You're Wasting Your Life Fighting P*rn (And Science Proves It's Making It Worse)
Samir Gardner argues that fighting porn through guilt and willpower backfires, citing research on thought suppression and moral conflict. He proposes an alternative: stop the struggle, reshape your environment and values, and redirect energy toward meaningful goals instead.
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Today we're going to go over why is it that when we try to quit porn, we end up struggling more than those that do not really try, that do not have as much knowledge as we do when it comes to porn and masturbation. And I'm going to explain why you're wasting your life quitting porn with evidence as well as an alternative so that you can actually quit without having to spend so much time quitting. Because over the past few years, I've been coaching people and I've talked to countless men who have been for years trying to quit porn and they still can't. And that has been ruining their lives, not just the porn itself, but the fact that they've been spending so much time, mental energy, and focus on quitting porn and it still is not working. So this is going to be the last video that you're going to watch on this topic because I'm going to explain why you keep on struggling and how to actually quit for good. Permanently. So you're wasting your life fighting porn, and science proves it's making it worse. How many hours— this is a question I'm going to ask you— how many hours of your life have you spent trying to quit porn? Not just, uh, watching it, trying to quit. Think about it. The YouTube videos you've watched about the dopamine, the NoFap, the new technique, the cold showers, the Reddit threads, the forums, the accountability apps, The journaling, the cold showers, the streak counting, the hours lying in bed fighting an urge or finding that sexual tension instead of sleeping. The guilt spirals after a relapse where you can't focus on anything else. And it takes maybe a few hours or even a few days to get back to normal. And all of that really adds up. For some of you, we're talking about, if we were to really look at it, years of your life. Years that could have been spent building that business, starting that family, getting closer to God, seeking more knowledge, and actually living your life to the fullest. And here's the part that's going to make you really uncomfortable. What if I told you that this time you spent fighting porn didn't just waste your life, it actually made the problem worse? That's not just my opinion. That's what the research says. So I'm going to show you 3 studies that prove that the very act of fighting porn is what keeps you coming back. And then I'm going to tell you what to do instead. So let's get into it, guys. The first study is the white bear experiment. In 1987, there's a psychologist at Harvard that ran an experiment where he split people into two groups. The group one, they got told, try not to think of a white bear for the next 5 minutes. And then group two got told, think about a white bear for the next 5 minutes. Every time someone thought of a white bear, they had to ring a bell. So this is how they could essentially get the results. Now here's what happened. The group that was told not to think about the white bear, they couldn't stop thinking about it. They rang the bell constantly. But here's the part that matters. After those 5 minutes, both groups were told, okay, now you can think about white bears. And the group that had been suppressing the thought, they thought about Whitebeard more than the group that had been freely thinking about them the whole time. And so this psychologist called this the rebound effect. When you try to suppress the thoughts— and this also applies to desires— two things happen in your brain simultaneously. The process one is the operating process. That's when your conscious efforts are trying to push the thought away, trying to think about something else, trying to distract yourself. And process 2 is the monitoring process. And this one runs in the background, constantly scanning your mind for the very thought you're trying to avoid. So what happens? Your brain, or you can say your mind, it's semantics, is, it's literally searching for the thought of a white bear in order to check if you're still thinking about it. And every time it finds it, which it does, uh, because it's looking for it, the thought gets stronger. Now replace white bear with porn. This is exactly what NoFap, what the porn recovery movement tells you to do. Don't think about it. Avoid triggers, distract yourself, keep yourself busy. Try the next technique. Take the cold showers, do the pushups, do something that would actively keep it away. So that you don't have to think about it, so that your desires don't show up. Every single one of those techniques activates the monitoring process. So your brain, aka mind, is now scanning for porn-related thoughts 24/7, which means you're still thinking about porn more than you would have if nobody had ever told you to fight it. This is not me just guessing, okay? A 2020 meta-analysis, basically a combination of credible credible studies and research about thought suppression confirmed that the ironic rebound effect is real and consistent across dozens of experiments. And we even have, as I talked about in a previous video, the carrot experiment where the subjects in, in the experiment got told to not think about anything related to carrots. And guess what? They ended up thinking about carrots more. So the recovery space, they tell you, you need to fight it. The science The research, the studies says that fighting is what is keeping you trapped. Now let me show you something even more damaging. So study number 2, moral incongruence. Now this might be controversial because this might trigger some of you that are more religious and that have this morality just like me. I am on that side. I'm a man of faith and I will never take science above what God says. Okay? This is my personal belief, but