Explaining How Joey Became Free from Porn Forever (Explaining the Exact Process)

All right, guys, so today we're here with Joey.

Joey, we did an interview, I think it was a few months ago. I don't remember the exact date. I'd have to check that out. I think it's been about 3 months. Yeah, exactly 3 to 4 months. And we discussed your transformation, right? And how you basically left porn masturbation after years of struggling with it, right? And that was you actually came in the process, the program, like a few months before that. And now today here, we're going to go and explain exactly what helped him actually quit, right? We're actually going to explain the process, what exactly helped him when it comes to the frameworks, when it comes to the process, so that you guys can actually apply it. And so I'll basically just start off with asking you, Joey, What exactly was like the process for you when it comes to like recovering? Like how long did it take? What was, I guess, like the main thing that allowed you to really like effortlessly move on from PMO?

The first thing I wanna say is, which I think is a bit of a misconception, that people think that there is certain time that, you know, they'll be miserable before they start seeing improvement and they gotta rush through it. They gotta rough through that few days, a few months, so they can start being productive again. You know, there's that idea of it takes 90 days to, uh, to rewire. But you know, you're not feeling the rewiring. You know, the rewiring happened in your brain, not your business. It's just your brain doing the thing.

So Joey here makes an excellent point. A lot of people have this misconception that the moment you leave a behavior that you've consistently doing for the past few years that it's going to be miserable to leave it, right? And so that expectation already creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where the individual already feels miserable because he simply expects to feel miserable, right? Which is kind of like a placebo effect. But the truth is, of course, you might feel a bit of discomfort if you've been using porn to escape from your life and now you don't have anything to hide behind to escape from your life, right? You'll finally have to face life and maybe life is miserable to you, but then that shows that there's nothing to do with it. And on top of that, when it comes to neuroplasticity, a lot of people believe that because their brain change, which occurs within the repetition of any habits or behaviors in order to facilitate the process of doing the behavior again, those brain changes do go away. And I want to point out to a very interesting study done in 2018 that was titled Change of Brain Structure Imaging of Long-Term Withdrawals of Methamphetamine-Dependent Patients. Right. And in this study, they took 44 44 individuals who had been abstinent from that drug for at least 14 months, and then they underwent MRI scan to scan their brain, and then they were compared to healthy controls. And with that study, they saw progressive brain recovery over that 14-month period. Now, what's interesting about this study is that these 44 individuals were at the peak of their brain changes, yet they went through 14 months of abstinence, which shows that brain changes is not going to compel you to or to force you to go back to do a behavior again. Your desire will, right? Which is the root cause as we explained in various videos in this channel. And also the concept of withdrawals, it's not a physical issue. It's a psychological one. Drugs do have some form of withdrawals, do have some form of toxicity that needs to be treated medically sometimes because it is ingested inside of the body like alcohol is too. But when it comes to porn, it is not ingested inside of the body. The problem that we have with porn is people get get told to quit using fear. And so instead of internally deciding to, to quit because they are convinced that it will be the better option, instead they dive with their two feet and essentially force themselves to quit using external motivating factors. And when they fail at quitting, instead of interpreting that as a simple decision to go back because they like watching porn, instead they interpret that as withdrawals. Alfred Lindsmith was a prominent American sociologist that has done a ton of work in the addiction field, in the drugs addiction and overall psychology field, explained in one of his books how withdrawals essentially are simply things which people create in their minds and then create a self-fulfilling prophecy around. Because people essentially interpret, for example, the desire to go back to a behavior as a withdrawal. People interpret their head hurting as a withdrawal. When in reality, these problems, these issues could just be caused by other factors or simply by a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than the substance or the behavior itself.

