Hi. I'm also a guy who quit porn using Easypeasy. I have relapsed after reading around 36 times. But I still got up and I finally won. Through my losses I've found out most reasons why people relapse after reading the book. I will explain the problem and how to fix it. You can save this post and come back to it if you want.
The problems are:
Moping and not rejoicing
Honestly, the MAIN thing I saw when I saw people relapsing was that they weren't happy. They were sad, and they were forcing themselves to smile. They kept failing BECAUSE they thought they were being deprived, as when you relapse, you get that moment of happiness. Even worse, when you've had a bad day, a relapse makes the effect of porn even more. Your subconscious immediately doubts the book and says "Why do you believe Hackauthor? This is fun. Stay here, and ignore the book"
Sadly, this doesn't last. An hour later, depression rolls around, and now the user is back to being miserable. They read the book, then depressed, make another empty "final visit" promise. And then they fail. And this becomes a cycle.
How to quit this? Honestly, if the mindset is the problem, then mindset is the solution. STOP thinking that you'll fail anyway, STOP thinking that this time isn't different, STOP thinking that you're being deprived of pleasure. When you tell yourself that you're gaining things, this time WILL be different, and believe in yourself, you'll definitely feel better. A quote that I thought of the time I quit:
"No point in quitting this addiction, no point in working hard, no point of achieving something, if you cannot believe in yourself."
Timing
Apart from mindset, I've noticed so many people relapse with the excuse "Well, you can quit next time." This issue has already been spoken about in the book, but I want to give the core message out again.
This excuse, that you'll quit next time, is something WHICH WILL KEEP YOU IN THE TRAP UNTIL THE DAY YOU DIE. Stop kidding yourself. You have to quit someday, and this addiction will keep getting more intense every time you relapse. Each time you relapse, you make the thought cemented in your head, that relapsing is good. That watching porn is better than quitting. That being a PMOer is better than being a Non-PMOer.
With that happening, no way will you win. So make that decision, the decision that you WON'T watch porn again. When you make it clear that you're done, withdrawal pangs are usually reduced a lot.
There's one condition, however. Which is, of course, the mindset. It's been talked about in the first point. Be happy, don't live life thinking you are being deprived.
Brainwashing
This subreddit is filled with people who say they're relapsing because they say they "Cannot get the brainwashing out of their head". Well, that's because you cannot, not immediately at least.
No matter how much you read Hackauthor's advice, the brainwashing isn't gonna go away immediately. That's why it's recommended to focus on your frame of mind. With a correct one, the brainwashing is beaten. Soon, after a few days, the brainwashing slowly disappears.
To this point, I just think you need to have a good understanding that brainwashing isn't something that goes away in a minute. It'll go only after a few days.
Work
Another thing I saw was that people think that beating porn takes effort and work. Hence when they have a bad day, they think quitting porn is adding onto the work they do. Thing is, it isn't. If you have the wrong mindset, it will.
I sound like a broken record at this point, talking about mindset in every point, but that should show you that it's the most important thing in quitting this addiction. Don't think that quitting porn is hard. Of course there will be withdrawal pangs. If there weren't, there wouldn't be any addicts. But if the brainwashing is gone, and you keep telling yourself that there are no advantages to internet porn, then soon you see it yourself. It's that simple.
Long term effects of quitting
Finally, the authenticity and plausibility of being happy when quitting. A final excuse people give when trying to quit is that "Do you really think you'll be happy when you quit?" This mindset really ends up making your entire attempt screwed.
The solution to this, is actually the most tricky one I faced. The last attempts I was quitting, I thought of this. In fact, I thought that if I forget the book, and get back into my practice of being a PMOer, I'll be happy.
But this mindset broke the last time I relapsed.
The depression, the sadness, and the guilt that I felt were too great. Whether I like it or not, the brainwashing is gone. I now truly see porn in a more detailed light than before. I've relapsed and I've failed so many times, why not NOT PMO once and see how that is?
11 days later, the last chain of porn broke. I had my moment of revelation, and I realized that I don't need porn anymore. I never had, I currently don't, and I never will. From there, I've had freedom.
