the root of the problem is emotions which means if you want to quit pornography due to feeling desperate you're doomed to fail because that desperation is what fuels the pornography I'm feeling so lost I'm feeling so helpless that's when your brain is going to reach for the [Music] pornography how do I stop watching pornography permanently I'm 17 I live in India and I'm preparing for an engineering entrance exam to my dream of becoming an astronaut there are 4 months left and I had really R ruined my preparation by procrastinating in addictions such as video games
pornography Etc I did get rid of my video game addiction but pornography I just can't seem to stop watching it I've tried the easy peasy method which I believe is the best possible method to quit pornography but I've have been unsuccessful I want to get rid of this addiction as soon as possible whenever I try to quit it's just a couple of days until I change my mind and relapse I'm making this post as a Last Hope for quitting pornography because I really cannot focus on my studies and my efficacy drops sharply due to this
addiction which I cannot afford at this period of time the first thing to understand I want you all to pay attention to the language permanently get rid can't seem to stop watching it um I want to get rid of this addiction as soon as possible I cannot afford at this period of time so the first thing to understand is that when we get addicted to something the addiction creates a desperation to fix I need to fix it now it needs to be fixed forever so the goal becomes how do I fix f it permanently and
the moment that we let the desperation fuel our desire to overcome an addiction is the moment we lose to the addiction because if it's being fueled by the desperation what happens when the desperation eases up a little bit what happens when you have a good day and you feel less desperate so you are setting up a fuel which will run out hey y' if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life check out Dr K's guide to Mental Health it combines over two decades of my
experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a Choose Your Own Adventure format so check out the link in the bio and start your journey today second thing to understand is that pornography is primarily a emotional regulation technique so if we look at the data on pornography and how it affects our brain people do not watch pornography because they're horny or lustful this is a common misc Inception they're not like the horniest people on the planet or horny people can watch a lot of
pornography but people who tend to get addicted to pornography are usually not horny when they watch it okay different things what tends to happen is we use pornography for emotional regulation so the key thing about sexual activity is that sexual activity has a very powerful effect in the brain so if we look at the purpose of the human brain and body it is to procreate which is why if you look at sort of like fertility and like things like that like you'll see this situation where if the body can afford to mate it will because
that's ultimately what the goal is so you'll even see in some situations like you know angler fish where the male angler fish will attach to a female and all of the male angler fish's organs will atrophy and it will become one giant testicle and pump sperm into the female anglerfish so we see some highly specialized adaptations based on sexuality and in the human brain or mind what we end up doing is you sex will override everything else in our head and so when sex like when I'm feeling bad if there's an opportunity for sex hey
let's push that out the window because hey there's sex so when we see pornography it triggers these kinds of changes in our brain it triggers a a strong amount of emotional suppression and then the other thing is that often times with pornography there will be some amount of masturbation there'll be some amount of orgasm which will release dopamine and will calm down our hippocampus even more we also sort ort of slow down our brain right there's post nut Clarity so there are all kinds of physiologic and neuroscientific changes from watching pornography but the root of
the problem is emotions which means if you want to quit pornography due to feeling desperate you're doomed to fail because that desperation is what fuels the pornography I'm feeling so lost I'm feeling so helpless that's when your brain is going to reach for the pornography so how do you quit permanently you do not quit permanently the way to quit permanently is by letting go of the word permanent you can't be sober for a year you can be sober today you can just resist now so if you really want to conquer this stop thinking about tomorrow
stop thinking about a month from now stop thinking about all the time that you've wasted stop thinking about how important it is that this get taken care of all of those thoughts are not helpful and in fact they are harmful regret about the past negative emotion fear of the future negative emotion desperation for change negative emotion negative negative negative just feeds the pornography instead one really simple thing don't watch pornography today don't watch pornography now this moment in time do not watch when tomorrow rolls around don't worry about tomorrow we're going to worry about today
