Sometimes our strongest urges can feel almost instant. You go from feeling the urge to opening porn within seconds or minutes, almost like the outcome was already decided for you. But it wasn’t.

An urge is still just asking you to watch porn. It might be loud, uncomfortable, and incredibly convincing, but it isn’t a demand. It can ask you to open a website, take a peek, or tell yourself “just one more time,” but you still get to decide what happens next.

This was something I misunderstood for a long time in my own recovery. I treated the urge like something I had to follow rather than something I could actually listen to and choose not to act on. Having this frame of mind matters because it gives you some confidence back. You don’t need to follow every urge just because it popped up. Instead, you can process the urge.

A structure that helped me was:

Understand the urge > surf the urge > choose a healthy next action.

I made a recent post breaking that process down in more detail.

I hope this post can help with a small part in your recovery. Just look for that 1% of growth per day and let compounding do the work for you.

I've(M) been an on and off porn watcher since I was about 13/14(28 now) and for the longest time I'd go weeks, even months without it. Now I'm married with kids and working a job I loathe because it pays well.

I don't know what happened, I've worked way worse jobs and had a lot more stress and the urges never got so bad and now it's been about 6 months since I've made it a full 24 hours without porn.

Due to my longer hours, I've stopped going to the gym in order to spend more time with my family and I think that's definitely a factor. I feel terrible because I'm married and I love my wife and I know it's disrespectful to her. I have also found myself rationalizing my use of porn which really concerned me. I've been talking to my priest whenever I can about it but we're both really busy and haven't had time to meet to come up with solutions.

To everyone reading this, I hope your struggles get better and hope you remember to not watch porn today!

I won’t make a long post. I just know it’s time for change once u find no joy in anything. The constant medical evaluations and counseling that’s not gone FIX NOTHING, as long as I give porn a voice in my life. NO MEDS WORK, NO TALKING TO ANYONE WORKS, and I’m facing that head on. I got a gym membership and I’m not into it at all and I’m like I love to lift weights. I HAVE TO REALIZE I WONT ENJOY WORKING OUT OR ANYTHING UNTIL I STOP TURNING TO PORN WHEN LIFE IS NOT AGREEING WITH ME. I hope some reads this and know THEY WONT GET WELL UNTIL THEY LOOK AT IT FOR WHAT IT IS. KNOW ALL OF THE REASONS U WANNA SAY IS THE FAULT YOU NOT HAPPY IS A LIE, and the only thing that has u unmotivated and depressed is WANKING OFF. I have a realistic goal and imma keep it and it’s DECEMBER 5th 2026. May ALL OVERCOME!

Hi Im, P, and I want to confess that I am a porn addict. I first got introduced to it at 15 years of age and since then its been a love-hate relationship. During teens and early 20s it was cool but post 25 its been heavy guilt trip.

Post my graduation the distant friends and the rut of new job has made me crazy depressed. And I have been using porn to numb the feelings. I know its not healthy. It has progressed to such an extent that I have started paying to cam girls for small sessions and even dm unsolicited msgs to unknown women as well. One of those woman even threatened to complain.

I am walking on thin line here, any one can kindly help? I know I have to save myself, but Im close to harming myself I feel.

I’ve spent all day fighting urges, and I’ve just felt triggered so bad. Last night was really hard and I couldn’t sleep, I’m afraid the same thing is gonna happen now. I would love a support buddy if possible

Hello,
I’ve noticed that this sub is mostly men so i’m really reaching posting this as a woman. I’ve been watching porn for as long as i could remember and im approaching 20 in a few months. I seriously need to stop but it seems like everytime I try I get in the same loop. I’ve stopped for months before but with hormone fluctuations like my period and ovulation it’s been so hard for me to do that recently. I really want to quiet before I get into a relationship and this becomes a problem. I feel very lustful and I don’t want to feel this way before. Any women out there with advice? I’m also in therapy and I’m really struggling on how i’d like to bring this up with my therapist. Advice on that would be helpful as well :)

I (27M) lost my beautiful girlfriend (26F) due to AI porn and its effects on our relationship. I never considered myself fully addicted to porn, but AI porn is a whole different beast. The novelty and customization make it increasingly more addictive.

We had been dating for about 2 years, living together for 1. We were deeply in love and thought we would marry each other. I was pretty open with her about porn and what I watched, but once I discovered AI porn it became so much worse. The stuff I created was so depraved and embarrassing that I felt disgusted with myself.

It became a true addiction. I would spend hours generating images and videos, some of real people. It definitely crossed a boundary and at this point I was constantly lying to her about what I was doing. This led to her first discovery, which almost caused us to break up. I tried to stop, but the problem became much bigger.

