How to Stop Thinking About Porn: Why Trying Harder Backfires

[00:00:00]I want to start this video with a very quick experiment. For the next 30 [music] seconds, whatever you do, do not think about a white bear. Don't picture the fur, don't picture the little black nose, or the way it moves across the ice. No white bears at all.

[00:00:16]How's that [music] going?

[00:00:18]Yeah, that's what I thought.

[00:00:20]>> And if you found this video by searching how to stop thinking about [music] porn, you've been running that exact experiment for a long time, just with much higher stakes than looking at a bear.

[00:00:30]>> So today I want to show you why trying not to think about [music] porn consistently makes that urge stronger.

[00:00:36]It's called the white bear effect, and it's a well-documented finding in [music] psychology. And then I want to give you the skill that works instead, which is called urge surfing.

[00:00:46]And by the end of this video, you'll know exactly how to do it, and it'll help you move [music] your recovery forward. In 1987, a Harvard psychologist named Daniel Wegner ran the experiment you just did. He asked people not to think about a white bear for 5 minutes, and to ring a bell every time that they failed. And the bells rang constantly.

[00:01:06]But the interesting part is this, when those same people were later invited to think about the bear freely, they thought about it way more than people who had never suppressed it at all. So the trying not to produce the rebound.

[00:01:21]>> So why? What is it about pushing a thought away that brings it back harder?

[00:01:26]>> Here's the mechanism, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. When you decide not to think about something, your mind sets up two processes. One goes hunting for distractions, the other runs quietly in the background scanning for the forbidden thought so it can sound the alarm the moment that it shows up. But think about what that means. In order to check whether you're thinking about porn, your brain has to keep a copy of porn active. So the very system in charge of keeping the thought out is what actually keeps the thought warm.

[00:01:58]Wagner called it ironic process theory and it's not a fragile lab finding.

[00:02:04]A 2019 meta-analysis in a journal called Perspectives on Psychological Science pulled 31 thought suppression studies and the rebound held up across the board.

[00:02:15]And it shows up in exactly this territory. There is another 2019 study in the Journal of Sex Research that found the adolescents who worked hardest to suppress their sexual thoughts, often for religious reasons, actually showed more compulsive sexual behavior and lower well-being. So, the suppression itself was doing a lot of the damage.

[00:02:38]>> Mhm. So, I just want to slow down here for a sec because for a lot of people watching, effort is all they've had.

[00:02:44]Right? Um and every time the willpower failed, they took that as evidence about who they are.

[00:02:51]>> Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. And of course you would double down on willpower in a situation like that.

[00:02:56]You're just going to try harder, right?

[00:02:58]So, willpower works for early mornings and hard work hard workouts and it works for tax season for most people and stuff like that. So, how could you not reach for it here?

[00:03:09]And we want to be compassionate about this. Willpower is what most people resort to when it comes to bad habits and addiction.

[00:03:16]>> Mhm.

[00:03:16]>> Including porn addiction.

[00:03:18]>> Mhm.

[00:03:18]>> But every time it failed, you concluded that you were weak and the research says something different. That white knuckling an urge, like gripping and trying to stop it through raw willpower alone, fails by design. Not because you're weak, but because it's not the right tool for the job.

[00:03:37]>> Mhm.

[00:03:38]>> That's the reason why we're exploring this white bear effect today.

[00:03:41]>> Mhm.

[00:03:42]>> One of the things that I see often in my clinical work and it's more common than you might think is before recovery starts, the preoccupation is all about the acting out.

[00:03:51]When, where, how to cover the tracks, all that thought process around the next hit.

[00:03:57]And then recovery begins, and the preoccupation actually flips. And so, now the mental loop is about not acting out. Don't think about it. Don't slip.

[00:04:09]Count the days. Get through the evening.

[00:04:11]>> Mhm. And if that's you, I want to name the strength in that first. Like that flip means you're taking this seriously.

