8 Rules to Get You 3 Months Sober from Porn

Do you keep trying to get sober but you can never seem to make it past the first week or two or even past the few days, first few days, right? I remember when I was experiencing a decade of addiction to porn, how impossible it felt to me to at first to make it past the first few days and then later on as I kept working and working and trying and trying, sometimes feeling like I was beating my head against a brick wall, I couldn't get past two, maybe three weeks if I was doing really well.

And that was as someone who had a father in the addiction field, someone who was actively talking about porn addiction. I could not get past those first few weeks and I constantly wondered, you know, what's going to get me there? What's going to help me overcome this for good? What's going to, I mean, if I could just get a month or two months or three months, it would change my life. And today I'm going to talk to you about eight rules that you can live by, eight boundaries you can set up in your life to get you three months sober from porn.

Okay, so this is really going to launch you into your initial period of sobriety. Now I'm going to talk about more things that you need to do in order to get long-term sobriety, but this is an excellent way to get started. If you feel like you can't hit that initial time frame of those three months, these eight rules will get you there.

So stay tuned. We're going to talk all about it my friend. Today I want to start by talking about your electronic devices.

Okay, so this is going to set up the first few rules here. When it comes to addiction, we often talk about triggers, right? Maybe you're familiar with this word. What's a trigger? You could be out in public and you could see a girl, you know, dressed in some kind of scantily clad outfit, right? Or you see an image on the computer that pops up for an ad or, you know, something happens in your life that's stressful and all of a sudden you're fantasizing and thinking thoughts about porn or about sex.

In all these cases, right, your brain is trying to, first and foremost, trying to escape difficult emotions. Okay, you may not actually perceive those emotions. Maybe they're going on under the surface.

There's stressors that you're facing. There's insecurities you're feeling. You're not, you don't understand or know how to process through those effectively.

It's okay to feel insecurities. It's okay to feel hard emotions. We need to process through them effectively, which is what one of the big things that I teach my clients to do.

And they're, the daily assessments that I have them do is an excellent way to learn how to really manage and work through challenging thoughts and emotions. But when it comes to a specific trigger, right, just a trigger in general, we need to know how to essentially bring down the amount of times that we're being triggered, right? So if we can decrease the frequency of triggers, especially when we're initially trying to overcome addiction, that can help us a ton, right? And then we can, over time, learn how to manage those triggers effectively. And last week's episode, episode 54, really talked a lot about how to manage a trigger effectively.

So listen to that. It will give you several life guidance and tips in order to understand why triggers can be so overwhelming, and what to do about them mentally, and also just externally, how to handle them. So electronic devices.

Okay, so to start with this, this first of eight rules, and this is a cliche one, so bear with me, but it can be an important one depending on who you are. But I think relatively universally, the first of these eight rules is filters, okay? Filters for electronic devices, for your phone, for your tablet, or your iPad, for your computer, okay? Filters are not an end-all be-all. They are not the answer, okay? And one of the big reasons, well, two reasons.

One, there's always a way around a filter. If you've dealt with a porn addiction for a long time, or you have a loved one who has, we will find a way to get through the filter. In fact, going on that hunt to get past the filter can actually add to the intensity, the forbiddenness, really the whole experience of the addiction, okay? So hunting and trying to work around that filter can actually add to the addiction itself, because it's intense, it's thrilling, right? And that doesn't mean anything.

There's nothing bad about us. It's just a normal human thing to feel that. We can become aware of it, and then we can work to change it.

So filters though, with that said, can be very helpful in the short term as a way to buffer this addiction, right? If we have barriers in between us and our drug of choice, because again, this is just a drug of choice. Porn is, in my mind, and really when we look at the research and how addiction works, and look at different philosophies, it's just another drug of choice, okay? It's just another way of coping with hard emotions, difficult challenges, or trying to escape, right? Or self-judgment we feel, or shame that we feel, fear we feel in our lives. It's just another way of coping with that in a way that is destructive and hurts us, right? And can hurt those around us as well, but nonetheless, it's just a drug of choice, okay? So if we can place barriers, just as someone who's trying to get off drugs or alcohol places barriers between them and the thing, right? They might never keep cash in their wallet, right? Or never keep their card on them when they go out, right? If they're not going to the store to buy something, so that they can't buy alcohol while they're out.

