Discover 7 Secrets To Eliminate Porn Addiction Forever

pornography addiction recovery

How to Measure Your Reboot Goals in 2022

Can you believe we’re already in the final week of 2021?

Winter holidays have come and gone and we’re only a few days away from New Year’s. If you haven’t already, now is the time to sit down and outline some goals for yourself during the upcoming year. Take a moment to reflect on 2021 and look forward to what you want to accomplish in 2022.

One critical aspect of setting effective goals is ensuring you can measure your progress. If your goal isn’t measurable, how will you know whether you’re on track to reach it or not? 

Some goals are easy to measure and track. Things like financial numbers or business milestones are straightforward and measurable. You can see precisely how close you are to accomplishing what you’re working toward.

When it comes to your porn addiction recovery, though, setting measurable goals is a bit more difficult. Many brothers are tempted to measure their success by their porn-free time. Sure, counting days is the easiest way to measure but it’s the least effective way to track progress. I’ve always been very vocal about encouraging men in the Porn Reboot program to not count days. I believe that porn-free streaks don’t matter, nor do I believe they are a true measure of your progress.

Counting days means nothing. What is the point of not masturbating if you aren’t going to make any other changes? Why would you not bust a nut for months and months but remain the same cranky, irritable, emotional person you’ve always been? If you remain undisciplined, isolated, and lack determination, then who cares how long your streak is?

There are better ways to measure your reboot goals in 2022.

Measure your improvement by recognizing whether you’re still acting out in ways that lead to slips. Measure your improvement based on your emotions and behavior. Measure your improvement by tracking the coping skills you implement or reboot capital you gain. Measure your improvement using the strength of your relationships.

These are all far more useful indicators of success than the number of days since you last jerked off or watched porn.

The Porn Reboot program is not for men who only want to overcome their pornography addiction. It isn’t for men who are concerned with their porn use or masturbation but not the other areas of their lives that are falling apart. It’s not for men who aren’t willing to make drastic changes in their lives to leave their old ways behind.

Instead, the Porn Reboot program is for men ready to dedicate their time, attention, and energy to becoming the best version of themselves possible. It’s for men who are tired of living directionless, pathetic lives that center around watching porn and masturbating. The program is a pathway to help you not only overcome your compulsive sexual behavior but to enhance your entire life.

If you want an easy way to measure your porn addiction recovery goals in 2022, I encourage you to sign up for our free “Best Year Ever” training program. It’s my gift to you for being part of the Porn Reboot community. Whether you’re new to the blog or you’ve been reading for a while, I want to offer this free blueprint that will help you start the year strong as a way to thank you for joining us here.

Once you sign up, I invite you to join us in the free Porn Reboot Facebook group if you haven’t already. We’re a group of hardworking, high-performing men dedicated to helping every man who wants to overcome his behavior with porn and reframe his life. If that sounds like you, sign up for the free program, join the group, and let us know that you’re starting 2022 strong with us. 

Looking forward to seeing you, brother.

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How to Be Compassionate with Yourself

If you’re anything like me, brother, you’re probably pretty hard on yourself.

I’ve noticed that a lot of us are pretty hard on ourselves even after we start gaining a hold on our out-of-control behavior. We spent so many months and years consumed by pornography and compulsive sexual behavior that it’s difficult to look at how our lives panned out.

I remember I hated myself when I was still struggling with my behavior. I was very hard on myself because I’d become the type of guy who said I’d do something but never followed through. I was also the type of guy who could see that I was doing something that was hurting me but I couldn’t do anything to stop it.

I can’t tell you how many times I promised myself that this would be the last time, that it wasn’t going to happen again. Then I would relapse and end up back where I started, or in an even worse place, over and over again. Eventually, I lost trust in myself because I continued doing this week after week, month after month, year after year.

Imagine depending on someone who tells you they’re going to do something, but whenever the time comes they have an excuse. Every single time you need them they let you down. This person you depend on has some reason or another to let you down each time you look to them to follow through.