What happened to me, is what I recommend you think about. Do you think you'll be happy while watching porn? I don't think I ever will. But you should make that decision.
These are the main reasons people relapse while quitting porn. I'm open to suggestions as to change the advice. Lemme know what you guys think!
After reading u/Hot-Standard9717’s post “I’ve cracked it”, I realized that I, too, had a similar realization and have since put it into words. For context, I helped a bunch of people here with my post a few months ago called the GOD NOTES, where I summarized EasyPeasy and The Freedom Model and had a very specific instruction of telling people to read it a specific number of times. I found that there's been a lot of success for people who relapsed after EasyPeasy and have since been curious as to why. This post explains why it's successful.
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There is no “porn addiction” (Freedom Model), we all have the choice to either use PMO or not use it. There is no magic PMO monster who takes over our bodies and forces us to watch PMO. There is no loss of consciousness where we have an urge and suddenly lose the memory of what happens next. What actually happens is that we get an urge, which is our body’s response to a stimulus or feeling, and then we decide what to do with it. Often times we get an urge and then decide to PMO. This post is about mindfully understanding this decision-making process, and making us conscious of it.
How do we end up using PMO? After creating my hacknotes post where I prescribed reading the notes every day for 7 days, I realized something. By reading the reasons why I shouldn’t PMO and the common delusions that led me to using PMO, I had an internal defense system where an urge would come but I would have 20-30 reasons permanently memorized as to why I didn’t want to relapse.
I then understood that PMO usage is a decision-making process that begins with an “impulse”. This can best be described as the stimulus that leads to an “urge”, this comes from internal feelings like anger or loneliness, to external ones like seeing a pretty girl in an ad, or a racy scene in a movie. Once you get that impulse you then mentally decide what to do with it, either choosing to use PMO to feel good or ignoring the feeling and letting it pass. For those who aren’t “addicted”, this "impulse to decision-making" process is instantaneous and doesn’t require a lot of mental friction.
I call this process the "Impulse-Decision Model".
If you are someone who is a user and doesn’t have an issue with it, it is a very fast “impulse to decision making” process. Think about it, if you enjoy using PMO and have no quarrel, you will get an impulse to use, and then you will think about it for a second, whether you want to at the moment or are busy, if you have time, etc, and then you will PMO. It can take a few seconds, but often times for the most “addicted” users, the process of going from impulse -> decision making -> to outcome, can happen in less than a second. Think about it, when you were in the deepest part of “addiction” and PMO’d multiple times a day, did you sit and debate before every session? No, oftentimes it would be a quick thought and then you’d fire up the browser.
However, as someone who wants to quit PMO, the decision-making part of this model becomes a battlefield. You have an “impulse”, something like seeing a sexy ad by accident and getting an “urge”, or feeling angry and sad and wanting a reprieve, which sends an urge to PMO. Once you get this impulse/urge feeling, you have an internal battle, a conundrum.
Part of you wants to PMO and feel good, the other part of you doesn’t. You have an internal battle and feel bad, eventually you either give in, or you decide not to while feeling bad or deprived, a phyrric victory in which you believe you will eventually give in to but at least not now.
Now let’s take a step back for a second and look at the big picture. You probably can imagine that this “Impulse Decision Model” just sounds like a fancy way of saying “deciding”. But that’s because that’s all it is, we aren’t addicted to using PMO, we are deciding to PMO, we just happen to delude ourselves into making the WRONG decision.
Have you ever seen a delicious extra large cake in an ad or store? How come you didn’t buy it and eat it immediately? Devouring thousands of calories worth of sugar, which is scientifically proven to increase dopamine?
How come when most men see a beautiful person and feel lust, they don’t turn into a caveman and rush to have sex with them or MO on the spot?
These decisions are so ridiculously obvious that we don’t even have to think about making a decision. In my case, if I see an extra large cheesecake, I know it can be tasty and I get a nanosecond urge to want to eat it, but then I remember that I’m lactose intolerant, don’t like to consume sugar, and eating an entire cheesecake would make me sick. I remember these things so fast that the entire impulse to decision-making process in this scenario would last less than a second. That is how confident I am that I wouldn’t enjoy eating an extra large cheesecake no matter how good it might taste and how much dopamine it would release. There are countless other things that could potentially make us feel good on a daily basis that we don’t do because of internal and external consequences that we have mentally ingrained into our self-image and personality (This post is aiming to help you do the same with PMO).