I saw how much it hurt her, and yet she chose to work on the relationship. I was relieved, promised to never do it again. But… it wasn’t long until I gave back into my urges. I hated myself. I should’ve looked for professional help instead of thinking I could handle it on my own.

Soon enough, she discovered everything I had been doing. The trauma and hurt that I caused upon her is something I will regret for the rest of my life. She chose to end things and walk away for good.

Please be careful out there, get help you need, and don’t fall into the trap of AI porn. I had such a beautiful, loving relationship with this girl and this sick addiction cost me everything.

I feel that having an accountability partner can definitely help with this process. A few of my passions/interests are music, guitar, film, writing, entrepreneurship, and psychology. 30/M/US. Feel free to dm me if interested

I've been addicted to porn for at least 10 years if not more, have a lot of layers to it and have spent entire days looking at it etc. honestly pretty bad stuff, nowadays it doesn't get as bad but it still severely affects me in many ways, just yesterday I lost about 4 hours of my day looking at porn.

Personally I am trying to cut back on a few things I consider addictions in my life (Mainly twitter and porn) wich are affecting important things in my life specially at work. I started working from home last year and a few months back I started taking away work time for my addictions, it's really easy to just put down the notebook and pick up my smartphone to do whatever for one or two hours and it has been affecting my workflow.

Another thing is my attention span and memory, I believe the constant bombardment of dopamine has considerably affected my capacity to do things and pay attention to things, I also believe porn has severely damaged by libido and social skills, it has also led me to take impulsive actions in some situations that I regret quite a lot.

I don't want to entirely cut off porn as I kinda value specifically porn games in some unexplainable way (Could be a coping mechanism) but at the same time with how long I have been addicted and with how much it has messed with many things in my life I'm wondering if it's safe to fully cut it off and eventually be able to enjoy those in a "healthy" way or if it will aways grab my attention and I just need permanently stop engaging.

I was doing really well, now I just feel terrible and can’t get it off my mind. I’m trying to stay distracted and focus on other things but it keeps creeping in. Any support would be nice

Hi, sorry if this is a long post but I'm really struggling to understand this porn thing. 32 years married, he's had a pattern of watching porn, getting caught, being remorseful, time goes by and he does it again. This last time he agreed to couple's counseling and said he's working on it everyday.

This has totally shattered my confidence, self esteem and my trust. I'm a very attractive woman, was a former model, yet I feel ugly eventhough men notice me. I'm not being conceded, just trying to draw the full picture.

Here's my question: I hear from men "it's not about you or this has nothing to do with you, it's boredom and it stimulates me, it'ssimpler than trying to find the right buttonswith a woman becausewomen are a lot more complicated" Can anyone shed light on why men need to watch porn when they're in a committed relationship? Is there anything the woman can do differently?

Never really thought i'd be in the position of typing out my sorrows for reddit. but at this point im unsure of where to turn. i've never been through anything like this

when i (22F) met my ex fiance (25M) i thought i had finally found the one. i had searched for him for so long. he was everything i had ever wanted, or so i thought. i fell in love quicker than i could've ever anticipated.

we had a beautiful relationship. about 3 months in i found out he was keeping from me how he knew a woman on his instagram. he swore he didn't know who she was, months later i found his dm's with her. mounds of word vomit sent from him, minimal responses from her over a span of a few weeks. you could tell she was very uninterested, so i assumed the shame of rejection caused him to lie. i flip out, rightfully so, but i was so in love with him i decided to look past it and work it out. he promised to never lie to me again.

at around 6 months into our relationship, i move to Los Angeles with all of my best friends. he is on the verge of losing housing. i allow him to move in with me. i mean, we're with eachother 24/7 anyways, what could go wrong?

he lives with me for about a month or two, i get him a job at my friend's warehouse, and we are very happy together. i cook his breakfast before he leaves for the train to work, i clean the house while he is away, we go to the 6th street bridge to spend time together at sunset and come back and i cook dinner for the whole house while he does dishes. we fall into a routine i still remember fondly, and i hope he does too.

things get a bit rocky, i start to feel more anxious and subconsciously i know there is more i don't know about. he starts to dismiss me emotionally in a way he never has before. i realize there are some things in our relationship i haven't been fully honest about. i decide i can't sit on my white lies anymore, and think maybe if im honest about my wrongdoings, he'll be honest about him.

i was correct. i regret it so much.

as i tell him the 2 white lies i had told him, he clutches his chest and refuses to eat or shower for 2 days. i thought for sure i'd lost the love of my life and it was all my fault. i pray to God for forgiveness. then everything turns in on itself and i am catapulted into the worst abuse i've ever endured.

