Break FREE from Porn Addiction with These Physical Strategies

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this video on physical strategies for porn addiction recovery. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. In this video, you're going to develop an understanding of the body as a factory. And I know we've talked about that in other videos, but for people who skip those videos, a little refresher is going to be helpful. Then we'll explore why stress of any type will often increase cravings and slow the recovery process. This is really important. And then we'll identify common physical symptoms of stress and pornography addiction and withdrawal and ways to address them. So that brief little recap. Think of your body like a factory. The HPA axis, your stress response system is like the chief operating officer, making sure that things run smoothly and telling the departments how to adapt when there's a problem or when. When there's a threat. Your gonadal and thyroid axes, your digestive system and immune system, these are all departments in the body factory. When there's problems at the factory, there are generally five main areas that the problems can happen. The factory is inefficient because it hasn't been maintained. You are sleep deprived. Your circadian rhythms are out of whack, or there are competing priorities. There are cravings, and your body's trying to fill one need when it needs to be fulfilling another. There's an inadequate supply of raw materials. That's the nutrients you eat. If you're eating crap, you're going to feel like crap. Sorry. There may be an inadequate production of secondary products like dopamine or serotonin. So you get the nutrients in there, and then they have got to be broken down into their component parts and reassembled as hormones and neurotransmitters. And for some reason the little worker bees on the floor are aren't putting the packages together, then you're going to feel depleted. And finally, there may be an imbalance in production between the departments, leading to over capacity. So one area may be producing too much, and we'll use dopamine because that's one everybody's familiar with. Too much dopamine, and the receiving department says, whoa, I can't take anymore. That's just. I don't have enough room to store it right now. Unfortunately, the problem with problems is that a problem in any piece of your life, which means. And whether it's physical, interpersonal, emotional, cognitive, or environmental, so a problem in any piece of your life will cause the HPA axis, that COO to sense a threat. This leads to the release of your excitatory chemicals. So you go into fight or flight and. Which includes dopamine and glutamate. These are two of the chemicals that are often released during porn watching as well as orgasm. Because of this, you're worsening the damage to the parts of the brain that you're trying to heal. You're trying to ease off the flood of dopamine and glutamate. But when your body's stressed, it's going to flood anyway. So it's important to really note that stress reduction and management is essential. It's impossible. I get you. I hear what you're saying right now, it's impossible to eliminate all sources of stress and be living. You don't have four months to go stay on a beach in Cancun or something. Okay, I get it. However, you can eliminate unnecessary stress. And I think you'll find as you work through the program that there are a lot of sources of unnecessary stress that you can remove from your life and free up the workers, if you will, to help heal your nervous system and get you recalibrated. Let's start with circanian rhythms. Circanian rhythms regulate not only sleep, but also your hunger, your insulin levels, your thyroid, your sex hormone levels, cortisol and, and energy levels and more. So having your circadian rhythms out of whack doesn't mean just being sleepy at the wrong time. It throws the entire factory into chaos when any of these things gets out of balance. If your blood sugar's low, your insulin's out of whack, your thyroid levels are too low or too high, the brain registers that registers it as, guess what? A threat. Your circadian rhythms are regulated by more than just daylight. Your circadian rhythms are regulated by your routine. Which is why with children, they come home from school, they play, they eat dinner, they take a bath, they get a story, they go to sleep. What we're doing with that routine is helping their circadian rhythm be primed and know when it's time to start secreting melatonin. Temperature also regulates circadian rhythms. Your body likes to be cool to sleep. So if you have just finished doing a really hard workout at the gym and you're still hot, your body temperature is still up, or if it's hot in your environment, it's often going to be harder to sleep. And social activity also regulates your circadian rhythms. If you are hanging out with friends, you, you are likely, number one, disrupting your routine. But number two, also telling your body, hey, it's not time to sleep. There are people around. It's time to socialize. Now, part of your circadian rhythms pertains to sleep. During sleep, the clutter from the production of the day at the factory is cleaned up. So when your body is doing things throughout the day, there's byproducts, there's trash that builds up. Think about any factory. And during the night when you're sleeping, the maintenance crew comes through, cleans out all the trash, cleans out all the hazards so there's not clutter everywhere, and recalibrates all the machines. That's the way it's supposed to work. Sleep deprivation causes