Porn, masturbation, and other compulsive sexual behaviors take away your control over your life. You become a chess piece in the game of life rather than the chess player. The whole premise of the Porn Reboot system is to get your life back under control. It takes you off of the chessboard and puts you back in the position of calling the shots. How do you do this, though?
One of the important concepts in the Porn Reboot system is what I call recovery time. It simply means putting aside a certain amount of time, preferably in the morning, for working on your out-of-control behavior.
When you don’t make any morning recovery time, you go through the day as you usually do. Once an urge arrives, though, it’s almost too late to turn to your tools or strategies. Like I say often, thoughts of relapse are a sign that your relapse has already started.
I find I have a better day when I put aside some specific recovery time. I use this time to reflect on how far I’ve come as well as any mistakes I’ve made recently. I’ll look at challenges I’ve had in my reboot that week, boundaries that I may have crossed, and where my urges came from.
It doesn’t take too much time as long as you commit to the process. You just have to put aside a few minutes to reflect. As a result, you start controlling your reboot and, as a result, controlling your life. You’re trying to get your out-of-control behavior back under control and recovery time is a crucial part of this process.
Taking time for reflection allows you to assess what’s going on in your life. Use your recovery time to take stock of your situation and circumstances. The most important thing in the present moment is control and one of the easiest ways to get control is to know what happened in the past. You have to dig into the root causes of your urges.
During your recovery time ask yourself some questions. What happened yesterday? What happened last week? What happened after your last slip. Consider these questions each morning. As you do this over time, you start to uncover patterns in your reboot and in your life. This gives you the ability to predict what will happen to you in the future.
It’s common sense. You’ll notice the structure after you do this for a few weeks. If you keep doing x, then y is going to happen. For example, if I eat a lot of sugar or carbs, then I’m going to crash. If I go to sleep late at night, I’m going to feel tired and groggy the next day. If I watch that Netflix series with too many sex scenes, the next day I might feel some urges.
The patterns in your own life will be specific to you but they’ll probably be something similar to those above. You have to do the work to determine which patterns you struggle with specifically. As you reflect during recovery time, you start stepping out of the role of a chess piece and into the role of the chess player. You’re regaining control of your life.
All you have to do is put aside some time each day. I started becoming the chess player in my own life when I started doing that. I anchored myself each day with 45 minutes of recovery time in the morning and I suggest you do the same. Sit down, spend the time writing and reflecting, and you’ll soon notice the shift in your life, too.