And so myself, my interest, they were just that I need to focus on my task list, basically. So it was just from day one. So, so like the second, you know, the morning I woke up, and instead of opening my laptop to those websites, I started, you know, watching, watching my courses. I started watching documentaries, watching your videos. And afterwards, like, you realize that, okay, so it's still some of your routine, right? Like, you don't— I didn't change my routine overnight. I was still in the morning, you know, watched a few things before getting ready to work, but it was like productive thing. It was things that you realize that helps for that work. So, so just when you start focusing on that, when you start focusing on really, uh, while doing whatever you want, whatever you deem, uh, right and necessary beside, uh, watching these videos, uh, the, the bad ones, right? So, uh, it just comes naturally. Like, there isn't— I couldn't say like it took me this amount of wakes because it's just a shift of focus, and that focus adds, adds up, adds to itself.

The amount of time that it takes to recover is purely subjective because here this is not about recovery. We're simply leaving a behavior behind. If you compare pornography with other behaviors such as video games, for example, or even junk food, or anything that you overcame that society nowadays deems as addictive, you'll see that you didn't take a recovery-like approach to them, but rather you took a rational decision-making approach to, is it better for me or not, right? And this is something that we're going to tackle in this video, how to properly question yourself so that you can really make rational decisions and move on from these behaviors forever. But again, we're not treating a pathological issue. This is not a disease. Porn is not a disease, but instead it's a psychological issue. It's simply a learned preference. So the number of days it takes for you to just completely leave it behind and forget about it is going to be completely subjective. It can take as much as a few days or as much as maybe a few weeks, a few months, but I would never ever, if I was you, count the time that it's going to take or constantly try to focus on if I recovered or not because it's going to be destructive because it's only going to bring you the opposite of what you want, the opposite of freedom.

Yep, yep, yep. Very, very interesting you say that. When it comes to overall you losing interest, what would you say were the main things that allowed you to just, because you told me, previously that you essentially what happened is you lost interest in PMO, right? But I wanted to kind of like cover like what were those things that allowed you to lose interest since that's something that a lot of people want, right? To just remove that desire essentially for PMO and just keep it for, you know, real women, right? Having like that just natural sexual drive. So what was it for you essentially?

Yeah, so basically What I like to do, well, it's been like some little while that I do that. Whenever I want to do something, you just pause and ask yourself, why am I doing it? You know, it doesn't have to be like a revolutionary reason. It can just be like, I just want to do this because like I want to do that. Okay. Like, because it seems fun.

Yep.

Whatever. And that's okay if you think like you want to watch some YouTube videos because it's fun, go ahead, it's fine, it's fine. But once you start doubting yourself, like, uh, I want to do it but I'm not sure, like, would it be good for me? I was just a bit— so just ask the questions, like, why, why am I doing this? Is there— is it, is it fine? You know, it's just asking those questions. It's a 3-question I ask myself specifically. Is why, why do I want to do it? What do I get from it? And what happens if I don't do it?

Yep. These are very, very important questions actually, right? And you—

it literally takes 10 seconds. It's 3 questions, but every answer should be 3 seconds. You should already know, you should already have meditated and planned a reason why, because you don't just do things, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. Yeah. And I totally agree with you on this, right? And you do have an approach that is, you know, based more so on your personality.

The 3 questions, as you saw, that he asked himself is 3 questions which I highly suggest anyone who is looking to quit porn or masturbation and even lust should go over. And these are very important. First one, as he said, why do you want to do it? Second, what do you get from it? Third, what happens if you don't do it? And the key here is that you You want to be honest with yourself and not judge yourself. There's no right or wrong answers. Even if your answers are completely irrational, you still want to write them down because they're probably rational to you deep down inside. Because just by asking these questions, you often become aware of certain things you were never aware of. And once you do become aware of those things, you'll realize, well, it doesn't make sense anymore. I used to PMO for these specific reasons, but now it doesn't make sense. So it's way easier for you. It's like you just sort of like have a haha moment where you realize, okay, I was doing I did this for so long for this reason, but now that I know that it's because of this reason, I can easily move on from it. And through our coaching program or mentorship, we have many sessions where we go over the deep hidden reasons why, behind why you PMO, behind why you want to lose.

