It might sound ridiculous that you could lose your home to online porn addiction. But successful people know how these things work. You might sacrifice an important meeting to re-arrange your schedule so that 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 dig for new porn – and then the person you need to contact may be gone by the time you get around to calling. Maybe you can’t call the next day, then maybe the person is out the following day, then suddenly you’re looking at a whole week going by. These things happen, and they happen in very small slips and follies. But then they add up to derailments in your life.
So, let’s say that your job is not as secure as it used to be, and thus 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 pushing you towards failure, even while it may help you feel better day to day, hour to hour (as all addictions do). So how can you stop it and turn things around before it’s too late?
First off, don’t try to stop masturbating online cold turkey. That’s a waste of time. You need 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 may seem pretty reasonable, and likely you can still function for the most part in the world. But think about it: even just an hour a day, five days a week is at least 5 hours a week, or about 20 hours a month. That’s half a work week every month that you’re spending 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 position in the world. Over the course of a year, that 20 hours a week adds up to be at least 240 hours a year. That six full work weeks of time, wasted, thrown away. That’s six full weeks that you’ve spent holding yourself down, instead of building yourself up. At the very least, you could have spent that time doing some sort of lasting recreation like taking a vacation, or 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 getting online to view porn. Plug that wish list into the time that you’re wasting online (say, six weeks our of each year). Then, day by day, work to avoid masturbation instead of working to line up opportunities to masturbate. Put yourself in situations where you have to be someplace when you know you will have access to a porn-ready computer. Go out and see people. Get involved with groups that volunteer, or play sports, or hunt, or do artwork, or do anything you’re interested in. Strive to get out and see others. When you slip up, you slip up. Drop it and move on to the next day. As you replace the damaging behavior of masturbating for hours online with the strengthening behavior of interacting with people and pursuing things that make you genuinely happy and stronger, then the urge to get online to dig for new porn will slowly diminish. You will get stronger. It will be less appealing to you. And before you know it, you’ll find that you’ve changed your life in a positive direction, slowly, over time, instead of crashing headlong into failure, slowly, over time.