I'm now reasonably confident that I've conquered my pornography addiction.
I decided to take on my pornography addiction shortly after getting married. My beautiful and talented new wife fell pregnant almost immediately, and the weight of my new responsibilities led me to audit and tackle my addictions. My worst addictions were all screentime related. I was addicted to porn, social media, general scrolling, and YouTube. I was one of those zoomers who couldn't resist the soothing mind wipe of the phone. My lesser bad habits were sugar and alcohol. My overall burden of addiction was not debilitating, but I knew that I would need to improve to uphold my own standards in work and fatherhood as my life became increasingly complicated.
My porn use was approximately daily, but more frequent whenever I was suffering acutely (i.e. a nasty bout of illness, a stressful time at work, etc.). I tried quitting with willpower alone several times, but that was insufficient. Making it inaccessible was a crucial crutch.
My technical solutions:
I set 1.1.1.1 family as my home's DNS server, with no fallback options. This fairly effectively blocks most hardcore pornography.
I followed the instructions here to do the same with my phone.
I set up a pi-hole and adblock on all of my devices to eliminate all advertisements, which can act as bait for my bad habits.
I also set lengthy xkcd style passwords for settings for these configurations, and wrote them down on a piece of paper buried in a drawer, to make the process of undoing these configurations work-intensive.
These changes were transformative. I occasionally found myself trying to relapse. I would try to visit problematic pages reflexively without any consideration. Hitting the blank DNS blocked page always knocked me out of that loop. Now I've gone ~6 months without porn use.
I've since applied the same general strategy to cutting down my garbage screen time in general. My wife and I canceled all streaming services, and reduced our media consumption to blu-rays from the local library. Choosing the media we consume days in advance has made us much more intentional and measured in our media consumption. I also blocked sites like facebook and reddit entirely.
The last addiction that I'm still struggling with is YouTube. I really enjoy YouTube so I haven't culled it entirely, but I have mitigated its addictiveness with browser extensions like socialFocus. These extensions eliminate video thumbnails, autoplay, recommendations on the video page, short form content etc. These changes make it harder to get sucked into a viewing loop, and make hysterical content less appealing. This has reduced my YouTube viewing time, but I still want to make further progress at paring my viewing down to only top-tier content.
Now that I have my digital addictions reasonably under control, I realize just what a toll I was suffering by letting others capture so much of my attention with agit-prop, demoralization propaganda, and superstimulus. I feel like I now have a greater emotional reserve. I can absorb bad news and chaotic situations more graciously, and I am enjoying life more. I feel like it's been particularly helpful in my parenthood, because I have more time and attention for my 9-month-old, and I can more easily withstand her tantrums without getting exasperated.
Next up will be my sugar and alcohol habits. Neither of these are particularly severe, but I do use these substances habitually more than I would prefer. Ideally I'd like to contain my excessive consumption of both refined sugar and alcohol to special occasions. I'm interested in feedback from the community on how best to tackle these.
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I'm now reasonably confident that I've conquered my pornography addiction.
I decided to take on my pornography addiction shortly after getting married. My beautiful and talented new wife fell pregnant almost immediately, and the weight of my new responsibilities led me to audit and tackle my addictions. My worst addictions were all screentime related. I was addicted to porn, social media, general scrolling, and YouTube. I was one of those zoomers who couldn't resist the soothing mind wipe of the phone. My lesser bad habits were sugar and alcohol. My overall burden of addiction was not debilitating, but I knew that I would need to improve to uphold my own standards in work and fatherhood as my life became increasingly complicated.
My porn use was approximately daily, but more frequent whenever I was suffering acutely (i.e. a nasty bout of illness, a stressful time at work, etc.). I tried quitting with willpower alone several times, but that was insufficient. Making it inaccessible was a crucial crutch.
My technical solutions:
I set 1.1.1.1 family as my home's DNS server, with no fallback options. This fairly effectively blocks most hardcore pornography.
I followed the instructions here to do the same with my phone.
I set up a pi-hole and adblock on all of my devices to eliminate all advertisements, which can act as bait for my bad habits.
I also set lengthy xkcd style passwords for settings for these configurations, and wrote them down on a piece of paper buried in a drawer, to make the process of undoing these configurations work-intensive.
These changes were transformative. I occasionally found myself trying to relapse. I would try to visit problematic pages reflexively without any consideration. Hitting the blank DNS blocked page always knocked me out of that loop. Now I've gone ~6 months without porn use.
I've since applied the same general strategy to cutting down my garbage screen time in general. My wife and I canceled all streaming services, and reduced our media consumption to blu-rays from the local library. Choosing the media we consume days in advance has made us much more intentional and measured in our media consumption. I also blocked sites like facebook and reddit entirely.
The last addiction that I'm still struggling with is YouTube. I really enjoy YouTube so I haven't culled it entirely, but I have mitigated its addictiveness with browser extensions like socialFocus. These extensions eliminate video thumbnails, autoplay, recommendations on the video page, short form content etc. These changes make it harder to get sucked into a viewing loop, and make hysterical content less appealing. This has reduced my YouTube viewing time, but I still want to make further progress at paring my viewing down to only top-tier content.
Now that I have my digital addictions reasonably under control, I realize just what a toll I was suffering by letting others capture so much of my attention with agit-prop, demoralization propaganda, and superstimulus. I feel like I now have a greater emotional reserve. I can absorb bad news and chaotic situations more graciously, and I am enjoying life more. I feel like it's been particularly helpful in my parenthood, because I have more time and attention for my 9-month-old, and I can more easily withstand her tantrums without getting exasperated.
Next up will be my sugar and alcohol habits. Neither of these are particularly severe, but I do use these substances habitually more than I would prefer. Ideally I'd like to contain my excessive consumption of both refined sugar and alcohol to special occasions. I'm interested in feedback from the community on how best to tackle these.
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