7 Tips to Help You Quit Porn
Ask anyone born before 1985 what their experiences with pornography were, and you’re likely to hear stories of stolen porn mags or smuggled VHS tapes. But more than the media, it was rarity that seemed to mark these moments – before the widespread use of modern internet porn, erotica was simply incredibly difficult for under-18s, meaning that porn was something highly sought after and treated as an expert.
Today, porn is still very much in demand, but it is so ubiquitous that the aforementioned problem surrounding porn has taken a complete 180-degree turn: Now, it can be difficult to avoid. While it’s unlikely to jump out at you, exactly, it’s incredibly hard not to find it if you spend even a second or two looking for it — and that might be all it takes, in a moment of excitement, to find yourself staring at thousands upon thousands of hours of sex videos free to download, a kind of bottomless horn.
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Whatever your reasons for reading this article, if you’re here, it’s probably because you’ve realized that porn plays a big role in your sexuality. Maybe you feel like it’s shaping your desires in ways you’re not comfortable with, or you just don’t like the way you feel after watching it. Maybe you’re not comfortable streaming clips that the artists aren’t paid for, but you don’t have the money to pay to watch. Maybe you just want to see if you can do without it for your own reasons. All of these apply!
Regardless, there are some handy tricks, concepts and alternatives you can use to curb your habit.
7 Tips to Quit Porn
1. Make a resolution
This may seem silly, but have you ever tried not to? If you’re feeling negative about your relationship with porn and like you’re a little reliant on it, what if you just promised yourself that you wouldn’t watch any for a certain amount of time — say, a few days, or a week, or a month, depending on how often you used to use porn — and did you try to stick with it? Everyone’s willpower will work a little differently in situations like these, so your mileage may vary, and if you’re trying to find solutions online, you may have already tried that avenue and failed. But before you move on to other options, it’s fair to suggest that you just do a porn-free analysis and see if you can stick with it. You might be surprised!
2. …Or just try different types of porn
Because of the way porn aggregators work, major porn producers take up a lot of visual real estate on sites like Pornhub and YouPorn and their ilk. But the truth is, not all porn companies out there do the same thing, and what bothers you about the porn you watch may not be a factor for other types of porn. For example, there is feminist porn, high production value porn, amateur porn, artistic porn, classic 70s porn and live chats with real cam girls, which is kind of porn-adjacent. Porn companies like KAMPARCHACH, Friends movies and MakeLoveNotPorn (all NSFW, obviously) might be what you’re looking for — or just going to Tumblr (yes, that Tumblr) and searching for different keywords might lead you to, for example, sexy illustrations, recordings, or GIFs of classic romance movies to fill the porn-shaped void in your life.
3. Read Erotica instead
If you’re excited to continue masturbating but don’t want porn involved, there are other options. People who don’t have access to visual porn have known this for a long time, but a really sexy alternative to watching people have sex is reading about people having sex. Granted, this might sound less exciting, especially if you’re not much of a reader, but erotica, like porn, is produced by the truckload and, unlike porn, has truly amazing amounts of conceptual variety. Whatever your fancy, there’s not just erotica, but lots of it, and some of it will be very, very hot. If you want to kick your porn-watching habits for something exciting but different, throw porn into your imagination with all the sexy stories out there. Who knows? You might even be inspired to write some of your own!
4. …Or Just Fantasize
This may be something you already do, but a great alternative to online porn is to simply imagine sexual scenarios in your head. The truth is that our brains are our largest sexual organs. Whether you’re making up scenes with past partners or future hookups with lovers you’ve never even spoken to – or envisioning scenes you’re not even a part of – exploring your sexual fantasies from your loner can be an exciting way to discover things that excite you more without the limiting constraints of cheesy porn tropes, story arcs, and bodies found in mainstream porn. Without the crutch of porn, you’ll likely find that you’re still able to activate your thoughts just like the company. So dim the lights, lie back and experience masturbation as your distant ancestors once did. (Too weird?)
5. Blocking porn sites
If the aforementioned potential solutions don’t seem strong enough — or you’ve already tried them and they just don’t work for you — you could always take the brute-force technological approach and invest in some website blocking software . While these options often leave some control in your hands – and no one-by-one blocking of individual sites could ever prevent you from accessing all porn on the Internet – at least it makes it difficult for you to easily access your favorite porn aggregators or producers could help you kick the habit in the short term. Websites and apps like Freedom, StayFocusd, Cold turkey and more could be what you’re looking for when it comes to kicking your porn habit for good — or just helping you cut back a bit by blocking porn during certain times of the day.
6. Get Parental
Luckily for you, you’re far from the first person to wonder how to stop people from viewing porn online. While much of the current effort to block porn is about adults preventing minors from accessing porn rather than adults preventing themselves from accessing it, the mechanisms are not entirely different. You could always run through a definitive guide like this yourself, but it’s possible that knowing what you did to stop yourself from looking at porn, you could undo it in a moment of weakness. In that case, you could enlist a technician or computer technician to aggressively porn-protect your devices for you, leaving you on the outside looking in, as it were — whether you tell them it’s for your purposes or to protect an imaginary minor up to you.
7. Make it a team effort
If you’ve tried all of these and you’re still struggling, it might be time to reach out for help. Many people find that sticking to a resolution is easier when there is someone to hold you accountable – hence the concept of gym buddies – and that could certainly be the case here. Although it may be more difficult given the topic, if you have a friend (or partner) you can talk to about these issues, you could try asking them to check you and your anti-porn resolution to give you extra motivation. If you can’t think of anyone in your life who fits the bill, you might consider turning to an online community for help — such as NoFap on redditwhere users come together to help each other stop masturbating.
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