Why Trying To Quit Porn Keeps You Stuck (Do This Instead)

Have you tried every single technique when it comes to quitting porn and masturbation, but you still find yourself relapsing over and over again? There's a specific reason why this happens, and I've coached hundreds of men over the past few years who would go on weeks and months of abstinence of no porn, no masturbation, and then they would just relapse once, and then they would go again on a few weeks, on a few months without porn and masturbation, and then again they would find themselves binging. And I get this question asked all of the time. That question is, how can I know if I'm actually free? When will I know that? And there's just one way to really achieve this, and it's going to sound super, super counterintuitive, and no one talks about this. I'm not kidding, and it works. So first, let's understand why is it that we keep on coming back to porn and masturbation despite the fact that We have more knowledge. We did the work. We tried to change our beliefs. We tried to remove the value that we might associate to porn and masturbation. We tried all of these things, but yet we still want to do it and we still come back to it. And there's a few mistakes that people make that I'm about to tackle right now. First, I wanna explain the carrot experiment. So in 1994, there's a psychologist that did an experiment where he asked himself a simple question, which is what would happen in the mind of a human being if they were told to not to not think about carrots. And he told people in his experiment, try your best for the next 5 to 10 minutes to not think. I want you to have no thoughts about carrots. Make sure that nothing related to carrots even enter your mind. Guess what happened? The moment they started, their mind was flooded with images of carrots, like carrot cakes, orange carrots, carrot sticks. Why? Because when you try to do something, when you try, for example, to quit porn, you make quitting porn harder. And there's a solution to that. I'm gonna get to it. Now, why is it that our thoughts and desires actually become stronger the moment we try to fight our desires or thoughts about porn and masturbation, or the moment that we try to remove them and really become free of them? Think of your mind like a path through a forest. The first time you have like just a thought, it's like you're just walking through like Thick brush. It's just hard to just walk through these brushes. Now, every single time that you really invest that mental energy into that specific thought by checking if you're still thinking about it, by trying to suppress it, by overall fighting it, it's like you're walking that path again through these brushes. And if you do that repeatedly, eventually it just becomes a highway. Like the thought doesn't even just like pop up anymore. It's almost becoming your default route. So the mistake that people make is that they try to change the thoughts that they have and the way that they feel, like their desires that they have. But instead, what you want to do that is going to change everything is you want to change the relationship that you have with your thoughts and desires. Let me give you an example. If you were scared of a roller coaster and then you try to fight off that fear and your friends push you to really try it despite you being very, very scared. If you try to tell yourself, no, you got this, man. I'm going on the roller coaster. Or you try to fight off your thoughts. No, I shouldn't. Feel fear right now, it doesn't make sense. Guess what's going to happen? You're still going to have that fear and you might feel the fear even more. But instead, if you accept that you have that fear and you're like, okay, yes, I do have that fear, but you change that relationship. You're like, it is normal for me to feel the fear because I've never done this before. So this is just a normal thought. Let me not put too much importance on it. Then what happens is the fear actually lessens. It dissolves. Now what we need to understand when it comes to porn and masturbation, the thoughts, the desires that we have is that that based on the latest research that was done at a Canadian university and published in 2020, they found out that the average person has up to 6,200 thoughts every single day. So you gotta ask yourself that question. Let's say that you have about 1,000 thoughts that are about porn and masturbation, about the desire, the urge, or just overall thoughts about them. The question is, why do we care about these thoughts specifically much more, but we disregard every other thought that we have and we treat them like junk, meaning that we don't really care about them. We just ignore them. Why are the thoughts about porn and masturbation different? Why do they hold more value to you? We need to understand that just because you have a thought, it doesn't mean that you had the intention to even create it in the first place. If I am on a balcony and I think of jumping off, does that mean that I want to jump off the balcony? This is the issue. The problem are not the thoughts. The thoughts, the desires, you can have hundreds of them every single day. They can appear in your mind randomly and they will not impact you in any shape or form. They do not hold any power over you. But the mistake that we make is that we evaluate those thoughts and we react to them and we have this belief that we need to evaluate them and they are important and we need to tackle them because we've been told by NoFap and all of these videos on YouTube about porn recovery