Urge Surfing, Part 2

If you're ready, you can now apply the urge surfing exercise to your porn addiction.

The Midbrain Problem

Pornography is a powerful addiction and one of the things that happens with addictions is that your midbrain takes over. This is why you often feel like you do your addictive behavior on autopilot mode. Like it's just happening to you, without your conscious input.

When doing the urge surfing exercise, you have to ensure that this won't happen.

Prepare an Emergency Exit

Ideally, you create some way for you to shut down the whole exercise as soon as you notice that you're about to relapse for real.

If you use a desktop computer to watch porn, then a good emergency exit is to literally yank the power cable out of the socket, to shut everything down immediately.

But of course, if you're using a laptop, tablet or phone, that won't work. So here are a few alternatives.

• If you're using a Windows computer, create a one-click shutdown button.
• Make environment changes that will interrupt you from falling into your porn routine (e.g. remove the chair from the room).
• Make a plan to turn off the device and leave the room (without your device) as soon as you are about to relapse.

The Urge Surfing Exercise

The steps for this exercise are the same as in the last lesson, except you add one line about what your emergency plan is.

Complete the sentence: "As soon as I notice that I'm about to relapse, I will..."

This way, you have a clear, written intention.

Suggested Steps of Escalation

You can customize this for your exercise, but as a guideline, here are the escalation steps I recommend:

1. Think about watching porn.
2. Look at the device (powered off).
3. Turn on the device, open browser.
4. Type first few letters of your usual porn site.
5. Type the full porn site URL, without hitting enter.
6. Hit enter and immediately turn away from the screen.
7. Close the browser, turn off the device and leave the room to end the exercise.