e.g. I access a porn site and my computer shuts down after showing an "uplifting" message.
Edit: I'm single and don't intend on starting a romantic relationship at the moment.
My second observation is: is it really a problem? Most of the supposed porn-addicts I've known have not actually fit the definition of addiction, "pleasurable but the continuation of which becomes compulsive and interferes with ordinary responsibilities and concerns, such as work, ...". Is it really an addiction? Are you late to work because you're watching porn? Do you find you don't have time for anything else because you watch porn? I can only figure that the US's puritanical roots cause people to so frequently conflate daily porn use on the order of 15 to 30 minutes with "addiction", when it clearly will not fit the bill for addiction.
My addiction does greatly affect my life and occasionally ruins my productivity. Sometimes I would stay up until 2AM watching porn while perfectly knowing I have to wake up early the next day. So yes, I would really describe it as compulsive.
That said, I think an addiction could include a 15-20 minute use. I'm strongly against porn (multitude of reasons), yet I watch it, which points to my being compulsive. 15-20 minutes doesn't seem like a lot, but I still consider it precious time that's wasted.
[1] Whatever it maybe for you. :-)
It's akin to the man is drinking engine oil to quench his thirst, asking how to stop drinking engine oil. We don't say "Drinking water specifically to stop bad habits is not a good idea". IMHO anyway.
If your lifestyle doesn't permit an intimate relationship, which is one of the best things about being a human, then you need to find yourself a new lifestyle.
As to your other comment, have you considered people who have mental illnesses/disorders? Their lifestyle (in every sense of the word) would not permit a romantic relationship, too bad they can't just "find another one".
I do agree with the GP that not everyone can just snap their fingers and "get a long term relationship", but for someone who has no other obvious impediments to one, and thinks they look at porn too much, my advice is to at least try. It seems obvious to me that the excessive porn is an outlet for frustration from not having a real relationship with a real human. There's only one reasonable way of solving that IMO, and that's going out and finding (or trying to find) such a relationship. Trying to turn yourself into Buddha is not reasonable IMO; people are supposed to have intimate relationships.
https://netresponsibility.com -- is accountability software. It monitors the sites you visit and sends reports to a friend of sites it thinks are "bad". This, in my opinion, is far better than filtering software because it forces you to have a conversation with your partner about what went down and why. It has gotten pretty stale and the current released version is basically non-working because dependency updates have broken a lot of things. A few devs are working on the next version (v4) on and off trying to get it off the ground. It works well, just needs more testing and more contributors. This runs on *nix and osx.
https://fasterscaleapp.com -- is a tool to help you become more self-aware of your emotional status and why you feel whatever way you feel. Addicts are notoriously awful at identifying what they're really feeling (and people in general are worse than they might initially think). The idea is that as you become better able to identify the direction you're headed in you can take actions to prevent a relapse or acting out BEFORE you get to that point. Both of those projects are OSS and the repos should be easily findable from those websites.
Both of these projects would really benefit from help, contributors, and just regular users. Net Responsibility has a forum and mailing list that you can get involved in. Faster Scale App is not quite as organized, it's just one guy working on it.
So my unsolicited advice is that you need to come up with a way to see yourself differently. Maybe as a man of faith. Maybe as a mountain climber or something. Consider giving yourself a mission that will get you the heck out of your apartment and take up all your free time, so that your addiction becomes an annoyance that you won't want to bother with.
And good luck!
My opinion:
Porn can be "addictive" because there is a significant emotional component to human sexuality and porn mostly gets a rise out of people by being shocking, which is why so much porn apparently revolves around social taboos (interracial, group scenes, barely legal in terms of age, etc). But the more you watch it, the more inured you become, so you need to move on to even more shocking things to get the same effect.
I think people suggest relationships as a solution because emotional intimacy can get that same strong emotional response without needing to keep upping the ante in an unhealthy way.
Do with that personal opinion what you will.
Best.
Secondly if this is a addiction then you should seek a help group. There is a AAA style meeting for everything.
Finally best of luck.
Yes, porn is destructive. Codesmoothie didn't ask for our feelings on it. Just answer the question.
One thing I'd recommend is using OpenDNS. They have policies that allow for blocking that kind of material.
Codesmoothie in addition to whatever technical solution you decide on, I'd recommend asking a trusted friend to hold you accountable, like someone else suggested.
Have your trusted friend put the OpenDNS settings in your router and have him set (and keep) the password for your router.
Here's what I did:
1) Installed RescueTime
2) 1 week later looked at my most visited websites and made a list of all I didn't want to visit again.
3) I added them to Simple Blocker and set a random password.