it is good to look at the research because this doesn't contradict our beliefs, but rather it is the reaction that individuals of a religious background, people that follow objective morality, experience. And we need to become aware of that. So a researcher named Joshua Grubbs ran a series of studies published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviors in 2019 and in Clinical Psychological Science in 2020 that changed everything we know about why men feel addicted to porn. So he studied thousands of people. And he found something that the recovery industry does not want you to hear, something that you never get exposed to. They said that the biggest predictor of whether someone feels addicted to porn is not how much porn they watch. I'll repeat, the biggest predictor of whether someone feels addicted to porn is not how much porn they watch. Let me say that again. How much porn you actually watch has almost nothing to do with whether you feel addicted or not. The number one predictor is something Grubbs calls moral incongruence. That's the gap between what you believe is right and what you're doing. If you believe porn is wrong because of your faith, your values, your upbringing, and you watch it anyway, that gap creates massive distress, just like it did to me. And I want to make it clear again, these secular studies, aka these non-religious studies, when you read them, you think, oh, look, they just say that religion is, or faith, or morality is the problem. That's If you remove your faith, if you remove your morals and your values, then you'll see that porn and masturbation, there's no issues with them whatsoever. You can do them whenever you want. It's healthy. I do not believe in this. I do not agree with this. So here I'm telling you to just look at the information and not just think emotionally. But the distress that we experience is what we interpret as addiction. It's not the porn itself. It's the guilt about the porn that we then conclude, well, why am I doing something that goes against my morals and values? Like, it makes no sense. I can't even explain that to someone else. They would think, why are you doing something that goes against your morals and values? Yeah, sure, you can say that you sin, you fall into it, especially the fact that it's even more taboo than other things that we do that are sinful. We think, well, there must be an explanation to that. And we get presented with this idea that maybe we are addicted and then We get presented with things like, oh, look at your brain on porn. Oh, look, porn is the new cigarette and people are addicted to nicotine. Porn hijacks your dopamine and so on. But here's why this matters to you. Every single porn recovery program, every NoFap video, every accountability group, they all do the same thing. They make you feel more guilty. And it's not even about faith here. It's not even about morals and values. It's this belief that you lost your streak again, and your streak means a lot. It is the most important thing. You relapsed again. This is destroying your brain. You're an addict. You might never even quit. This is what creates even more guilt. And every one of those messages increases your moral incongruence, which increases your distress, which increases your perceived addiction, which makes you feel more out of control, which makes you come back. Grubbs also found that people with high moral incongruence reported feeling addicted to porn even when their actual usage was low. Think about that. A guy watching porn once a week will believe it's deeply sinful. And of course it's sinful. We're not gonna deny that. But that guy feels more addicted than a guy watching it daily who doesn't have moral conflict about it. The feeling of addiction is not caused by porn. It's caused by the war you're waging against yourself that you don't even need to fight. It's this moral incongruence, this cognitive dissonance. And every hour you spend in that war, watching recovery videos, journaling about your shame, your thoughts, your desires, resetting your street counter, confessing to your accountability partner, every hour is feeding the machine that keeps you stuck. This is the real issue. It is not the porn. The porn is just there. It's just a video on the screen. The moment you don't see porn as this powerful forbidden fruit, it loses its power. And once it loses its power, you realize you were the one that had the power to begin with. Not a superpower. No, I'm just talking about— it's just a video on your screen, just like TV is. Why don't we treat it the same way? Why do we look at Netflix, TV, social media as this thing that, yeah, I have control over that, I can choose to watch it or not? But when it comes to porn, we have a different belief system that is obviously influenced by the porn recovery movement. And this is the exact Illusion I want you to break free from. Study number 3, the label trap. Dr. David Lee, uh, who's a clinical psychologist who published the book The Myth of Sex Addiction and co-authored, uh, a landmark paper called The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Review of the Pornography Addiction Model. His core finding is that the DSM-5, which is the actual diagnostic manual that every psychologist in the world uses does not recognize porn addiction as a real diagnosis. It's not in there. It was proposed, reviewed, and rejected. Not because nobody thought about it, because the evidence didn't support it. Now, why does this matter? Because it's not about the DSM-5. You could argue, yeah, they, they have their own interests. They are biased. It's more about when you call yourself an addict, you create what psychologists call a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stage 1, you adopt the belief, oh, I am addicted to porn. Stage 2, that belief shapes your behavior. You act like an addict. You count days, you install blockers, you avoid being alone. You live in fear, basically. You treat every thought as a threat. Stage 3, those behaviors produce results