It's such an important part of the process, which is essentially the best thing because, you know, I'm not— you're not just, you know, trying to like force a framework on yourself. You rather like you use that framework, you can say like based on like who you are as a person, which works perfectly with you. Now, let me ask you this. A lot of people, they know in order to quit, you need to see some reasons for quitting, if that makes sense. And you told me about, for example, you being productive with your goals, which was aligned with your vision and all of those things that matter to you and the lifestyle that you essentially want to pursue and the goals that you had. I remember still when we talked like, it was like a long time ago before you went through the videos, before you went through the coaching and stuff, you were talking to me about like the goals that you had, right? Like I'm not going to like go into too much depth into them because it's so personal. But like for you, I guess like what were the main benefits that you would experience like more so from like a short-term perspective as well as a long-term perspective when it comes to leaving PMO completely behind?

So for me, actually, I did the opposite approach. You know, instead of thinking what are the benefits if I stop, what the benefits if I stop, I rather thought that what are the benefits if I keep doing it? So instead of—

And you realize there's a lack of benefits, right?

Yeah, so it's like I thought, let's convince myself to keep doing it. Like, why? If I have to write reasons, find me 20 reasons, you know? Like, it was just that there's no benefits. Like, why, why, why are you doing something that there's no benefits? Yeah, and not only there's no benefits, it's, uh, it hurts you. You know, uh, put your hands 5 minutes over a candle every single day. You will not become fireproof. It will just— you will hurt your hand. It will become unusable. So it's, so it's not— it's rather to think that why, what are the benefits if you're doing it, right? Like, it's easier to tell someone Like instead of telling someone that do something, you get a benefit, they'll be more likely to do it if you give them the benefits and you tell them if you don't do it, we'll take it away from you.

Yeah, that's just, yeah, totally agree.

And so I took the same approach with myself. Like it's just, I have those benefits now, right? I have good grades and I have a good base, a good foundation for my agency. I'm going to lose it if I don't stop watching it. And what will outweigh, what will be like a good reason, like what will be the amazing thing that will happen if I keep watching those stuff instead of a respectable company, instead of a good career? Like the benefit there doesn't compare.

100%.

So yeah, so yeah, so why do it? You know, it's just like whatever you think the advantage of it is, it's not an advantage. It's, uh, it's, it's, uh, it's a facade, really. Just a front, a beautiful front. Then you walk into the store And everything's rotten, you know?

Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's a powerful perspective, right? That's also like a way that I suggest people to actually, you know, I mean, to use when it comes to looking at that behavior specifically.

So the way that Joey now explained how he essentially moved on from this behavior is interesting because there is two popular ways to move on from a behavior in the cognitive behavioral education space. The first one is, as Joey explained, it's to essentially you just devalue the behavior by realizing on a logical and maybe emotional level that it won't give you what you thought it could give you. So for example, if you taught all of your life that junk food was to provide pleasure, if you do want to devalue behaviors, if you scroll down on my YouTube channel, I have many videos called debunking where I essentially debunk the reasons as to why people PMO, as to why people think that PMO is valuable in the back of their mind. And that's what Joey essentially did. Now the other way is to simply compare that behavior to opposite of that behavior. So in that case, comparing watching porn to not watching and to make it easier to potentially add new things in your life that you could try or do things that you always wanted to do instead of watching porn. Now, not necessarily as a replacement, but rather as a natural way, but rather as something, but rather to just fill your time now that you'll have way more free time. And that usually makes it very effortless for people to move on from a behavior because if you do that process the right way, you'll just feel like, why have I been PMOing? Why have I been watching porn all of this time? And it doesn't even make sense anymore. And then you really move on from that because you realize that there are better options out there that are way better. As I ask every single student of mine to kind of like prove that this way of going about changing behavior works. If you are struggling with porn right now and I were to give you $1 million, but the catch is you'd never be able to watch porn again, would you be able to do it? "Would you quit?" And every single time, I'm not lying, I'm not exaggerating, they say yes if money is something which they value, obviously. And so they realize it's more so a question of, okay, this is a better option. The $1 million is a better option than watching porn, obviously. So it's easier for people to just get rid of this and also makes them realize that they can quit. There's nothing stopping them from quitting because if it's just a question of getting $1 million, then they could just find something better than porn and just move on from it. Essentially, they just realize that it's just a question of value, right? One thing is more valuable than the other and then you move on.

