saying that potentially his compulsive porn use would be causing his uh erectile dysfunction and it's the reason why it was banned because it was it's assumed

in like the sex community that if you're telling people not to watch porn it's because you're like some authoritarian Christian who like wants to ban porn in the world because of like some weird ethical system or or something like this when in reality it's it's not that it's that this is a this Is a destructive thing that literally causes people to like lose their boners makes that [ __ ] up their mental health makes them more anxious and depressed makes them more isolated Etc and that's the reason but can you go into that I don't

know if you've done much thinking about that but that's that that argument from them I'm like how are you that stupid like how are you that like it's like they're looking through like a pinhole when it's like the there's a [ __ ] you know like elephant to the room right there it's like it's ridiculous yeah absolutely I mean that that's totally unsurprising I think Reddit is a Reddit is a manifestation even outside of Reddit I've heard so many people describe it they're like oh no don't shame porn porn's good masturbation and jerking off all

the time to to [ __ ] hyper novel stimuli is super good for you yeah so I I think this is a good segue into like when I Was talking can I just say I feel like most people should not have opinions 90% of people your opinions are just useless like there I'm sorry never mind comment down below I I value your opinion uh but I think this is a good segue into the a conversation I was I started earlier a little bit about what in the world is pornography because I think that people treat

it as if it's something normal and natural and then like I mentioned they use it ignorantly Not understanding at all what it is that they are interacting with they think it's naked bodies and pixels on a screen that is not what pornography is um something that's really important right is pornography normal um well there's a lot of things that are normal that are not healthy one right this is the naturalistic fallacy I also like to differentiate between normal and common just because something's common doesn't make it normal it's common for people to Eat [ __

] Chick-fil-A that's like 85 [ __ ] [ __ ] up ingredients in it but it's not normal your body did not evolve to eat that type of food exactly yeah and with respect to pornography like most people don't understand the history that for all of human history up until about the 1970s there was no such thing as pornography there was erotic art that people created in various societies but if you wanted to actually see people Having sex you had basically you basically had to be a participant in the ACT um there was no way

to package an image or a video of two people engaging in a sexual act and mass Distributing it across a so it was it was just tough to crack a nut back then I mean you had to like use your your imagination yeah it was really old school old school Tech uh the old mind's eye but uh yeah up until the 1970s there was no such thing as what we know today as pornography um and If you fast forward through time you don't even get Playboy and Hustler until like you know really the 19 I

don't know when Playboy started Hustler came a little bit afterwards but you're talking like 1980s 1990s and it wasn't until 2004 that the with arrival of the internet that uh internet pornography became a thing and then it didn't turn into what we now know as high-speed internet pornography until 2008 um and so you are looking at a novel sexual Technology that is basically a mass psychological experiment being done on an entire population without their consent that has been going on for less than 20 years and I I think one of my favorite an anecdotes from

from this is that uh the first people to experience like insane amounts of erectile dysfunction from porn were like software developers and coders who were like intimately connected they're always getting like The fastest internet and like their brains are just blown dude yeah so in the year 2000 the rates of erectile dysfunction among men under the age of 35 were 0% by 2011 which is three years after the introduction of high-speed internet pornography and the mass distribution of the iPhone which is also a piece of technological innovation that enabled pornography to spread it the way

that the way that it did 3 years after that the rates of erectile dysfunction Among men under 35 Rose to 30% and it's crazy too cuz like the internet used to be a thing that you like went to it'd be like oh [ __ ] you have this computer in your house with the whole setup and the and the speakers and it was like the family computer and you go sit down there be like oh cool let me use the family computer so it's like really tough to bust a nut in your living room to

that you know when you got like all your family members there Uh unless that's your thing but [Laughter] um but uh yeah but then like you said iPhone you can just go into the bathroom and like crank crank the hog you know absolutely so you now have Jer the dude you have it it's like on the go you have jacking the Kraken you have a highly addictive sexual technology which it takes literally a few swipes of your thumb to access that you carry around with you in your pocket M yeah and Willpower is going to

get you through that right yeah it's like the analogy that I use with with with some of my students is that like if you were imagine that you met somebody who was struggling with alcoholism and you were trying to help them get this problem solved so you sat down with them and you started asking him some questions about their life and you asked them well tell me about where you live and they said well I live in a Bar yeah I live in a bar and I carry a flask around in my pocket at all

times right it's like so so how hard is it for you and I have to pull out the flask constantly it's like would it be any surprise you that this person struggles with alcoholism if they live in a bar but we don't make that connection because the digital environment is something that we tend to treat as invisible yet it's all around us every single day people are now spending an Average of like six to eight hours a day on screens you are living inside of a digital environment yet we do not put boundaries in our