It’s pretty hard to love this sort of person especially when the things they mess up are important to you. But that’s exactly the type of person that many of us believe ourselves to be. We’ve let ourselves down time and time again so we’ve lost faith in ourselves over the years.

You have to build that faith and trust back up if you want to be successful in your reboot. It’s not easy at the beginning when you have little reason to believe that this time will be different, though. One tool you can use to get yourself through these lulls in belief is self-compassion.

The idea of being compassionate with yourself might sound silly or even impossible. You might think it’s cheesy or woo-woo science. But today I ask that you leave behind whatever preconceived notions you have about self-compassion.

I started using a very specific technique to practice self-compassion in my life. Think about the way your grandmother views you. If you don’t have a grandmother around, consider the typical ways grandparents treat their grandchildren. 

More often than not, grandparents don’t carry the burden of raising their grandchildren so there’s some space between them and that responsibility. This is why you see the stereotype of grandparents who spoil their grandchildren; they love endlessly and often lack the weight that comes with raising you themselves.

Think of the compassion your grandmother or grandfather holds in their heart for you. They have so much love, compassion, and forgiveness. They want what’s best for you and want to see you do well. No matter the mistakes you make, your grandparents will continue loving you through it.

I still struggle with the self-compassion aspect of my reboot to this day. It’s not easy to cut myself some slack or give myself a break. I expect myself to be a high performer at all times. So I adopted this practice of viewing myself as my grandparents would in the last few weeks. I’ve been working on it as a way to allow myself to be more compassionate toward myself.

When I look at myself as a grandparent would, I feel endlessly loving and forgiving. I feel like I wouldn’t give up on myself. I would be patient with myself. No matter what happens, I would always find love for myself despite the circumstances.

I’d love for you to try this out and let me know what you think. If self-compassion is difficult for you to achieve like it is for me, this practice may be useful for you, too. After trying it for a few days, hop over into our Porn Addiction Recovery – Reboot Facebook group and let us know about your experience!

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Monogamy for Recovered Sex Addicts

You’ll often hear that a long-term, monogamous relationship can’t compete with the novelty and dopamine-inducing effects of having sex with a new person.

This is a widespread opinion. 

And as a result, many people decide not to even try to be monogamous – they think they’ll never make it. This applies to pornography addicts as well.

Now, I’m not going to lie and say that there isn’t a small element of truth to this opinion. But it doesn’t take into account one factor:

There are many men who had a lot of casual sex. But that was before they got married and stayed committed for the rest of their lives. 

These individuals have an advantage over others because they’ve had their fill of sexual experiences on purpose.

But what about men who recover from sex addiction and get married?

Well, that doesn’t mean they’re actually ready for marriage. Most of the time, that goal’s been set for them and conditioned by society.

These men then feel like monogamy is the only way to go. So, they end up in relationships and just play along because they feel like that’s what they’re supposed to do.

But in doing so, they most likely won’t become a happy, fulfilled person. It’s because whatever issues they had with women and sex won’t just go away because they’ve become monogamous.

Now, you might wonder why don’t more coaches and therapists talk about this. 

Well, apart from myself, I have yet to meet a non-religious counselor, coach, or mentor who wasn’t a sex addict and had an active and healthy sexual life involving multiple women.

While some therapists have recovered from their addictions, none of them put themselves through a structured method regarding women.

But that’s what I did. Porn Addiction Recovery is our hope

I had a structured plan of meeting women, developing authentic relationships, and having healthy sex with them. 

The point of this method is that when you repeat the process dozens of times, it becomes a part of your nature. 

And then you can leave it behind and move on to a monogamous relationship. 

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3 Enemies of Recovery From Porn Addiction

I have clients who don’t recover from their porn addiction.

That’s the reality.

6 years of recovery mentoring and a few hundred clients in, I’ve seen men in their mid to late twenties who choose to keep on watching porn enter their thirties and totally f**k their lives up.

While, as a professional, my clients do have the highest porn addiction recovery rate out of all the options out there, I still fret and stay up late trying to figure out how and why some clients don’t recover. Not everyone can be saved and this frustrates the hell out of me sometimes.