Or they may need to cut off all connections and friends that do drugs, or that do those things because they, you know, there's things they appreciate about those friends, but they got to get rid of them. It doesn't mean they can never reach out to those friends again. It doesn't mean this person can't actually go back to their house and grab their wallet and their cash, right? Same thing with these filters.

It doesn't mean, this isn't the ultimate answer, but it's going to create barriers to access, right? So getting a filter on your device can be very, very helpful. And there are many different filters out there to choose from. So that's completely up to you.

Filter number two is parental controls or password protection. Okay, this is a something very simple and easy to set up on your device. It goes right along with filters, but I have multiple clients that their spouse will have a password to their electronic devices that only they know.

And so they have voluntarily set that system up with their spouse so that they, again, have a barrier to access, right? Could they go other places or find porn somewhere else or find some way around it? Or could they, you know, learn what that, find out what that password is through, you know, a number of schemes? Yes, of course, right? If we let that addict part of the brain rule and take charge and lead the way instead of the better part of ourselves, who we really are take charge and lead the way, right? Then it can go to all sorts of lengths. But we're creating barriers to access. So setting up parental controls, you can easily do that on an iPhone.

You can easily do that on an Android, okay? Or you can do password protections, right? And then you can actually set up that password protection or those parental controls throughout the day or at different times, right? Or cutting off access to the internet or to specific apps. You can cut off access to those. And then if you do need access to those at certain times, you can have your spouse put in the password or give access and then have access for a temporary period of time.

And if you're someone who struggled with addiction for a long time and you don't feel like you can trust yourself, stay in the same room with your spouse while you access the internet, right? Be in the room with them. That can be very, very helpful. So that's rule number two, parental controls and password protection.

Rule number three, time frames. Time frames. What do I mean by that? I mean when you have access to your devices and the amount of time that you have on your devices, okay? I know we're talking about a lot about devices here.

We'll get onto some other things soon. But these are important aspects, right? This is your, for the most part, how you access porn, right? Access your drug of choice, all right? And so we're trying to set ourselves up for success here. Time frames.

When it comes to, when are you the most susceptible to your addiction? And that has to do with, you know, really being aware and conscious of your patterns. For me, it was always nighttime, always nighttime. And eventually it became morning time and then it became all day, every day that I experienced those kinds of things, okay? But in a lot of ways, nights were the most difficult for me.

So I would actually hand over my devices to the person that I lived with at night, right? That's an awkward conversation. That's a hard thing to say, you know, I need help with this. I can't trust myself.

But do you want sobriety or do you want that kind of, you know, feeling of pride in yourself or this, you know, I can control myself type feeling? Do you want that or do you want to just go through the embarrassment and kind of that feeling of just handing those devices over to someone, right? It sucks. It's not fun, but it's going to be better for you in the long run. It's going to be really, really powerful for you and really positive in the long run, right? So determine when that is for you.

When are you handing over your devices? When are you giving them over to that other person? Is that nighttime? Is there a certain time of the day that you're going to hand them over and not have access to them? And then the other aspect is the amount of time that you spend on your device. Okay. How long are you actually going to, to, to be on your device? And this is just about setting up, setting up rules and boundaries for yourself.

Okay. So I'm only going to spend so long, you know, on YouTube or on whatever it might be online, um, on social media, which I personally recommend if you deal with a porn addiction, get off of social media altogether, just get rid of it. Okay.

You could get on there to like, look at things with family on occasion for five or 10 minutes a day, but I'd keep that really strict. Again, that's, that's that timeframe set up the amount of time that you're going to be on the, on your device. If you're going to get on and watch YouTube, watching YouTube for an hour or two is really going to set you in a susceptible mindset for addiction.

So you need to determine for yourself, okay, do I want to be sober or do I want YouTube? And that's, that's really hard. I'm not saying that's easy. That's a difficult shift to make.

And it's often made in small steps. So just, you know, if you're watching YouTube for two hours a day right now, cut it down to an hour and a half. If it's an hour and a half, cut it down to, you know, an hour and 15 minutes or what have you.

Right. And then eventually I, my highest recommendation is you get to a point where you just don't watch YouTube. It's just not something that you do other than getting on there to watch, you know, an educational video or to learn about something or a concept, right.

