The Porn Addiction Funnel: How To Break the Addiction Cycle
- Jake Kastleman
- May 8, 2024
- 21 min read
Updated: Oct 9, 2024
Hey there, friend. Today, I want to dive deep into something that's been on my mind a lot lately—the porn addiction funnel. You know, that slippery slope we all fall into when life starts throwing us curveballs and we're left scrambling for some semblance of control?
Whether it's boredom, burnout, loneliness, or just good old-fashioned lust, we've all been there. But here's the thing: we don't have to let these feelings dictate our actions. We have the power to break free of porn addiction and reclaim our lives.
So buckle up, because we're about to embark on a journey to overcome porn addiction and rediscover what it means to truly thrive!
Understanding the Porn Addiction Funnel
Let's start by unpacking the concept of the porn addiction funnel. Picture this: you're going about your day, minding your own business, when suddenly, BAM! Stress comes knocking at your door. It could be anything—work deadlines, relationship drama, or just a general sense of unease. And instead of facing these stressors head-on, you find yourself slipping into the abyss of addiction.
Now, I'm not here to demonize stress. In fact, stress can be a powerful motivator when channeled in the right direction. The key is to differentiate between positive stress, which propels us towards growth and fulfillment, and negative stress, which drags us down into the murky depths of self-pity and escapism.
The porn addiction funnel - or any addiction funnel for that matter - is all about the habit we can build of "numbing out" or escaping when stress emerges. This is a mental habit we can build to cope with stress, but it is also one we can break by choosing the Mindfulness Funnel instead.
Choosing Your Path: Mindlessness vs. Mindfulness
When it comes to dealing with stress, we have two options: mindlessness or mindfulness. Mindlessness leads us down the treacherous path of addiction, where we seek solace in fleeting pleasures that ultimately leave us feeling empty and disconnected. These are base pleasures: things that are low effort with an intense reward. Things like porn, drugs, alcohol, video games, junk food, TV, social media, etc.
On the other hand, we can enter what we call "The Mindfulness Funnel", which invites us to embrace activities that bring meaning and fulfillment into our lives—whether it's cooking a delicious meal, writing a heartfelt letter, building a business, playing a musical instrument, or simply spending quality time with loved ones.
Building a habit of choosing to manage stress this way enables us to grow and expand as an individual, rather than shrinking and isolating as is the case with the addiction funnel.
The Power of Noble Pleasures to Overcome Porn Addiction
So, what exactly are noble pleasures? Noble pleasures are the activities that light us up from the inside out—the things that make us feel alive, connected, and truly present in the moment.
Noble pleasures include activities that are high effort with a high reward, or high presence with a deep reward.
This might be highly fulfilling endeavors like creating a podcast, serving others, writing a book, or exercise. It could also be things like strumming a guitar, taking a leisurely stroll in nature, or engaging in heartfelt conversations with friends. Noble pleasures have the power to expand our minds, nourish our souls, and elevate our spirits.
The more we choose noble pleasures, the more we will come to crave them instead of addictive base pleasures. This empowers our recovery and breaks us out of the mindset and lifestyle habits that fuel porn addiction.
Breaking Free from the Addiction Cycle
Now, I won't sugarcoat it—breaking free from the addiction cycle is no easy feat. It takes time, effort, and a whole lot of self-reflection. It also requires you to build entirely new mental habits to quit porn. But trust me when I say that it's worth it! By gradually replacing base pleasures with noble ones, we can rewire our brains, strengthen our resilience, and reclaim our sense of agency over our lives.
My Own Journey to Become Free of Porn
Speaking from personal experience, I know just how daunting it can be to confront your demons and chart a new course for yourself.
For years, I struggled with social anxiety, multiple addictions, and a pervasive sense of emptiness. But through perseverance, self-discovery, and the unwavering support of God, I was able to break free from the chains of pornography addiction and rediscover what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning.