stress in every area. If you are sleep deprived, guess what? You're going to be tired. No duh. When you're tired, your brain says, hey, this is not good. We need to be awake, we need to be alert. So it triggers the HPA axis, the stress response, to give you a little dose of sort of internal caffeine. I interpersonally, you may experience low patience and a lack of empathy with other people. When you're sleep deprived, you just don't have the energy to deal with with their stuff. Emotionally, you may be more irritable or depressed for some people. But most of the time when people are sleep deprived because that stress response system is going in high gear trying to help you stay safe, the emotional feeling is more akin to anxiety or irritability. Cognitively, you will have brain fog. That trash did not get cleaned out. So it's building up and the factory can't operate effectively, which will lead to reduced functioning in your thinking. You're going to have difficulty finding that word or solving that problem because you're not getting enough sleep. Another thing that we do also see in sleep deprivation is an increase in intrusive thoughts and difficulty controlling them, which when you're in recovery is a big thing because that's when those thoughts of the drug or the sex or the porn or whatever start coming in and you don't want to think about it, but it starts being more and more intrusive. And environmentally, you may become in increasingly sensitive to sensory input. When people are sleep deprived, they may become more sensitive to noise. It's just a little bit of noise is overwhelming. Everything is kind of grading on their every last nerve. So you can see that by merely, if you will, addressing your circadian rhythms and your sleep patterns and starting to try to get those recalibrated some, you're actually probably going to reduce a lot of physical stress on your body. So what can you do? Cut out or restrict before bed Caffeine and ideally nicotine. Caffeine has a really long half life. So if you can, eliminating caffeine after 12pm after noon would be ideal. Not everybody can do that or is willing to. You got to pick your battles. Cut out alcohol, especially before sleep. Now, alcohol itself, when you drink it, no matter what time of day, it's a toxin and it actually, as it leaves your body, triggers the stress response because your body can't react, rebalance the neurotransmitters as quickly as the alcohol is leaving your body. That's a whole different video. But we do know that alcohol use increases the stress response, the HPA axis, as well as systemic inflammation, which also triggers the HPA axis. So ideally, cut out alcohol altogether if you can. Definitely make sure that your blood alcohol level is 0.00 when you are going to sleep. Because alcohol, while it may help you think, feel like you relax and get to sleep quicker, that may be true, but your sleep is of a much lower quality, especially two or three hours later than it would be if you weren't drinking at all. Reduce blue light two hours before bed. That means try to get blue light filters on your mobile devices. Try to. You can get a device that you plug into your TV that applies a blue light filter to that that can be helpful if you can, you know, get off electronic devices altogether. Read Reduce the blue light in your light bulbs. Whatever room that you are winding down in, it is ideal to switch to. At the very least the soft white bulbs. You want something with a little bit of a yellow glow to it. Preferably switch to yellow light like the lights you put in a bug light that you have. And you can get those. But the more yellow the light is, the more candle like the light is, the less blue light you're going to be exposed to. And take down the wattage instead of being bright and whatever, take down the wattage as much as you comfortably can without straining your eyes if you're reading, et cetera. Cool down. Some people like to work out before bed and that's fine. But it's important to cool down. Cool your body down. Make sure you are engaging in things that are relaxing to try to slow things down so you can start cooling down and getting ready for bed. Remember, temperature. Outside temperature as well as internal core temperature, both impact your circadian rhythms. Sleep ergonomics. This is important. Make sure that you're sleeping with a good pillow. Make sure that you're sleeping with the support that you need. A good mattress topper and a good pillow are really really hopeful. If you have sleep apnea, get that addressed. Sleep apnea keeps that HPA axis, that stress response on full bore a lot of the time because every time you quit breathing, guess what? Your body body registers it as a threat. Reduce or eliminate sleep disruptors. That includes smells, sounds and movement. And this can be pretty broad. If you've got a partner that snores like a freight train, you're going to have to figure out how to deal with that. Whether it is noise cancelling earbuds or sleeping in a different room or whatever it is. If you've got a dog that sleeps or a cat that sleeps on the bed with you and moves around or comes over in the middle of the night and hunkers up next to you, you want to try to ad adjust that or eliminate that. For my dog, big old 85 pound boxer, I have a body pillow that I put down and he gets up but he knows to respect the wall, he does not come over that body pillow. And so we've worked out a, an understanding if you will. I'm not willing to kick my animals out of the, out of the room. Smells can also be problematic if there is. If there are allergens going around or if there are particular