digital environment the same way we would in our physical environment because it doesn't come intuitively to us because as you said this is not technology that we did not evolve to deal with so we have to come up with a new set of solutions to this problem because it's unlike anything we've ever dealt with before uh I'm Gonna prompt you uh act as a porn recovery coach and uh give me the uh the scientific breakdown of what porned uses to the brain like the hyper frontality for example and then uh give a practical example of

what that looks like and how it it plays out in people's lives oh my gosh yeah so from a scientific perspective and a neuroscientific perspective we see the same neurological changes inside of chronic porn users brains as we do with people who are Engaging with addictive substances of all kinds so the four things that to go through one is called hypofrontality which means that we see a decrease in Gray matter in the prefrontal cortex the prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain which is responsible for executive functioning it is in many I mean it

does many things but one of the most important things that it does is if you look at how the brain is wired there are um there's like A gas pedal that runs up from your Primal brain your lyic system to your prefrontal cortex and there's a brake pedal that runs down from your prefrontal cortex to your lyic system if you do not have a strong prefrontal cortex you are literally all gas no breaks you will constantly be subject to the whims of your Primal desires with seemingly no ability to stop it and that is a

that is not a moral failing or a character failing this is a real Neurological change that is measurable with the right instrument obviously like an MRI or something to look at what's happening yeah and if your executive function is bad that means you can't focus very well you can't strategically plan as well like it [ __ ] you up with work it [ __ ] you up with you know just planning in your life and yeah absolutely yeah I mean so there's hypofrontality another one that we we see is craving so if you look inside

of A porn addict's brain while they're not using porn you will see that the the reward circuitry in their brain is actually hyperactivated meaning they are craving pornography even when it's not present and you do not see that same activation inside of the brains of people who don't struggle with pornography and to make this to bring this into like a practical sense one of the defining features of struggling with the pornography Addiction is that you are living in in a world that is characterized by an obsession with sex and self for somebody struggling with pornography

sex their life basically revolves around either watching pornography or trying to stop watching pornography and their Vision becomes restricted to me my problems how I can escape this how I can get what I want so you see that there's a a deep link between Obsession which is what we see As craving and uh well yeah there's a deep link between the experience of sexual Obsession and rumination on self and this perpetuation of addictive craving inside of the brain um but uh yeah so we have hypofrontality we got craving another one is called hyper sensitivity so

if you take somebody who has an addictive or or who's been using porn heavily for their entire life and you show them something that is triggering of their urge to watch Pornography so for example if I took somebody who struggles with porn and I just showed them like an Instagram model in a bikini the activation in their brain compared to somebody who doesn't have a pornography addiction is like off the charts so not only do you struggle with pornography but you have become incredibly vulnerable to re-engaging in that addictive behavior uh at exposure to triggers

or cues that are basically uh like they do not impact Other people and so that also creates the sense of like I don't understand why I struggle with this when other people don't it's like well dude you have a brain now that is like imagine taking your average person and then amplifying the the desire to engage in this Behavior by like 10 20 times and is that just because they've gone down that rabbit hole so many times that it's like yeah the way the way I like to think about this is like imagine you're on

a Hillside and then there's like this path down to the Sea uh but there there's there's no path yet so it's just like this tall grass and the first time you walk through it it's actually kind of hard and then the next time you're like okay I see the path through the grass and you keep walking eventually that's like just a dirt path through this like you know 6ot tall grass and you know how to get there and that's kind of what's happening to them I guess absolutely so I mean you think about what is

what is sex as we talked about before it is the most rewarding thing that your body can engage in it is a signal to your genes that you have succeeded in the challenge of life and passed on your genes to the Next Generation you get rewarded pretty heavily for doing that it turns out as most of us know so if you know sex is one of the most powerful biological drives you're finding a way to simulate artificially Being involved in a real sexual interaction you get a lot of the same reward interestingly enough though we

do see that there's something about masturbation in pornography that does not actually produce the same brain chemistry as when you are in a real sexual experience with a real person yeah and you feel the difference too for sure it's way more dopamine intensive it's a dopamine Rush primarily that people get from it and so you're giving Your brain this reward and there's a principle in Neuroscience that everything that you do today that gives you a reward you will crave tomorrow that's how your brain is wired the the nucleus accumbens which is the reward Pathways in

your brain is very simple circuitry um if you do something that feels good that gives reward brain do more of that thing brain want more good it's like it is that simple more good want more good feel Good now and so the more that you engage with this kind of stuff you are priming your brain for uh dependency on that thing in order to continue to experience a reward and uh to to quickly rope this into with something we talked about earlier the interesting thing is that you actually already see a lot of these brain

changes in somebody who experienced childhood trauma they already have hypofrontality they already Have a weakening and a susceptibility of certain parts of the brain that predispose them to be incredibly vulnerable to addiction and that is part of the reason why there's such a powerful link between uh it could be explicit big tea Capital trauma like the loss of a parent or loved one it can be little tea trauma that occurs over time like bullying or emotional neglect in a family system uh so all of those things predispose people to struggle with Pornography or any addiction

