Research-Based Strategies to Quit Pornography
This article is going to be a bit longer, so let’s get straight to the point:
Below is a very concise summary of a recent study (Bőthe et al., 2021) showing the effectiveness of using specific tools to aid in quitting pornography, including 264 participants. At the end of this article is a combination of an interpretation of the results of the study and a guide in how you can use them to construct your own personalized plan to quit pornography in a way that resonates with you.
The Participants used in the Study
To make sure that the participants used in the study were experiencing problems as a result of their use of pornography, the study used the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale (PPCS), which is a self-assessment of how individuals evaluate their own level of problematic pornography usage.
The PPCS has a total score of 126, and a score of 76- and above indicates that the user has a high risk of problematic pornography usage. The participants in this study reported high levels of problematic pornography usage (with a median value of 80.8 on the PPCS), and 1/3 of participants had sought treatment for their pornography use before. Most participants used pornography regularly, with a total of 1/3 using it more than seven times a week, and spending almost an hour using pornography per session.
The specific negative effects of pornography usage experienced by the participants in this study were:
Self-perceived addiction to pornography
Cravings to use pornography
Low levels of confidence in one’s own ability to abstain from pornography
Going into the study, the 264 participants were split into two roughly equally-sized groups:
The intervention group, which was the group subjected to the experimental treatment expected to help participants quit pornography
The waitlist control group, which were not subjected to any kind of treatment, and were used as comparison to the intervention group to see if the treatment had a decreasing effect on participants’ problematic pornography usage
Interestingly, there were significant differences in how many participants in each of these groups completed the study, with only 11% of the intervention group completing the six-week treatment, compared to 55% of the waitlist control group remaining in the end of the study. Instead of simply interpreting this as a disappointing turnout, we can theorize that this may be a reflection of how challenging quitting pornography actually is, as is the case often described in online-forum reports of the taxing mental effects experienced by individuals committing to abstinence from pornography.
To support this theory, we have additional information about the participants who dropped out of the study: Participants who dropped out reported higher satisfaction with their life in general, but at the same time had higher intensity in their cravings to use pornography. While further studies will have to explore the exact meaning of this connection, it gives us the implication that the more you feel like your life is not looking the way you want it to, and the more control you have over your urges to consume pornography, the more likely you are to complete the process of quitting pornography for good.
The Nature of the Study
The intervention used to aid participants in quitting pornography consisted of six modules:
The first module provided information about the intervention, and motivated subjects to reflect on what their own use of pornography looked like
The second module assisted participants in identifying situations that often brought a risk of using pornography, and informed participants of strategies in how to deal with these risks
The third module reflected on methods to change habits that led to the use of pornography, and how to replace these habits with activites that brought more positive emotions
The fourth module identified triggers for cravings to use pornography, and gave examples of methods to reduce the intensity of cravings
The fifth module taught participants the concept of automatic negative thoughts, and methods to challenge these thoughts with more constructive introspection
The sixth module reviewed the content of previous modules, the achievements made by participants during the process of the intervention, and helped participants construct a plan to prevent relapses back into using pornography
The Results of the Study
The participants who used the study’s pornography-quitting tools had significantly lower scores on the PPCS self-evaluation than participants in the waitlist control group. After the six-week module was complete, participants had decreased their PPCS scores to below the 76-score cutoff, and therefore no longer qualified as having a high risk of problematic pornography usage. Meanwhile, participants in the waitlist control group remained within the high-risk zone.
This was also true in scores of frequency of pornography usage, participants’ self-perceived addiction to pornography, participants’ craving to use pornography, and in participants’ belief in their own capacity to abstain from pornography. Furthermore, the study showed that the participants who completed the six-week intervention did not change their perception of moral incongruence in pornography. This gives some credit to the results of the study not being a side-effect of participants’ perception that they were acting in line with their moral values, as was the theory in our last article discussing the positive effects of abstaining from pornography.
The Way to Quit Pornography
Interpreting the characteristics of the participants used in the study and the results of using the study’s intervention to aid in quitting pornography, here is a point-by-point instruction of which parts you need to include in your battle-plan to quit pornography for good. The points used here are presented in the order in which they should be followed throughout your journey, and are inspired by which parts of the study’s intervention were perceived as most useful by participants.
A description of your usage of pornography
What do you usually do just before viewing pornography?
What are the pros and cons of your usage?
What strategies have helped you abstain in the past?
What are your personal reasons for change?
What resources do you have available that could help you?
Read about others’ experiences
Keep track of your progress, e.g using a diary
Why you use pornography, and how you can change it
Listen to your thoughts and feelings that arise after using pornography: What do they tell you? Are you using pornography to suppress certain negative emotions?
What are your triggers? What events usually happen on days that you feel cravings to view pornography?
Keep in touch with friends, preferably a companion who is on the same journey to quit pornography. In this case, giving advice to your companion on effective strategies is shown to be very useful to your own progress.
What you can do to feel better without pornography
What fun activities can you engage in on times that you usually use pornography?
Repeat your personal reasons to quit pornography
Realize that good habits become long-lasting habits, if given time
What you can do about your cravings
Inspect your cravings: What are they telling you to do, in specific terms? When you imagine them, how do they look?
Read our discussion of how pornography affects the brain to learn about how cravings work as a function of a dopamine deficit, and what to do about it
Construct your own personal plan to handle cravings: Using the knowledge you have about how cravings work and how they can be handled, what strategies do you think would help you decrease the intensity of a craving?
Your behaviors, emotions and thoughts
Identify the negative thoughts that occur automatically in your mind when you think about your use of pornography, for example “I’m not strong enough to quit” or “I don’t have interesting hobbies to replace pornography”
Make a list of rational responses you can give your negative automatic thoughts to put them in their place, for example “I’m strong enough to quit because I’ve quit bad habits before” or “I can make my habits more interesting to me, or I can always get new ones”
How you can preserve your success in quitting pornography
Go back and review your notes on previous points: What points felt most useful to you? What strategies worked the best?
Write a plan of how you will prevent use of pornography in the future
If you would like to apply to the actual program used in the study, called “Hands-off”, you can do that here
The Proven Benefits of using this method, using the study’s results as reference:
Getting yourself out of the risk-zone of problematic pornography usage, using your own measures of what you think is important
Decreasing your self-perceived addiction to pornography
Decreasing your cravings to use pornography
Strengthening your confidence that you can abstain from pornography
Reference
Bőthe, B., Baumgartner, C., Schaub, M. P., Demetrovics, Z., & Orosz, G. (2021). Hands-off: Feasibility and preliminary results of a two-armed randomized controlled trial of a web-based self-help tool to reduce problematic pornography use, Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 10(4), 1015-1035. doi: https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.2021.00070