[00:04:18]Something in you is fighting for your own life in recovery here, and that part of you deserves honor. Like not criticism. We're not trying to shame that.

[00:04:26]>> No, 100%. It really does. But notice what hasn't changed in all of this, right? The channel's the same. It's the preoccupation.

[00:04:33]>> Mhm.

[00:04:34]>> So, porn can still dominate your thinking for hours a day. You've just switched sides on the same obsession.

[00:04:40]You're still in a way obsessing about porn even when you're obsessing about not using it.

[00:04:45]>> Yeah.

[00:04:45]>> Trying to stop it.

[00:04:46]>> Yeah, which makes me think of the apps and like the day counters. There's a whole online world built around streaks for helping people quit. Like is that is that helping people or is that keeping them stuck?

[00:04:58]>> Well, early recovery has a trick that very few people know about, and there's not a lot of warnings about. And that is that the obsession doesn't leave.

[00:05:07]>> Okay. In early recovery.

[00:05:08]>> In early recovery.

[00:05:09]It just switches sides from doing it to not doing it.

[00:05:12]>> Okay. Yeah.

[00:05:14]>> So, before recovery, you were preoccupied with using, and now you're preoccupied with not using. You're counting days, as I said, guarding evenings. And that flip is real progress towards the recovery, but your brain is still spending hours a day on porn just from the other side of the fence.

[00:05:30]>> Wow.

[00:05:31]>> This time.

[00:05:32]At some point, the next step is actually releasing that obsession itself. Because a mind that's always fighting is still a mind that's always looking at the thing that it's fighting.

[00:05:42]>> Right.

[00:05:43]>> About the streak counters, the intention of that deserves respect, 100%. Those communities are full of people trying hard to get free, and community itself is genuinely protective and helpful. But a day counter is a monitoring process with a scoreboard. It asks you to check daily whether the forbidden thing happened or not, which is precisely or essentially the mechanism that Wagner showed keeps the thought hot unless you can separate the count from the addiction.

[00:06:16]>> Mhm.

[00:06:17]Mhm. Mhm.

[00:06:18]>> the challenge here. And some of the folk beliefs in in some of the parts of the recovery world, things like semen retention giving you superpowers, those aren't clinical. They're mythology wrapped around a real longing to get free. Other parts of what they have to offer are very useful for recovery, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

[00:06:38]But here's the problem with measuring recovery in streaks. A streak measures the absence of a behavior, not the presence of recovery, nor the skills to avoid acting on an urge.

[00:06:50]Break a 90-day streak once, and the counter says you're back at zero.

[00:06:54]But you're actually nothing of the sort.

[00:06:56]90 days of practice didn't evaporate because of one night. Recovery isn't the chain of days you didn't use. It's the set of skills you can actually do when the urge shows up. And so, what we really need to measure are the skills.

[00:07:12]>> That's good.

[00:07:13]>> Yeah.

[00:07:13]>> That's the important part, really. Like, are you in recovery? Is a bigger, more important question than how many days?

[00:07:19]>> Mhm.

[00:07:20]>> Yes.

[00:07:21]>> Mhm.

[00:07:22]>> Now, if you're in recovery right now, here's what we're curious about. Have you noticed that flip, that season where all you're thinking about porn turned into thinking about not using porn?

[00:07:31]Whether look like counting days or white-knuckling evenings, like when did you first notice that the fight itself was taking up as much space as the habit used to?

[00:07:40]And then how did you move forward from there? We'd love to hear about that.

[00:07:42]Drop it in the comments. We do read everyone, and we are able to respond to many of them.

[00:07:47]>> So, what actually happens in the brain when an urge hits?

[00:07:50]>> When an urge hits?

[00:07:52]Good question. So, to stop fighting an urge, it helps to know like what that urge actually is first of all. So, Patrick Carnes, the researcher who built much of the clinical foundation for treating sex and porn addiction, mapped out the addiction cycle and made it very simple.

