Quit Porn

Quitting porn was one of the first steps that I took that put me on this great trajectory in life. I would not be anywhere close to where I am as a person or feel nearly as good as I do if I didn’t stop watching porn. It’s something that I didn’t even think about doing until a couple of poor relationships with woman woke me up to the fact that I might be doing something wrong.

But the benefits go far beyond relationships. Watching porn is not only destroying your intimate relationships, but it is demolishing your motivation and energy levels as a man.

It’s evil down to the core. It’s stripping away men’s divine sexual drive, you’re strongest and most primal drive you have. It’s leaving you drained and unmotivated in life to achieve anything of real value. It’s warping your perspective on women, sex, and relationships and how they really are in the real world.

This topic is particularly important to me. Doing this was one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done, but it is completely life changing. Since nobody talks about the damages of these new internet platforms, I thought it would be great to share my story and ideas on porn.  Hopefully I can shine some light on the terrible effects of porn and sell some men on quitting for good. Enjoy!

Individual Negative Effects

“Sexual energy – specifically male sexual energy – is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. It is man’s actionable energy, creative energy, which allows man to create like a god, command like a king, and work like a slave to meet his goals and achieve his whims.” – Stefan Aarnio

Every man has a limited amount of sexual energy. This energy is the driving force behind every man’s desire to become attractive and valuable to women. When you are watching porn however, you are wasting your natural sexual energy that you have on fugazi, absolutely nothing. Containing that sexual energy and channeling it into building yourself up as a man is what you really should be doing with it, not wasting it watching other people have sex with women that you’re attracted to.

One of the biggest motivators in a man’s life is attracting a beautiful and valuable women to be their mate. Women are essential for continuing your genetics, and because of this men have a natural drive to build value to be chosen by them to continue our genes. Women decide which genes are worthy to be procreated, and the men compete for that procreation.

When you are watching porn, you’re brain is thinking that it has unlimited access to beautiful women. Your brain thinks that you are winning the competition to be selected as sexual partners of women (which you are not). Because of this, your brain then decides that you no longer need a strong sexual drive to achieve things, and your motivation to be a great man plummets. What is the point of improving yourself as a man if you believe that you are getting any women you’ve ever wanted? Even if you are in a relationship, wasting your sexual energy on nothing is destroying your motivation to be a great man.

And now we have a culture that is okay with the VAST majority of men watching porn regularly. This deep desire to attract women has become demented in the modern world, and it is being used (unintentionally) to keep men low-energy and docile. This is truly the silent killer of this generation’s men.

Negative Effects on Relationships

When men watch porn, it is showing and teaching them how to have sex with women. It’s showing them the queues that women give when they are enjoying sex and is showing them how women like to be treated during sex. But the most popular porn is performed by actors that overly exaggerate the scenes and create something that is not realistic at all. This gives men a distorted view of sex that has them feeling that they are not doing enough or not performing well enough because his woman is not reacting like the women he’s been watching in the videos for years.

Watching porn also messes up your own personal sex life. Your brain is being overstimulated by these dramatized sex scenes, so that when the real deal happens it could never possibly compete with the professional actors that you watch every day. You will never get as much enjoyment and connection out of sex as you naturally would if you continued to watch porn.

Like any other addiction out there, porn can become an escape. When relationship issues come up, it is very easy to ignore them and to watch porn to alleviate the discomfort of the situation. I personally am guilty of this, and this has always lead to deterioration of the relationship that I was in. It gives you the ability to ignore the current unfulfillment or problem in your relationship, to temporarily fix the issue at hand. But this will inevitably lead to the destruction of a relationship if you continue to ignore the issues.

Supernormal Stimuli

Supernormal stimulus: an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.

Porn is an example of a supernormal stimulus. Porn is a hyper-exaggerated version of sex. It is designed to elicit a stronger response than regular sex, which is why it is so compelling to continue to watch it. This leads to all of the disadvantages of watching porn mentioned above such as decreased motivation and energy, less enjoyment from real sex, unrealistic expectations on your partner, and countless other issues. I found a cool comic on Stuart McMillen’s website about this very topic that talks about Niko Tinbergen’s research on behavior and supernormal stimuli in animals. Below is an short excerpt from the comic:

Supernormal Stimuli by Stuart McMillen

Porn is one of the many examples of a supernormal stimuli for humans. It is hijacking sexual instincts beyond their evolutionary purposes.

It is almost like we are exploiting the game of life, taking advantage of a glitch in the game. Everyone understands that glitches and exploits in the game make it less fun and fulfilling. Everyone remembers the GTA glitch where you could give yourself an insane amount of cash, but than at that point what’s the point of playing anymore? If you can see an infinite amount of beautiful women whenever you’d like, what motivation is there to play the game better?

Personal Benefits From Quitting

The initial benefits of quitting porn were unbelievable for me. You hit a certain point around 2 weeks when you start to actually notice benefits, and once you’re about a month in, you’ll have more energy than you’ve ever had before. When this initial period happened to me, I literally had no idea what to do with all of this energy. It was shocking. This energy boost that you get is your reward system in your brain reverting back to its natural form, instead of being overstimulated and unmotivated every day.  

