If you want to keep porn out of your home, you need to know:
There's not enough porn-proofing in the world to stop
you unless you really want to quit porn.
But:
the very act of taking a first step to prevent porn can lead to
momentum, which can lead to total, lasting freedom. Those first steps
matter.
If you can do what you ought for a while, it can become
what you want for life. Once you're in the stream of recovery, it builds
on itself until you've hit a sweet spot of small victories that link to
big ones.
It's the initial smaller victories that require an uncomfortable re-structuring of your habits and your home.
Here are four ways to set up boundaries and
prevent porn in your home.
1) Change up your whole living space, from bed sheets to pantry to picture frames.
If
you're like me, you've been frustrated enough at trying to break bad
habits that you've almost flipped a table or thrown your things around.
It turns out: that might be the very thing that flips the switch.
Any
habit comes with a long list of associations that we hardly think
about, from the color of your sheets to the food in your pantry to the
shape of your picture frames. These triggers coincide with emotions like
guilt or anger, stress or depression, along with hundreds of familiar
patterns that weave into a path. Your brain eventually stores these
external visuals as part of a routine. When you make a drastic change to
these things: you interrupt that routine and prevent porn.
Even a visually neutral cue that's been associated with your addiction can trigger a relapse. In other words, something as plain and harmless as the shape of your computer can set off a series of habitual behaviors.
Simple
things like rearranging your furniture, throwing away your blankets,
putting stickers on your laptop, getting a bright lamp, or giving up
midnight snacks will do wonders. Switch your sock drawer with your
shirts or line up all your toiletries backwards.
This might sound
like hocus-pocus pseudo-science, but the first time I tried this, I was
surprised at how much even my other habits, like flossing or bringing a
laptop to bed, had changed. I had the feeling of being a visitor in my
own space, and the extra precious seconds between trigger and behavior
created the necessary distance to shake myself out of the urge and
prevent porn from invading my mind.
2) Keep your electronics insulated in boundary zones.
It's likely that almost your whole addiction happens online.
This
may sound very obvious: but if you're able to lock your access by
multiple barriers, it will slow you down enough until an urge can pass.
And
yes, the urge will always pass. In fact, creating these barriers causes
an aversion to accessing pornography, because you'll associate
difficulty with your computer.
I had a friend once in high
school who was short, skinny, and probably weighed the size of my thigh.
Whenever he was bullied, no matter how slight the comment, he would
immediately drop everything and get into a fight. He lost, every single
time. But the bully would never pick on my friend again, because the
bully just didn't want that sort of trouble.
This sounds like a
silly example: But to prevent porn we have to be willing to fight
ourselves for our recovery, to create the right kind of trouble to
dispel the wrong kind of trouble. In a computer age, it's an
inconvenience to lock up your access.
It's annoying to put your laptop in the hallway or to keep your phone charger in the living room. It can feel limiting to get X3watch to
block supposedly harmless websites. But really, I would rather have
filtered access to a ton of websites than a single avenue to feeding my
addiction.
It's difficult to use my computer: but that's a cost I'm more than willing to pay, even with lifelong vigilance.
Another option for those of you with kids is Circle.
It's a little device that sits in your house and controls internet
access for your kids, making it a really handy gatekeeper for those
impressionable minds you're raising.
3) Keep alternative options close by.
The best way to break a habit is to replace it with something else.
If
your hands can find something else to do, you'll break your familiar
cycles. Nearly every article on fighting porn suggests alternative
behaviors, from going to the gym to chewing gum to getting a dog to
writing in a journal to calling a friend. If your home is full of these
options, you can short-circuit yourself every time the "urge" strikes.
Here's
how this works. When the urge happens, there are a host of reasons —
stress, anxiety, boredom, a day not going your way — and this leads to
pent-up energy that needs to be released.
If you can reward
yourself after choosing the alternative, whether by eating a piece of
chocolate or watching an extra episode of whatever show you're currently
binging on Netflix, you'll hugely increase your chance of breaking the
old habit. The power of reward is how the entire world was convinced by Claude Hopkins to brush their teeth. Soon, the "alternate options" can become the only options.
4) Be willing to leave your house immediately.
In the end, if you really want to look at porn: you probably will.
In the closed safety of our home, especially alone, it's just too easy.
You
can try what I've done many, many times. You can get up and leave. You
can, as the Bible says, flee from sexual immorality. That literally
means grab up your robes and go the other way.
As I've said: The urge will always pass. A long walk will knock out the urge.
If you must, go into a run.
There's
no shame in this. There's no weirdness about it. Running will not only
fill you up with the necessary endorphins to reward you, but puts you
where you need to be: out in the open.
That's a big, symbolic win for honesty.
Because
really, you're not just trying to porn-proof your home. You're trying
to prevent porn in your heart. Sometimes that means stepping outside, to
remember who you are, and that you can leave this struggle behind.
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