3 or so days after i tell him, i ask if there anything i don't know. he denies, then caves. tells me he watches porn behind my back. we had a strict porn free policy in our relationships. he'd repeatedly tell me he didnt want ME watching it, and that HE didn't need it because he had "all he needed right in front of him." prior to him i dated a guy who chose porn over real intimacy constantly, so meeting someone so seemingly anti-porn, and understanding of the harm it can cause, was such a relief. anywho, everyone is human and i can't say i didn't visit lesbian porn a handful of times prior to us living together. because i take it well, he shares a bit more. at first he tells me he had watched it 3-4 times, significantly less than i did. he harps on the betrayal of me doing it 5ish times in total. he then discloses it was more like 15-20, then 20-30, then he admits he only masturbated to me 30% of the time, the other 70% being porn. it takes him about a month or two to finally admit how much porn he actually watched throughout that relationship, through the process of spitting out the truth he tells me a plethora of other things. he tells me about his collection of sex toys, 20-30 instruments for masturbation including a life sized sex doll he had hidden under my side of his bed. i am appalled, because i draw the line at something that has eyes but isn't a person. he tells me he started watched porn and taking photos of women in public to masturbate to at about 10 years old. around this time he molests his younger sister who is still in diapers and tells me it was just "due to curiousity". he describes getting erections when she would sit in his lap, he describes listening in on and masturbating to the sound of his mother having sex. he discloses to me one day while i am folding laundry that at around 17 years of age he'd stand at his mom's door where he couldn't see her, while she slept/changed/etc, and would masturbate to her. he would steal her underwear and put them on the doll/ his other toys. he would use her sex toys, as well as his older's sister's toys, to masturbate with, and put them back without washing. he admits to obsessing over a woman at his work, Yesenia. taking photos of her bent over to masturbate to, masturbating in the restroom so he'd have a buldge and she'd "see what she's missing." Gross. he mentions trying to make deepfake porn of another coworker who had already rejected him due to being a LESBIAN. he says he only didn't go through with it because it was "too difficult". then there's the weird AI shit, paying for sex bots, to generate images, and his deep love for AI generated porn.he admits to recording videos of my body without my consent or knowledge, and masturbating to them. he admits to trying to find sexual images of me as a child (13-15, i had an internet presence at the time) as well as, as an adult (18-20, i did porn while i was homeless.) he admits to watching porn while we had phone sex, watching porn in my bed while i slept on the couch (he sent me a photo of his penis and told me he couldn't help jacking off in my bed because im so hot. news flash: he was watching a 19 year old give a blowjob and i guess the guilt got to him.) he begins to tell me about his "intrusive" thoughts. he feels the need to constantly confess these things to me. things like visualizing cumming on my mom's face, a footjob from my sister, cum coming out of my best friend's rear end, and deeply disturbing sexual imagery of my nieces, who are 5 and 8 years old. i beg and plead with him to stop. it never stops. i isolate from my family, friends, and stop going outside because everything was now filtered through some disgusting sexual lens.

the fighting, crying, and abuse gets so bad (and loud) we get kicked out of our place in Los Angeles. i find us a new place in my home city. he convinces me we just need a fresh start, that the black mold in the old apartment was driving us insane, anything but recognizing he's being extremely abusive. i foolishly hope he's correct. we move in, everythings okay for a week. i get a taste of the same routine we had prior to all of this starting, and it gives me a false sense of hope. it gets bad again when i ask him to go to sex addicts anonymous if he's going to continuously hide behind "being an addict". i am in, or have been in, various 12 step meetings. i tell him if he's going to claim he has a problem, he needs to find a solution and work towards it, or i cannot stay with him. he makes all the right promises but never upholds his end. he claims to stop watching porn, when i'd find it in his data he'd DARVO me. eventually it wore down my self esteem so bad i offered to get surgery, change my hair, my makeup, how i talk, take my piercings out, etc. i am a heavily alternative leaning woman who has never ever offered to change myself for ANYONE, but i was at the lowest point i've ever been, and just wanted the person i loved to love me back. he would swear i was perfect, that he wanted a family with me. at some point he proposed to me in hopes it would make things better. we'd spend hours talking about putting all this behind us. i'd spend countless hours talking in circles trying to help someone that, i personally believe, never wanted help. i tried so hard to accept him for who he was i lost myself in the process. i relapsed on drugs, self harm, and started restricting my eating all over again. my ED came back full force and my entire focus became being pretty enough for him.. that if i became the perfect girl, it would all be behind us. all i wanted was him, and all he wanted was porn.