Not to sound all “zen” and deep- but today, during my morning meditation, I figured out a few reasons why. (this also means that my meditation session sucked, lol)

Don’t get me wrong, though. This process took about 5 years and today was the day I experienced my “revelation”.

The first thing to understand is that YOUR BRAIN DOES NOT WANT TO CHANGE.

The older you get, the tougher it is to recover. If you are over the age of 26, your brain has made enough sense of life and society that it doesn’t really need to change that much. You’ve created mental models for most things in life and complacency sets in. The human brain naturally resists rewiring of any sorts and prefers comfort and familiarity.

This process is called homeostasis.

This is one reason why recovery from porn addiction is not as easy as “staying away from porn for 90 Days”.

There are MANY things that our brain doesn’t want to change- not just watching porn and masturbating to it. I’ve compiled them into three main things which I call the three enemies of recovery.

Enemy #1: Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is the way your brain goes through information and discards anything which doesn’t fit the way you see the world. Remember- the brain resists change. Confirmation bias keeps us comfortable and prevents us from rewiring our brains neural pathways.

You can see confirmation bias demonstrated online where different people have polar opposite reactions to a video or article.
Another example is religion or some sort of ideology. Your ideology comes from two things: your beliefs and emotions.

Your beliefs are formed from a neural pathway in your brain being used over and over again- for years. Your emotions are neuro-chemical reactions. When combined, you get an ideology- like a religious conviction, political belief, radical feminism, socialism, radical veganism (this is apparently a thing), and so on.

The problem is that confirmation bias makes it difficult to analyze anything which is different from your belief or emotions. This is why many men cannot accept the fact that they are “porn addicts”. Your idea of an addict is not linked to pornography. Your beliefs about quitting porn hold you back.

Here’s an example you can probably relate to:

When you are experiencing a streak of not watching porn and masturbation, you begin to believe and tell yourself that “I’ve got this under control”- then you start getting sloppy with the things that kept your off porn in the first place and next thing you know, you are relapsing to something like a very light sex scene in a movie.

This happens OVER and OVER again…but you never change. You never change and keep thinking you have it under control because you haven’t changed your belief to something more realistic such as: “I don’t have this under control until my brain rewires itself AND it takes more than a few months to recover from porn addiction.”

Enemy #2: Technology

Many men- especially millennial men, use technology irresponsibly and there is a price to pay for that. The cost is damage to their ability to synthesize information and to think independently.

My research into my clients revealed a few things:

The more you watch T.V, the less likely you are to recover from your porn addiction. Men who watch T.V, Netflix, and Youtube as entertainment for more than 10 hours a week have a HIGH relapse rate.

Men who are most likely to relapse consume information via technology without discipline. They look up anything they don’t know on their phones before thinking for themselves. They would rather watch a video than read a book about recovery.

See, the majority of modern humans cannot deal with boredom or lack of satisfaction in their lives simply because every time they feel bored, they tune into T.V, Social Media or….porn.

We have not trained ourselves to sit and think in silence. As a result, many men cannot sit still and evaluate their emotional state- a necessary step in recovery.

They don’t THINK enough and as a result are not only prone to relapse but are prone to being unfulfilled and unsuccessful.

In our current world, success is not determined by how much manual labor you can do, or how hard you can work. It’s predicted by your ability to think and be creative.

Enemy #3: Lazy Thinking and Beliefs

Lazy Beliefs are basically beliefs which you formed to make life easier for you and make you feel better when you don’t achieve your goal.

Easy thinking makes you soft and fragile because it often puts the responsibility of your situation on someone else.

Here are a few examples:

a) “This time will be different because____________ will happen!”

This is the belief that something positive will happen in the future that will change your life without any effort on your part. For instance:

“I’ll stop watching porn and masturbating when I have sex /get a girlfriend/to get married to the right woman .”

“I’ll become more attractive/ stop being stressed when I get a good job/ become very successful ___years from now.”

“I won’t slip or relapse this time because I got a therapist/ recovery coach/ joined a group.”

b)”I’m ___________ therefore ____event probably won’t happen to me.”