when they get exposed to it cool I'm going to bring up the questions that people have uh Luigi salal says what to replace porn with uh which habit of dopamine and anxiety to combat loneliness I don't even know what that means habit of dopamine and anxiety to combat lonel he basically says what to replace porn with yeah I guess that's comes from the idea of if you have a habit you should replace it with Something else yeah yeah so the this gets back to I think we were talking about positive sobriety and I didn't quite

explain what it was but positive sobriety is where you are engaged in such a meaningful enriching and genuinely satisfying and fulfilling life that there is no battle with pornography anymore of any kind your bandwidth in life is so filled with things that genuinely meet your emotional needs that you no longer think about watching Pornography because it's a substandard thing for accomplishing the goal of actually meeting your needs and you have more things available that are genuinely better but you also are no longer engaged engaged in this battle of trying to stop watching pornography because all

of your time is just filled doing good cool things but the process of finding out what you have to replace pornography with is a deeply individual Endeavor what I enjoy and what I find meaningful Is not what a lot of people are going to find enjoyable and meaningful um but there's General things that we can hit on right so I would say by far the single most powerful things interventions that somebody could make in their life right now today that would improve their ability to stay sober from pornography would be get your [ __ ]

sleep on track and start exercising hard uh you have to you have to be living a life where your body is Physically healthy and living on a stable routine in order for your emotional life to become healthy and stable if your life is chaos and suffering your emotional life is going to be chaos and suffering that would be like across the board General recommendation and good advice for everybody diet sleep and exercise if those two if those three things are not on point you got work to do beyond that it is your social connections are

you Going out and working on your dating uh do you have meaningful friendships in your life that you engage with on a regular basis uh beyond that do you have any hobbies or meaningful goals or Pursuits that you can engage in is there anything in your life that you find again would be very cool if it existed is there anything that you have that kind of relationship with are are there any activities that when you engage in them give you that sense of Life Progression like your life is moving forward or you're experiencing Joy or

something meaningful to you like for you it's Ultimate Frisbee I don't really like Ultimate Frisbee uh I I think it's I'm like neutral that's why you're wrong here's where you're here's where you're wrong uh it's not even that I dislike it I feel like the Switzerland of of Ultimate Frisbee I it's I'm incredibly neutral towards it um but for me I I do martial art called capera which a lot of Other people probably wouldn't like but I love it there's a lot of things about it that are incredibly meaningful to me so these this process

of finding out like what can you fill your time with let me back up to make this a little bit more profound this isn't just a problem to solve this is literally the adventure of your life to discover who you are and what you like and what evokes a sense of meaning and purpose inside of you That is the adventure of your life and so I would encourage people to take this endeavor very seriously and I think one way they can take it even more seriously is if you see here's the patterns that I've been

following here's here's how my life is right now after doing this look at the severity of the problem that you have and then think 5 10 years from now what is your life going to look like how old are you going to be how much regret are you going to have how much is that Regret going to make you feel like it's crushing your soul how much you know anxiety or depression do you feel on a daily basis is this driving you closer toward getting women into your life is this driving you closer to having

great friendships or is it just driving you away from everything valuable in your life and try to paint a vivid picture of what your life looks like if you keep living that way and then conversely think about your life if you get this Problem handled you cultivate an awesome life that you want to be a part of that you know takes up your time that's enjoyable that you're you have a purpose and meaning great social life what does that alternative look like and what are the values that you need to live by in order to

make sure that reality is the reality that you live yeah I know we we've talked about this before and this is something that I also use inside my program uh partially is the Dickens Method it turns out funny enough that A Christmas Story by Charles Dickens is one of the most psychologically important books that's been written in the last couple hundred years because the this the Christmas story charts out how to gain massive emotional leverage on your own psychology in order to allow change to happen so you think of a Christmas story it's like well

go back into the past look at how you got here how you treated people the contents of Your life over the last several years if you're struggling with pornography addiction or if you suck at dating and your dating life has been a wreck and you look back over the last 10 15 years of your life what has your life been composed up for a lot of people struggling with pornography it's been like shame loneliness uh self-hatred struggling to get anything done because their focus sucks no motivation no meaningful goals or Pursuits chronic Rejection because they're

ashamed and and insecure and then that just like leeches out into all their social relationships uh like there's just this pile of pain and when you have that understanding you come to the present right well where are you today if you are honest with yourself has anything gotten better in your life over the last couple years or has it stayed the same is the strategy that you're trying to use to create change in your life Effective yeah is it working is it working and the the truth of your life will reveal to you that in

most cases it's not and then you move that forward so right if your strategy does not change and you chart this trajectory that you have just honestly discovered from connecting your past to your present and you draw that out into your future what is that future and is that a place that you want to go and if you are being super honest with yourself and Connecting with the truth of your situation do you have any real evidence that something is going to change with your best thinking which you've always had by definition and the best