smells in your room that are just nox, it's important to address them. And movement. I already talked about. Consider guided imagery when you're trying to sleep. Back in the day, when you were a young child, your parents may have told you to count sheep. Well, guess what? That is guided imagery. You're taking your mind and you're focusing your attention on envisioning that sheep jumping over the fence, sheep after sheep after sheep. And because you're focused on that, your brain is not going here, there and everywhere. I've never had a whole lot of success at sheep, but I will lay down and I will close my eyes and I'll envision, for example, my spring garden and how I'm going to lay those things out. So yes, my mind is going a little bit, but it's not going toward anything stressful. It's going towards something that brings me peace and only use the bedroom for sleep and real life sex. No solo masturbation, no porn use, none of that. If you are trying to rewire your brain, then that bedroom has to become a sanctuary. Now let's talk about cravings. When you were using porn, your brain was overloaded with dopamine and shut down the receiving bays at the factory and, and created a different procedure to handle the excess. You know, remember I Said one department was just producing too much. The receiving department said, I don't have anywhere to put this stuff. And it had to create a different process now that you're not using. There's no flood of deliveries. So there's not enough dopamine, serotonin, all those things in that excitatory or that pleasure cocktail coming through. And so the receiving bays are now going, okay, what do we do? We were shipping all this dopamine off to an ancillary site, but we need it now. So an imbalance is caused, which is registered as stress to the system. That's not a bad stress. I mean, it's unfortunate because it's going to cause cravings, but that's your brain saying, all right, this system ain't working anymore. We're, we need to rewire so that stress is actually going to help prompt the rewiring process. But if you give into the cravings and flood the system again, then you're, you're going to undo that rewiring. In the meantime, the HPA axis recognizes, hey, there is a deficiency in these neurochemicals. We need them to keep the body factory operating and to keep producing what we need to produce. So it releases the stress response cocktail. It releases the emergency crew, if you will, in order to try to restore balance. Now, when it releases those chemicals, that's your body saying, you need to fight or flee. You need to figure out how to go out into the world and rebalance this imbalance. And that's when you start feeling cravings. Just like it takes time to change policies at the factory, once your brain is used to the excess hormones and neurotransmitters coming in, it takes time to revert to the old procedures. So, yes, this stress is not necessarily a bad thing. It is something that you've got to tolerate until your brain gets the message that, hey, we need to do some rewiring tools to deal with cravings. And you're not going to like this. I don't have any wonderful tools that are going to make them just magically go away. Because your brain is saying, hey, I need this. And the higher order thinking area of your brain is saying, no, you don't. You want it, but you don't need it. So what we have here is what we call distress tolerance. In distress tolerance, the first thing you acknowledge how you're feeling and you accept it. And one tool that people use is sometimes called urge surfing. Recognize that urges come in, they peak, and they go out. If you don't pay attention to them. If you don't go in, give into them, eventually they're going to subside. Sometimes it takes a little longer than others, but every time you start giving them attention, they are going to stay around a little bit longer. Dirty discomfort is when you fight with the feelings, fight with the cravings. You get angry about having a craving, you get anxious that you're going to relapse and all of those other stress feelings are going to intensify the cravings and intensify the stress hormone release, which is not what we want. And that's going to prolong recovery. Recovery. So notice it, accept it, recognize that that's your body's way of saying we need to rewire the system. That's all it's saying. Nothing is drastically wrong because of the release of the stress hormones. It's going to be important once you acknowledge and accept you need to downregulate, get out of fight, orf flight so you can get into your wise mind. You can do this through square breathing. Breathe in for four, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four and repeat. You can do it by singing loudly and you know, you don't even have to sing on key. You can do it by screaming into a pillow. You know, hopefully not so loud that you're going to make the neighbors worried. But taking that deep breath and just ah, screaming into a pillow can be helpful. Blowing bubbles, not necessarily with bubble stuff because I know a lot, a lot of people think that that's for kids. But get bubble gum and when you chew your bubble gum and then you have to take a deep breath in and exhale to blow that bubble, you know, you'll feel like you're a kid again. That's okay. But that slows your breathing and when you slow your breathing, it's going to trigger the relaxation response. You can also engage in grounding activities to help you down regulate grounding activities. Turn your attention away from the craving. Says we're not going to pay attention to that. We're going to focus on something else. The most Simple 1 is 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Identify five things that you see, four things that you hear, three things that you smell, two things that you can feel, and one thing that you can taste. Or you might just do fives. 