Tired of generic advice and Nofap nonsense? I’m not here to sell you a dopamine detox or preach about your childhood trauma. I’m here to give you a battle-tested strategy that helped me finally stop watching porn—for good.
This is the plan I used to quit porn and improve my sex life. If you want to learn how to quit porn, let me first tell you what you won’t find here.
This isn’t:
- Advice based only on the theory of addiction recovery with no real-life experience.
- Speculation based on a few good ideas.
- A Nofap plan that requires will-power
- Hearsay from a guy who’s only got a few weeks in on his internet pornography recovery.
This is a battle-tested, science-backed plan to end your porn habit and the shame that comes with it.
Most literature on the internet talks about inner healing, dopamine, figuring out why porn is your coping mechanism, and finding your deep-seated reasons for watching porn. You find God and learn about the neuroscience of why you can’t stop, it won’t actually help you to quit.
The more you learn about addiction, the more you learn about trauma.
— Ed Latimore (@EdLatimore) November 17, 2020
Feeling complete and whole is good, but it doesn’t exactly help you solve the problem. They give advice like this because they either lack experience with porn addiction (or any addiction, for that matter) or they’re fakes who are trying to sell you something.
The negative consequences of internet porn
You wouldn’t tell a crackhead to do some soul searching.
Inner peace is important, but we don’t have time to worry about why the crackhead smokes crack. We just want to get the crackhead off crack as quickly as possible, hopefully before something terrible, life-altering, and irreversible happens.
Pornography is a drug and deserves a similar approach.
While people aren’t committing robbery to get money for pornography, pornography addiction isn’t exactly a victimless problem.In fact, a 2022 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that frequent pornography consumption is associated with lower relationship satisfaction, less sexual desire, and even performance issues in young men.
Porn addiction makes a person more likely to cheat, causing emotional distress for the addict’s partner. Many people already consider viewing pornography a type of infidelity. If the couple has children, then they become the collateral damage of a relationship ruined by porn addiction.
While emotional and spiritual work may help, porn’s appeal is simple:
It’s not appealing because you’re broken, empty, or have an addictive personality. Porn is appealing because orgasms feel good and result from giving in to the most powerful drive on the planet; the need to procreate.
The easy access to internet pornography allows you to get this effect whenever you want with as much variety as you desire.
Porn hijacks and rewires the brain by taking advantage of something calledThe Coolidge Effect.
What is The Coolidge Effect?
It’s a biological phenomenon where males (in both humans and animals) show renewed sexual interest when introduced to novel partners—even after losing interest in prior ones. Porn exploits this by providing endless novelty, rewiring your brain to crave constant stimulation.
It’s basically impossible to get bored of sexual variety. A man will choose a new sexual partner over food and water. Normally, he doesn’t have that many options, but pornography creates the illusion of choice.
The human mind has a surprisingly difficult time distinguishing between real and imagined events. Part of the reason why viewing porn is addictive is why scary movies are scary.
We know it’s not in front of us, but we have a hormonal and physiological response anyway.
Every new video or thumbnail triggers a dopamine spike, training your brain to chase novelty over real connection. That’s why quitting porn often feels harder than quitting junk food or booze.
Should you give up porn?
I’m not anti-porn. I’m anti-porn addiction. It just so happens that porn is incredibly easy to get addicted to and I am very anti-addiction.
Guys who quit porn often report:
- Better focus and energy
- Stronger erections
- More confidence around women
- Increased motivation
- More satisfying sex
You can experiment on yourself to see if you experience any of the routinely touted benefits of giving up porn. If you want to jerk off to the screen until your heart’s content, go for it. All I’ll say is that there are consequences for every action.
But you found this article so that means you know there’s something wrong. Maybe you’re starting to experience the dreaded “erectile dysfunction”. Or you’re becoming numb to normal girls in their natural beauty.
Or maybe you’re still interested in normal women, and you can still get it up, but the sexual satisfaction you receive from real physical intimacy is out the window.
If you aren’t sure if something is wrong, here are 6 clear signs that you’re definitely addicted to porn. You need this article if you say yes to anything on that list.
Or maybe you’re just a guy who’s healthy now but knows that his pornography viewing habit is no good and you want a way out. Whatever your situation is, you’re in the right place.