plan that you've always had which is the only one you've ever had because if you knew how to do better you would be doing better by definition with the same things that got you into this mess do you honestly think that you're going to get out of it is Your life going to be better in five years by doubling down on the same strategy that you have proven to yourself is ineffective and honestly is that a place you want to be like especially if you're you're struggling with pornography addiction for most people their lives are

not like staying the same it's not like struggling with an addiction of of some kind is somehow like yeah it's like this bad habit that I do every once in a While it's like no if I look back over the last couple years of my life this has gotten worse like maybe for a lot of people that I work with it starts out with pornography then it gets more extreme then it moves on to other things like they start you know um you know the sexual behaviors can escalate off of pornography into their real life

let's put it that way and and uh that trajectory of things getting worse and worse over time is the way things are Going you know do you want to be sucked down that rabbit hole and then conversely it's also really important for people to begin to imagine a positive vision of their future that is real and tangible that they can use to compare to where their life will go if they don't change so now that everyone has a hopefully everyone listening understands the severity of it and um if these people do want to change what

are some Practical First Steps that they can take in the in the short run and then also in the long run get into community that is by by far the most important thing that people can do and I think if you were to make like the three power laws or like the five power laws of of porn addiction recovery what would the what would number one be like the most important step and then two and three for but uh number one by far would be getting connected to a community of other Recovering porn addicts I

know that may sound kind of weird to a lot of people but if you look at this principle in every any other aspect of life it immediately makes sense right like I want to get better at dating why don't I connect with men who have solved this problem who are better than better than me at this who can give me mentorship feedback and advice and also like Wing men to go out with right and there's the same thing in pornography addiction Recovery if you connect with a group of guys who share your common goal many

of which have solved this problem from whom you can receive connection advice and mentorship and also it finally creates an environment where that deeper need for connection and for emotional intimacy with the group can finally occur that is how you're going to be successful one of the things that I've experienced in my life and pretty much everybody that i' I've ever met Experiences is that it's very hard to internally self-generate the power that we need to change the ways that a lot of people change typically like you know people come onto your program you can

throw in I mean you know and I know this as well you can throw information at people for their entire life and no change happens you get them into an immersive experience into a community where they can like receive by osmosis the energy And the motivation and the like the dynamic of the community and it's like they become a different person yeah it's like the difference between reading a book on lifting and like going to like CrossFit or something you know yeah and underneath that as well this I mean this could be an entire podcast

in and of itself but it's a lot a lot of people do not realize that addiction is not an individual event uh an addiction and the environment in which it occurs are the Same thing so if you are living in an environment where your physical environment your social environment your digital environment your cultural environment your status environment which that's a whole podcast s of itself too your spiritual environment are all not allowing you to to meet your needs that environment is the thing that is giving you permission in creating the space for the kind of

person you're going to be able to be so if you change Your environment by connecting to a community for example then you automatically open up a new space of potential to literally be a different version of yourself um and so again isolation secrecy and shame are the things that drive addiction uh if I ever meet somebody who has successfully recovered from legitimate Addiction on their own I'll let you know I've never met anybody who's done it because addiction is a disease of isolation and Obsessive self-reliance the more self-reliant people are and the lower their willingness

to connect with others for help the more likely they are to have an addiction and the more that they double down on that strategy the stronger their addiction gets and dude this I think like this is in every area of life people that don't want to get mentors or don't want to get coaches they rely on that narcissistic self-sufficiency bias they're never like People you want to be like they're always struggling in one way or another it's like I have mentors in business I had mentors in dating I had mentors in uh Fitness it's and

even in Ultimate frisbe dude I have like there's some old professional players that I that teach me and stuff it's like and I buy courses and I go through them it's like if you want to be good in life you need to get a coach like just straight up um the difference is with I think what you and I do they they did this a meta analysis where they found that people that get a coach they learn four times faster or get four times more results I think the difference between what you and I do

is most of the people that don't get a coach that that need a coach will never get results and it sounds kind of sad but that's the reality like there's people that are so stuck that unless a massive intervention happens it's GG That's the rest of your life have fun it's it's really sad but that's the reality absolutely because because of what you said it's an isolation right they're in isolation there feels shame like shame if you look at the what is that spirituality chart or whatever the consciousness shame is like the literal bottom yeah

so absolutely yeah I mean and this this also what I was talking about earlier how modern people don't really understand how change happens we Also not only that this is these two things are integrated people don't understand how their brains work like wait how do you what is your process on how you think change happens I have a thing where I I call it the these are the three ways three ways you can change one is Epiphany the second one is environment or habits and the third is environment and I always ask people pick pick

what you think is the most important and for me I think it's Environment if you're in an environment like a social environment you know it it'd be like if you're you're out of shape and then you live with like 10 personal trainers that are like Elite level lifters and nutritionists you don't have a choice like they're you're just going to work out and you're going you're going to be indoctrinated into their belief systems and to their ways of eating and to their ways of lifting and and being and like Habits are good but it takes

a lot of willpower to cultivate that habit in the beginning uh and then Epiphany is great to like make you understand that you need to change like a lot of a lot of change happens in an instant where it's like you know you you're in a marriage for 10 years and you go you know what no more or you're like you're like addicted to smoking crack like I was and you're just like you know what no more Yeah um yeah so I I there I think that like you know the the way that you list