For someone who’s internal and external consequences are not as clear and their decision making process has more friction, the decision to NOT eat an entire cheesecake either goes in the other direction and is an afterthought resulting in thousands of calories being digested or becomes a mental battlefield where they anguish over the decision to eat the cake or not. This is food addiction.
After understanding this impulse -> decision making model, I am confident that you will view PMO usage the same way you might think about doing hardcore drugs or eating an entire cheesecake, things that might feel good in the moment but you don’t do for a number of reasons.
In this process we are going to make PMO’s impulse to decision process frictionless.
Now when it comes to PMO, we also have a similar dilemma as the cheesecake. Except, our decision-making process is a bit delusional.
We tend to have a lot of friction involved in the decision-making process, deluding ourselves by saying things such as
“It’s just a peek!”,
or
“I need it to feel good right now”.
Now let’s breakdown how we can think about using PMO with relation to this mental model.
When you feel an urge, imagine this mental model
When we get an urge to PMO, we MUST begin the process of imagining the Impulse-Model.
Okay, I have an urge to PMO, what is the impulse? How did I get this urge? Is it external, as in did I view something that caused thing feeling? Or is this internal, do I feel loneliness or a negative emotion that I want to eliminate through PMO?
Once this is identified you can thus begin the decision-making process.
Our goal is not to successfully defeat the urge to PMO in the decision-making process right now. Our goal is to identify the feeling of wanting to PMO, and then understand what our decision-making process is that results in the PMO session.
We have to imagine all the reasons that are pro-PMO in that instance, and what the consequences would be, then we can either choose to continue PMO’ing or decide against it. This is the beginning.
If you are not truly sure whether you actually want to quit PMO and whether quitting PMO is your happier option in life, then continue to PMO until you feel like quitting is your happiest option in life.
This part is important. We can never quit if we aren’t sure whether we actually want to or not. We can’t be motivated to quit because other people are telling us to, the EZPZ method commands us to, NoFappers tell us to, or for us wanting “benefits”.
You have to want to quit because you understand that your life is happier without PMO usage and your self-image is that of someone who doesn’t view PMO.
Now once you’re 100% sure you want to quit PMO, you will have the grounds to create a mental software that makes it so each time you get an urge you can instantly overturn every pro-PMO argument in the decision-making part of the model.
I’ve highlighted most of the notes from EZPZ and important parts of Freedom Model, I’ve also included more information and insight related to PMO usage and why quitting is the happier option.
Do as it prescribes, reading the notes everyday for a week, 3x 2nd week, then once the third week. By constant revision the mental software will become memorized in your brain and it will subsconsciouly come up whenever you have an urge and you have a delusional argument as to why you want to use PMO.
Our goal here is that, whenever you get an urge to PMO, you imagine this mental model and then during the decision making part, you remember every reason from the GOD notes or EasyPeasy or Freedom Model.
You visualize your impulse, where the urge comes from. Then you visualize the arguments that are pro-PMO and your mental reasons for why YOU want to quit PMO. You will have every argument against using PMO memorized and they will come immediately without too much thought. Once this mental software is incredibly strong, the impulse will get weaker, the pro-PMO arguments become weaker, and the decision to NOT PMO will require less mental friction.
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From studying Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and reading CBT books (David Burns) I've realized that the most beneficial way for your mind to make the neural connections here, you NEED to write down this exercise with the Impulse-Decision model in mind. You can use the image above as an example of how to structure it.
Next time you get an urge take a piece of paper and write down the following:
Where the impulse is coming from
What your reasons are for using PMO
What are your arguments against those reasons
Then write down what is the worst possible thing that will happen from deciding NOT to PMO.
Then write down your decision of whether you are using PMO or not.