Through it all, I came to understand that porn addiction is just a symptom of deeper, underlying suffering that we can work through by developing a recovery mindset and lifestyle through daily recovery practices. These include practices to transform mental health, spiritual health, physical health, and relationships.
Step Out of the Porn Addiction Funnel
If you're feeling stuck in the throes of pornography addiction, know that you're not alone. With dedication, perseverance, and a willingness to embrace change, you have the power to overcome porn addiction and rewrite the script of your life.
If you really want to dive deep into this topic, please listen to podcast episode 51, where I cover far more on the addiction funnel and how to break the cycle of addiction.
What have you tried so far to quit porn? Internet filters, accountability buddies, talk therapy, church or religious programs…The No More Desire Intensive Recovery Program is unlike any recovery method you’ve experienced before. My clients don’t just quit porn, they lose their desire for it by building a recovery mindset and lifestyle.
If you want to take the next step to overcome your porn addiction for good, check out my Free Workshop: The 8 Keys to Lose Your Desire for Porn. I will give you a practical and applied roadmap for recovery, including…
The REAL root causes of porn addiction.
How to stop porn cravings before they start.
The 5 Levels of Cognition that influence addiction.
The 4 Unconscious Drivers of porn cravings.
How sexual shame fuels pornography addiction.
1 simple daily practice to get out of the addiction funnel
And a whole lot more
You can also check out my Free eBook: The 10 Tools to Conquer Cravings, which gives you 10 quick mental techniques that you can use anytime, anywhere to redirect your mind and replace porn cravings with new thought patterns and mental habits.
So, head to nomoredesire.com to watch the Free Workshop or pick up the Free eBook and get going on the next steps of your recovery journey.
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Transcription of Episode 51: The Porn Addiction Funnel | How To Break the Addiction Cycle
Today, we're talking about the addiction funnel. Why you stop thinking when cravings hit, and how to break that cycle. Now, let's face it, right? Life can be challenging.
You know, we get bored. We get burned out. We get lonely.
Lust hits us sometimes. We get hungry. We get tired.
We can get caught up in anger and anxiety. We become afraid. All of these types of feelings that we experience can potentially cause us to go toward addiction.
They don't have to, but they can. And each of these feelings, we can really categorize as these stressors. In stressors, you and I can potentially prevent these types of feelings from taking us over.
Now, we don't want to seek to stop ourselves from experiencing these stressors. I think there's quite a message in today's day and age that stress is a bad thing. Stress is quote-unquote bad.
We want to avoid it. I'm gonna actually add a nuance to that. Stress is not bad.
Stress is just great. It's good to have stress in life if we are pursuing meaningful, purposeful things. If we have positive stress in our lives, which comes from living a meaningful life where we are taking risks, we're being brave, we're helping people, we're doing things that bring us outside of our comfort zone, these are good stressors.
Then we have negative stressors, which ultimately are those things that we...we're experiencing negative stress like fear, and anxiety, and depression, and really selfishness in a lot of ways. We're really focused on ourselves and what we're going through, and how life is so hard, and we're a victim. Again, I experience all those same tendencies, all those same weaknesses.
It's just a very human thing. But we don't have to allow that selfishness to take over. We don't have to allow these kinds of thoughts and emotions that we experience to drag us down, and isolate us, and cause us to go towards escape, and to numb out through addiction.
Now, we have kind of two things that we can choose in life, two states of mind, if you will, in order to handle stresses in life. On one end, we have ways of escape. We're going to actually resist the suffering and the challenges in life by trying to numb out via addiction.
That's one route, right? That's one state of mind. We can choose mindlessness, right? And that would be the addiction funnel that we're talking about in this episode. The other place that we can go to is the mindfulness funnel.