C is are [ __ ] good though bro crack yeah uh everything that you said in terms of how change happens I definitely would agree with I mean so one thing I do want to uh get back to the power laws so we make sure we finish that train of thought um but to to close this tangent um I think what's really important for people first is to understand how change doesn't happen the ineffective Strategies for creating change do it by yourself more you don't you don't need you don't need to read information you got

it yeah yeah so I mean there's a lot of traps that people can fall into that keep them stuck Theory junky itis is obviously one of them I want I want to guess some more uh this is specifically with porn these some of them obviously appli to pornography but General that keeps people stuck um unwilling to like look internally um they they haven't Shape their values to match what they what they want uh out of life um man let me think stuck in general I think a lot of times people use the the emotions as

their escape like they're addicted to those negative emotions and they feel like uh if they get rid of them then they'll lose that certainty that those those emotions give them but I'll let you finish yeah so yeah those are all those are all good so there's traps that we can talk about but Fundamentally I think one of the most important things for for people to begin to look inward at is what is it that you turn to when you need power to change in your life and how do you discover this well when's the last

time that something very difficult or challenging happened to you how did you respond did you shame yourself did you beat the [ __ ] out of yourself did you criticize yourself compare yourself to others uh basically just destroy yourself in some attempt to Like beat yourself with a stick hoping that if you experience enough pain you're finally going to do different well what does that tell you right in the worst moments of your life how you respond immediately reveals the one thing that you think is the most powerful like the the highest power from which

you can draw change from so this was a really powerful Insight that I had in my recovery which you know also with the community thing mentorship and all That stuff 100% like if you want to go fast get a mentor there's also free support resour resources for people that I actually require my clients to go to so I require everybody who works with me inside my mentorship program to attend one 12-step meeting a week for inside of a sex addiction recovery program of which like 85 90% of people in attendance are there for pornography um

so getting yourself into Community regardless of whether it's a paid Mentor Or something like 12ep group is essential um but uh oh dang I just got thrown off what were you saying that just totally threw me off sorry uh traps motivations oh that's right so when I was working in my 12 steps there's a the second step of recovery um my sponsor at the time who was like a mentor guiding you through the steps he had me do this exercise and he was like I think that you believe in a higher power you just need

to find out what it Is that you believe in and uh I had this was about three or four months into into recovery for me where um I just had a relapse and I I the night before I had prayed for like some kind of Miracle to occur in my life didn't know what it was but and at this time too I I didn't have like a religious understanding of God but I was appealing to um you know I was practicing as if right if I could just pretend and give it a shot a hypothesis

maybe I would discover whether there was Something there or not for me and so I was I prayed for a miracle the next day I went to a coffee shop and uh I was sitting there journaling about my relapse and so much of it was just so much shame and anger and like why can't you do better why can't you be better kind of thing and uh there was one point where I wrote down this specific statement and the statement was uh how far down do I have to go before I'm going to stop and

it was like I had this Lightning bolt moment inside of my head where something scrambled that sentence and revealed to me the belief that was underneath it which is if only I could hurt badly enough then I would stop and that that showed me in that moment that I was living with this belief that I could just hurt myself into changing that pain was going to be the thing that would get me to somehow become the fully actualized like loving compassionate super capable competent version of Myself that I wanted to become my belief was that

pain is the most powerful thing in the universe in order to create change and the insanity of that thought just hit me in that moment where I was like people struggle with addiction I struggle with addiction because I was in pain how in the world would I do I like why do I believe that adding more pain onto the pile is somehow going to solve the problem and so that exploration I think everybody should do and this is a Very common trap talking about how people don't how would you recommend them to work on that

or to so it exercise like when was the when was the last time something seriously challenging happened in your life look at immediately how you responded to it yeah I also think like writing down exactly what your selft talk is is what's being said in your own thoughts and what questions you're asking yourself like a lot of times it's a Question people be like [ __ ] when am I actually G to be good enough or like when am I gonna hurt enough to finally stop like and these things are just kind of replaying your

subconscious and like when when you start writing them down you can observe those thoughts and then you can do what's called defuse from those thoughts and those and those questions so you start adding a little bit of uh space between them so you can say like I notice that I'm having the Thought that you know I need to feel more pain in order to change yeah absolutely and I think when you when you start to identify that like okay these are the thoughts that I had this is how I responded uh it it'll start to