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At this point in my life, when I get an urge to PMO, it reminds me of the cheesecake analogy. It’s something that pops up for a nano second before vanishing. It is just a thought that has no power over me and doesn’t require second guessing or mental arguments. My mental software is so strong that even coming across porn on the internet by accident doesn’t send an urge, I just let it pass and move on.
The reason why EasyPeasy is effective yet people continue to relapse isn't because of content. It's because either the person isn't sure they want to quit, or because they simply forgot what EasyPeasy said. We end up using PMO without ever understanding what is going on subconsciously and why we are making this decision, people end up lamenting that it is "impossible" to quit and that we have "addictive personalities" (doesn't exist). We are making decisions, and we are not being conscious of the decision making process; that's all that is happening.
Even if you decide to continue using PMO until you’re ready, USE this mental model of recognizing the impulse and where it comes from, the pro-PMO arguments and how they compare to the GOD notes and your self-image, and then CONSCIOUSLY DECIDE to to use PMO.
If you are ready to quit it will be the easiest thing you ever do.
I’ve tried EasyPeasy and AVRT before, but I keep coming back to The Freedom Model (TFM) because it seems like the approach that makes the most sense to me.
I understand the idea behind TFM: people change when they believe they can get greater benefits from quitting than from continuing to use. I also understand that cravings are just thoughts telling us that using will make us feel good.
My struggle is that, even though I know quitting would be good for me, I still choose the pleasure and good feelings I get from using. When the desire comes up, I focus on how good using would feel, and that pleasure seems more appealing to me than the benefits I know I could get from quitting.
I think this is the core of my problem. It’s not that I don’t understand that quitting would be beneficial. It’s that, in the moment, the pleasure I expect to get from using still feels more valuable to me than those benefits.
So, for those of you who successfully quit using TFM, I’d really like to understand what changed for you.
How did you find a benefit in quitting that genuinely made you choose it over the pleasure of using? What was it that made living without using more appealing than continuing to experience that pleasure?
Did you discover something you valued more than the feeling of using? Did your perspective on the pleasure itself change? Or did you gradually realize that you could get more enjoyment and satisfaction out of life without using?
Most importantly, how did you go from knowing that quitting was the better option to actually preferring it when you had the choice between using and not using?
I’d really appreciate hearing your personal experiences, what motivated you to quit, and what benefits you found that made the decision worthwhile.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this and share their experiences. I really appreciate it.
Disclaimer:
This is going to be somewhat of a rant i felt like i would never be able to experience the kind of life i wanted mainly because I believed it in my heart mind and soul being brown 5,7 and middle class was a huge setback. I,d be like atleast i can pleasure myself to the thought of getting intimate with the woman i wanted mainly. Basically checking out of the game without even playing. I kept believing id die in this third world of a country. Whenever i opened insta i saw my friends getting jacked and getting somewhere in life. But after experiencing deaths in family i realized life is short and i have a lot of control over my life what i need to do is just start taking responsibilities and start living so thats what i decided to do in 2024 i started reading self help books communication skills levled up i hit the gym went from 52kg to 64kg and then started cold approaching girls gained confidence fixed my teeth got confidence i felt like i was on a roll and nothing could go wrong. Well i failed exams and then went onto a spree with on and off usage i created an insta account that worked okay but every follower loss hit me. Long story short i came to a very important realization: life is happening rn infront of my eyes if i just even move and put little little effort id be much happier than avoiding and dreading later
I still dont have a gurl yes i have much more physical presence now do i have a job no but do i hate myself no im the one choosing no one else my decisions can shape my life.
I was able to fully internalise freedom model and was moving with confidence, but unfortunately, had a relapse and did edging. I know relapse idea is not in consistent with Freedom model.
But how do we deal with relapse, in case it happens? (From a freedom model perspective)
How do we get back the same confidence and mindset back which we got during fully reading freedommodel?
Created an account just to post this after a while on this sub anonymously (getting help from it).
For me, TEPM Audiobook (On Youtube) helped immensely, and each of the few times I read it all the way through, I went without PMO for the longest I have in my life (since I started). Something about this guy's voice just cuts clear through and the way he reads it is makes Easy Peasy so plain obvious.