Okay, so in other words, that is going to be going a direction of choosing things that are meaningful, purposeful, things that help us connect to other people, things that are focused on service and making a difference, things that are focused on our family, you know, listening to someone, seeking to understand them, processing through thoughts and feelings, pursuing those types of activities and those passions, those goals that bring us, really get to our core, right? Whether that be our core just as a human being and we need to connect and we need to experience enjoyment in life or those things that are for you really are extremely meaningful to you personally, right? For instance, you might love to cook. Maybe you don't currently do that. Maybe it's kind of a dormant talent or a dormant skill that you have, but internally you've always been fascinated by cooking, by putting ingredients together and mixing all the different types of, you know, spices and sauces and different foods together to see what you can create.
Because you love to make those things to serve them to others to help bring enjoyment to their lives. You love to create through cooking. Maybe it's something more like what I love to do, which is I love to write.
I love to speak. I love to be here on the podcast. I love to create the curriculum and the program that I do for my clients and to help people through the content that I make.
It's amazing to build something from nothing, right? It's amazing to go from I have no program to I have something and it makes a difference for people and I see how it impacts them. That for me gets to my core. It's what I've always wanted to do.
What is that thing for you, right? What does that thing look like for you? What difference do you want to make in the world? And that doesn't have to necessarily be a difference of like I'm going out and serving the homeless. It could be, right? It could be that. But it also could be ways that you bring joy to others by having novel fun experiences with them or by helping people laugh, by uplifting people through stories or through just simple connections and having fun together.
What is the core for you, right? And that comes down to your personality. It comes down to your life experiences. It comes down to, I believe, what you came here with perhaps from what you were before this life as a spiritual being, right? What have you based it on your belief and how you see it.
So how do we want to spend our time, energy, and focus, right? If we look at the addiction funnel, this is a powerful way of escaping and numbing out. It is a, it has a very powerful reward. I like to say that pretty much anything that, pretty much anything can be addicting that is low effort with an intense reward.
Again, low effort, intense reward. I call these base pleasures in the No More Desire program. Base pleasures, the more that I engage in base pleasures, the more I become conditioned to them.
I call that pleasure conditioning. We become conditioned to a type of pleasure and that could be base pleasures or noble pleasures. So if I choose base pleasures, that's going to be low effort, intense reward activities.
Again, I'm not putting much effort in of any kind, so that would be things like television or video games or social media. It could be things like eating junk food or processed foods, right? That really give us that dopamine hit, right? It's really pleasurable. We don't have to do much for it.
We just, you know, stuff a cookie in our mouth, right? And then that's getting us this dopamine hit. It could be things like, also be things like gossip or anger or bullying or intimidation. It could be things like abuse or violence.
Those, and obviously things like drugs, alcohol, pornography use, right? I think we understand that. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't be listening to this podcast. Now, this isn't to say that some of these things, right, like video games or TV or maybe a little treat here or there, are a deal-breaker, right? It just means that what we want to do is to really cut these base pleasures out of our lives, these things that send us into the addiction funnel.
And the addiction funnel is, again, this numbing out, this escape, this funnel we go into where everything important in our lives disappears. We escape from all of that and we escape from our responsibilities, maybe the things that are bothering us or hurting us in our lives that we really need to solve and take care of. And instead, we're trying to solve our issues by escaping.
And everything disappears when we're in that addiction funnel. We get narrow-minded. We get mindless, right? We get mindless when we're mindlessly scrolling through social media or we get mindless when we're playing hours of video games.
It's okay to maybe have a little base pleasure escape on occasion. You know, I might say for 15 to 20 minutes, maybe a, you know, a couple times a week. And I know that's a high bar, you know, when I say that.
I know I'm, I know that for a lot of us that's, that's like 15 to 20 minutes two times a week to like watch TV or things like that. And again, if you want to watch a movie once a week, awesome. But kind of setting this high bar of where you want to get to because the less you can enter that addiction funnel, the less prone you will be to it.
Does that make sense? I hope that's making sense. I'm kind of all over the place here. But to help you out, we want to seek more, we want to seek less to go into the addiction funnel of these base pleasures and more to go into the, the mindfulness funnel, the mindfulness funnel.