reveal something that I I really would like people to take uh as something that is not just superficial like think about it if if something if the most challenging thing happens in your life that is the moment when you Need the greatest power to change the thing that you turn to when you need the greatest power to change is the thing by definition you believe has the most power in the entire universe If You by definition if you knew of something that contained a greater and more effective power for you to change you would be

turning to it but you don't what what what is that for many people shame I think that is like the defining uh the def the way one way to Define the core spiritual and cultural struggle and dysfunction that we have is that people worship shame and they don't realize so how would you have people be more Shameless or get over shame or improve what I've seen in a lot of people is that when you simply point that out when you point out to them like you believe that shame is the most powerful force in the

universe to cause you to change and that's why you keep turning to it that realization in and of Itself seems to have the power to kind of like disidentify or like you were talking about people from that belief the next thing to ask yourself would be well what do I what could I hypothesize would be a more effective energy to connect to in order for change to happen and what you will inevitably find across the board is that the things that people put in a the things that people discover have the most power to actually

cause meaningful change is the truth and love As cliche as that sounds it is it is literally the truth that it is it is the experience of love and not in like uh it can be in a relational kind of way right like I feel you know seen in you know affirmed by somebody but that's a very small part of what I'm talking you had a really good quote you're like uh uh you can only really beat yourself up when you're down but love is there when you're beaten down to lift you up and Love's

there when you're When you've accomplished something to reward you so can you go into depth on that yeah so yeah this is something that I a core part of the trainings that I do with my clients on understanding patterns of self-sabotage what is a pattern of self-sabotage it is basically a a chronic Perpetual experience of skipping off the bottom it's like something happens crisis in my life I feel terrible I hate myself then the Motivation that I get from feeling that much pain uh allows me to get away from the circumstances that I was just

in but only for a period of time and then all of a sudden I find myself self-sabotaging and I skip back off the bottom again so if I look at your life and you struggle with self-sabotage what do I see a pattern of you continually subconsciously engineering circumstances in your life that give you permission to reconnect with shame pain self-hatred And all of that largely because as I just mentioned you probably are unconsciously believing that shame is your most effective power to create change in your life or pain so if you don't feel shame and

pain you have no power to change well that's a problem because as a human being your need for power to change is constant uh and if you do not like okay so I'm hurting a lot I made some changes in my life like two three weeks later like I don't hurt So much like this isn't so bad anymore and then all of a sudden it feels like [ __ ] like things are actually okay well now I don't feel like doing anything anymore because I lost my source of power and motivation so you will only

be able to feel motivated you will only connect with the power that shame and pain can give you when your life is horrible but love conversely if you start turning to that as a power to change is always Available whether you are in the lowest lows of your life or the highest highs love is like a tractor beam that is always calling you higher and always wants more for you always wants better for you always wants what is genuinely good for you so when you start to turn towards love and the truth as a power

to change all of a sudden you connect with something that is infinite in both its capacity and its availability there is no limit or like uh circumstances in Your life uh in which love is inaccessible yeah the only one I would add on to love and truth would be gratitude which is like I think because of the modern era we have so many like that you're comparing yourself constantly to people online whether you consciously or unconsciously do that it's just like it's just happening right and if you have shame for yourself and or maybe what

you look Like or your situation in life if you flip to gratitude and you feel like holy [ __ ] like I have four limbs right now like I can walk I can run I I'm in a country where the air is like clean like there's so much that we take for granted that if you start like listing out everything that you you should be grateful for it is like insane like the odds of you being born as a human are like like infantes small like we have we have the capacity to have like the

best Life possible we also have the capacity to make it like the worst life possible it's about how you like you um was it interpolate or you like interact with life and and your interpretation of the events in your life so yeah I think love truth gratitude are all good places to start absolutely yeah I mean and this is uh I have a specific training in my course called the the happiness equation that goes over this idea that again it's like these systems of beliefs that People don't realize that that are operating and driving their

life for a lot of people they have this idea that happiness is about getting what you want um they don't realize that the idea that uh getting what I want will make me happy that's not a recipe for happiness that is the equation for the honic tread that actually makes you more miserable over time in uh conversely to that gratitude is the magic Elixir that makes what you have enough and that's a lot of Things people don't realize is that gratitude is the thing that runs the honic treadmill in reverse and if you ride the

honic treadmill for long enough you actually end up with a psychology in which the only way you can feel positive emotion is by something getting better in your life and that obviously has finite returns right you can go to all the five-star restaurants you can get to a point where like maybe your dating success is just totally off the charts And that will just become your new normal at which point the availability of things to become better will actually disappear in which case you're just a miserable person yep yeah the the the little the anecdote

