Hi everyone! I’ve been seeing lots of posts about porn recently. Here’s a comment I wrote recently (edited a bit for this post) that you might find helpful if you’re feeling worried about porn.

If you’re worried about your porn usage, here’s some reasons you might be having consistent negative experiences with it:

1. ⁠You are masturbating when bored instead of horny

2. ⁠You have been watching porn too frequently so you are basically forcing yourself to orgasm by watching more taboo videos*

• (not at all implying you’re watching something illegal. incest themed porn is a common example of taboo porn that doesn’t indicate you actually want to have sex with a family member)

1. ⁠You associate shame with arousal, so to masturbate you intentionally cause shame in yourself to feel comfortable. Your nervous system wants to do what it did yesterday, and if masturbation felt shameful yesterday, it wants to feel ashamed when masturbating today.

It’s up to you what you do with porn. Porn addiction as a concept is controversial. You might be masturbating every time you get bored of scrolling, or before sleep. That’s really normal but might not the best for someone with POCD because like I mentioned you might need something more taboo (incest, power dynamics) since you’re not actually horny. Here’s a helpful video by a psychiatrist about porn: https://youtu.be/cojJ6fOwVKk?si=XLoihepg-TSjuJOv he’s got lots of videos on porn and other subjects that you may or may not find useful. (Btw, I’m referencing incest porn as an example of taboo porn, but there’s nothing wrong with watching incest-themed porn unless it’s harmful to you. It’s a really common theme in porn these days and doesn’t mean you want to have sex with family.)

Here’s some ideas for feeling better besides seeing a professional:

1. You could keep a journal where every time you want to masturbate, you write down how you’re feeling before and after (no need to write anything sexual in it, it could just be “bored | embarrassed”. This can help you be more aware of what moods lead to which result.

2. Try to read less nofap content. There’s zero addiction literature that says you can shame yourself out of stopping a habit. You already make yourself feel bad just for existing, you don’t need help feeling worse. Take a break from masturbating if you want, but if you end up masturbating anyway, don’t beat yourself up, instead take note of what the circumstances were. Get curious instead of mean.

3. Try to stay out of your room more. This is good advice for POCD in general, because you want to stay grounded as much as possible, exposed to triggers so you can continually prove to yourself you aren’t randomly going to start hurting people. But it also means you won’t be watching porn.

4. Leave your phone in your closet and try masturbating without it. See how that feels.

You got this. OCD is treatable and none of this is permanent. I’m serious. As you continue to make small and large choices to improve your life, you’ll see results. But if you keep doing the same things every day, you probably won’t feel better. It’s okay, by the way, that it’s hard to get better. OCD is a really challenging disorder to heal from. You absolutely can heal though.