The issue I've been having is the relapse, and I've seen other posters stress to go back to the text, or to your notes to prevent this, because wedo forget about how we dismantled the brainwashing.
I feel like the biggest barrier stopping me from doing this however has been the time it takes to reopen my mind to TEPM via reading notes, or re-reading the book entirely.
Because of the effectiveness of the audiobook, I wondered if I could remaster the audiobook into a version for people thinking about relapsing. So I went to genAI. (If you have ethical problems with genAI, I completely understand)
I went to Claude and uploaded the pdf of TEPM book (Available here) and asked it to write a script for elevenlabs.io 's voice generation TTS and to accurately and succinctly summarize important ideas in the author's own words and cater it to a person thinking about relapsing right now. Someone who's feeling the pang.
I also asked for a second, longer script that would go into much more depth for about 10 minutes worth of detail going over TEPM's key ideas.
I went to Eleven Labs and uploaded the original audiobook and cloned the narrator's voice (You can do this with a free trial).
I then pasted the two scripts and ta-da! I got two strikingly similar mp3's (slightly off) for me to play on any device whenever I need to.
I'm unable to put the files here so I put them on soundfiles.eu for you to see for yourself. If you think this may help you, I recommend repeating my process so you can edit the script yourself, however you like.
Thanks
Mindfulness will solve most of your problems in life but especially porn addiction. If you start practicing mindfulness you’ll be distinguish your actual thoughts, and intrusive thoughts that just come and go. Your mind is constantly thinking nonsense that means absolutely nothing; porn being one of those.
For me something I struggled with was having the intrusive thought come up and mistaking this for genuine desire. Anytime you get that pang you need to immediately start break dancing even if you’re in public, because you’ve been presented with an opportunity to change your life by taking a step in the right direction. It really is very easy.
Personally I prefer diaphragmatic breathing/meditation—but you can also just take long walks in the forest and just observe the thoughts that come and go. Something is always better nothing so if you can’t do 5mins try 3 or even 1 minute.
After reading EasyPeasy, I found it difficult to really remove the aspect of the brainwashing that views PMO as “good”. Sure I could understand the negative effects, I could understand that there were certainly no positive effects, but there was still some part of me that *wanted* to PMO. For whatever reason, I found it very difficult to shake off this part of me, and ended up, not relapsing, but peeking and MOing afterward having closed it.
I didn’t understand what brought me to doing that, other than there still being a part of me that wanted to do it. I read the “relapse” section of the book countless times, as well as the “just one peek” part, obviously. The analogy with bleach, from “Meditations of a Porn Addict” never sat right with me, maybe because it seemed too absurd and unbelievable. There can be no enjoyment in drinking bleach, right? I get that the metaphor is that there isn’t any enjoyment in porn either, but the thing is that there IS enjoyment in it. You do feel pleasure, dopamine is released and, even though you’re eventually back to your old rotten dopamine-starved self, for a brief moment you feel good.
After peeking once more later that day and feeling the fear and dread of eventually relapsing, I thought of another way of looking at it that has helped me push away both the fear and the part of me that wanted to continue in my addiction:
My main problem was that despite quitting, I was still looking at porn as some kind of forbidden fruit. This fruit, to me, tasted good when I ate it, and then I felt horrible afterwards but still had to keep eating the fruit every once in a while. Porn though, isn’t a fresh forbidden fruit. It’s not (for instance) a fresh apple, it’s like a rotten one. Think of sexuality as this apple, you can enjoy it fresh (by having actual sex), or you can eat it in its rotten state (watching porn). Sure, at first you may be curious to try the rotten apple. You take a bite, and for a (very) brief moment it may even taste quite alright, but not long afterwards you taste the rot, you feel bad, you may even feel like puking. Why did you eat the rotten apple? If you wanted apples, surely you should’ve just eaten a fresh one, right? But anyways, you didn’t, and now you feel stupid. I guess we can agree that eating rotten apples is stupid, and it would be especially stupid to go ahead and eat another one - you’ll just feel bad again, and probably even more stupid because this time you KNEW what it was going to taste like.