Or maybe to watch something fun for, for five minutes, you know, a few times a week or a couple of times a week or something. This will greatly aid you in your sobriety. Not an easy thing to do, small steps to get there.

You've got to replace those habits with new habits, new things that you do, but determine those timeframes for you, right? What does that look like? How much time are you spending on devices and when do you have access to them? So that is rule number three. Rule number four, okay, that we're going to actually get into general life here. So we're moving away from those first three rules of electronic devices.

And we're going to get into rules for just general life. All right. One of these things is bedtime.

And I know that might sound unrelated to sobriety, but it's not. It's, it's directly related. When do you go to bed? That is rule number four.

Bedtime is so important for sobriety because, well, to a few different reasons. One, if I don't go to bed early enough, I often don't get enough sleep. And if I don't have enough sleep, I'm less able to make critical decisions and make wise decisions.

I'm going to be in a more susceptible state of mind to things like addiction or easy pleasures, or I don't feel much like working or doing meaningful things in my life. I'm going to seek out easy forms of entertainment instead of applying myself, doing things that help me feel joy and meaning and strength and happiness and connection to other people, connection to God. So we need to set that up to establish when am I going to go to bed for that reason.

And then also so many of my clients, including myself for the decade I was addicted to porn, I couldn't trust myself late at night, like past 10 or 10 30. It just got too late. And I got in this really susceptible state of mind, just less aware, less, um, less able to, uh, kind of, you know, control myself or take the reins on the choices I was making.

It just late at night, your brain just doesn't work as well. And as human beings, we're kind of meant to go to sleep with the sun, wake up with the sun. It doesn't always end up that way, but that's kind of the ideas early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Like Benjamin Franklin knew how to overcome addiction. All right. This, this is a, this is a part of sobriety.

If you want to kind of approach, okay. Consider all the different aspects of your life that might be out of balance, right? Physically, mentally, spiritually, and in your relationships and seek to bring those things into balance. So bedtime is, is, is a part of that.

Okay. So what time is that for you? Is it 10 o'clock? You know, is it 10 30? Do you kind of have to go to bed later? Cause you, you wake up later and that's how you're, you maybe you're single and people stay up late, you know, so maybe it's 11. I wouldn't, I wouldn't go too much past that cause the later and later you get, it's just, we're not really meant to be up at that time.

We don't make as good of decisions. We often don't do things that are productive. We do things that are a big waste of time when we stay up late at night.

And one of those things is watching porn, right? So bedtime is, is so important for, for that reason. And for having good energy, when we, when we go to bed early and wake up early, we have far more energy during the day. We just feel better.

It's, it's, it's, it's pretty much just a fact of life. And I don't judge anybody who goes to bed late or wakes up late. I'm just, just speaking this truth from people's experiences and what helps them.

Rule number five is wake up time. Okay. When we sleep in, even if it's on a weekend, you know, if you're sleeping in until nine or 10, it, it's, it's too late.

Okay. It's too late to sleep in. And the reason for that is again, with, with our, the way our brains work as human beings and the ways that what really helps us to stay in a positive mindset and stay in a motivated kind of frame, frame of mind, waking up early really helps us feel that motivation.

It helps us feel strength throughout the day. It helps us feel focus. When we wake up late, we start off the day groggy, right? And I'm not, I'm it's, it can always be hard to wake up no matter what time you wake up.

But when we wake up late, our brain and our body just don't function as well as they would when we wake up early and sleeping in like that often we'll have more sexual dreams and things like that. I don't know what that is, but I talked to clients, they experienced the same thing. I experienced the same thing.

Okay. Not that I'm not saying sexual dreams are bad, right? But indulging in those and sleeping in really late and, you know, filling your mind with all of these sexual fantasies, et cetera, and dwelling on them is not going to aid you in living a meaningful life and in overcoming this addiction that is, is, is plaguing you. So if you want to adjust that, right, the earlier you go to bed at night, the earlier you'll be able to wake up at least easier, the easier time you're going to have waking up early and just establishing kind of rules where is it more important to me on the weekends to stay up really late with the guys or whoever, you know, until two o'clock in the morning doing whatever, or is my sobriety more important to me? And that's, again, it's, it's a hard decision.