Now, maybe last question, potentially last. What would you say to people that say, oh, I fear that I might come back to it? Like for example, right, you know, they managed to quit porn for a few weeks, a few, maybe even a few months, right? I've had that in the past, 3 to 4 months easily and then come back to it. But that was back then, right? But for you, what would you say essentially would be the advice that you give to those people?

Well, figure out why do you have that fear. It's easier to say, but basically what I'm saying is that if you take something out of your life and you're afraid that you come back to it, It means it was meaningful to you. It means you identified something better. And this is a lot of people that says that before quitting, before actually quitting. You know, like right now, me and you, we quit. Do you ever think, what if I go back to it?

Of course not.

No, because it's, you just, you went over it. You passed that phase and you saw that like actually I will never go back to it because I didn't like it. And you realize you didn't like it. You're done with that phase. You find something better. Do you ever think like, oh, should I go back to high school? No, you finish high school. You knew what you needed to know. You saw what you needed to see. It's over. Move to better things. As much as you loved high school, It's over. There are better things.

Yeah, yeah.

And so basically they say is like, don't, don't fear this, don't fear this. This is just at first. It's like the same thing that when somebody goes to the gym and he starts thinking like, oh, what if I got hurt? You know, oh, look at that guy, he's lifting 100 pounds. I will never be able to lift that, I'll break my back. But then you left 100 pounds. It was like, I should probably do that a few times and eventually I'll always be able to lift 100 pounds. So it's just, think about it, like, why do you think that? What do you fear? You know, like, what is it, what is it that you think that at some point I will have no choice but to reopen those websites.

The fear that people have when it comes to coming back to watching porn again after a few weeks or months of being free from it— I get asked that a lot. People tell me, well, Samir, how would I make sure that I never come back to it? Because that fear usually stems from an individual making a promise to themselves time and time again that, oh, I don't want go back to porn again, and then they feel great. They manage to go a few days, a few weeks, a few months, maybe even without porn. And then one day they feel the desire to do it, and then they come back to it again. And then they feel shame, they feel guilt, and then again, they repeat the same sort of mistake. And that can go on for years. And then you feel like you can't even trust yourself, essentially. This is the problem that people face. So we don't just want to focus on removing that fear, but we first want to tackle why is it meaningful to you? Why is that behavior meaningful to you, as Joey said. But another tip that I would give you to add on that in order to remove that fear is to never play these NoFap games of being so conscious of the number of days that you are without porn, and also not basing your self-worth based on the number of days, or trying to just allow yourself to feel confident, to feel good, to feel righteous based on the number of days that you've been without porn. Instead, go and move on from that behavior naturally by simply simply deciding to have that intention, obviously, to quit. And then if you do slip up in the beginning, which might be natural, just like you do with many other behaviors, which you decide to leave behind successfully. If you do slip up, you just ask for forgiveness if you are someone of faith and you then move on with your day. And this is such a powerful thing to do because you'll now naturally move on from that behavior rather than forcefully do it.

Thank you, Joey, for sharing these insights. This is very, very insightful. And I definitely people should apply and can apply those things right now essentially, and really put them into practice so that they can make drastic progress within the next few days, the next few weeks, depending on your level of commitment. As you showed commitment, they can also show commitment. So thank you again, man.

Sure.