[00:08:07]There's trigger, then there's preoccupation, then there's ritual, and then there's acting out. And again, many people miss the part that the preoccupation is already chemically rewarding the brain. So, thinking about it is just rewarding the brain. And the moment your mind starts to circle porn, dopamine and norepinephrine are already lifting you. They're already giving you a little bit of a boost or a hit. You're getting a lighter dose of the drug just by thinking about the drug.

[00:08:35]>> Mhm. Which explains what people you say, like I knew better, but I did it anyway.

[00:08:41]>> Yes. I did anyways cuz of the cycle and the brain was already starting to move, right?

[00:08:46]You did know better, but as that chemical cascade builds, your prefrontal cortex, which is the reasoning part of the brain that holds your values and your plans, it's the part that we've talked about as the braking mechanism to stop or pause you, that tends to go offline as the limbic system takes over, the deeper part of the brain.

[00:09:05]And your access to your own knowing was chemically reduced in the moment, too.

[00:09:11]>> Mhm.

[00:09:12]Mhm.

[00:09:13]>> And we're not saying that that makes it okay. We're just explaining why this system feels like it has no other option or why it's losing access to those brakes in the moment. This is what's going on.

[00:09:23]So, there is uh two more numbers here that are worth caring.

[00:09:28]The effort it takes to stop scales up against you the longer the cycle runs.

[00:09:35]So, that's really important to know. In my practice, I often refer to this as like a weird-looking chain. Like, usually when you buy always when you buy a chain, it's always the same size links on a chain, right?

[00:09:46]But, in pornography addiction and in acting out, it think of a really weird chain where maybe the start of it is like little paper rings and then they become like maybe paper mache, a little stronger, and then they're clay, and then they're maybe baked clay, and then they become a light metal, and then eventually they're a heavy metal. So, you have this chain that as it goes, the links get progressively harder to break.

[00:10:07]And that is kind of like how this goes.

[00:10:10]So, the longer the further you go down that pathway, the harder it is to get off it. The harder it is to break out of it. So, the chance to intervene on yourself is very early on.

[00:10:19]>> Okay. So, that's what you mean by like the length of the cycle is like how long you've been on this chain.

[00:10:23]>> How long you've been on the chain, yeah.

[00:10:25]For sure.

[00:10:26]>> Okay.

[00:10:27]So, you can think about it like maybe it's one X here, and this is called the preoccupation stage, and then once everybody has a ritual where they move into this, it's like five X hard to break when you get to that five times as hard to break when you get to that part.

[00:10:40]And but by the time you're at the edge of acting out, it's like a hundred times as hard to break out of that. So, timing always beats force. If you intervene early, you're good. Otherwise, the math the multiplication just buries you.

[00:10:52]>> Right.

[00:10:52]>> really hard to break out.

[00:10:53]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:55]>> I've been told that the average temptation to use porn lasts about 27 minutes.

[00:11:00]Which is an interesting number. So, if you think about that, like an urge is not a permanent state that you have to defeat. That's a good That's the good news. Like, when you feel like Often when you're in it, the brain rationalizes says, "Well, I want to use it. It's never going to stop until I use it."

[00:11:14]>> Ah.

[00:11:16]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:17]>> But, an urge is not permanent. It's actually just a wave, and it builds, and it crests, and if you don't feed it, that wave will pass. Your brain was designed to make repeated rewards automatic, which is why that wave comes.

[00:11:33]But that same design also makes unfed pathways weaken in the brain, okay?

[00:11:41]Which is why the wave shrink over time when you don't continue to act out. So, you actually don't have to outfight outfight the wave, you just have to outlast it.

[00:11:50]And often it's shorter than you actually think.

[00:11:53]>> Ooh, yes. And the more often you outlast it, the less frequently those waves will come. So, before we go to the skill, I I just want to catch something here. Maybe somebody watching just had the thought, you know, but the thoughts themselves, every time one shows up, have I already failed?

