Mitigating the depth of your relapse and general consumption

One thing we should attempt to work on, think through and aggregate resources around, is mitigating the depths of our relapses.

What this means is that, in the event that you have relapsed - you first need to realise your “fight” is not over. In my experience, a 10 minute relapse where I immediately commit to getting back on the horse is meaningfully less harmful than a 2 hour relapse than spirals into a weekend. For me this also extends into the specific kinds of material used (e.g., Instagram vs actual porn, pictures vs videos, generic vs my specific kink, one long video va compilations).

Although reasonable minds may disagree, a reasonable thing to work on if you’re constantly relapsing may be making your content more vanilla and making the whole ordeal shorter. Although I’m nowhere near done in my journey, it started with lowering how graphic and ridiculous the content I was consuming was and I’m now in a place where I view my giving up porn is inevitable.

For those whole care to know: M26, on 5 days of nothing, down from spending whole weekends masturbating a couple of months back.

Edit: also just noting that the impacts of masturbating for me were to the point where I would get sick if I did it very intensely. So the above helped me mitigate some of the worst effects/symptoms during my journey. Sidenote: if you’re going to relapse, work towards single videos and lasting 10 mins - it greatly decreases the onset of PIED.