You don’t need professional help. You don’t need an intervention. You just need this article.
Here is the plan I used to quit porn
Step 1: Delete your browser history
This is one of those popular tips for dealing with a porn addiction that has real merit.
Porn sites employ clever tricks to keep you coming back. One is making sure that when you type “www” in your browser, the first cache site is a porn site.
Aside from giving your friends a chance to make fun of you every time they use your computer, it cleverly puts the idea in your mind to revisit the porn sites instead of your original plan.
Those of you with a background in psychology will recognize this as a type of Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlovian conditioning asdefined by Wikipedia :
Classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian or respondent conditioning) refers to a learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus (e.g. food) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g. a bell). It also refers to the learning process that results from this pairing, through which the neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response (e.g. salivation) that is usually similar to the one elicited by the potent stimulus.
Many times you end up looking at porn, your original plan probably wasn’t to look at porn. You went to type in the address for another site, and the last porn site you visited filled in your search bar as a suggestion. Now you’re triggered into craving porn.
The only way around this is to delete your browser history.
On mobile, disable “suggested sites” and clear Safari or Chrome history regularly. Porn sites rely on your digital muscle memory.
Step 2: Install an adult site blocker
The easiest way to stop watching porn is to make it impossible for you to do so.
You can easily install porn blockers on your browser. There are various options to stop your computer from even being able to visit pornographic sites. Some of the more popular options are:
Once you’ve made it impossible to satisfy your pornography habit on your electronic devices, the next step is to live transparently. You need to make sure that you use your computer in front of people at all times.
When it’s impossible to browse internet porn on your own and you’re constantly in front of other people, then you’ll break your internet porn habit by sheer force. It will be impossible for you to watch in private and you’ll never get a chance to anyway.
Try apps like Quittr. These limit access across devices and help break the habit by removing temptation.
Eventually, the urge will leave you.
Read my review of the Quittr App here
Step 3: Don’t touch your penis
Sounds harsh, but if you’re serious about stopping porn, this is critical.
Except for necessary functions.
There are only 3 times a man has to touch his penis: Cleaning, urinating, and jerking off. You have to do the first two. You should be able to do the last one without porn.
Celibacy is not the goal.
Men have been polishing the pole for centuries without porn. Some men need porn to jerk off. They also watch porn without the desire to get off, which creates a desire to masturbate.
This is pavlovian conditioning rearing its ugly head again.
Touching your penis outside of showering or pissing makes you want to watch porn. Stop touching your dick beyond essential functions. This will also make actual sex even better.
If you want to quit porn, stop building routines that lead you back to it.
Step 4: Get physical & get away from the computer
I write this under the assumption that you ingest all of your porn through a computer with an internet connection. Porn addiction is just like any other addiction in that part of what you are addicted to is the ritual.
Crackheads aren’t just addicted to the high of crack cocaine. They’re addicted to the stuffing, lighting, and passing of the crack pipe. It’s the ritual.
Yes, this is pavlovian conditioning again. I told you that a big reason you’re addicted to porn is that it’s a Pavlovian response.
With that said, getting off of crack is probably easier than getting off of porn because you don’t HAVE to ever touch a crack pipe.
However, you almost certainly have to use a computer.
This creates a ritual. You sit down with the intention of working, but you get the urge to jerk off. Good old-fashioned physical activity works best for me at those times.
Go for a run, lift some weights, stretch, whatever.
The point is to burn off energy, get moving and get away from the computer. You’ll return to the computer in a refreshed state of mind and less interested in porn.
Movement increases dopamine naturally, helping you replace artificial highs with real ones.
This also has the side benefit of getting you in shape, which will make the next step that much easier.
Step 5: Talk to some women
Get some intimate female contact in your life.
Even platonic female friendships can help retrain your brain to relate to real women, rather than digital fantasies.
There’s a school of thought which says watching porn makes you less likely to seek out interactions with women. By this reasoning, not watching porn will inspire you to interact with more females.
If your goal is more successful interactions with women, this is not bad advice. However, I have a problem with it for kicking the porn habit: this is putting the cart before the horse.