5, 5, 5. Identify five things that are green, five things that are brown. Whatever works for you. The whole goal is to turn your attention, force your brain to focus on it. It's kind of like taking your brain by the hand and going, no, we're gonna we're going over here right now. Once you've gotten into your wise mind, it's going to be important to distract. That urge hasn't gone away yet. Down. Regulating, triggering that relaxation response, triggering that vagus nerve helps, but that's generally only the first couple of minutes. Then you need to do something so you don't pay attention to it. You're probably not going to meditate or engage in grounding activities for 15 or 20 minutes. So what do you do? Distraction, Distract. Don't react. What can you do? Can you go downstairs and work on your woodworking equipment? Can you call a friend? Can you do push ups? Can you? What is it that you can do to occupy your mind and your body for the next 15 to 20 minutes and seek safety and support? That means if you're feeling tempted and you're in an unsafe environment, I. E. One where you can easily access porn on your phone or the Internet or something, you need to get to a safe place. It's kind of like an alcoholic being in a bar. That's not a safe place. They need to get out of there. If they had to go there for some reason, they need to get out. So seek safety and ideally support. Call your sponsor, call your coach, call your friend, call somebody that you can talk to, your accountability partner who can just help you distract. You don't need to process what's going on right now. Just saying, hey, I'm having really bad cravings right now, so help me distract myself until they go away. Nutrition. As I said earlier, when you are powering that body factory, that comes from nutrition, when you eat crap, you feel like crap. Hormones, neurotransmitters and neurons are all made from the foods you eat. Nutrients are far more available coming from whole foods than from supplements. And it's important to recognize that too much of a supplement can all be detrimental. It can actually inhibit absorption of other nutrients that are needed. So it's better to have it in the natural balance whenever possible. Now, if your doctor suggests something else, by all means. But randomly going out and just starting to try to take various different supplements or herbs or whatever, that's really playing with fire food, especially high fat, high sugar foods, increase your dopamine and your serotonin. That's what your brain is craving. So your brain may say, oh, I know one way to get it. It's not nearly as good as porn, but it may take the edge off. So you may start craving these comfort foods, having them once in a while, not a big deal. Just don't overdo it. Early recovery is not the time to radically change your eating habits and your nutrition or start eliminating all of the foods you enjoy. You want to moderate them. I use the example very often that I love pizza. Okay, no problem. I can eat pizza. But on my pizza I put green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, onions, tomatoes, diced tomatoes. And I make it as healthy as possible. So I still get my mozzarella, love my mozzarella, still get my cheese, still get my pizza. But it is healthier than it would be if it was like a four meat pizza or something. Get enough protein. A lot of people get plenty of protein, but it's important if, especially if you're a vegetarian or vegan, to make sure that you're getting enough protein. And the general rule, and this is varies for everybody, but the general rule is.04 to 0.6 grams of protein per pound of body weight. So I'll just take the middle at.05. So if you weigh 100 pounds, you're going to need 50 grams of protein. If you weigh 200, you'll need 100 grams. So it's pretty easy to figure that out. And if you're eating a lot of animal products, it is highly likely that you're getting plenty of protein. But I do bring that up if you don't have enough protein. Protein has the amino acids that are broken down to make serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, et cetera. So if you don't have enough protein, you're gonna feel like crap. Try to have a grain with every meal. And there are a lot of grains out there that are gluten free. So if you're gluten intolerant, no worries. Have three cups of vegetables a day. Notice I didn't say three servings because a lot of people look at me and go, I'm not eating a vegetable at breakfast. Three cups. So you can have a really big salad or bowl of broccoli and carrots at dinner, or you can split it between lunch and dinner. But it's important to get those vegetables. Colorful vegetables contain antioxidants and those antioxidants help reduce inflammation, which reduces the stress on your body and helps in the neuro neurological recovery process. Eat whole fruit instead of juice. Whole fruit has fiber in it which slows the absorption of the sugar from the foods and from the fruits, which can help regulate your blood sugar levels a little bit more at every meal. Try to aim for three colors on your plate. And as I've said before, skittles and M&Ms. And condiments don't count. Find three colors and there are foods we'll talk about in just a second that are fruits or vegetables that you can include in a breakfast that are appropriate, if you will, for breakfast, drink at least 64 ounces of water a day. Greatly