Relapse to porn may often seem like it ‘just happened’, or that it was an ‘inevitability’, but usually, there are a few common reasons why relapse happens. These reasons – triggers – vary from person to person. Fortunately, we can begin to identify these triggers and take steps to avoid them.
In this blog post, we’ll be looking at what triggers a porn relapse, and how you can identify your common triggers. If you’re new here, welcome to the site. Triumph Of Modern Man is committed to helping men overcome an addiction to pornography.
A lot of the information covered here is shared in more detail in Become Triumphant: The Ultimate Guide To Overcoming Your Pornography Addiction For Good. Check it out if you want to take your progress to the next level.
A future blog post will go into more detail about how you can alter these triggers, or prevent/minimise them from happening.
Understanding porn relapse
Before we can identify your triggers, we must first learn what a relapse is.
In the case of porn addiction, a relapse is watching porn or engaging with similar content after going through a period of abstaining – however long this period is. The intention is what makes a relapse a relapse; if you are trying to stay away from porn, in an effort to overcome this addiction, and you fall back to old ways… that’s a relapse.
At it’s core, and for the sake of understanding in this post, relapse can be seen as a habit. It follows the same structure as a habit, the Habit Loop, and through viewing it in this way we can take actionable steps to break the habit.
The Habit Loop for a porn relapse would look something like this:
Cue (the thing that triggers the habit)
Craving (the desire for the habit’s reward; here, that is the urge to watch porn and masturbate)
Routine (the habit or action itself; the act of watching porn and masturbating)
Reward (the positive outcome of the habit; pleasure chemicals in the brain)
Here we’ll be focusing on the Cue – our triggers – and how we can change our triggers to prevent a porn relapse.
Identifying your triggers
Now that you know what triggers are, and what they can cause, we can begin to identify your common triggers.
The best time to find a trigger is after a relapse. Upon reflection, you can figure out what caused the initial urge that led to PMO.
If you’re struggling, try to think about what you were doing just before the process that led to relapse. Were you working? Playing a video game? Scrolling the internet? Thinking about what this activity was and what broke your focus on that activity will give you a clue to what the trigger is.
That being said, you can also think about obvious things that have caused you to relapse to porn in the past. Some common triggers for many include the following:
- Seeing an attractive girl on social media
- Watching a borderline-sexual YouTube video
- Hearing a moan in a meme
- Being alone and bored
- Cravings for sexual release
Now, it’s very important that you write these down. Keeping a record of all of your triggers helps you to remember them and create a clear action plan to negating and avoiding each.
Take Action – 5 to 10 minutes
Have a think about the different kinds of things that have caused you to relapse in the past. Create a spreadsheet using Google Docs and record each of your triggers here, along with how powerful you consider each trigger to be, on a scale of 1-10, in reference to how likely it is to cause a relapse. We’ll come back to this spreadsheet in a later blog post.
For example, one entry would look like the following:
Trigger: Being alone and bored. Power: 8/10.
And there you have it, a quick guide to identifying your porn relapse triggers. In the future, there will be a follow-up blog post that covers how you can prevent and change those triggers, that you’ve now recognised, from happening.
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Until next time, Stay Triumphant.
James
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