I had is this uh Grant Cardone gets on like 120 foot yacht with his wife his that he just bought he just bought this yacht he steps on it with his wife and he goes he looks at his wife he goes too small it's like what the F yeah oh man but the other the other aspects of of power to change I think fundamentally involves Community um this is something that I I was I kind of hit on a little bit earlier and then I saw there the power law thing to return to but I

was saying people don't fundamentally understand how what like what being a human being is we don't understand how our minds work who we are uh and a lot of this I know you know because of your your research into like Evolutionary sciences and psychology and stuff like that human beings are not like we have not evolved to be in isolation and that's not just like oh you know it's super uncomfortable to be alone it's like you don't you fundamentally do not understand what a human being is if you think a human being can function in

isolation uh and and it's interesting that in cognitive science we actually are gathering incredibly interesting scientific data To prove that this is true so the leading theory of cognitive science is called 4E cognitive science like letter e and the four E stand for uh embodied meaning that cognition which is you could think about as like how do I process emotions in the events of my life is embodied meaning cognition is something that doesn't happen like in the brain it is a mindbody process right that's something we know if you go and you work out you

have a Fantastic workout when you're kind of in a bad mood you can literally work through emotions through physical movement everybody has experienced that although they may not you know recognize that the other one is embedded cognition happens inside of a context your environment right your environment determines how well your brain is going to work and what things your brain is going to be able to do another one is it's enacted right you can't just Consume the you have to act it out in the world in order for you to change but the next one

is that it's extended and that is that cognition does [Laughter] not H that's a anyway all right go on go on uh but cognition is extended meaning that your ability to process life is dependent on you being connected to network of other brains and other Nervous systems literally you cannot effectively process your life and your emotions in isolation the human being is a network organism we have evolved to be in connection with tribe and community and other human beings and in the absence of that we just suffer so one of the things that I an

idea that I kind of stumbled across I don't know if people have ever heard of this before there's something called a superorganism so to think about this if you put a sing ant On a table what does it do it just like kind of wanders around it doesn't do anything very sophisticated it like squirts some weird juices and like follows weird sents and tries to find food if I put a thousand ants on this table or 10,000 ants what happens this really really complex intelligent Behavior suddenly emerges because a thousand ants together actually becomes a

super organism all of them together now allow the emergence of a Sophisticated Behavior or property that you can never get out of a single ant alone so when I talk about like you cannot cure addiction and isolation I firmly believe that the psychological immune system that people are looking for is an emergent property of community and interestingly enough if you want to get like wisdom tradition about it this is actually a very deeply spiritual and religious idea there's a verse in the gospels where Christ says where two or More are gathered in my name there

I am in their midst kind of paraphrasing that a a little bit there's this very strong injunction right what is Christ Christ is that which redeems saves right it's sort of like you think about Christ symbolically as a like Cosmic immune system in some way uh tells you that it is only in connection with two or more who are gathered around that common purpose that this experience emerges and so people who've been struggling in Isolation fundamentally do not realize how much power to change they are disconnected from living inside of this mindset of toxic self-reliance

I'm just imagining you telling your future girlfriend like we need to have more threesoms and four sus than orgies because there's an emergent phenomenon that comes out when more are gathered we create this super orgasm when we're all together but um I think this is this is A good place to wrap it on Jesus Christ amen uh but yeah tell us a bit about your uh mentorship program um yeah so mentorship one thing really quick that I we started this thread I want to close it off the power laws of addiction recovery one is community

um I would say how do I wrap this up simply um environment change Community um understanding that addiction is not a willpower deficiency disorder uh and working an actual program of recovery uh One of the most common traps I see people fall into is that they think that they they judge themselves by their intentions and not by their actions like every person who shows up at the start of a 100 meter dash has the same intention and that's to win the race clearly not everybody wins the race your intention is not what's going to decide

whether you succeed or not it's whether you actually do the things um but another one would be so like that Internal then the the connection pieces this is more than you know three fix the internal connections get into Community work on fixing the uh connection with other people improve your dating skills uh work with Austin Shameless plug and then the last one would be connect work on connecting with a higher sense of purpose um as your life becomes more connected your desire to watch pornography will naturally Fall Away um so the mentorship program that I

run uh It is a a six-month program it's a group mentorship program where I take people through what I believe to this day I just have not seen another one out there is the only program for porn addiction recovery that is truly holistic and comprehensive um it's a six-month program that will take you through this process of getting porn out of your life helping you to heal the internal roots of the problem helping you to heal the uh social connections that are broken Improving your dating skills and relationships so another small thing for people who

maybe not know this behind the scenes for about the last year and a half I've been the inner game inside of your your program I took a month-long immersion with Austin back in 2021 when he was doing those in Miami totally changed my life and you know that's how we got connected and became friends and um I've since then used a lot of what I've learned from Austin in combination With the sort of internal stuff that I'm good at to help people with the internal inner game kind of stuff so that's a huge part of