not today not today not today those of y' all who procrastinate leverage your procrastination procrastinate with pornography I'll watch tomorrow I'll let myself watch tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow keep putting it off keep putting it off keep putting it off and as you put it off other things will start to happen you won't need it quite as much you'll start to unwire yourself now a couple of other practical tips number one number one cause of relapse is not actually strong negative emotion it is boredom so when you need that Spurt of dopamine your brain will make
you bored if you struggle with pornography addiction and video game addiction and some other kind of addiction boredom is the problem boredom is a dopaminergic craving so if you want to quit pornography you better have your day packed from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed the more you you can structure your day the less vulnerable you will be to pornography because pornography squeezes in in the gaps right I've got 15 minutes let me watch some porn I've got an hour before bed I'm done with dinner maybe I'll game I
don't know what I'm doing I don't want to go to sleep yet porn porn will fill in whatever Gap you have so if you've got a gap in your day porn will fill it number two is structure your day as much as you can number three is remember that the root of pornography is emotional regulation as long as you do not have alternate emotional coping skills pornography will be your def this is where stuff like meditation works really well or doing something like seeing a therapist things like that like you need some way to regulate
your emotions because the trash has to be taken out and porn is really good at taking out the trash so you got to take out the trash in some other way now the key thing that people trip up with here is that when you try to take out the trash you have to remember that while you are building a new emotional coping skill it will be less effective than anything else you do it will be the biggest waste of time this is what people miss about emotional coping skills any new coping skill you're going to
be level zero and you're like a level 92 pornography Watcher your brain knows exactly what's going on knows exactly what it's looking for knows exactly where to find it you even know based on what kind of pornography you watch right depending on what kind of mood you're in whether you need something a little bit more hardcore a little bit less hardcore it's interesting right and that's because your brain knows we need a stronger so this is also interesting if we look at why pornography is addictive we need a supern normal stimulus and a supernormal stimulus
is something that is like more than what we're used to so we see brighter colors we see 4K we see surround sound we see VR all this kind of stuff is more more stimulus engages our brain more so if you really want to kick it you got to procrastinate you got to pack your day because boredom is really going to be what screws you you got to start start to learn alternate coping skills meditation is probably number one that's why it's so hard why does all the bad stuff feel so good what a great question
so in our society today all the bad stuff is what feels really good playing video games using drugs pornography the bad stuff eating unhealthy food food that is high in carbohydrates and fat and processed all the why does the worst stuff feel so good it's because the world that we live in today is so accessible and easy we have such an abundance of those things and back in the day when we evolved the things that made us feel the best were a rarity right if you look at calorie density for example we used to eat
stuff like cassab I mean a lot of the world still does right we'd eat these different tubers and we'd forage and berries and stuff like that we didn't have like animal farms we had like we had to go out and Hunt so there was a very natural balance between our yearning for something and the availability in the in the in the world the reason that life has become harder is because life has become abundant and easy and the easier it gets the harder things become for us when I have food delivery grocery delivery I can
work remotely I I can always find new friends online I don't need to leave the house I don't need to leave my computer I don't need to learn how to repair relationships because I can just block someone and start talking to someone new so the easier the world has become the harder things have become for us because when we wired when our brains evolved they evolved in a certain kind of environment where we could not gratify desires 24 hours a day it was physically impossible and so now what's happened is the burden has shifted to
us to self-regulate so we're quickly entering a world where EQ or emotional quotient is more important for your long-term success than IQ or your intellectual capability self-regulation is what correlates with success not intelligence I mean intelligence does correlate with success but what we really see is that self-regulation and conscientiousness are very important and so the stuff the reason all the bad stuff feels good is because it didn't used to be bad because it used to be rare but now that it's become abundant it becomes harmful sex is not harmful food is not harmful it is
the abundance of those things that is harmful and so what's changed is that the availability has increased which means we need to be more restrictive to compensate so we have to evolve as human beings to survive in this world [Music] today