My social anxiety disappeared. My confidence skyrocketed. My attention was more focused. I had way more energy every day. I could go on and on about the benefits I felt, but it would be better if you experienced them yourself. Once I got a taste of these benefits, it became impossible for me to go back.

When you do this, you are literally going to be like “Wow, this is how we’re supposed to feel all the time?”. It’s truly amazing, I can’t stress enough how important this was for me. You get closer to God in the most literal sense.  

Conclusion

“It’s now possible for a young man to look at more beautiful nude women in one day than any man has ever seen, prior to 10 years ago, 20 years ago – that any many in history had ever seen. That’s not nothing. That’s something. And to think that doesn’t do anything to you. It’s like – no, that likely does something to you” – Jordan Peterson on this video

Hopefully you understand why quitting porn would be extremely beneficial to you. This is just the tip of the iceberg on this topic, but hopefully I’ve given you enough to become motivated to stop.

You might think you don’t have a problem, but you’ll never really know until you try to stop. It is a lot harder than you think, and the difficulty of quitting emphasizes how addicting and damaging it is too you. But the rewards for quitting are that much greater than the difficulty of quitting. Thank you for reading, I hope I taught you something valuable today.   

References

"Escaping Porn Addiction": This was the first video that I ever watched on this topic. This video inspired me to stop watching porn. I remember it vividly. I was sitting in my college apartment in my room surfing YouTube after a breakup and the YouTube algorithm decided to put this video on my feed. I didn’t so much relate to his situation, but it was the first time I heard a story from someone whose life was damaged directly by porn. After the video, I wrote down in my notes and made a promise to myself that I was going to embark on the same journey as this man. I’m so glad that I did.

“The Great Porn Experiment”: Great video about pornography and why it is so addicting. There’s also a billion other videos on YouTube about quitting porn, don’t stop at just these two.

I also dropped a quote from Stefan Aarnio during this article from the book Hard Times Create Strong Men. This book is all about why you should be a strong man. He has a whole chapter in it about pornography and why it is so dangerous to men. I got a lot of the ideas from the Individual Negative Effects paragraph from this book. I have really enjoyed the whole book so far, and highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in this type of stuff. Really long read though. If you haven’t already, I would start with The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida.

I stumbled upon Stuart McMillen’s website today when I was looking into supernormal stimuli, and it is really cool. It’s basically a blog but he writes comics instead of regular blogs. He’s got a lot of cool topics on there that I’m going to check out.

Side Note

These are the articles I really love writing, where I’m able to pour my heart out and talk about something that was very beneficial for me. I didn’t post last weekend because I was writing about a topic that didn’t inspire me. I don’t like writing about topics that aren’t extremely beneficial to me, and I don’t like writing about topics that don’t challenge me. This is challenging. I feel a tremendous responsibility to articulate this topic as well as I can, because it is extremely important to me. And I know for a FACT that there are countless other men out there who are in the same boat I was in.

Also, comment section!!!!!!!!! This would be a great one to comment on. You don’t need to leave a name or anything, just let me know if this information was helpful, or if you’ve decided you’re going to quit as well. If anyone wants to reach out too, by all means my line is open. I know how hard this is, so I’m always available to talk about it.  

I have failed to mention this previously as well, but there is a newsletter now! If you would like to get an email every time I post an article, you can sign up to my newsletter for FREE. It’s pretty awesome, and a great way to show support. I spend roughly 6-8 hours on these articles per week, so dropping a subscription to my news letter would be greatly appreciated. I have the news letter sign up on the front page as well as at the bottom of this blog.

Tips

For anyone that actually will try to quit, I have three tips for you that helped me get through it. As hard as it is to achieve, it is that much more rewarding once you quit, and I highly encourage you to do so.

Tip one: you will fail. You will relapse. Expect to. Don’t get too upset when you do. It’s normal to fail and fall backwards, just don’t kick yourself too hard and get yourself back on track. It’s been about a year and a half since I made the decision to stop, and I’ve failed or broken the streak multiple times. I’m in a great place now, but don’t think that I made that initial decision and haven’t done it since then. It’s an addiction that has been built up over years, this is not something you can realistically go cold turkey on.

Tip two: watch videos about it. Constantly remind yourself why you are doing this, it’s very easy to forget. Keep drilling that information into your brain, you’ll eventually get it. Hearing other people’s stories about quitting is tremendously helpful. Education is power. Educate yourself on why porn is bad, it makes it that much easier to stop.

Tip three: Get off Instagram. I found it nearly impossible to be on Instagram every day. There are too many attractive women, they’ll get your hormones pumping. You can try to change your feed to not have any women on it, but this is unreasonable, and it seems that Instagram will throw some booty onto your feed whether you want it there or not. (Quit TikTok too, same reasons). You can get back on once you feel comfortable, but I think you will end up deciding to stay off or heavily lower your time on them once you see the benefits of abstaining from them. (Potential future topic on quitting social media, pretty much same reasons as porn)

This challenge takes time, and you will have to learn what works for you and what doesn’t as you go along. These are the things that helped me the most, hopefully they’ll help you as well on your journey. Thank you for reading!