[00:12:10]>> Just cuz you've had the thought?

[00:12:11]>> Yeah. Like the thought came in, so I've already failed.

[00:12:14]>> Yeah, fair.

[00:12:15]And the answer is no. And again, the part that might be challenging to hear about this is cuz it this does cut both ways, but a thought is not a relapse.

[00:12:25]And an urge is not a relapse.

[00:12:27]An urge to use porn. In Carnes' model, the danger isn't the thought arriving.

[00:12:33]It's feeding it into the ritual. So, if you treat every thought as a failure, you manufacture shame, and shame is like jet fuel for the exact spiral that we've been describing you for sending you down that chain, sending you down that pathway.

[00:12:46]So, the thought showing up is your nervous system doing what nervous systems do with years of repetition.

[00:12:53]What you do in the next 27 minutes though, that's the part that's yours.

[00:12:58]Those thoughts will fade with disuse over time.

[00:13:05]>> Okay.

[00:13:05]>> That's the good news, the important news.

[00:13:07]>> Yeah.

[00:13:07]>> Okay?

[00:13:08]>> Yeah. So, we're not stuck here.

[00:13:10]>> We're not stuck here.

[00:13:11]>> Mhm.

[00:13:12]>> So, we talked about urge surfing, and this is the skill for outlasting the wave.

[00:13:17]It was developed by Alan Marlatt, the University of Washington psychologist who pioneered relapse prevention.

[00:13:24]Riding the urge like a wave. Neither obeying it nor wrestling it, just staying present in yourself, in your body, noticing it while it crests and while it passes.

[00:13:36]Think of it like this. If suppression is trying to hold a beach ball under water, urge surfing is just letting it float past you while you keep your feet on the sand.

[00:13:45]>> Mhm.

[00:13:46]But I can hear someone saying like that sounds passive.

[00:13:49]>> Like you're not doing enough.

[00:13:50]>> Yeah, like I'm giving up or I'm just letting the urge run around. Oops.

[00:13:56]>> Yeah, and I would contend that it's the opposite of passive. Like this is a real skill with real evidence behind it.

[00:14:02]There was a 2023 study of 244 adults in addiction treatment and it found that the more people relied on suppression, like pushing the beach ball under, the stronger their cravings ran.

[00:14:14]>> Mhm.

[00:14:15]>> And a 2025 meta-analysis pooling 20 studies with more than 2,000 participants found that therapies teaching these acceptance-based skills, they produced large improvements in problematic pornography use that held at follow-up.

[00:14:31]>> Cool.

[00:14:32]>> And the recession of >> Yeah. I mean that makes sense again with the white bear thing.

[00:14:37]Like if you're trying so hard not to think about it, that's what you're thinking about.

[00:14:41]>> Yes, exactly.

[00:14:43]And it's so cool that there's so much science coming in behind it to support this, right?

[00:14:47]So, let me tell you like what this looks like in real time as you experience it.

[00:14:52]There's really kind of four moves to this approach. So, first is to name it with some self-compassion, okay?

[00:14:59]So, an urge is here. Of course, this is hard at this stage of recovery. And sometimes just putting your hand on your chest here, acknowledging the challenge of this. Of course, it's hard at this stage of recovery. And of course, these urges still come. So, notice that self-compassion has no self-contempt. There's no alarm in it. It's just like you're describing weather. Something that you're noticing coming oh towards you. You're not confessing a crime.

[00:15:28]You haven't acted out yet.

[00:15:29]>> Okay. Okay.

[00:15:30]>> Okay.

[00:15:31]So, that's an important start. The second thing to do is to locate this in your brain, not your character. This is how you think about it.

[00:15:39]So, this is just my brain looking for the old pathway. That's what you can tell yourself. The urge is not evidence that you're permanently broken. It's just evidence that you have a nervous system that learned, probably over years, where comfort could be found.