The point is - How long are you going to go around eating rotten apples, just for that one possible moment where they taste like a fresh one? Go get a fresh apple right now instead! Or don’t, you’re free to engage in as many non apple-related activities as you’d like. Whatever you do though, stop eating rotten apples. You know it’s bad for you and you don’t like doing it, so what’s the point in eating more of them? Go enjoy your life, free from the burden of forcing yourself to eat rotten apples!
Hello guys, I finished reading easypeasy a few days ago and had my final visit, I know that porn gives me nothing, I know that porn doesn't relieve anything and worsen emotional states.
I don't want to go back to porn ever again.
Its not for porn that I am craving, neither is masturbation.
I want to be loved and cared, I want to be hugged.
Although the little monster tries to convince me that I need porn to cope I know that I don't need this, I am a little afraid that maybe my brainwashing hasn't been undone.
Should I reread the book? Maybe I am not as stoic as I should?
(Sorry if this is written weird I am kinda writing it all in one go)
Hello all!
I would like to share a realization I had recently which changed my perspective on porn addiction.
I first read EasyPeasy a very long time ago, longer than I would like to admit. I read Rational Recovery, I read Burgeon, I read pretty much everything I could. I had various length "streaks", but none of them were extremely long. I knew I was still using willpower, but I just didn't know what to do. I felt lost, and like I would be doomed to continue trying the same things until I die.
Then, I read the Freedom Model book. (If you are looking for this book find a link for it on the subreddit and use the Internet Archive). I HIGHLY recommend reading this book (I read the 50 page one). None of these books on their own will make you quit, but this one will give you the necessary framing, especially if you have read EasyPeasy. This book focuses on the ideas that addiction isn't real, and everything everybody does is so that they can be happy.
I thought about this a lot, but I found myself going back to porn. I knew that logically I didn't like the side effects of it. I knew that the addiction made me depressed. I knew all of this. But there is one thing I never considered.
I enjoyed being an addict. I enjoyed the tension. It felt exciting, even if it was a bad kind of excitement. I think many people enjoyed being addicted. They enjoy the tension (even if they do not realize it) of trying to "remain free". They like the boost of confidence they get when they quit. It is not necessarily porn that they enjoy, but it is everything around it. The addict personality.
EasyPeasy doesn't really touch on this. It talks about how an "addict" mindset (which is good to know about), but not really about the "addict" personality. EasyPeasy (in my experience) just gives you tools to try and quit using willpower, without explicitly labeling it. That's what pretty much all this subreddit is. "What tool or tip or trick can I use to instantly become free?" Somebody else's knowledge isn't going to save you. This is stuff you need to understand on your own, and ideally formulate on your own. This may happen, but it may not happen for a given person. I am writing this in the hope that people are able to expand upon it on their own.
So what did I do?
I removed the tension. I stopped playing in the metaphorical tug-of-war. I did not do this by using tools or techniques or methods. I simply stopped putting porn on a pedestal.
Think of the concept of supply and demand. Theoretically, when supply is low, demand is high. The same is true for porn. Being an "ex-user" turns porn into a scarce material that, most of the time you can't access (whether voluntarily or involuntarily). But by accepting that you can watch porn at any moment if you really wanted, it takes away the demand.
I think there is more to it than that. Some smaller ideas that hold this framework together. It is important to understand that fear is self fulfilling, and that when you have decided to quit, any pang is just your brain reminding you of the past. But the key is understanding that you can choose. This is what freed me.
I would like to say one last thing. To those who read this and do not immediately see freedom, please do not start dooming. Any emotion that results from "failure" or "lack of understanding" is just going to become part of the cycle, and will do more damage. And do not think that you can read something 20x and it suddenly fixes you. You need to write. You need to come to your own understandings. You need to have your own experiences.
Write about the possibility that you enjoy addiction. See where this statement holds true. See where it is not true. But do not be dogmatic about this concept. The more you try and force yourself into believing that you hate everything about porn (which may or may not be true), the fact is that you go back to it for a reason. Not because somebody takes over your body and forces you to watch, but because you choose to. The more you force yourself into trying to believe something somebody writes online or in a book, the less time you spend actually understanding yourself.