And what does that look like? What are the noble pleasures that I mentioned previously? Noble pleasures are going to be things such as cooking, like I mentioned, or such as creating a program, writing, reading. It's going to be things like helping people and serving people, whether that be through our career or through volunteer experience. It's going to be most of all, in a lot of ways, by the way, I will say most of all, time with our family and dedication and service to our family.
We want to put our family first, our, whether that be our parents and siblings, or that be our, our spouse and our children. We want to put them first at really at the core of our lives, them and God, right? And if we are seeking to serve them in everything we do, from the things that we do for our careers to bring in money, or the things that we're doing for them directly in the time we're spending with them, the conversations we're having with them, the love that we're showing for them, we can enter this mindfulness funnel. In other words, it's not really a funnel at all.
It's like our vision and our capacity expands when we engage in noble pleasures, in things that bring us joy and peace, a long-lasting joy and peace, and that really connect us to those around us and connect us to God. And I like to say connect us to the light of God that is within, or in other words, what we might call our eternal self, this part of us that's really connected to God and the people around us. We know that we're engaging in noble pleasures when they expand our abilities, they expand our capacities.
When I am learning through reading, when I am creating in writing, whatever that might be, right? Whatever that writing is, that could be a fictional story that you're creating, right? In order to bless people's lives by bringing it out to the people can have cool experiences and reading that book and really enjoying it. And obviously it's blessing you as you create it. This could be, again, cooking.
This could be things like sports, or things like longboarding, or music, music, right? Musical instruments, guitar, piano, brass instruments, etc, etc. All these types of things that really expand our capacity, right? You've probably heard studies about how music, right? The right types of music, such as classical music, actually helps us think better. And when we play a musical instrument like piano, it actually expands our minds, abilities, and capacities.
Those are things that are noble pleasures, right? When we connect with others, when we have good meaningful relationships, when we serve people, that expands our joy, our positivity, our peace. Those are things that we want to do on a regular basis to overcome the habit of addiction. And the more and more that we actually choose those things, the more of a habit it becomes for us to move into the mindfulness funnel where our life expands.
Throughout the day, we're choosing to go to these things. It could be prayer and meditation. It could be studying of holy words, right? Where we're really connecting with God directly through that prayer, through that meditation, through studying holy words.
And it could be a lot of these other things that I've mentioned where we want to have as many of those experiences as we can throughout the day in order to have as many of these mindfulness experiences where our mind becomes full. It expands, right? Our heart becomes full. We feel joy.
We feel peace. And we feel excitement, a zest for life. On the other hand, right, with the addiction funnel, when we engage in social media, video games, TV, junk food, I know all these things that are really easily accessible.
The more we do that, the smaller our lives become. The more anxious we become. The more depressed we become.
The less able we become to interact and connect with others genuinely, to really appreciate and enjoy the present moment. If you and I choose those things every day, especially if we're doing it multiple hours a day, when we come home from work, we're watching TV for two hours. Or during our lunch break, we're on our phone for a half hour to 45 minutes, scrolling through through meaningless social media feeds and reels and TikToks.
Your life becomes smaller. Your ability to engage with life from a place of presence and of joy and actually really feel zest for life decreases. It goes down.
It is nullified. I want to make this really clear because there is the addict part of your brain that is saying no to that and making up excuses and saying all these reasons why it's just fine for you to engage in social media and video games, etc. I'm telling you right now, the more you cut those things out of your life, the freer you become.
And that's the amazing thing is that the world shares with us the message. The more that you engage with social media and video games and TV and junk food, the more free you feel. The more you engage with all these pleasures, that's the good stuff in life, right? That's what makes you feel alive.
That's what really helps you have a fun life. Go out, drink, party, have sex, go crazy, right? Do all that. Give in to these passions of the body and you will feel free.
And it's exactly the opposite. It's not how it works because we need meaning. We need purpose.
We need to feel that light of God and we need to feel connected to the people around us. So we need to choose things that bring us that connection. And when we do, we are less and less and less susceptible to pornography addiction.