[00:15:55]And frankly, like you're allowed to feel some grief here, too, because you're letting go of a pathway that once got you through lonely nights, through difficult feelings, and maybe even worse than that. And it makes sense that letting go of that old source of comfort is going to ache a little bit.

[00:16:10]>> Mhm. Mhm. I'm glad you said that grief piece out loud.

[00:16:14]Like giving addicts in recovery permission to grieve an old coping mechanism is compassionate.

[00:16:20]>> It is compassionate, yeah.

[00:16:21]>> Um maybe they can think of it this way.

[00:16:23]Like the sadness isn't a sign you secretly want to go back. It's a sign you're actually letting go of something.

[00:16:30]>> Love it. Yeah.

[00:16:32]And then the third thing is to downgrade it from a need to an urge. So, this is an urge, not a need. It will pass.

[00:16:39]Again, you're telling yourself that. So, you're framing this thing correctly.

[00:16:42]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:43]>> Right? Often, it's held as something inevitable, something that I have to do.

[00:16:47]No, this is just an urge in your brain.

[00:16:50]>> Yeah.

[00:16:50]>> That's the extent of it right now.

[00:16:52]Urges arrive wearing the costume of an emergency. Like you have to take care of them. They're not emergencies. Nothing bad happens to you if an urge goes unmet. And in about 27 minutes, usually less, the wave has moved through.

[00:17:06]And that's just good to know.

[00:17:08]And then the fourth thing, too, uh is to execute your plan, whatever that is.

[00:17:12]We'll talk about that in a moment here.

[00:17:13]But to give the brain brain a better reward.

[00:17:16]>> Mhm.

[00:17:17]>> I have a plan for this. I know I'll feel better when I follow it. So, whether it looks like stepping outside, moving your body, calling a friend, getting to a meeting. If you've worked with a therapist on a tiered escape plan, this is the moment that it exists for. So, you have a plan, you have something to do.

[00:17:34]>> Mhm. So, what's the difference between that and like just distracting yourself?

[00:17:39]Because, you know, pivoting is just distracting yourself.

[00:17:43]No.

[00:17:43]It could be. Like, pivoting to something else could be just distracting yourself.

[00:17:47]>> Mhm.

[00:17:47]Well, the difference is a sequence. Let me try to unpack it a little bit more and see if it clarifies this, okay?

[00:17:53]>> You're not scrambling to unthink a thought.

[00:17:56]>> Okay.

[00:17:57]>> Okay? That's the white bear, like trying hard to not not think about the white bear.

[00:18:01]>> Mhm.

[00:18:02]>> You acknowledged it. You named it for what it is, and then you redirected it.

[00:18:07]Like, you actually started doing something else. So, you're not there sort of parked sitting trying not to think the thing.

[00:18:13]>> Right. Right.

[00:18:14]>> That's the difference here.

[00:18:16]And that redirecting is so good, right?

[00:18:18]So, that that monitor, the thing that's watching for it, can stand down because nothing has been forcibly kept out.

[00:18:25]Does that make sense?

[00:18:26]>> Right. It doesn't have to be on alert cuz there's It's It's not a threat. It's not being perceived as a threat.

[00:18:31]>> gone a different direction entirely, right? And that's also the answer to the person wondering if surfing is just like fantasizing with a clinical name.

[00:18:40]Fantasy is participation. It's quite different. It feeds the preoccupation stage. It gives the wave energy. But, surfing is is observing that you're having the thought. Only that.

[00:18:51]Not engaging or interacting with the thought.

[00:18:54]It gives you some distance while you move to a better reward, something that works better for you now that you're in recovery. So, one keeps the cycle spinning, but the other just kind of lets it die down.

[00:19:06]>> Mhm. So, what if the wave doesn't pass?

[00:19:09]Like, what if after 27 minutes it's still roaring?

[00:19:12]>> It's still roaring away? Well, then the thing you want to do is to increase self-intervention instead of white-knuckling harder.

[00:19:19]Okay?