Hey everyone. I'm in my mid-teens, and I have been struggling with a severe PMO addiction for the past four years.
In the beginning, it was mostly just a habit I couldn't shake. But over the last two years, I have fallen much deeper into internet and screen addiction. I now spend 3 to 4 hours a day consumed by adult content and talking to AI chatbots. It has taken over my life to the point where I don't have many memories from high school, and I recently had to switch to a distance-learning "dummy school" setup.
My tastes escalated drastically over time, and I started seeking out increasingly extreme content and audio escalation. I felt completely helpless. I used to use Reddit to feed my bad habits, but today I am turning over a new leaf and using this platform to fight back.
While locking down the apps on my phone this morning, I found an old recovery streak counter app hidden away. It had been running since late 2024 and showed over 600 days. Obviously, I hadn't actually kept that streak—I just forgot the app was there. But seeing that massive number made me realize how much time has passed and how badly I want that freedom to be my reality. I am so young, and I am genuinely scared for my future if I don't change right now.
I am quitting for good today. I have tried many times before on my own, but I never sought accountability or opened up to a community. I am ready to do this right.
I am looking for accountability partners to help stay on track. It doesn't matter where you are from or your age, as long as we can support each other.
Also, thanks for reading this. I used Google Translate to write this message from my native language to English, so it might sound a bit sloppy. I have been so addicted that I never even properly learned English or any other skill, but I am ready to learn now.
Any tips, advice, or support you can share would mean the world to me. Thank you for reading.
TLDR: I completed the book a month ago and felt hopeful about leaving the habit behind, but I relapsed after roughly 15 days (probably from overconfidence and the idea that a quick look was fine). I am trying to decide how to move forward. Should I reread the book? How should I manage setbacks? I would value suggestions from others who have encountered something similar. Thank you!
Long version: I have worked to reduce or end PMO use for a while. I used the Easyway method to quit cigarettes more than five years ago. I tried it with weed a few years ago but relapsed within days, and I finally stopped a few months later after panic attacks started. I was glad to find an Easyway book for PMO last month and read it. My earlier attempts depended on vigilance and standard behaviour management techniques from a therapist. They brought partial success but did not fully resolve the issue. Until about two years ago, I barely saw it as a problem or thought much about it. I used to engage daily. Over time, I drifted into content that does not interest me (trans stuff). I think I was pulled into “goon” culture while smoking weed and did not reflect much on it. Unfortunately, it continued after I quit. I try to avoid it, yet it returns. This worried me, so I spoke with a therapist. He offered some help -suggesting boundaries like screen time and gradual limits on use - which extended the gap to about four to seven days.
My best “victory” so far was about 40 days clean late last year. I used AI as a companion to manage the process. Most of the time, it relied on willpower. It felt great; I felt different in a positive way. I seemed to finally experience what I had avoided, such as sadness, loneliness, and excitement. My attraction to females rose sharply - not sexually, but through ordinary details like their smiles, speech, or hair. Then I relapsed for a few days and again stayed away for 40-45 days, likely aided by fasting, but I fell back after a relationship ended. I returned to the familiar pattern. I contacted the therapist again and noticed links between engagement and boredom or free time, mostly on weekends. Unfortunately, I have not surpassed five to seven days with his support. I gradually realized there is a limit to what he could provide, and it was my responsibility to address it.
At this point I discovered the easypeasy book, which felt like a genuine gift. I felt great while reading it and especially after finishing. I was quite happy during the first few days of avoiding PMO. Around the two-week mark, I had free time again and made the mistake of searching a term on Reddit, which gradually pulled me back into the trap. Unfortunately, I am back to the same old situation.
I believe I have the right motivation. I know what lies beyond this cycle; I saw it last year and during the two weeks away after easypeasy. I will keep trying to overcome it no matter what so I am reaching out to you all. If you have experienced a relapse, please suggest how to move forward. I know easypeasy is the only path, so I am starting the book again. I have read only the intro, but the relapse has sparked a fear that even this might not work. I hope I am mistaken. I am open to all suggestions. Thank you!