We are better able to quit porn when we choose things that are of the mindfulness funnel rather than the addiction funnel. Again, the funnel to spell it out once more. Before we enter that funnel, we can see the things that are important to us.
But we go through stressors and then we go down into a funnel where all the important things to us disappear. We numb out. We escape.
We deal with our problems in an immature way, to be completely frank. And then when we come out on the other side, after we numb out or we climax, in the case of porn addiction and masturbation, then what happens after that is that our vision of the things that are important to us re-expand and we come out on the other end and we say, oh my gosh, what did I just do? What was I thinking? What was I thinking? And the answer to that is you weren't thinking. Really, you were just fully engaging with numbing out and escaping.
And afterwards, your vision kind of expands. So the keys to overcome the addiction cycle, the key to that is we need to choose the mindfulness funnel. And it feels very, very unnatural to do that at first.
I remember that for years, choosing to do things that were meaningful and that were peaceful, such as walking or reading or being out in nature or writing, creating a curriculum, doing a podcast, all these things felt terrifying to me or boring to me. They didn't stimulate me enough. They weren't exciting enough.
They also took too much effort. I felt too lazy to do them. And all of those feelings are completely normal.
I want to let you know that up front. If you don't feel like doing these things, instead of the TV and social media and, you know, all the other types of things that are easily accessible, that are low effort with an intense reward, if you feel more like doing those and you don't feel like doing the things of the mindfulness funnel, which again, the things of the mindfulness funnel are things that are high effort, if you haven't gathered that yet, right? They're high effort. But they also yield a high reward, whether that be a short-term or long-term reward.
With work, often we will get a short-term reward of feeling fulfilled, but we'll also get a long-term reward of whatever it is that we create, or a promotion that we gain, or the status that we gain, or the money, obviously, that we're able to bring in for our family, the lifestyle that we can live from what we do for our job, right? It could be short-term or long-term. And then also, in addition, it's important to know that mindfulness activities, these things that are in the mindfulness funnel, these noble pleasures, in addition to them being high effort, high reward, there is also another type of noble pleasure, which is high awareness or high presence with a deep reward. And that would be things like sitting and being still, listening to the birds chirp outside, right? That would be things like, again, like walking out in nature mindfully, enjoying and appreciating the flowers and the trees and the wildlife.
It would be things like spending time with loved ones, where you may not necessarily be having an exciting time, but you're just enjoying each other's presence and being together. Having these experiences can feel difficult at first. When we're so used to the addiction funnel, we're so used to base pleasures that are low effort with an intense reward.
But over time, over months and years, we eventually get to the place where we actually no longer want things in the addiction funnel. We want them less and less and less. And we build these habits to replace the mindlessness that is in the addiction funnel and the numbing out and the escaping that we used to crave.
We replace it with this expansion of our mind, this expansion of life, this joy that we get into when we're actually doing things that are meaningful, that make a difference. We get to serve people. We get to really, again, expand our capacities as a person.
The more that you do that, the more used to it you become. And eventually, you grow to love it. For instance, I used to have horrible social anxiety.
Really, really bad. For my whole life, from the earliest age I can remember, from when I had a memory as a child, up to my early 20s. And I, in my late teen years, I was really trying to get good at talking with people.
I was trying to build my social skills because I knew I really wanted to be good at talking to people. I wasn't comfortable with the fact that I was so nervous around people and acted so awkwardly. And I know other people, they're, you know, introverted and like they're at peace with, yeah, I'm not that good with people and I'm okay with that.
And I like to just do my own introvert thing. That was never the case for me. And it's just different, right? That's just different.
I really, really wanted to have a lot of good relationships and interact with friends and people and have a lot of really quality interactions. I wanted that badly. But I felt incapable of it.
And I hated being around people in a lot of ways because it made me so nervous. And at that time, a couple of things were really contributing to that. Several things.
One was these base pleasures that we're talking about. I was engaging in porn addiction. I had a video game addiction.
And I also had really just an internet addiction, right? And we can get into the nutrition that I was having. I had an addiction to junk food and to food in general. All of those things were really building up this low effort, intense reward kind of mentality.