reduce your caffeine. Caffeine is a stimulant. Stimulants promote inflammation. Inflammation is not what we want. And get enough vitamin D. Vitamin D in the US is added to a bunch of our foods. So if you eat a lot of cheese and drink a lot of milk and eat cereal, you may be getting plenty of vitamin D. But a lot of people don't like milk and they're not getting enough. I think the last research report I read said that about 60% of people are vitamin D deficient all year long and even more than that are vitamin D deficient during the fall and winter, which increases seasonal affective disorder. It increases feelings of depression. Vitamin D is also intimately involved in suppressing inflammation. So if you don't have enough vitamin D, then your immune system's not going to work as well. And again, it's going to be harder for your body. Vitamin D is great. You can overdose on it. Don't go hog wild with it. You can get a very easy blood test done, which I advise all people and I advised in earlier videos, get a blood test done so you know if you are deficient in vital nutrients or any of your hormones or neurotransmitter. Well, hormones are out of whack. There is not a blood test for neurotransmitters that is effective for mood. You can get a blood test for neurotransmitters, but it tells you the neurotransmitters throughout the whole body. And there's receptors for serotonin. For example, 80% of the receptors for serotonin are in your gut, not your brain. That number that you get from testing your neurotransmitter levels doesn't have a lot of translation for effective recovery principles. Example foods for grains, you can have whole wheat or sourdough bread, whole grain pasta, oatmeal, brown or black rice, quinoa, chia or amaranth. For people who are gluten intolerant, there are grains on this list that don't have any gluten in them, particularly chia. And the quinoa, chia and amaranth all have complete proteins. That means they have all of the essential amino acids like you would find in an animal Based product For fruits and vegetables. You can have snap peas, broccoli, spinach, kale, romaine lettuce, you want to have it. Any fruit or vegetable you eat, you want to be colorful, not blah like iceberg lettuce, red or green cabbage. Sauerkraut. Now, yeah, sauerkraut is kind of blah in color, but the ferment, fermented aspect of it has a lot of health benefits. Bell peppers, any of your green, red, yellow peppers, onions, carrots, cucumbers, butternut, spaghetti or zucchini, squash or tomatoes. Some of these things we typically think of as vegetables are actually fruits. I don't get too caught up in that. What you want is colorful stuff. Proteins you can eat. Eggs, dairy, meats. Yeah, go figure. Quinoa, buckwheat, soy, hemp or chia also all have essential amino acids. So they are giving you what you need. In addition to being a grain, they're also giving you all of your protein amino acids. If you are eating beans or legumes or nuts, it's important to combine them in order to get the essential amino acids. Now, some research lately has said you don't need to necessarily combine them at the same meal. You can have one for lunch and one for dinner or something, and that's okay. Ultimately, you need to base it on how your body feels. And if you have been vegan or vegetarian for a while, you're probably pretty adept at this exercise. High intensity exercise will increase your cortisol levels and your testosterone. It'll increase your stress hormones. Some low intensity exercise actually reduces cortisol and stress chemicals. Some people really find it cathartic at the end of the day to go into the gym and have a really, you know, intense workout that helps them relax for the evening. If a high intensity workout actually helps you feel better, then by all means do it. None of these principles is a hundred percent applicable to every single person. A lot of people, however, may find that they don't like high intensity exercise or it's too exhausting. So figuring out how you feel exercise is important. It helps increase oxygenation in your system, which helps reduce inflammation and promote the healing process. What are some low intensity exercises that you can do? You can play golf. Yep. You can tell your significant other doc says I gotta play nine holes after work every day. All right, I'll own up to that. Walking, Just taking the dog out on a walk. You know, not power walking, walking, kayaking, non triggering virtual reality games. We used to have one that was Fruit Ninja. I loved that. I don't know, whatever happened to the dvd? I think my kids got hold of it. But finding VR games like we used to have on the Wii, I don't think that even exists anymore. That get you to move your body where you're interacting in real real time. But they're non triggering and yard work and cleaning house. Now those things aren't fun for most people, but they good distractions and they can be great ways to get your body moving without feeling like you're exercising per se. Physical relaxation. You knew I'd get there somewhere sometime. Helping your muscles and your ligaments and your body relax is going to be really important. It's not just emotional relaxation, but physical relaxation. You can do stretching, you can do range of motion exercises, you can get a massage unless that's triggering. You can get some of those massage pads that have the shiatsu massager in them if that helps you relax. I know I have a lot of knots in my back, so I love my shiatsu massager. Not doesn't work for everybody. Sauna or a hot bath. Don't overdo it. If you are doing it right before bed, it's probably going to