How to Heal From Porn Addiction

Can you heal from porn addiction? The answer is yes! It won’t be easy, but that doesn’t make this process impossible. In this article, we’ll help you understand how to eliminate porn from your life and live the life of freedom you deserve.

To heal from porn addiction, you’ll need to first identify the problem and set clear recovery goals, then build a support network, find a recovery program to keep you accountable, address any underlying concerns, and finally replace the time you spent watching porn with different, healthier patterns. Keep reading to learn the specifics of each of these steps and how to implement them in your life starting now!

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Why Has Healing From Porn Addiction Been So Hard?

Porn addiction is a behavioral addiction, similar to being addicted to sex or gambling. Like other addictions, it often doesn’t have one specific cause—there are many underlying factors that can contribute to porn addiction, and it’s not uncommon for people to develop an emotional reliance on pornography before they’re even aware it’s bad. Unfortunately, time and repetition train the brain to believe it needs porn, and even to experience addiction-like symptoms.

Many people turn to porn as a coping method to deal with stress, anxiety, or depression. Porn produces a spike in the brain’s feel good chemicals, teaching the brain that it needs porn to release stress. Of course, this is not actually true, but our brains believe this lie, leading to the condition we sometimes call porn addiction.

How to Heal From Porn Addiction

The term “heal” is a literal one in this case. Months or years of watching too much pornography have changed how your brain reacts to stress and other triggers, but this is not permanent. Your efforts to heal from porn addiction will also rewire your brain in a good and positive way, but the process will not happen overnight.

The best things you can do to heal from porn are to identify the problem and set clear goals, build a support network of safe people, find a recovery program, address any underlying concerns that may be augmenting the issue, and replace the time you spent watching porn with a positive behavior instead.

1. Identify the Problem

How can you heal from porn addiction if you don’t realize that’s what you’re struggling with? Thankfully, if you’re reading this article, you’re probably aware that what you’re doing is having a negative effect on you. Take a moment to consider the effect that pornography has had on your life.

What will your life be like once you’ve healed from porn?

2. Set Clear Recovery Goals for Yourself

It’s hard to measure your progress if you aren’t shooting for a specific goal. Do you really know why you want to quit? The recovery process will make much more sense if you give yourself something to work towards. Recovery goals are different for everyone, but take a moment to find something that both motivates you and feels achievable.

For example, ‘never watch porn ever again’ may not be a very effective goal. However, ‘watch porn 50% less than I did last month,’ is a goal that will help you both see your progress and reach for something specific. You’ll need to spend some time observing your own porn-viewing habits before you can create helpful goals.

3. Build an Effective Support Network

Talk to someone you care about. Pornography can be a scary issue to bring up, but you need human connection to make progress against addiction. The science is clear: it’s impossible to heal from porn in isolation. So even if you aren’t ready to share your struggle with porn with the people around you, take baby steps to practice by learning to open up to them about other parts of your life, like your feelings and emotions.

If you aren’t ready to discuss your struggle with pornography with your friends or loved ones, online support groups can be just as effective as you start your journey to heal from porn.

4. Find a Recovery Program

The fastest way to heal from porn is to find a program and get involved. Relay is a recovery program created for people struggling with pornography by people who have been in their shoes. Instead of just being a habit tracker, Relay combines the proven science of support groups with powerful curriculum from behavioral psychologists who specialize in addiction recovery.

Gain a group of new teammates who understand exactly what you’re going through, and work together with them to finally make lasting progress against addiction. With Relay, you’ll learn to root out addiction at the source, and gain real tools to help you heal from porn and regain control of your life!

5. Make a Plan and Stay Accountable

In the Relay program, we’ll walk you through this in greater detail, but it’s important to create a recovery plan that your group or loved ones can hold you accountable to. The best way to make a recovery plan to heal from porn is to…

1. Analyze what happens when you usually give in and watch porn. What time is it? What are you usually feeling? Tired, bored, stressed?
2. Plan something else to do when that time of day comes and you start to notice those emotions. Pick activities that are positive, interesting, and healthy.
3. Share this alternate activity with your supporters, and then let them know when you start noticing those triggering emotions, so that they can help you to follow through with the things you’ve chosen to do instead of watching porn.

Instead of just confessing to the people you’re accountable to when you mess up, try utilizing them as an actual support network. This means doing more than just telling them about it when you mess up. Try reaching out to them when you feel low, sharing your recovery plan with them, and spending time just enjoying genuine connection with them.

6. Address Underlying Concerns to Facilitate Longterm Healing

Often, addiction to pornography is a symptom of other underlying issues. In order to heal from porn long-term, those issues need to be uncovered and addressed. These issues can range from everyday stresses to real mental health issues.

Imagine having a broken bone. Intense physical pain is just a symptom of the underlying fracture. You can take all the pain medication you want to, but if you leave that broken bone untreated, it will continue to cause problems in your everyday life. Addiction to pornography is no different — you have to address the underlying issues. If you’re ready to go deeper and heal your pornography issue once and for all, you can find help here.

Conclusion

Healing from porn is intimidating, but you can do it. It will take work, honesty, and the right recovery program, but it’s not impossible! Thousands of others have walked this path before you, and many others are on the path right now ready to support you. Remember that you aren’t alone in this, and if you’re ready to change, try Relay!

Sources:

Is pornography addictive? | American Psychological Association

Neuroscience of Internet Pornography Addiction: A Review and Update | PMC

Online Porn Addiction: What We Know and What We Don’t—A Systematic Review | PMC

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