This happens when you believe you are exempt from something happening to you because you are “special”.

Let’s start with my favorite:

“I watched 70 videos about not fapping on Youtube and I am a Level 5 Black Belt with 500 Days of not fapping. so I’m going to recover for sure!”

Reality: You can remain in the early stages of recovery from porn addiction with no relapses for months and even YEARS only to relapse 2 years later because you still haven’t rewired your brain or dealt with the underlying issues that made you addicted to porn in the first place.

The ugly truth is that many men who claim to have recovered from porn addiction have not. They simply regressed to a stage of their addiction where they can go months without watching porn or masturbating- but they eventually slip and binge for a few days, then get back on the horse. This pattern will likely continue throughout their lives.

“I’m a strong Christian/Religious person- my faith and belief in Jesus Christ/ religious deity will pull me through”

Reality: God helps those who help themselves. Faith is an amazing thing to have in your arsenal against addiction, but Faith without a realistic goal, faith without doing the necessary recovery work, heck, even faith without a filter installed on your devices will NOT work.

” I won’t be unemployed and lonely in my thirties because I’m in college now and I have some friends.”

(Actual quote by a twenty-something-year-old porn addict who is an “introvert”, has no close friends, is failing his sophomore year in college and is broke because of his severe addiction to live cam sites).

Reality: As I mentioned earlier, I have followed the lives of dozens of my clients over the years. If you don’t fix your porn addiction and any other unhealthy behaviors in your twenties, it only gets tougher as you get older.

It is heartbreaking to speak to men in their 40’s who literally watched all their dreams slip away because of their effects of pornography on their lives:lack of focus, complacency with their career, lack of friends and an encouraging network, never attaining any form of financial independence, never being in a fulfilling long term relationship, or choosing porn over their one relationship.

“I can’t wake up early because I need at least 9 hours of sleep to function”

Reality: Sleep is important, so sleep as much as you need, but if you consistently go to bed at 2 am because you’re up watching Youtube videos, catching up on TV series, edging to porn or juggling 5 dead-end conversations on Tinder, you are only fooling yourself. Try going to bed at 9:30 PM if you can and see how many hours you really need. Some of you will literally solve 90% of your problems by being in bed by 10 PM every night.

“I would be more successful/ have more money if not for the____(blame someone else) who keeps me down!”

Reality: Who is the scapegoat in your life? Your parents? Your wife or girlfriend? Trump? The porn industry? Take 100% responsibility for your life.

Here’s what I mean by 100% responsibility: If my car gets rear-ended while I’m rushing to an important meeting and I am late as a result, its MY responsibility, not the idiot behind me who was texting and driving. If I wasn’t rushing and had left 30 minutes earlier, I would not be the victim in the accident.

If I am in a bar with friends and some drunk pick a fight with me and I get knocked out, it’s 100% MY RESPONSIBILITY because I could have

1) Not reacting in a way that resulted in a fight

2) Not been as easy to knock out (taken my martial arts training more seriously)

3) Not been drinking in a bar

One last one since I’m on a roll (this will probably lose me some subscribers- but whatever): if you are in a relationship and your girl cheats on you, its 100% YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.

1) There were probably warning signs that she was not long term material, but you ignored them because “she was the One”.

2) You got comfortable in your relationship and didn’t give her what she needed, so another guy swooped in.

3) Your relationship game wasn’t great/you weren’t experienced enough and some other guy who was better suited to her seduced her. In which case, she wasn’t long term material in the first place and most likely not the right woman for you.

The point is- take full responsibility for your life and trust me- you’ll be a much happier man.

There you have it- the three enemies of recovery.

It is my hope that bringing these to your awareness will prevent you from falling into this trap.

Your brother in this struggle,

J.K

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The Productive Porn Addict

 

Dealing with an out of control behavior with porn, sex or masturbation can be tough and it definitely affects your life in negative ways.

I know many men who follow Porn Addiction Recovery Reboot have been trying to quit for a long time- there are moments when you are doing very well and times when you’re just deep in it binging, feeling shame, guilt, and loss of control. …

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