Humans are hard-wired to choose the path of least resistance. It’s a survival mechanism that served us for many years. But in the modern society that we live in, this can cause many problems.
That being said, when we’re aware of it and when we know how to use it to help us achieve our goals, it can be an extremely powerful tool. And that’s what we’ll be looking at here – how you can use inconvenience to prevent a NoFap relapse.
Designed against difficulty
The path of least resistance plays out in many of our lives every single day. It’s much easier to eat the tasty cake than it is the handful of mixed nuts. It’s easier to watch a YouTube video or scroll social media than it is to work towards our goals.
And it’s much easier to give in to the Porn Demon than it is to stay strong.
It’s not your fault that we’re built this way. Back in prehistoric times, choosing sugary and high-fat foods helped us survive. Conserving energy meant we could save it for when it was needed most.
When you have this knowledge of the path of least resistance, it becomes your responsibility to optimise your life through inconvenience.
It becomes your responsibility to use inconvenience to make ‘bad’ things harder, and ‘good’ things easier. It’s your job to make it as easy as possible to work towards your goals, and as hard as possible to relapse.
So how can we make it easier to resist temptation and work towards our goals than to relapse?
Creating inconvenience
There are a few key ways we can make relapse inconvenient, and thus create resistance to relapse. Here’s how you get started.
Begin by making it as difficult as possible to look at porn and masturbate.
- Create barriers to entry, such as local adult content blockers and wifi parental permissions.
- Ensure you have nothing to clean up with. Hide your toilet paper and don’t buy tissues.
- Keep your phone or laptop (or whatever you use to watch porn) away from the place you normally relapse.
- Make it difficult to take that device into that room.
Doing these things alone will immediately make it less likely that you relapse.
You can then take it one step further, by doing the following:
- Schedule your time and don’t leave gaps of time where you could potentially be bored
- Ensure you always have something (ideally productive) to do
- Set up pre-commitments with consequences for not completing
For a more extreme approach, you could also begin only using your bedroom for sleeping. Only ever go into your bedroom to sleep and for other necessary activities. Nothing else. Work in another room. Chill in another room. Only go into your bedroom when you have to.
Think about it. If you did all of the above, how easy would it be to relapse?
It would be pretty f*cking difficult.
By making your NoFap relapse – or any relapse, for that matter – as inconvenient as possible, you significantly reduce the likelihood that it will happen.
If you have to turn off content blockers and bypass adult filters to access porn, isn’t it easier to not start in the first place?
If you’re always out of toilet paper and tissues, you have nothing to clean up with, and so probably won’t PMO.
If you’re always doing something, and have pre-commitments, you won’t have any time for relapse.
Resisting your triggers
Your NoFap triggers are the things that cause your urges to happen. Your urges usually lead to relapse.
By removing your NoFap triggers, you remove your urges. No urges means no relapse.
We can apply this concept and technique to our triggers to make them less likely to happen.
If one of your triggers is seeing attractive girls on social media, you can create resistance to that trigger by unfollowing those accounts, signing out of your account, and deleting social media apps. Now, when you want to see an attractive girl on social media, you have to install the app, log in, and find the account (and possibly request to follow, etc).
That’s so many steps for something you don’t even want that much.
Or here’s another example. Let’s say a trigger for you is being alone and bored. Well, make it as difficult as possible for that to happen. Always have things to do. Fill your time with scheduled activities. Make sure that a situation in which you are alone and bored can’t happen.
Do you see how this can help? It’s another way to look at trigger prevention that can be used alongside any existing tactics or strategies you have.
Other ways inconvenience helps
Inconvenience and resistance help in more ways than one.
The more steps that you need to go through before you can relapse, the more chances you’re giving yourself to come to clarity and catch yourself before you slip.
Read that again.
The more steps that you need to go through before you can relapse, the more chances you’re giving yourself to come to clarity and catch yourself before you slip.
The longer it takes to reach relapse, the longer you have to stop yourself.
You’re not only working with resistance, you’re using it. You become a master of resistance.
And not only that. You can also use this technique to make positive habits easier to do, too.
If it’s easier to do 10 pushups than it is to go through the steps to relapse, then you’re probably gonna do the pushups.
If it’s easier to meditate than to pop to the shop and buy tissues, then meditation is the obvious choice.
If you fill your time with productive activities and things that are good for your wellbeing, you’ll have no time to relapse.
And that is how you get through the 90 days recovery.
Take Action – 5 to 10 minutes
Think about how you can make it as inconvenient as possible to relapse. This needs to be applicable to you and your specific relapse triggers. Then list out the main ways you can make relapse as difficult as possible through inconvenience. Next, create that resistance. Set up your content blockers. Schedule your time. Do whatever it takes to make it inconvenient.
If you do that, man, you’re one step closer to Becoming Triumphant.
Thanks for reading. Until next time, peace.
James