Now, I can't use chrome to access those sites, unless I uninstall the plugin. And, I've made a deal with myself that I wont uninstall it for atleast 2 months.
Anyway, tools can only help. At some point you just have to do it.
Here are instructions:
https://opensource.com/life/16/3/firewall-your-home-network-...
You can Google about Raspberry Pi Firewall to see other setups.
Give a close friend $1000 and tell him to keep $100 for each time you find yourself failing at your task. Of course this relies on you being truthful to yourself/friend but since it's on your initiative anyway, it might work.
No idea if this works.
It SHOULD be trivial to have a whitelist operating via a hardpoint like your modem or your ISP. But sadly, the market does not offer such options--and enabling your ISP to block any particular traffic means they have to sniff it ALL out.
But the reality is: you can just buy a different modem or ISP.
And if that isn't the case, you can just stare at women in bikinis at the beach or the nearby pool... or the slightly short/tight skirt or loose blouse of your co-worker... or the professionally dressed news caster on TV... or pictures of Mother Theresa in her habit.
Well, maybe if you wean yourself down to nuns in habits, I suppose you might be cured.
But the reality is that you are under a spell, and you don't quite realize it. Call it sin, call it "not a struggle against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities," call it addiction, call it some psychological/emotional disorder....
No matter what, you are under a spell, a trance, a stupor... like the spell the King of Rohan was under by Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings. It IS poison that you drink daily, but you haven't really woken up to the fact.
The power of addiction is that it convinces you that it isn't really there, or that it really isn't self destructive. And everytime you go back to it, it gets to keep whispering its lies and pouring its poison into your ears while you sleep, and while you stumble half-awake otherwise.
So... you either need to so fully suffer a tragedy so immense that it snaps you back into full consciousness and gets you seriously down the road of recovery, or you need to get maximally aggressive in getting away from it so you can CLEAR YOUR HEAD.
What I had to do? Get rid of my computer and internet access altogether, except under extremely controlled settings in public with accountability.
It's hard to imagine surviving without the computer and IoT, but humans managed to do without it for 50K to 6.5K years (depending on your faith).
That's the realization I had to get to, and from what I read, my "addiction" was about as light and controlled as yours. Still, at this point, I can see how it was continually poisoning my mind, clouding my thoughts, lulling my senses, turning all consciousness into a constant search for the next hit from the slightest curve or cleavage.
F' that man! There's so many more wonderful/terrible/thrilling things to notice and experience in the world.
Very few escape our sexuality and primal/primary drives, but we don't have to be slaves to them!
Do whatever is necessary to get completely clear for 30-90 days to let your brain start to rewire. You will notice a huge change after just a week!
P.S. Video games are a big problem too. Get clear of the junk.
Looking at this simply from the standpoint of addition for the sake of simplicity, if you cannot utterly, completely, totally (etc) eliminate every possible chance for you to be able to access what you're trying to access. Whatever you try, you will know that there's a way to work around it and find yourself surprisingly motivated to bypass any limitations you try and impose on yourself.
The best way I can explain this is to reference the example I read that explained this phenomena to me. You can train ferrets to happily sit on your lap and go to sleep, but to achieve this you have to put them on a leash and then make it utterly impossible for them to get off your lap by holding onto the leash and only letting them roam around your lap. It'll take quite a while before they finally give up, accept that they're not going anywhere, and settle down, but they eventually figure out that there is absolutely no way they can change the situation and accept it. Getting yourself to that stage is... you're an IT guy. You can answer that yourself.
On top of that, this whole thing is ten thousand times more intense due to the fact that it's addiction-based.
Now, you could try and get a cellular contract that stipulates an upstream VPN (ie, where the cell signal coming into your phone comes from from a VPN you specify), and do the same for your wired internet (ie, the ADSL/cable/fiber/etc line going into your house also upstreams off a VPN). Configure the server side of that VPN on a machine with a firewall and some scripting that does the blocking. Then, take the private key you logged in with, encrypt that into say a tiny dm-crypt block file, take half the dm-crypt passphrase and keep it yourself, and give the other half of the passphrase to someone else. While the two halves are separate noone can login to the VPN server, guaranteeing noone will snoop or be able to adjust the settings.
So, that would work.... buuut you could very easily just walk down the road and buy a data SIM. Welp.
Unfortunately I think you would need to lock yourself in a room to achieve the kind of solution you're trying to get at.
I saw something really amazing on addiction recently - http://youtu.be/Sh7YB58EFgU - which I found on imgur of all places (apparently it has its moments). Being criticized for being in such a position is unproductive and unhelpful, and I can't say I think too highly of the couple of commentators who've replied here and mocked you for being candid, straightforward and honest, and being bold enough to say you need help. Kudos.