my program as well it be like the inner game working on cultivating your capacity for healthy intimacy and relationships and then the final part is that higher purpose connecting people with a real and tangible sense of meaning and connection and purpose in their lives that transcends the momentary Transient circumstances um and then lastly connecting people with the knowledge of how do you maintain this transformation moving forward yeah and I recommend everyone go down to the link in the description below check out uh Nate's YouTube channel really good [ __ ] on there uh I'm actually

maybe I'll just plug a playlist of yours because I I like the sequential viewing of it it's really really good and then also on uh so what's your YouTube what's your Instagram uh both at recover with Nate all lowercase no spaces m and anything you want to leave the viewers with uh I just want to I would leave people just with a tremendous amount of encouragement that this is one of the most common and and shame laced problems that people struggle with you know it's kind of funny like you see Andrew Tate or he came

over he's like why can't you stop you know masturbating jacking off your Head is connected to your arm like there there's this there's a crazy amount of shame that we feel in a huge cultural and societal expectation that you should just be able to solve this problem on your own or that this is not really a big deal at all yet you watch people like losing their lives and they haven't you know had a successful relationship maybe ever or they ruin a relationship because of this or they have severe Ed it's like this causes very

serious Problems for people people lose their jobs I have clients I've worked with who have faced legal consequences because of how bad this problem gets um this is the probably the most common problem among men in our generation is there struggle with pornography so I would encourage people to one understand that you are not alone if you struggle with this this is like the most common thing as you said earlier the more personal the issue the more Universal the issue um but the Other thing is that recovery is actually possible like I I work with

people and this is part of my experience who just struggle and struggle and struggle and struggle they try they try they try and they just fall on their face hundreds or thousands saw one guy is like 15 years addicted and then he's six free now right yeah see I I you know working with all these people and again this is part of my experience where you try this strategy to get this problem solved for So long and it's ineffective that you you tend to give up that there's just any hope at all and so my

message for people would be there is a pathway of recovery that works and you are worth recovering uh I truly and firmly believe in the value that everybody's life has and the greatest tragedy would be for a false belief in your stuckness to prevent your gifts and the things that you could give to the world to fail to come into being I truly believe that if People knew their own worth and their own value that would immediately relieve them a lot of a lot of shame but I want people to know that recovery is possible

and they are worth recovering awesome guys go check out Nate's Channel thanks for listening to this podcast and I'll see you in the next one peace do you want to take your game from this into nothing to this I'm going to you right Now there's no way you're escaping me why are you why are you so good while you may understand my transformation you may not know that I've taught over 1,000 people all over the world in person to trans form using the same framework and I've distilled everything I've learned into this one course most

courses only give you a small portion of what you need to get the results that you're looking for such as getting over approach anxiety or Learning how to text while they may go deep on one subject you miss out on all the other essential aspects of learning game and lastly they only cover Theory no one actually provides guys with the exercises they need to transform Theory into skills through practice this problem in our industry led us to create game transformation the fastest sequential process for learning game ever what if there was just one course that

gave you 100% of what you need in Chronological order with lifetime support from a helpful community and an experienced Mentor throughout this program you'll learn every essential aspect of dating even if you're a complete beginner in game transformation you progress through five main stages phase one desensitization we help you destroy approach anxiety so you can relax and approach anyone anytime anywhere phase two Vibe this is where we Give you the tools to charismatically express yourself and make those conversations engaging phase three sexualization this is where you flip a switch in women's Brains so they view

you as a sexual man and not a friend phase four strategy this is where your results start to Skyrocket there was even one night where we pulled left went back out pulled again you're having fun sexual interactions where girls are gazing into Your eyes they're desperate to see what's next and this is where we show you how to lead that interaction home phase five is naturalization you game on autopilot and you date the women you truly adore not only that you're going to get over 20 bonuses including the DM Destroyer how to unleash the flood

Gates and get hundreds of girls in your DMs within hours banned videos too spicy for YouTube over 50 interviews with top coaches and elite players a secret app To automate your messaging using my optimized lines over 40 fulllength infields and so much more but what do other coaches think about the program what do you think about that framework my story follows a very very similar if not identical progression so you've done an awesome job it's very Sim of my personal journey man I'm definitely resonate with everything you're saying I really feel that it's actually that's

a process you'll also see students just Like you get results with a game transformation framework when I talked to a woman in person I felt like my mind went completely black I didn't know what to say I purchased multiple programs from pretty well-known individuals in the dating Niche I honestly believe this is the ultimate course I finally I'm starting to feel really confident when talking to woman in person I'm going on multiple dates uh and more quality dayses as well all the answers are right Here like they're right here in this course it's like so

comprehensive if you're UND decided man I would say take the [ __ ] leap of faith you're going to have a lot of fun so if this sounds like the program you've been looking for then click the link below and join now here's to your transformation [Music]