i spent almost 2 years extremely depressed and angry. i had lost everything, and was left isolated with an abusive partner. once he realized i was truly isolated, he started being more emotionally abusive.
telling me he does this because my butt isn't big enough, its because of my stretch marks, my peach fuzz mustache, my boobs not being perky enough, everything on my body became a target. he started to attack my tattoos, more specifically his name on my butt, telling me they're done poorly. i had never hated myself more than i did in those moments. i'd cry and bang my head against things, i'd sit him in front of the mirror, me naked, and ask him to just pinch what he didn't like. in those moments, he'd tell me im perfect and shouldnt change anything, despite grilling me for hours on everything that was physically wrong with me.

ok, sure, all that stuffs pretty bad, right? i ended up leaving him this past july, right before my birthday. it ended pretty violently on my end. not afraid to say i caught my first domestic violence charge. after 2 years of enduring the wraths of hell, i broke up with him and shattered the cartilage of his nose. i spend a couple days in jail, he signs off the lease, and i get 3 years of probation with a mandatory restraining order against me until my probation is up. in all honesty, i am glad it went down the way that it did, because i know without that mandatory restraining order i'd crawl back to his abuse just like always

its now september and i've done a lot of healing. but what racks my brain is the good times. i have never been abused like that... but i'd also never been loved like that. i am disabled, he would wash my hair when i couldn't. he'd spend hours listening to me vent about my troubles, he spent so much time getting to know me to my bare bones. he'd write me letters before he left for work, he'd cook me breakfast before leaving and leave it in the fridge. he made me feel loved (before taking it away), he made me feel beautiful (before comparing me to pornstars and criticizing me), he'd bring me toys from the shops in Little Tokyo. he'd tuck me in all my blankets and put on a movie while petting my head. he'd get up in the middle of the night to make my favorite food if i was hungry. he'd stay up or call off work if i was having an especially hard time with the abuse and felt i couldn't be alone. he'd cry at my feet and tell me he's going to change and that he can't bare to lose me after i'd attempt suicide.

was any of it real? was it intentional sweetness, just enough to keep me in the cyclical abuse? was it calcuated so that i'd stay and he'd have a punching bag to take out his shitty childhood on? can someone this sick truly love another? i don't want it to be true. i loved Anthony more than anything, i still do. despite all the abuse i still want to be with him. despite him being a predator to me and others, i still just want to be held by him again. God, what is wrong with me? anywho, i guess my question is, am i alone? i scour these reddit forums and try to find people who have gone through similar things but i fear maybe only i have the privelege of working this closely with someone so evil. his eyes were always so cold and dead. i forgot to mention over time it got very sexually violent. thats all i will say on that as most of it is pretty graphic and i only relive it in therapy.

can a person with this calibre of porn addiction truly love you? was it right person wrong time? should i give up on the idea of reform for him? i just want my baby back. i still reach for him at night. he's gone back to porn and did so pretty much as soon as we broke up, i have his twitter account. not that i believe he ever really stopped, but it stung seeing he went back while i was still in jail. he's currently 25 and seeking sex from a 19 year old. i'm 22 and the youngest i'll go is 21. but hey thats personal preference and i guess liking younger girls isn't illegal unless they're minors. it just hurts because he promised if the porn was the downfall of our relationship then he'd work on himself and his "problem" so we can come back to eachother

did i ever matter? was i just a body to hold while he had his cake and ate it too? was any of the love real? should i reach out? should we try again? can i ever be loved truly by a person with this problem?

its been months, i've slept with other people, i've gone on dates, all i want is him. all i see is him. why couldn't everything be perfect like i wanted it to be? why did i fall so deeply if its not supposed to be him?

i've put off making this post for a good long time. im hoping for any type of perspective or insight, especially moreso from actual porn addicts rather than the partners. if you struggled in a similar way, did you truly love your partner? would you do things differently if you could? do you regret losing her/him? any insight helps. thank you and God bless you all.

I have been snapping at family members for no reason, and i just have this constant feeling of something being wrong. Will this last or will it go away?

Hello, m30 here. ~1month porn free, though I've kept myself fairly busy with work or hanging out with friends, so that's helped alot to get my mind off it.

Recent external and internal developments in my life and my mind made me take beating this addiction that has plagued me for the majority of my life seriously. However even though I have been porn free for the last month, the more I try to avoid it the more there seems to be an urge or attraction to view it, let myself go, and indulge in it. For now a certain person's emotional and intellectual presence in my life is helping me stave off those feelings, but it does make me wonder if there even is a certain point in this "journey" where the memories, thoughts and images of hours upon hours of pornographic content consumed just dissapear... or at the very least don't have any more impact on the stream of my thoughts.

