Quit porn.
In Telegram I go by Unit. Nothing on your phone says porn.
What it costs
Across about 50 studies, men who watched more porn were less satisfied with their partners and their sex lives. In US survey data, married people who started watching were about twice as likely to be divorced by the next survey.
Wright et al., Human Communication Research, 2017 · Perry & Schleifer, Journal of Sex Research, 2018
In a survey of 14,581 adults, men and women who had lost control over porn had more sexual problems. How often they watched did not explain it. Losing control did.
Porn becomes the way you handle stress, push feelings down and get through boredom, and those are the motives tied to losing control. Quitting means handling them another way. That's what we practice.
Of 82,243 people in 42 countries, about 3% were at risk of problematic porn use. At most 1 in 10 of them had ever looked for help.
How it goes
A baseline. You tell me about urges and slips in plain words, as they happen. I learn your hours, your triggers and what porn does for you. No advice yet.
The early months are the hardest, so I stay close. Short lessons, one technique at a time, a plan for your own risky moments, and a message before they come.
I write less often, and I keep writing. Once a month, six short questions from a scale researchers use (the PPCS-6) show how far you are from where you started. No streaks, no counters.
In one study, new habits took a median of 66 days to become automatic, and some took 254. A program that stops at week six stops before most people are done.
What I teach
Notice the urge, let it sit there, and do what you care about anyway. In a small randomized trial, this approach (ACT) cut porn viewing by 93%, against 21% for men who waited.
If it's past 11 and I'm in bed with the phone, the phone sleeps in the kitchen. Across 94 studies, plans this specific helped people reach their goals.
Gollwitzer & Sheeran, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006
Ride the urge for ten minutes instead of fighting it. It peaks, then it passes. People in addiction treatment who trained this way used less a year later than people in usual care.
A slip is one event. The "I already blew it" feeling is what turns one slip into a week, so we look at what set it off and you start again the same day.
I talk about what you did, never about who you are. In people seeking help, shame went with more compulsive behavior, and guilt about a specific act went with taking steps to change.
Discreet
In Telegram I go by Unit, with a plain avatar. Notifications never say porn. Nothing to install, nothing on your home screen. One message deletes everything I have on you.