It may sound ridiculous that you could lose your home to addiction to online pornography. But successful people know how these things work. You may sacrifice an important meeting to rearrange your schedule so you can access porn that day. Or, you might put off an important business or banking phone call you need to make, because you want to stay online a little longer while you search for new porn, and then the person you need to get in touch with may be gone by the time you get there. around to call. Maybe you can’t call the next day, then maybe the person is out the next day, and suddenly you’re watching a whole week go by. These things happen, and they happen in little slips and crazy things. But then they add to the derailments in your life.
So let’s say your job isn’t as secure as it used to be and therefore maybe your ability to pay your mortgage is precarious, and on top of that you like to log on to porn sites whenever you can for 1, 2, or even 3 hours per session. Your porn habit is essentially setting you up for failure, even as it can help you feel better day by day, hour by hour (as all addictions do). So how can you stop it and turn things around before it’s too late?
First of all, don’t try to stop masturbating online cold turkey. That is a waste of time. You have to start small and expect many, many setbacks. Quickly assess how much time you are currently wasting online. An hour or two online each day might seem reasonable enough, and chances are you can still function for the most part in the world. But think about it: even one hour a day, five days a week is at least 5 hours a week, or about 20 hours a month. That’s half a workweek every month spent staring at pixels on a screen, eroding your self-esteem, when you could be applying those 20 hours to building your self-esteem and improving your standing in the world. Over the course of a year, those 20 hours a week add up to at least 240 hours a year. Those six full weeks of work, wasted, thrown away. That’s six whole weeks you’ve spent holding yourself back, instead of getting stronger. At the very least, you could have spent that time doing some kind of lasting recreation like taking a vacation, taking a class, or even writing a book or going out and meeting real people.
Make a list of things you wish you were doing instead of going online to watch pornography. Connect that wish list to the time you’re wasting online (say, six weeks out of every year). Then, day by day, work on avoiding masturbation instead of working on finding opportunities to masturbate. Put yourself in situations where you have to be somewhere when you know you will have access to a computer rigged for pornography. Go out and see the people. Join volunteer groups, play sports, hunt, make art, or do whatever interests you. Make an effort to get out and see others. When you slip, you slip. Leave it and move on the next day. As you replace the harmful behavior of masturbating for hours online with the empowering behavior of interacting with people and looking for things that make you genuinely happy and stronger, the urge to go online to search for new porn will slowly lessen. You will get stronger. It will be less attractive to you. And before you know it, you’ll realize that you’ve changed your life in a positive direction, slowly, over time, instead of falling headlong into failure, slowly, over time.