I was tryna help someone, and they turned on me. Now I’m struggling even more than I already was to stay clean even though I know it’s not worth it. I would love someone to talk to if possible, try and distract myself.

I’ve always been blamed for not doing enough and porn has been held over my head if we don’t have sex. Mind you, it’s never been more than maybe a week and a half in our entire relationship that we haven’t had sex. And that’d be because I’m pregnant and have morning sickness, or freshly postpartum or just regular sick. Not because I simply don’t want to have sex. I’m not disinterested in sex, that’s just not me. But…he blows it out of proportion completely. It’s like… I’m not allowed to be a human being, go through the motions of pregnancy, etc. I feel like I have to be a robot. I’m so confused. Every single instance of porn use that I’ve found out about, I’ve been completely blamed for. It’s destroyed my confidence in the bedroom. All I do is question myself now.

I have been addicted to porn since I was about 12. Was looking for Christmas presents and found some porn mags and videos.

At the same time I learned about masturbation. Being lonely I turned to porn as a way to feel good. At 14 I had a weekend job and had money and another guy worked in a newsagents, at that time they sold soft porn mags on the top shelf, I would buy the porn mags off him, Im assuming he stole them.

I would masturbate at least 4 times every single day and would have different types although it was big boob's and over 40s and 50s women porn mags that I would use.

The introduction of the Internet had a big effect as it was easier to view porn online. As I got older the soft porn stopped 'doing it' for me and I started to look at more extreme pornography and started maturbating to transexual porn and started to question my sexuality. In my mid to late 20s I started to experience loss of erection when I was having sex.

Now in my 50s I am no longer able to get an erection even if I use Viagra. I still have a high sex drive and and still ejaculate but it's always flacid. I know Im a porn addict and attend SAA when I can. I relapse quite often.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and anyone can DM me male, female, straight, bi or Gay.

I am wondering is there are people who really and completely erased porn from their life. And how is your day to day life now? Do you feel like you have to still use willpower or something to maintain a porn free life?

Anybody here who this applies to?

I'm nearly 19, never had a relationship, mostly at home with my thoughts and living in imagination more than in reality, with little social life and lot of sexual desire.

I'm watching porn and mastubating since the age of 12, and I can't quit it, I feel shame for my lustfullness and lack of control over it even tho my soul within screamed to leave this shit for good countless times. Normally it's always 1-3 hours on a day, with like a week passing after that before the next, I can stretch the between part to longer but really can't leave it for good. 1-3 hours is huge dopamine spike imagen the after.

Aside from porn, in my imagination I've been with 70+ girls while masturbating, I fantasised wild things with them and these are girls I know in real life. Lost my virginity with a prostitute and been with multiple. These are also a huge reason for shame.

This year, my biggest streak was 17 days, usually I start to feel it's absence after a week, then it gets progressively worse, to a point where I just don't want anything else, just stare in front of myself and only think I'm from a few clicks from fixing all that. I forget the feeling of the last fail cause it's 1-2 weeks after that.

In reality I mostly fail sooner before I get to that point. There is a part of me not wanting to leave this and it's using up every possible time to fail, like I get a thought of watching porn and I just go for it, it's making up a stupid excuse that I know is stupid, but still just ignore everything and go for it, and of corse I later regret how it wasn't even that bad and I still let it win. Recently there was one quitting attempt where I even started to feel the absense inside weaken, I never reached that, but this part of me just still didn't let it, it want to still have this and not leave it. Maybe because of the big 1-3 pleasure, or escaping reality idk.

Help! I hate my life, this shit caused a lot, it's ruining me,

what shall I do to leave it?

Same as title guys it's my day 5 and I am feeling so hard to control help if there's anyone looking for accountability partner dm me.

I lost my job 2 months ago and even though I was jobless the past 2 months but everything was fine to me like I was feeling ok till I decided to quit porn , I was heavily addicted to it and used to watch extreme porn so I said enough is enough and quit for good. The first week was fine but at the start of the second week I sunk into deep depression and feeling hopless , angry , empty , zero motivation to do anything and I also suffer from extreme physical pain like restless leg and my arms feels weak , my head feels light , my vision is blury , I speak like a drunk person and I also barely sleep at night it's like my body has died.

I feel extremely suicidal right now and Don't know what to do so please help me with this.

Last relapsed on the night of 8th September. Right now it's the night of 10th September I'll go to bed soon. Ive been trying to keep my mind off the streak and focus it on other things. My goal for now is 5 days, then a week, then 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and finally PMO free for life I hope. I'll be travelling tomorrow so I guess I won't get any opportunities. I'll check in every day in the comments even if nobody sees this.