increase your body temperature. But if you do it an hour or so before bed, your body has plenty of time to cool off. Or if you finish after you get out of the sauna, you take a cool shower. That helps your body cool off. Don't overdo it. Meditation and yoga can both help with physical relaxation. What you're trying to do is relax those muscles, relax those knots when you're tense and when you're stressed, your muscles are all wound up and ready to spring into action. Well, you don't want to be springing into action. You want to be drifting off to sleep. So it's important to help relax those muscles. It also helps reduce pain. Speaking of pain, being mindful of muscle tension and clenching not only right before bed, but throughout the day is really important. I'm one of those people, I grind my teeth like crazy at night and I clench my teeth during the day when I start to get stressed. And I have to be very mindful of that. And you may be saying at this point, again, well, what does this have to do with porn addiction? If you're in pain, you're triggering the stress response, which is going to trigger a call for dopamine. That dopaminergic system's out of function, out of order, which is going to start causing cravings. So we need to help you start reducing unnecessary stress. Meditation. We talked about guided imagery Earlier. Another form of meditation that's good for pain management is altered focus. I pinched my sciatic nerve a couple weeks ago and I'm still struggling with recovery. But I know that if I lay down and I focus on the pain that I'm experiencing with the pressure of just laying flat, that it's going to occupy my attention, it's going to trigger my stress response, and it's typically going to start feeling worse. So altered focus means focusing on something else, whether it's jiggling your foot or rubbing your hands together, whatever it is that you can do to take your attention away from wherever that problem is, that pain is, or that craving is, and turn it to something else where you can focus on it. You can also focus if it's pain, you can also focus on imagining turning down the volume knob or reducing the color versus a really intense color of red over the pain. And. And you start turning that knob and gradually it turns to a cooler blue. That's not my favorite one. I prefer just focusing on something else. You'll find something that works for you and ergonomics. When you are in a ergonomically incorrect position, it puts stress on your body. So pay attention to your ergonomics at work. What, whatever that looks like. If you are alignment or if you are sitting at a computer all day long, there are ergonomics to pay attention to so your body is not under stress. Talk to your human resources department if you're not sure what good ergonomics would look like for you at your work system. At your workstation, you can also go online and it's really easy to find information about ergonomics. Ergonomics on the sofa. A lot of people spend a lot of time on the sofa or, or in a gaming chair or a desk chair, that's fine. But it's important if you're doing that to pay attention to your ergonomics. So your lower back is supported, so your neck is supported, so you are not feeling strained or pulled in any particular way. And in bed, I already mentioned that when we talked about sleep. But ergonomics in bed is super important. You're spending hopefully seven to nine hours there and that means that there's a long time that your body can either be relaxed and rejuvenating or in pain. Arousal. This will be covered more in the cognitive and interpersonal sections. But many people in early recovery from porn addiction are struggling with a lack of arousal to non porn stimuli. Everything feels flat, it feels gray. And people in real life just aren't causing any sort of sexual arousal in them. That's okay, that's your brain has been rewired incorrectly, if you will. As your brain starts to heal and Delta phos b and prolactin subside. Remember those are some of the chemicals in the brain that are designed to protect it. As those things go down, then arousal will become more possible. Remember back to the Sciency video. Delta phos b and prolactin are two chemicals in your brain that actually suppress dopamine. They suppress the activity of dopamine. So you can have dopamine just flooding in there, but it's not going to have much of an effect. And as those chemicals subside, as your brain starts to heal, arousal will come back around. It's crucial during this time to not romanticize or fantasize about porn as that prevents rewiring. For in real life arousal, which I assume is is your goal. So when you start to think about porn distract turn your attention somewhere else and it may not be to a real life person at that point in time. But it's important not to romanticize that porn, not to dwell on it or think about it too much. Additional videos that might be helpful on the YouTube channel are on the HPA axis and stress, sleep, nutrition, relaxation and pain management. You can easily find other videos I've done on the topic@doc snipes.com Doc Snipes D AI the goals of physical interventions are to reduce physical stress and secondary emotional stress that contribute to hormone and neurotransmitter imbalances. You want to provide the body factory the time and the resources it needs to rebalance and rewire to a porn free lifestyle. Please note that the younger you were when you started excessively using porn, the greater the damage is most likely. Therefore recovery may take longer. So don't compare your recovery to someone else's. Just look for progress every day, not perfection.