I’ve met porn addicts who can get laid. They have simply come to–for whatever reason–prefer porn to sex. The problem is that porn is easy to acquire. Even low-quality sex requires some effort.
If you want to quit porn, you need to have sex.
If pornography is as addictive as nicotine, then sex is like a vape. At first, it will not satisfy you the way masturbation to a digital fantasy will, but eventually, you will prefer this to porn as long as you don’t relapse.
This is why I think it’s important to meet women as a means to get off of porn. Not vice-versa. It makes the transition to a pornless state MUCH easier if you have something instead of nothing at all.
Step 6: Meditation and mindfulness
Counterintuitively, sometimes the best thing to do to help you quit using porn is to do nothing. I don’t mean this as a piece of mysterious zen or a confusing koan. This advice is to be taken literally; simply let yourself experience the craving and urges.
This might sound no different than what you’ve been doing and why you found this article in the first place, but the trick here is to be mindful and focus on your breathing when you do it.
If we work from the premise that the urge for sex is natural and we know that porn is an exaggerated, manipulated sexual response, then it stands to reason that urges to watch porn are natural in many ways.
This doesn’t mean that need to give in to them any more than you give in to your urge to hit someone when they make you angry. Instead, learn to exist with the urge by focusing on it, realizing what it is, but neither trying to control it, resist it, or give in to it.
This is accomplished through meditation, breathing, and mindfulness. The easiest way to practice this is to close your eyes and focus on the sound and rhythm of your breathing while being completely aware of the urge to watch porn.
I can’t guarantee the feeling will pass, but that’s not the point anyway. The point is to recognize that the urge exists but doesn’t have power over you. This is the closest to the idea of recognizing the pain in working out but not letting it stop you from working out.
You accept that pain and continue on towards your goal of fitness. This is the same
Step 7: Build or join a support group
Pornography’s greatest power is that it is done alone and in secret. Unlike other drugs, most guys don’t use pornography with other guys around. However, if you can link up with someone else who is trying to quit using porn, then you turn the tables on porn addiction.
When you have an accountability partner, you are not only keeping yourself, but you’re keeping someone else honest. The support group that you build doesn’t just have to be other guys who use porn.
Any type of person with an addiction they’re trying to kick is fine. All that matters is the common purpose of getting back control in your life.
It doesn’t have to be in person either. I used WhatsApp and Telegram to organize my support group. The Quittr porn blocking app actually comes with this group built in, and there are over 13k members in there (as of this writing).
You don’t have to go to a 12-step meeting. Even one honest friend who checks in on you weekly can make a huge difference. Quitter comes with a built-in community to help you navigate porn addiction.
Beating porn addiction falls under the “simple, but not easy” category.
I’m avoiding the argument of whether you should or shouldn’t watch porn. To quit porn, these seven steps are all you need. Just remember, the first 3 days are the most difficult because you’re overcoming Pavlovian conditioning.
After that, it gets much easier.
What if I relapse?
Slipping up doesn’t mean you failed. It just means you’re still human. Don’t binge or spiral—just reset.
Every relapse is a reminder that this habit has the power to affect us..
But every day you go without it is proof that you have more. Restart the steps. Don’t beat yourself up. Build streaks, not shame.
Porn might be free, but the cost is your time, energy, focus, and confidence. You don’t need therapy, a course, or a priest. You just need a real plan—and the will to follow it.
This one worked for me. If you’re serious about learning how to stop watching porn, use it. It’s free. It works. And it just might change your life.
The the more a more indepth plan with actionable steps that will absolutely get you off porn, you check out my flagship guide “The Dick Detox.” It covers these steps and many more that I used to kick porn that I’d taught to hundreds of men.
Frequently asked questions about quitting porn
Q: Is watching porn really addictive?
Yes, while not officially classified as an addiction in the DSM-5, many mental health professionals acknowledge that compulsive porn use has the same behavioral patterns as addiction—dopamine spikes, withdrawal-like symptoms, and tolerance.
Q: How long does it take to quit porn?
Results vary, but most people report significant improvements within 30–60 days. The first 3 days are the hardest. After that, urges weaken.
Q: Does NoFap work?
NoFap is popular, but often ineffective long-term. It focuses on abstinence, not replacement. My strategy helps you replace the habit instead of just white-knuckling through it.
