Is “No Nut November” Bad For Porn Addiction?
That special time of year has come around again where men worldwide challenge their self restraint by giving up pornography and masturbation for a month (No nut November). That’s all good and fine as a game, but let me tell you why a complete stop is not always the best way to quit pornography use and can make your struggle with porn addiction a little bit harder.
What are the common strategies to quit porn?
In general, there are 2 major approaches to quitting porn temporarily or permanently. No judgement - we don’t do that here.
The first strategy is the hard stop strategy, this is the most intuitive. When something starts to become problematic in your life - it is beneficial to abstain.
Gaining too much weight? Cut down on carbs. Waking up too late? Stop staying up till morning. For people who have issues with porn, they usually notice a problem when their behaviour changes - like staying up too late to consume porn. Or when they notice physiological changes for example finding themselves being exclusively aroused by porn and unaroused with their partner.
Naturally in its early stages, stopping for a certain amount of time will do your body and mind some good, giving yourself time to recalibrate and reprioristize. It is absolutely a reflex response to set a time goal like a week or a month and attempt to resist porn during that time.
In most cases, this method ONLY uses willpower to resist the urges of using.
And No Fap November falls under this category.
The second approach is called the phased reduction strategy. In this method you can choose to reduce your use incrementally. It’s not a new concept by any means, we often see this in other substance and behavioural addiction programs.
Basically instead of a hard and abrupt stop you can limit your use at a certain amount - and as time passes you reassess and reduce that amount. Instead of using 7 days a week you might reduce that to 5 and maybe by the end of the year you reduce that to 0 for example. One of the benefits of the phased reduction strategy is that it does not exhaust your willpower. It is not a complete stop and you have time to adjust. Overwhelmingly, most patients use or have used the hard stop as their go to method.
Mostly because it feels efficient - it’s decisive, simplistic and it’s the quickest way to achieve their goal behaviour pattern. In the context of relationship issues with pornography, it might be the one that you feel you have to promise in order avoid further conflict.
Unfortunately what isn’t commonly shared is that a hard stop doesn’t work for everyone. In fact, if you’ve repeatedly tried to do a hard stop and failed it might be a sign that whatever you’re trying to quit is a bigger problem than you thought.
Source: Franco Alva, Unsplash
Is Quitting ALL about willpower?
That’s a big nope. Willpower is a significant part of the equation but not all of it. Your success in quitting isn’t based on willpower. It’s based on how prepared you are.
This includes modifying your environment.
Developing your strategies.
And understanding your urges really well.
Willpower refers to the ability to resist instant gratification and not a character trait.
It is a limited resource that is sensitive to stress and gets depleted and exhausted.
When you resist your urges, you can think of it as using up your willpower resources but you can also deplete this resource throughout the day. Such as struggling through a work day after 4 hrs of sleep, biting your tongue when your boss says something you disagree with but want that promotion. So it’s something you want to conserve as well.
For some, quitting is a long game that you have to play smart - so don’t use strategies that depend on exhausting your most valuable resource. By the way, you can find other strategies that don’t exhaust your willpower such as the urge control tools (4Ds).
So let’s talk about something that you will come across often in this long journey of quitting.
How do the different strategies affect urge levels?
Let’s start with the hard stop strategy or the streak method.
If you do a hard stop you are maximising your ability to break the link between thought and action - your urges tell you to do it mentally and your action is to not.
Although your urges will tone down in around 4 weeks should you succeed, some people don’t-
-because this strategy will spike up your urges to its peak levels in the early weeks. Sometimes you may experience psychological or physiological withdrawal, or whatever you were using the pornography to cope with, now needs to be addressed.
If you aren’t prepared it will exhaust your willpower very fast.
Phased reduction on the other hand is more considerate to how your urges will behave because we are incrementally reducing the intensity of the urges.
We do this by delaying or stretching the time between urge and action, which lets you adapt and get used to the feeling of not using when the urge strikes.
This time in between urge and action gradually increases in phases as you develop more control.
So, pros: Phasing prevents the gigantic early urge spike
And cons: will have to engage with the problem that you are trying to quit for a longer time.
But with a clinically higher success rate of quitting. (this will reappear in the pros column)
With that in mind let’s talk about something else that is unavoidable.
How do the strategies affect how you react to failure?
This is the one thing people usually miss.
You have to factor in the cost of failure.
There are two kinds of failures in this process - when we slip up on our journey we call it a LAPSE but when you return to old severe patterns, we call it a RELAPSE.
Failure takes its toll, it’s demotivating and for many people doing the hard stop method, if they fail once they’ll just say screw this, quitting is too hard, and relapse. Sometimes we feel ashamed, unworthy, disappointed, judged by other nofappers and just simply give up.
When using a phased reduction strategy, we can think of lapses are simply part of the process. We can examine where we went wrong and strategize on how to deal with the issues if and when they happen again in the future. The progress you make is much more visible and felt in the phased reduction strategy because every phase you pass feels like a milestone or checkpoint that you accrue over time.
In the hard stop strategy there are only two checkpoints: start and finish.
If you lose your streak between those two points you can’t help but see it as a complete failure. Life is not a game but even crash bandicoot has checkpoints at every level.
Bumps in the road MUST be expected.
To sum up,
Although the phased reduction strategy asks you to sit with your problem for a longer time, it provides an outlook that is forgiving of your failures and encourages learning, practising, refining and strategizing.
Understanding your pattern, making modest reductions and achieving small and attainable goals will make you more resilient to failure and more motivated to continue on your path. And in the spirit of that, let’s make one final important distinction
What is the difference between abstaining and quitting?
If you want long term success with reducing or quitting your problem, you’re going to really need to examine the reasons WHY you are using in the first place.
Using porn as an example,
Is it to address mismatched libido with your partner?
Is it to manage mood or stress?
Is it to explore and express your sexuality?
Is it to deal with low self esteem?
Sometimes we aren’t even really aware of why we have the consumption patterns we have until we stop consuming. For example if you are using it to manage stress and depression you are going to experience more stress and depressive symptoms while trying to maintain your “streak”. If you don’t see these bumps in the road coming when trying to quit, the process is going to be an even rougher ride.
Phased reduction gives you an invaluable resource - time. Time allows you to understand and figure out healthier ways or alternatives to address that need whether that be a substitute or a support system to endure your urges.
In this way you are less likely to experience significant setbacks because you are prepared -not only to brace for what’s coming but for when lapses happen.
Abstaining is simply one of the many courses of actions you must take in quitting.
It is just that - an action.
The real process of quitting requires a strategy.
No Nut November is all good and well - as a game. It is NOT the only way to actually quit things and it MAY be the hardest way. Either way, good luck this November you no nut warriors out there. And if you’re struggling, try switching to a phased reduction instead.
I’m Luke Vu. Be kind, be you. Catch you next time.