10. The Paradox of Hopelessness (And the Simple Formula to Break Free)

Welcome to the Breaking Free from Porn podcast. My name is Samir Gardner, and today I'm going to help you guys when it comes to hopelessness. This is a big issue that I see people face when it comes to quitting porn. They tried the different techniques, they've tried many different things, they've tried over and over again. They thought this is going to be the last time. "Okay, now I'm never going to come back to it again. I just found out the new secret technique." Of course, we don't say that word for word, but we say something along those lines in our minds. And then guess what? We find ourselves coming back to it. Sometimes we think that we know more than anyone else. Okay, I've been there before. I've debunked everything. Debunk the pleasure to porn, to masturbation. You say, "Okay, yeah, it's all an illusion." but we keep on coming back to the illusion. And then we take it like in the back of our minds, will I ever quit this? Will I ever quit this? Now, first and foremost, I wanna just preface this by saying, and this is something I've talked about, I mean, for example, in previous podcasts, in different YouTube videos, but it's really important to understand that at the end of the day, when it comes to quitting porn, we often operate with this NoFap, Narrative, this NoFap approach of I need to quit this once and for all, and this is going to be my goal. And I've talked about this many times over and over again, that if you make quitting porn forever a goal, like a strict, rigid rule, then the moment you fall short of that rule, you don't achieve your standards, your high, high standards, well, you're going to feel down, and then you're going to feel shame, you're going to feel hopeless, and then you're going to just come back to it again and again. It's going to be like a cycle because imagine that your goal, you're like, okay, I'm never going to watch porn again for the rest of my life. I'm not saying that this goal is not realistic. Anyone can quit forever, any habits for that matter. Of course, we're talking about like, for example, okay, if it's a drug habit or if it's overall you playing video games, you on social media, like it's not impossible. We know this, okay? But when you make it such a strict, strict, rigid rule, the issue is if you do fall short, meaning you do come back to porn for whatever reason, maybe just because, okay, now you're just adapting and you're going to move on naturally, and so you decided to watch it again because you thought, oh, I don't know what to do, let me watch it again. A lot of people, that's what happens, and then they really, they, they watch it again, they, they watch the porn, they masturbate but then they say, okay, yeah, I made a mistake. Let me move on. And then maybe they go back to it a few more times, but then eventually they just move on naturally and they just forget about it. Most people do not quit on the first attempt. Okay? Yes, it is possible. 100%, 1000%. But most people, you need to change your values. You need to change your perspective. You need to change so many things that yes, again, it's possible, but for you to have like a very strong conviction that, yeah, I'm never going to come back to it again is extremely hard. I mean, extremely rare that people have such strong conviction from the start, okay? And so when you make such a goal of, okay, I'm going to quit porn forever, it's like saying, oh yeah, I just started this specific sport, I'm going to compete in the national, like I'm going to compete at the highest level. It's like, yes, it is possible, but from the start, Okay, like, let's be more realistic. I'm not saying that quitting porn is hard. Again, I'm saying that the person might not be as convinced, but when they interpret them falling short and them going back to porn as failure and as, oh, maybe I'll never achieve this goal, this is the issue. It's like, no, you just went back to it because you decided to come back to it for specific reasons, not because you failed, not because the techniques you tried out, not because the mindset shift that you just had uh, didn't work, but more so because you, you still want— wanted to go back to it for specific reasons. And that's normal, okay? Like, you've been watching porn for all of these years, you've been masturbating for all of these years. What do you mean you're going to never come back to it? What do you mean this is your goal to, uh, never come back to it? Because another issue with making porn such a strict, rigid rule is that you— it's so far out in the future. I mean, when are you going to be free forever? Is it gonna be at day 90? Is it gonna be at day 400? Is it gonna be when you have literally no desire, no thoughts? You see, so there's no like, like the person will maybe never achieve essentially that. And so they will be in a constant state of thinking, okay, am I free? Am I not free? And they will constantly monitor that and to monitor something. And as I've talked about in the podcast on unwanted intrusive thoughts, to constantly monitor something, as we know, makes the thoughts and the desire actually stronger as you constantly think about them. Okay, and we all know that, okay, if