The quality of our lives often depend on the quality of our habits.
– James Clear
Let’s face it, as teens we were all exposed to porn. What starts off as a peep show to get our jollies either fades into the backdrop with age or morphs into a habit often vying for our time and energy. If you’re one of those people who feel it’s become a habit, this one’s for you!
Years ago, I came across a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear, which at its core, talks about how to build good habits and break the bad ones. There’s a really cool section that discusses about the different stages of habit and how to break them.
All habits proceed through four stages. To break a habit, the first step would be to have a strategy for stage I, the cue stage and then move on to the other stages.
Now let me explain how I applied this concept to break the porn habit. I bought an external hard disk with a memory capacity of 250 GB. I downloaded every single video that I liked or would like to watch again, and saved it to the hard disk. Soon, I had my own porn stash and the collection was impressive. At this stage, I stopped adding new content. I wanted to discipline myself to the point where I would only watch porn from this very hard disk and not anywhere else. Since the hard disk was full of my favourite hot videos, I kept watching them over and over again.
I added layers to this, in the sense that, I would deliberately keep this hard disk tucked away in a suitcase and I would put the suitcase in the attic. When I got the urge to watch porn in the middle of the night or whenever, I had to climb up the stairs, pull that suitcase out from the attic to access the hard disk and then connect it to my laptop and finally watch it. As time went by, I just couldn’t keep up with it. The thought of having to go to the attic and pull up that suitcase every time involved significant effort, something that the slacker in me couldn’t do over and over again. Keep in mind, these were videos I had watched a million times, I knew every scene second by second. There was nothing new to watch and it got pretty boring. Familiarity breeds contempt eh! And slowly, the time that I spent watching porn declined.
To summarize, this is how I dealt with the four stages of habit.
The downside with this method, however, is that it won’t work if you keep adding new content or you are subscribed to a porn site. The material should be the same every time with the presumption that you won’t watch porn from any other source besides the hard disk. The hard disk is all you got for your porn needs, not your mobile phone or any other easily accessible device, just think porn never exists outside of this box. Also, the bigger the porn collection the longer it takes to watch repeatedly and eventually get to the boredom stage. So, have a porn collection that doesn’t take too much time to watch through its entirety. There you are, that’s how you break the porn habit using Atomic Habits.