Know & Control Your Triggers
We are all creatures of habit.
And most of our behavior follows a predictable pattern, called the habit loop.
Every habit starts with a trigger and ends with a reward. The reward trains your brain to keep performing the same behavior. Regardless of whether, in the long term, it has a positive or negative impact on us.
The only thing that matters in the habit loop is the short term / instant reward.
This is exactly how we get addicted to porn.
Example: Habit Loop & Porn Addiction
You see bikini pics on social media (trigger), that makes you feel horny and you go to watch porn (action), and then you get an orgasm and feel good (reward).
The brain makes the connection that:
Looking at bikini pics leads to orgasms and feeling good.
This trains your brain to:
- Identify the trigger faster (bikini pics on social media), and
- Do the action that produces the reward (watch porn)
The brain doesn't care about the fact that you don't want to watch porn because of the long term consequences. It just wants the instant gratification.
Habit loops are how our behavior becomes automatic.
The bad news is: your brain has been trained to watch porn automatically.
And the good news is: you can (just as easily) train your brain to do something else, something positive instead of watching porn.
Address the Trigger, Not the Action
The key to breaking the habit loop is to intercept it at the trigger level.
Not action.
By the time you are in action, it's already too late.
This is why methods like NoFap don't work.
Many approaches to quit porn focus too much on the action instead of removing the triggers.
But dealing with triggers is far more effective.
In our example of getting triggered by bikini pics on social media: if we never saw those pics in the first place... we wouldn't get triggered to watch porn.
There is no effort required to "resist" temptations.
Just simple trigger management.
That's why step 1 is to Identify Your Triggers.
Hidden Triggers
Bikini pics on Instagram are an example of an obvious trigger.
When you start writing down your triggers, I'm sure many obvious ones will come to mind quickly: seeing sexy girls on social media or coming across sexual content in movies, shows and other forms of media.
But the triggers don't end there.
Everyone has much less obvious triggers too. Think back to the last few times you watched porn. What happened just before?
Think about:
- Environmental triggers - e.g. being home alone with nothing to do.
- Emotional triggers - e.g. feeling bored, sad or lonely.
- Avoidance triggers - e.g. you have to do some work that you really don't want to.
Write down these triggers as well. It's often quite mundane stuff that triggers us into addictive behavior.
Make a New IF - THEN Plan
Now that you know your triggers, we have to create a plan for 'what to do' when you encounter any of those triggers again.
We can do our best to remove all the triggers from our environment but the truth is that something or the other will trigger us at some point.
It's best to be prepared for that scenario, instead of going in blind.
To continue our social media example, the plan could be:
If I see bikini pics on social media, I will unfollow that account and do 10 pushups immediately.
Or:
If I'm home alone and feeling bored, I will go for a walk and listen to a podcast or audiobook.
What we're doing here is deliberately changing the action we take when we get triggered.
Over time, our brains will get used to this new habit loop, and we will start unfollowing accounts and doing pushups automatically.
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