that confirms the belief. The monitoring process makes you think, about porn more. The moral incongruence makes you feel more addicted, and eventually you watch it again. Stage 4, the relapse reinforces the belief. See, I am really addicted. I really can't control this. This is evidence that I am actually addicted. So David Lee argues that, that calling this behavior an addiction removes personal responsibility. Removes that idea that you have free will. It tells you that something external has power over you, that a video on a screen can hijack your brain, that you're a victim of neurochemistry. And that belief that you're powerless is the most dangerous thing the recovery industry has given you. Because if you're powerless, you need to fight. If you need to fight, you're thinking about it constantly. If you're thinking about it constantly, The Whitebeard rebound kicks in. If the rebound kicks in, you watch again. If you watch again, they're morally incongruent fights. If they're morally incongruent fights, you feel more addicted and the cycle continues. 3 researchers, 3 different studies, just one conclusion. The fighting is the problem, not porn, the fight. Now here's what you're actually losing, okay? And I need to get real with you here because this is not just about psychology studies. This is about your life. Let me ask you something. How much of your mental energy goes to this fight every single day? You know, when you have what we call sexual tension, where you think about doing it and then you negotiate with yourself, no, I shouldn't do it. No, maybe just this one more time. Oh no, but if I do it, I'm gonna feel shame. Oh no, but if I don't do it, I'm gonna feel better. We know how much mental energy, we spend doing that. Sometimes we negotiate with ourselves for 8 hours straight. We can't even focus on the work that is in front of us, on our relationships, on things that could change our lives. When you wake up, what's the first thing you think about? For some people, it's, I hope today isn't the day I relapse. They live in that state of fear. When you're at work, are you fully present when you're working on your business, or is part of your brain running the monitoring process scanning for triggers, going on social media, feeling scared that you might come across this Instagram model, and then just like last time, you end up relapsing again. When you're with family, are you there, or are you carrying that shame from last night, from the other day? When you pray, are you connecting with God, or are you like begging for forgiveness, or worse, sometimes feeling hopeless that, or maybe I'm kind of doomed because I've done it so many times and I keep on coming back to it. More than half of your mental energy is going to a fight that the science says is making it worse. And what you're not doing because of it, that business you want to focus on, that career, you haven't started it because you told yourself, I'll do it once I'm clean. And that woman you want to marry, you haven't made the moves because you feel like a fraud. That promotion at work, you're not going for it because your confidence is destroyed. Marriage, family, you put literally the most important things in your life on hold because you believe you need to win this fight first. This is the biggest lie the recovery space has planted in your head, that you need to fix this before you can have that, that you need 90 days clean before you deserve a relationship and marriage, that you need to reboot your brain before you can be a man of God, that you need to beat the addiction before you can start your business or scaled your business. No, you don't need to beat anything. You need to stop fighting and start living. Let me tell you about the moment this changed for me. When I was deep in this, really trying to figure out how to really quit, I would come home from work every single day and go straight to my room, close the door and just exist there. Now I'll give you context. At that time in my life, I decided to not have any friends anymore. The reason being is that Most of my friends did not treat me well, and I wanted to really change my life. I wanted to become this guy that would become successful and that would get in shape, that would achieve his dreams, that would become a role model for others around him. So I was lonely, like extremely lonely, and I felt bored and I was isolated. So I'll just go to my room and of course I would be productive, reading books, watching YouTube videos about how to improve my life. How to start that business and so on. But I'll just be here, same wall, same screen, same routine, hours alone every single day. And I was spending so much of my time in that room fighting, watching recovery videos, reading forums, writing in my journal about how I need to quit, resetting my counter app, or I would just have it in the back of my mind being like, oh yeah, I did it last time. 2 weeks ago, so that means I'm on 14 days praying for strength. I was doing everything the recovery space told me to do, and I kept coming back. And not just the recovery space, I would go to books like Easy Peasy. I would do my own research, try to debunk things, because the fight was all I was doing. My entire life had become about quitting porn. And here's what I realized. The thing I needed to change was not my relationship with porn. It was my life. My room wasn't forcing me to watch anything. That's addiction model thinking, and it's wrong. But sitting in that room alone every single day was draining my mental health. And on top of that, I was fighting it. And I knew it. I knew I shouldn't be living like this in my room isolated. And that's what a fortress means. It's not that you do nothing, but that the change doesn't feel like a war. And this is what I want you to reflect on. What is it that you know you need to do and that will probably help you quit, but you think, no, but I need to just watch more videos so I can really understand maybe what's really my root cause and I need to debunk