Struggle with porn addiction. Advice?

Before you can start addressing the addiction, you will need to pay very close attention to two feelings you will experience after an ejaculation. The first one is in the brain and the second one in the body.

Everyone gets flooded with the large dose of pleasure from the dopamine surge after ejaculating that they always forget about the drained feeling in the body. Most people would immediately go to sleep after that very brief pleasure. Therefore, they do not have to deal with the actual longer-term consequence in the body until next morning or after a few hours of sleep, at which point the brain has already overridden or dampened the feeling of drainedness and tiredness with well-restedness.

Now, you need to pay very close attention to what your body feels right after ejaculating. Pay very close attention to that feeling of being drained and empty, because you have literally just shot out a huge load of energy that took a week to form, which is going to take another week to recover and you will have to spend time and money to refill it through food and rest.

Remember that feeling. (1)

Now, try to go on without masturbation for a week. During this time, exercise frequently -- best if you start out slow and increase in intensity toward the end of the week-long challenge. Run, swim, weightlifting -- doesn't matter, any activity is great. After a week, sit down and pay very close attention to your mental and bodily responses (you should be at your peak yet). Think about what you are doing and what you are capable of doing in that peak state. Write them down.

And remember that feeling. (2)

Now, whether you choose to masturbate again is entirely up to you. However, if you so choose to go through the whole act again, ignore the flood of pleasure and instead pay very close attention to feeling (1) again. Compare feeling (1) to feeling (2).


At the end of the day, porn and masturbation are a pair of harmful habits, but habits they are nonetheless. And it is very difficult to go cold turkey on a habit, or any habit at all, because all of us are fallen and most of us are weak.

That is why you need to prepare yourself and facilitate a situation where you recognize frequently enough what you are capable of doing if you choose to turn away from those sinful habits. That means acknowledging the reality that you are weak and will likely sin again because your Faith is not strong enough. How do you get stronger then? You work.

You need to allow yourself to see why choosing God is better. You need to let yourself get addicted to your own peak condition over sinful habits (i.e. choosing life, and therefore God), because faith without works is dead. (James 2:17).

The only way to break a feedback loop is to replace it with a better one. Start out with week-long periods of no masturbation and go from there.

God has given us free will and intellect. Use them both wisely.

/r/Catholicism Thread