It's not an easy thing to do, but it can help so, so much. My life completely transformed when I started going to bed earlier and waking up earlier, my motivation changed, my focus changed, the kinds of things I spent my time doing changed. I made, I set rules and boundaries with family and friends.

Like I don't stay up past, you know, I, I don't, I don't stay hanging out past 10 and that's, that's pretty universal for me. There are rare occasions where I'll cross that now, but that's only because I have nine years of sobriety that I now cross that. Previously, I could not put myself in that position, period.

Okay, so that's, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, that was rule five. Rule six is going to be being home alone. Okay, this, this is so major for so many of my clients.

It was major for me. I could not trust myself when I was at home alone. And I know multiple people that they slip and relapse when they're at home by themselves.

And my greatest piece of advice, which is completely straightforward and blunt is do not be home alone. Do not be home alone. Okay, down the road, when you have a few years of sobriety, and notice I said a few years, you will be to the point where you can trust yourself, right? You, I should say more specifically, you know, you can feel when you're susceptible to addiction and you know where your mind's at, where your thoughts and emotions are at, you become so aware of them and so present to them that you know if you are in a, you're headed towards a vulnerable situation, and you need to get out of it.

But when you're still trying to build those skills and that awareness, don't be at home by yourself. Don't do it. And you're like, well, I, you know, what am I supposed to do? I need to work.

Go out to the library. Okay, if you're in college, go out to your school and study there at their study center, or go to a public library. Walk outside.

Okay, if your spouse has gone for an hour or something like that, go on a walk outside, chill, listen to an audio book, call up a friend. You know, you can call someone. Another thing you can do if you have to be at home alone, call someone.

Maybe you can even call your spouse, even if they're at work, and leave them on the phone. You don't, you guys don't have to be talking, but just leave them on the phone and leave that phone on speaker next to you. Okay, and then, and then they are, you are connected with them.

You have this accountability buddy. It sounds, it may sound silly. It may sound embarrassing.

It may not be something you want to do. It may be inconvenient, but do you want convenience? Do you want to feel that feeling of like, yeah, I've got this that hasn't been working for you, or do you want to get sober? Right, that's, it's the sacrifice that has to be made, and sometimes those choices can feel embarrassing, but eventually you get used to it, and you just say, this is what I got to do for my sobriety, and it's just the way it is. It's not like a, it's not an awesome feeling to have to hand your devices over to someone, or it's not an awesome feeling to not be able to be at home by yourself.

You're like, I'm an adult. Why can't I trust myself being at home? This is where you're at, man. So you just got to make the decisions that are necessary.

So hopefully that's helpful. Okay, now we're going on to rule seven, which is all about events that you choose not to go to, and what types of events am I talking about? So some of these could be things that you temporarily avoid, right, that we need to temporarily avoid when we struggle with addiction. We're trying to overcome it.

We're trying to get better. So these could be things like concerts. Okay, maybe not concerts as a whole, right, but rock concerts, or rap concerts, or concerts that are very worldly, or contain, you know, dancers that are in, excuse me, scantily clad outfits, right? You don't really necessarily want to be going to this concert with all these dancers, all this crazy stuff going on, people drinking and smoking around you when you're trying to get sober, right? Here's, you know, and for some of us that might sound confusing.

Others of us, maybe you get that, right, but others it's like, well, what's the big deal? How's that leading to porn addiction? What you need to bear in mind, okay, is every decision that you're making in your life. Everything you do each day all contributes to either your susceptibility to addiction or your susceptibility to recovery. Either you are bringing kind of this, how do I say, pleasure-oriented mindset in, okay, this is an aspect of addiction.

It's not all of addiction, it's just an aspect of it. You're bringing a pleasure-oriented mindset into your life by taking actions, and doing things, and choosing activities that build up that pleasure-oriented mindset. Or you are pursuing activities that bring meaning to your life, that are bring purpose to your life.

You're going to want to avoid, and that's going to lead to more recovery, right, in a very fundamental way. That is such a big part, such a foundation for addiction versus recovery. And that can be a lot of things, right? It takes us time to build that up, right, which is in my program.