this or I need to just be more social. No. What is it that you actually need to do? What is that change in your life? Maybe internally, maybe externally, and focus on that. So let me show you the difference between what you've been taught and what actually works. The fight model is Oh, porn is an addiction. Therefore, you're powerless. I need to suppress my thoughts. I need to suppress my desires. And we know that it just makes it worse. You maximize your guilt and shame, not just because of your morals and values, but because of the belief that you are resetting your streak and you just lost all of your progress. You lost all of these benefits. You think that you need to count your days because if you get on day 90, then the habit is then removed, and that obviously keeps porn as part of your identity. You spend hours on recovery content and that steals your time, your mental energy, and so on. And you have this belief that, oh, I'll live once I'm clean. And that means that you keep on delaying all of these goals, all of these projects, all of these meaningful things. Then you have the Effortless Method where you understand that you always have free will every single time. This is not just accountability. Or pressuring you that, oh, look, you have free will, therefore just don't watch porn. No, it's understanding that you can feel in control all of the time. You understand that it's about perceived value. And I highly suggest watching my other videos on that topic to understand it more in depth, that you don't need to also suppress your thoughts and desires. You can just change your relationship with them and then they'll just disappear. You can remove the moral incongruence by realizing that you do it because of perceived value. You do it because of specific reasons and that you're not just addicted, that there's nothing wrong with you. You're not flawed. You're not addicted. Your brain is not messed up. That there's no streak. You can just move on like it was never a thing to begin with. You can invest your time in what actually matters, that marriage, that family, becoming that role model for people around you in your community. You can start living now. And that is the solution, the Effortless Method. The left side here, the fighting model, steals your life. It makes everything worse. It makes it harder to quit. And you spend so much time fighting it and the right side gives it back. Think about it like this. Okay. Imagine a kid falls on a playground and he just brushes it off. You've probably seen videos about this, or maybe you even seen it in real life where when a kid just falls and there's no one around him, maybe he cries for like a few seconds or maybe he looks at his knee because he just fell on his knee and then he just brushes it off and continues on playing. But the moment an adult runs over screaming, are you okay? That looks terrible. Now the kid is crying and he stops playing. He stops what he was doing. And we realize that the fall isn't the problem. The adult's panic was. Porn is the fall. The recovery industry is the adult. They ran over and said, you have a disease. You've lost control. You need 90 days, this and that. That made it feel impossible. Remove the panic, remove the perceived value, and what's left? A choice you don't want. And not just a choice you shouldn't make, a choice you don't want intrinsically. You don't want to make anymore. So in conclusion, let me bring this together. You've been told that quitting porn requires a battle, that it takes 90 days minimum, that you need accountability partners, blockers, journals, Apps, forums, cold showers, and constant vigilance. And what has all of that gotten you? More time thinking about porn than you would have if nobody had told you to fight it to begin with. We've seen that these psychologists, and it's not to say that their opinions is the objective truth, but we can clearly see what their perspective is, that fighting it first of all makes it, makes the thought stronger, that the guilt and shame is what creates the feeling of addiction because of how you interpret it, and that the addiction label itself is not even supported by diagnostic evidence. Fighting is the problem. So here's my challenge to you. Stop fighting it and start asking yourself the real question. What is it that I know I need to do that I haven't done? Not about porn, about your life, your routine, your environment, your health, your relationships, your goals. Just recently, I did an interview with Dr. Stanton Peele, a psychologist that wrote various books on the topic of addiction. And one of the things that he said is Look, sometimes the solution is just to have self-efficacy. I have this belief that you can actually change your life around, that you can pursue something that's meaningful to you. Just like Viktor Frankl talked about in his famous book, Man's Search for Meaning. Sometimes you just need these little things. You don't need the next technique, the next method, because every hour you spend fighting porn is an hour stolen from what actually matters— your marriage, your family, your business. Your faith, your future. Porn is not your enemy. Your wasted potential is. And if you want help quitting this stuff, not just a 90-day fight, not another program to fail at, but an actual shift in how you see porn so that quitting becomes effortless and all of that energy goes back into your life, there's a link down below to book a free call. The years you spent fighting, you can't get those back, but you can stop the clock right now. And this is what I hope for you and start spending every hour on what actually matters. This is what my clients, my students, they describe. They don't describe quitting porn. They describe getting their life back, feeling free, like something clicked and they just moved on. And then they built the business, got the woman to marry, deepened their faith, became the man they always knew they could be. Not because they won a battle, because they stopped fighting one. It's Samir Gardner.