My practical/viable advice is this (you're going to have to read between the lines so I can keep this PG-13): I suspect it's probably difficult to do what you need/want to do without the porn anymore, and/or difficult to feel satisfied without it. You're going to need to adjust - in workable increments (enough to pinch a little, but not too much; a disciplined amount) - to get yourself completely off of this extra input. By all means do continue, per se; just without the porn.
Remember that our enjoyment of this whole process is just really, really intricate commentary; the main focus is that this is our way of reproducing. It's not the sole purpose; we've been built the way we have so that we're biologically obsessed with it and find it difficult to not reproduce. It's important, though, to remember that reproduction is the foundation of why all of this sort of thing exists; not anything else, for example getting high for its own sake, or forgetting other things in life, or staying wired, or anything else (I have no idea (and don't need) the finer details of your situation; I'm just pointing out some examples to give an idea of what I'm talking about).
I point this out because you may need to spend some time recalibrating your mental model to something that factors reality into the picture.
The way it's supposed to go is, if you're on your own, you have two options - periodically run the photocopier without any paper to keep the mechanism in shape (</euphemism>), or wait for the process to happen in your sleep. The first approach is what most guys use; the second is the body's pressure relief valve and only generally operates when you're already super tense and overloaded. But neither of those options are supposed to be particularly engaging or enjoyable; they're industrial means to an end. The brain is built to find the process noteworthy regardless of cause, but sex is the really enjoyable version.
However, you've (unfortunately) hyperoptimized/trained/specialized yourself to know exactly what makes you super happy, and you've learned how to continuously provide (= source) the top 1% of input that you really like. That's going to need to be discarded - these skills you've taught yourself are effectively useless - because sex doesn't work quite like that, sex is about communication and balance between two (usually) people.
So I have an odd idea for you. I found this a while ago - http://www.nateliason.com/multiple-orgasms-men/ - which you may find interesting to throw yourself into. It's sufficiently unusual that if you haven't discovered it before it will be novel and new and help distract you, and it'll also help get you back on track and prepare for relationships. I've heard some urologists freak out about these types of techniques, while others say there's no cause for alarm. I personally sit on the "I haven't seen any actual studies showing catastrophic disasters" fence, so I'm giving this a go myself (the main challenge is remembering to do it, which is proving a little difficult as I don't have a smartphone and can't use the recommended apps).
TL;DR: You need to replace the stimuli you're currently using with other stimuli of some kind. Just flat-out removing it absolutely stupid and not going to work (it'll just backfire very badly and disillusion you in a big way).
> Unfortunately I think you would need to lock yourself in a room to achieve the kind of solution you're trying to get at.
While addictions can be so extreme as you described, this doesn't describe me, and I don't think (correct me if I am wrong) it is very typical of someone who would consider themselves addicted to pornography. Typically before my session, I would be in a worse than normal mood, or just really wanting to release. If my computer suddenly locked up for an hour, I would likely "sober up" and go do something else.
> You need to replace the stimuli you're currently using with other stimuli of some kind. Just flat-out removing it absolutely stupid and not going to work.
I agree that is very hard to remove a pleasure source all at once, and a plausible route would be to go incrementally. Reading the other comments, I would agree that spending more time with people in general (not just romantically) would be a healthy alternative.
Hm, I think I got completely sidetracked with the concept of addiction when I was composing my initial response. It's completely reasonable to say that I described a statistically unlikely worst-case scenario, and I'm glad to hear your situation isn't that bad!
Looking at it from a different angle, removing high fructose corn syrup and other forms of highly concentrated sugar from your diet is an extremely healthy thing to do; HFCS can become addictive. What we're describing is exactly the same thing, if you ask me; just remove the concentrated/hyperoptimized stimulati, and everything will balance itself back out.
Yeah, it'll be a huge adjustment and kind of depressing to begin with but it's for the best.
As I said in my previous comment, actual sex is what's enjoyable, and everything else is just a means to an end. IMO, guilt-tripping people into thinking "running the photocopier" (if you will) is unconditionally wrong is itself a hugely imbalanced view to have.
Also, /r/NoFap focuses on "short periods of abstinence" - these might be weeks/months long, but they aren't permanent. I'm honestly not sure how people would abstain, myself.
Spending more time with others sounds like a great idea, but IMHO it cannot be a full replacement for what I describe in the previous paragraph, and trying to treat it as such may cause you to wind up in some suboptimal situations (continuous distraction leading to, uh, unexpected relationships, etc).