I have daily practices, hands-on practices, and hands-on methods that people use every single day in the program in order to build up that life of meaning, and purpose, and connection with other people, and balance, and fulfillment, right? We need these things in order to be sober. This builds our recovery. Now if I go to a concert that's very pleasure-oriented, and that's, you know, it's worldly, it's crazy, it's people are just partaking of all these, you know, things just to feel something in life, right? That is aligning me more with that, this kind of mindset that's of addiction.

So it's very important to keep that in mind, and I, you know, if you don't quite connect with that, that's okay. Hopefully you get a general understanding of what I'm saying here. You may need to avoid places like the beach, or the swimming pool.

These places are not bad. The beach is wonderful. Swimming pools are wonderful.

This is probably going to be something temporarily, maybe during the first few years of getting sober, depending on what your addiction has looked like, that you'll need to avoid those situations. And that's hard. It can be hard to say no to friends, or no to family, and not go to these locations.

And it could even be embarrassing, right? If you need to explain why that is. But you can, you can own that. Just be like, hey, I'm trying to get better, you know, for me it's just too triggering to be around all those women who are in bikinis and swimsuits.

It just, it just doesn't work for me. Down the road, I think, once I have more sobriety under my belt, I'll be in a position to be able to go. But for now, that's the decision I have to make for me.

And I know it sucks, and I wish I didn't need to do that. It's just the way it is for me. And if someone doesn't respect that, that's up to them.

This is about your sobriety. It's not about their opinion of you. This is about you and your life.

Okay, so there may be certain events like that. That's rule number seven. Rule number eight are the activities that you don't engage in, and activities that you do.

Okay, this is, this is very general, and I've talked about this in many other episodes. But we need to be aware of, as I was saying with the events, what kind of choices am I making on a daily basis? What activities or actions am I taking on a daily basis? If I'm spending hours per day watching TV, or movies, or playing video games, or scrolling on social media, or eating junk food, or doing any of those types of things that are what we can refer to as base pleasures. Okay, low effort, intense reward activities, intense mental reward.

This is going to make us more susceptible to further low effort, intense reward activities. Binge watching Netflix for two hours is right in line with watching porn and masturbating. I know it might sound strange, but think about that.

When you sit down and mindlessly watch TV for two hours, how similar is that to mindlessly watching porn for two hours? Now, porn is probably going to be much more intense, but that Netflix, or TV, or movies, or video games, especially video games in a lot of ways. Sorry friends, video games are super fun. I totally get that.

I respect that. I'm not saying you can never play them, but I am saying that the more that you play them, the more susceptible you are going to be to addiction because it is, again, low effort, intense reward. Or in other words, the effort you put in in comparison to the mental reward that you are receiving, especially with something that is designed to be addictive, such as social media, right? Scrolling through social media, watching all these reels, or these TikToks, or these, you know, kind of entertaining little bits and pieces that are just one after the other, after the other.

It's designed to be very addictive. And also the social nature of it, social quote, unquote, of thinking we're connecting with people and getting all these insights into their lives, we think we're connecting, but we're not. And so it actually leaves us craving connection by the end when our brain thinks, wow, I thought I was connecting with people.

I thought I was seeing things about their lives. It's very addictive in that way because it doesn't actually fulfill us. It gives us kind of the entertainment bit with none of the fulfillment or the fullness of spending time with people.

So it's important to bear that in mind about something that's designed to be addictive, like social media or video games, which are designed to be addictive. I think a lot of times video game creators don't do it with malicious intent. They're doing it to sell a product.

They're doing it to make something that will be entertaining and fun and something people will want to play and something that they, you move up through the levels, you earn stars, you earn gems, you earn whatever it might be, right? You're advancing through the game, even just talking about it right now. Okay. I used to have a video game addiction.

It's like hyping me up just talking about it. I had a big addiction to Zelda and other games like that. They were, they were my jam because I'm, I'm about accomplishment.

I'm about progression. I'm about improving. And it felt like I was always doing that in those video games, but it is it's plagiarism, not plagiarism.

I should say it's a, it's a fake, a facsimile. It's a counterfeit is a better word for fulfillment and, and creation in life, right? In life, when we're working or we're accomplishing things in life, or we're building relationships, we feel that accomplishment and that fulfillment video games cannot give that to you. They will counterfeit a version of that.