you don't— if you try to not think of a pink elephant, well, guess what you're going to think about? A pink elephant. Okay, so this is why we must never make quitting porn such a strict, rigid rule. And as a byproduct, you will feel less hopeless, and as a byproduct, it will be easier for us to just naturally move on, meaning we don't have to fight it off. We We just get more convinced. We just overall internally are motivated to just move on from point of masturbation. And we start lessening that desire. The desire is not as appealing anymore. So this is very important. Now, when it comes to hopelessness, and sometimes we do decide to feel hopeless, okay? This is the thing. We do decide to feel hopeless. Now, I know a lot of people think they just feel hopeless because of their situations. But it is a question of first how you interpret your situation in the first place, because, okay, let's say that I been trying to quit porn for the past 10 years and nothing work and I'm still binging on porn every single week. If I interpret that as, oh, that means that I'll never quit, then of course, then I'm gonna feel hopeless. If I interpret that as, okay, maybe I've been like over these past 10 years, I've just been doing like the wrong things. I've just been going about it the wrong way. That's why it hasn't been working. Then I'll probably not feel hopeless because I think, no, I just made a mistake and now I can do this new way. I can take this new approach. Therefore I have still hope. Okay. But we need to understand first and foremost that hopelessness actually protects you from disappointments. This is at the root of hopelessness. Why we feel hopeless and why we decide to feel hopeless is because we don't want to be disappointed again. We don't want to go through a period or like an attempt of, okay, I'm going to quit this forever, and then we find ourselves coming back to it again. It's like, oh yeah, now it's going to work, and then it doesn't work. We don't want to feel that. We don't want to feel disappointed, okay? If we don't have one, we don't want to have like our hopes very high up and then just crash again, okay? So here's the formula. It's going to be very simple. It's going to be paradoxical because you're going to think, no way this works, but it actually works very well. Okay, you want— and this is what we call the— it's what we call the paradoxical cost-benefit analysis. Okay, what are the benefits? And you want to list them out. If you feel hopeless, what are the benefits of telling yourself that you are hopeless? What are those benefits? List all of the advantages of feeling hopeless. Be honest with yourself, okay? Again, I gave you, for example, okay, we feel hopeless to protect ourselves from disappointment. This might be one, but you want to list all of them, okay? So for example, they did that with people that had, I mean, obviously felt hopeless in regards to their drug usage, for example, and how they were acting out. And for example, sometimes it's like, oh, if I feel hopeless, then I do not need to go through like let's say, for example, to try to work myself through or to try to change and change the different things about myself, for example, because I mean, basically I won't have to do the work that's required for me to change because I feel hopeless. And sure, it might sound like I'm just passive-aggressive by saying, okay, yeah, you just don't want to do the work. That's why you feel hopeless. That's why you impose that on yourself. You do decide to feel that. No, it's instead like, let me be honest with myself, okay? Because look, I do understand that from a— maybe your perspective, and from my past attempts at quitting in the past, that sure, sometimes we feel hopeless because generally we think like there's no other options, there's a lack of perceived options. And sure, this might be a reason, but then we know deep down that there's always a way out. Objectively at least. And so you wanna ask yourselves, okay, like if I feel hopeless, what is it exactly that I'm getting? Am I protecting myself from failure? Am I protecting myself from having to really go through like hardships or adversity because I don't know if I'm gonna be able to really change myself? What is it exactly? And it might be like 15 benefits you're going to, really find out about yourself. And then you wanna ask yourself, okay, yeah, I have those benefits. And you can then list out the benefits for not feeling hopeless, but you wanna really have it on paper because when you have clarity, you can then look at it. You can then rationalize. You cannot rationalize, you cannot change things just by being ambiguous, just by not really knowing what is it exactly that's going on. Like, how are you going to change things if you don't know what's going on? So this is the simple formula, and I'm just going to stop here. Really, the paradoxical cost-benefit analysis. List out the benefits first and foremost about feeling hopeless. Then list out the benefits of not feeling hopeless. And list the cost of both and add them on paper. It's going to take 10 to 15 minutes, but it's going to change everything. So this is it. It was a short episode, but I hope it was helpful. And I'll see you guys in the next episode.