This habit of getting base pleasures that were low effort, intense reward. And it made it very difficult for me to engage with people. Because when it comes to conversation and interactions with people, they are far more slow-paced than video games.
Far more slow-paced than TV. It is far harder and takes way more effort and mindfulness, right? Being in that mindfulness funnel to actually have a good interaction, a meaningful interaction with someone. Because it takes presence.
It takes presence. It takes effort. It takes practice.
And it's, again, in that same vein, in order to have an enjoyable experience such as playing a musical instrument, it takes months and years of work to get to a point where you actually really like it. At first it sucks, but eventually you get to a point where you enjoy it. And so I came to understand, especially in my early 20s, that I needed to cut these things out of my life.
Because I really wanted the social anxiety to go away. And I started to see that the less I watched porn, the less that I masturbated, the less that I engaged in video games, and television, and movies, and social media, and Internet, and junk food, the less I did those things. And the more that I wrote, and I read, and I engaged in conversation, and I did activities that were active outside, that I got out and I exercised, that I ate foods that made me feel good, fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, right? All of these types of things that I felt peace, I felt joy, I felt able to connect with people.
And you can have that too. If you experience social anxiety, or you have a hard time interacting with people, or you're, you know, a lot of these kinds of activities that bring fulfillment and help you feel like a better person, feel unattainable for you, you can do this. I was in the throes of addiction.
I was deeply locked in, and it was difficult for me to see a way out. But God helped me give me new motivations, and he helped guide me in tiny steps I could make, many of which I'm telling you about right now. I'm giving you the keys to get sober, and to get clean.
You can do this as well. And now, in my life, years down the road, there's been a lot of other pieces, right? Some of which I work on with my clients. A lot of other pieces to social anxiety than just the base pleasure versus noble pleasure aspect.
But that helps a lot. Okay? And there's other pieces in addition to our physical nutrition, right? Our nutrition can help a lot with our mindset and our mood. There are other pieces as well psychologically we need to work through, and our mindset, and things within our lifestyle, and choices we need to make on a weekly and daily basis, processing through emotions, in order to be able to get to a point where I actually feel comfortable being around people.
So you can have that as well. You can have that as well, my friend. And I actually work with my clients on all of these types of things within the realm of mental well-being, emotional well-being, spiritual well-being, physical well-being, even diet and exercise.
I work with my clients on. They have made some changes that have substantially impacted their susceptibility to addiction, and to porn addiction, through making changes to their diet, and to their exercise regime. And then also, of course, relationships.
Major aspect of my program that I work with my clients on, and that I have hands-on exercises within the program to do. So what are those things for you, right? What places do you personally get into the mindfulness funnel from? What helps you feel alive? What helps you feel purpose? What helps you feel meaning? Or just what helps you simply feel present, and in the moment? What are some of those things that are currently working for you? Or what are some of those things that you want to develop? Because you can build the habit. Okay, I used to hate reading.
I used to hate writing. I used to hate vegetables, right? I used to hate exercising. Now I love all those things.
I also used to hate interacting with people because it took so much effort, and it made me so nervous. And now I genuinely enjoy speaking with other people. And I don't say that to toot my own horn.
I just say that to inspire you. You can have all that too. And doing all of this will help get you out of a porn addiction, out of porn addiction.
You will overcome porn addiction by making these changes. So answer those questions for yourself. Work on that, right? Write out these types of activities that you're doing right now that are base pleasures, the ones that are noble pleasures.
I challenge you to do this. Take this opportunity to write down this exercise. Write out the base pleasures.
Write out the noble pleasures. And then decide, what am I going to start doing right now? What is one thing that I can work on? One noble pleasure I can do instead of a base pleasure. And if you do that in the ongoing weeks and months, and continuously ramping up, lower, less base pleasures and more noble pleasures, eventually you'll get to the point where you'll see, wow, I am so much less susceptible to porn addiction.