that If you have a specific thought about porn, it's maybe because your brain has been damaged, that you're still recovering, that you might lose control over your own self and then relapse. And so we have these fears, or you think, oh, I have these thoughts, I have this desire, it might mean that I'm broken. And that creates panic because emotions are cognitive products, meaning the way we think of something, how we think about our own thoughts, our own desires, is then going to create the emotion, is then going to create the desires in the first place. The And then that also, for a lot of people, keeps the thoughts alive. They end up thinking about it more and more and more as they panic more, and it's this vicious cycle. Now you might think, okay, Samir Gardner, this sounds amazing, but I just can't really let go. But what if I stop caring about these thoughts? And what if I stop caring about so much about trying to quit porn that I just find myself binging? I just find myself in a worse situation. What you want to do? Is a simple solution. Most people never take the time. It only takes 10 to 15 minutes to do, and it will change your life forever. You want to do a paradoxical cost-to-benefit analysis. Super simple, but it works. And that is, you want to write down what do you gain from trying harder, from obsessing over it, from caring about it so much? And be honest with yourself, obviously. And what are the costs of that approach? On the flip side, what would you gain if you were to not really care about quitting so much? If you were to not care about these thoughts and these desires, if you were to just let them pass by, and what would be the cost? And be honest here. And that's going to provide you with clarity. And you're going to realize, actually, it'll be more safe for me to not care about my thoughts. It'll be more guaranteed that I would actually quit this forever if I were to not care so much. And this is when you're going to have like this aha moment. And suddenly you'll be able to feel like you can actually move on forever from this. That you were operating based on a framework that doesn't even work in the first place. The NoFap framework, the porn recovery framework of, I need to fight this. I need to not think about this. I need to know if I'm free or not. When will I be free? I need to be worried about this. I need to do my best when it comes to quitting this, because in the past I've failed at this, because in the past I've managed to go a few weeks, a few months without it, but then I came back to it. But when you realize that you do not need a technique, you do not need a framework, you simply need to understand, you simply need to have clarity. This is when you realize that you can be free right now. Let me explain. If your desires, they don't matter to you, you have these thoughts, you think about this beautiful woman, you want to have intimacy with her. You think back about the porn video that you watch. You think about a sexual experience that you had in the past. And you think, oh, this would be so fun to indulge in. If you just interpret that as These are just thoughts. These are just desires. Yeah, maybe I want to do them, but they don't really mean anything. They're like a bitch. Well, yeah, I used to think about them. That's the reason why I think about them. Other than that, I don't really care. And you do not panic. You do not try to suppress them or think, oh no, I shouldn't be thinking about this. When these desires, when these thoughts don't matter, you stop dreading them, you stop anticipating them, you stop avoiding them, then what happens is they actually happen less often. If they do happen, there's less intensity and they just start fading out on their own. Think about it like this. Imagine there's a bully and every single time you see the bully, you feel fear. You think, oh no, let me try to be nice with him. Let me try to talk to him so he doesn't bully me. Let me try to avoid him. Let me try to fight back. Guess what happens? The bully comes back to you. The bully will see that you react to him, therefore is going to pick on you again because the bully only feeds on the fact that you give it attention. And then because you give him attention, well, he comes back It's the same exact thing with our thoughts and desires. Or think about it like this. Imagine you have a cut on your arm and you put a bandaid so that it stops bleeding. But imagine every single minute you open the bandaid and you see if you're still bleeding. Guess what happens? It's not going to heal. It's going to take much more time. You're delaying the process of healing. The moment you don't really care, you just put that bandaid and you say, I'm not going to take a look at it. I'm not going to give it too much attention. Guess what happens? The cut actually heals and it does much, much sooner. And the same exact thing happens with our thoughts, our desires. When you stop checking them, when you stop trying to analyze them, and instead you really leave them alone, you treat them like junk email. When you open your emails in the morning and you see a junk email, you do not really pay attention to it. You see it and you're like, okay, let me go to my inbox. Let me look at what is actually important. When you treat your thoughts like this, when you treat your desires like this, your mind will start moving on. The truth is you will be fully recovered. Listen to me carefully. You will be fully recovered the moment you do not care if you're fully recovered or not. The moment you do not care if you're fully