[00:19:20]So, things like grounding and then physical movement and then calling someone who knows about your recovery.

[00:19:26]That's an amazing option because human connection is the strongest wave breaker that we know.

[00:19:32]And if urges routinely outlast every tool you've got, then maybe that's a signal to bring in professional support.

[00:19:40]It's not proof that you're failing, but this is It's just good to know that you can up the level of intervention if you need to, right?

[00:19:47]>> Yeah.

[00:19:48]>> And one more thing that I like to say about this two-for-one day is to practice this when you're not tempted >> Yeah.

[00:19:53]>> as well. So, if you just kind of save this for when the the urge comes, then you're fighting that and learning this new thing.

[00:20:01]We tell clients, "If you can't do it when things are easy, you can't do it when things are hard." So, rehearse the sequence a couple of times a day in calm moments, and it will be there when the prefrontal cortex starts dimming and when you need it most. So, that can be a help as well to kind of preload this new thing that you're trying out. There's one more move, and it's the one that separates managing urges from actually healing. So, after the wave passes, you ask the question that I built a lot of my clinical work around, which is what might this have been pacifying, this urge? Like, what was it coming in to medicate? An urge is a stress response, not an appetite. It's not random noise.

[00:20:39]It tends to show up on schedule, after conflict or under deadline or in boredom, and above all in loneliness.

[00:20:49]Because porn offers a cheap imitation of the connection that you're actually starving for, that's why it's coming in.

[00:20:55]So, the useful question after an urge isn't "Why can't I stop thinking about porn?"

[00:21:01]It's actually "Okay, what was going on in me, maybe an hour, maybe just a few minutes before that wave that made checking out or looking for this exit, this escape feel necessary. Answer that question enough times and recovery stops being about porn at all. It becomes about the life, the thing that's living underneath it.

[00:21:20]>> Yes, like the desire that's driving it.

[00:21:22]>> Yes, those longings, whatever they are.

[00:21:25]>> Mhm.

[00:21:25]>> Or the unmet needs.

[00:21:27]>> Okay, so if I'm tracking the whole arc here.

[00:21:29]>> Yeah.

[00:21:29]>> Like stop fighting the thought because fighting it like feeds it.

[00:21:33]>> Yeah.

[00:21:34]>> Okay. Um surf the urge because it's a wave and it's shorter than you think.

[00:21:40]>> Yeah.

[00:21:40]>> Shorter than it feels like when it starts. And then get curious afterward because the urge was carrying information >> Yeah.

[00:21:48]>> about what was happening for you.

[00:21:49]>> Yeah, that's the whole thing.

[00:21:51]>> Mhm.

[00:21:51]>> And the last piece that Verinda mentioned there, like reading what the urges are pointing at, that's deeper work. And most people do struggle to figure it out alone, like wave after wave, pattern after pattern.

[00:22:03]It helps to have someone trained >> Mhm.

[00:22:05]>> to see it with you, for sure.

[00:22:06]>> Mhm.

[00:22:07]>> in there.

[00:22:08]>> Yeah, yeah. So let's pause here for a second. If somewhere in this conversation you recognized yourself, like maybe in the flip, where even your fight against porn has become the obsession, or in the word loneliness, like just notice that. It's your own system telling you where the work is that you need to do.

[00:22:25]>> Yeah, and if you're at the point where you want help with that work, this is exactly what we do at Therapy Evo.

[00:22:30]I'm a certified sex addiction therapist.

[00:22:32]I've trained our team members who work with porn addiction to go after the engine underneath the behavior, not just the behavior. Our sessions are via Zoom, so it usually doesn't matter where you live. The easiest first step is a free 20-minute consultation, just a conversation to see if it's the right fit. If you're on YouTube, the link is in the pinned comment. If you're listening to our podcast, you can head to our website at therapyevo.com.

[00:22:57]So, here's what to actually do, maybe as soon as tonight when the next urge arrives. Don't just white knuckle again, but say to yourself, an urge is here. