If you want to keep porn out of your home, you need to know:
There’s not enough porn-proofing in the world to stop you unless you really want to quit porn.
But: the very act of taking a first step to prevent porn can lead to momentum, which can lead to total, lasting freedom. Those first steps matter.
If you can do what you ought for a while, it can become what you want for life. Once you’re in the stream of recovery, it builds on itself until you’ve hit a sweet spot of small victories that link to big ones.
It’s the initial smaller victories that require an uncomfortable re-structuring of your habits and your home.
Here are four ways to set up boundaries and prevent porn in your home.
1) Change up your whole living space, from bed sheets to pantry to picture frames.
If you’re like me, you’ve been frustrated enough at trying to break bad habits that you’ve almost flipped a table or thrown your things around.
It turns out: that might be the very thing that flips the switch.
Any habit comes with a long list of associations that we hardly think about, from the color of your sheets to the food in your pantry to the shape of your picture frames. These triggers coincide with emotions like guilt or anger, stress or depression, along with hundreds of familiar patterns that weave into a path. Your brain eventually stores these external visuals as part of a routine. When you make a drastic change to these things: you interrupt that routine and prevent porn.
Even a visually neutral cue that’s been associated with your addiction can trigger a relapse. In other words, something as plain and harmless as the shape of your computer can set off a series of habitual behaviors.
Simple things like rearranging your furniture, throwing away your blankets, putting stickers on your laptop, getting a bright lamp, or giving up midnight snacks will do wonders. Switch your sock drawer with your shirts or line up all your toiletries backwards.
This might sound like hocus-pocus pseudo-science, but the first time I tried this, I was surprised at how much even my other habits, like flossing or bringing a laptop to bed, had changed. I had the feeling of being a visitor in my own space, and the extra precious seconds between trigger and behavior created the necessary distance to shake myself out of the urge and prevent porn from invading my mind.
2) Keep your electronics insulated in boundary zones.
It’s likely that almost your whole addiction happens online.
This may sound very obvious: but if you’re able to lock your access by multiple barriers, it will slow you down enough until an urge can pass.
And yes, the urge will always pass. In fact, creating these barriers causes an aversion to accessing pornography, because you’ll associate difficulty with your computer.
I had a friend once in high school who was short, skinny, and probably weighed the size of my thigh. Whenever he was bullied, no matter how slight the comment, he would immediately drop everything and get into a fight. He lost, every single time. But the bully would never pick on my friend again, because the bully just didn’t want that sort of trouble.
This sounds like a silly example: But to prevent porn we have to be willing to fight ourselves for our recovery, to create the right kind of trouble to dispel the wrong kind of trouble. In a computer age, it’s an inconvenience to lock up your access.
It’s annoying to put your laptop in the hallway or to keep your phone charger in the living room. It can feel limiting to get X3watch to block supposedly harmless websites. But really, I would rather have filtered access to a ton of websites than a single avenue to feeding my addiction.
It’s difficult to use my computer: but that’s a cost I’m more than willing to pay, even with lifelong vigilance.
Another option for those of you with kids is Circle. It’s a little device that sits in your house and controls internet access for your kids, making it a really handy gatekeeper for those impressionable minds you’re raising. ….. Read more