recovered or not, because the moment you don't care, then it can't run your life. It can only run your life the moment you really care about it. But the moment you don't care, then it cannot do anything. And let me make this clear. You can't know the future anyways. You can't have absolute certainty in the future. Yes, it would feel good to know that, oh, I'm never ever going to come back to it. And you have absolute certainty in that. But guess what? You can't have that. Sure, you might have that today and you think I'm never going to come back to it. Maybe tomorrow you're going to feel like, no, actually I might come back to it again. So instead, what you need to do is to not even play that game of trying to have absolute certainty, reassurance that this is never going to come back. This is never going to happen again. I'm never ever going to watch porn or masturbate for the rest of my life. Not because it's impossible, but because it only makes it harder to quit. When you stop playing that game, you will naturally move on. It's like, imagine you're trying to fall asleep and you keep thinking about, am I sleeping? Am I not sleeping? And you worry about that and you analyze your thoughts. Guess what happens? You can't sleep, you have trouble falling asleep. But the moment you don't really care, guess what happens? Your mind will naturally move on and adapt. And I'll ask you this question: why is it that you don't really care so much about other sins, other bad habits, but we care so much about quitting porn? Even though in the eyes of God there are other sins which are worse or equal, there are other habits which are worse when it comes to your productivity, your mental well-being, your lifestyle, but you don't really care so much about them. And if you decide that you want to quit and you have the intention of quitting, you do not really give that much importance, and you actually end up just moving on from them. What we don't realize is we've been fed this message from NoFap that the moment we quit porn, the moment we quit masturbation, our life is going to, like, drastically change, that suddenly you'll be extremely productive you'll have that confidence that, that will make the opposite gender attracted to you. You'll be living your life according to your potential. And sure, there are objective benefits. You'll gain so much from quitting, but it's like eating healthy. Eating healthy is beneficial when you stop eating junk food and instead you eat whole foods, for example. It's great. But if your goal is to be in shape, then you still need to exercise. You still need to sleep properly. And with quitting porn and masturbation, you still need to go and live your life. You still need to go and take action. To take risks, to maybe build your career or your business, to talk to people. It's not like quitting porn will just make these things completely effortless and you'll just be a completely different human being. This is the lie that we're sold. I also want to add, guys, that you'll truly live your life the moment you don't really care too much about, am I going to come back to PMO or not? Basically, the moment you're not living in this fear. And to not worry about coming back to PMO, is not an achievement. It's literally a decision. That's why I said you need to do the paradoxical cost to benefit analysis. Because at the end of the day, your actual behaviors, your actual, you can say, results in life, they don't come just from like controlling your thoughts and having mastery over every single thought of yours on a day-to-day basis. It wouldn't make sense. The actual behaviors, the actions that you take, the results that you get as a byproduct, those things they come from what you actually value, from what you actually pursue. You want to naturally pursue those things that are meaningful to you, that are important to you, that you value, whether that be to build a family and have kids, whether that be to have more success in your business or career. Maybe it's to start your own charity, your own projects to help other people. You want to focus on these things not as an attempt to remove the thoughts that you have about porn and to move on from porn. You want to do these things because they matter to you. Because at the end of the day, real change is not going to happen because you say, don't think about porn, don't think about masturbation, don't think about these desires, don't think about these flashbacks. Real change will happen when you actually move on, when you actually do different things, when you stop living that fear, that uncertainty that maybe you're going to come back to PMO and you live without that because you instead pursue things that are much more important to you. This is when real change occurs, and you'll genuinely find yourself slowly but surely not even caring about it anymore, completely forgetting about porn, and you'll literally forget how it used to feel. Therefore, your desire for porn and masturbation is going to lessen so much. So the most powerful thing you can do is to not even indulge with these thoughts, to not even indulge with these desires. To not try to remove or suppress them. Just notice them. Just like you see the junk email in your inbox folder when you wake up in the morning and you check your emails, you see the junk mail, you take a quick look, and then you just move on. And you look at the main inbox, what actually matters. And the paradox is extremely simple to understand. The moment you stop trying to forget about porn, that's when you'll actually forget about it.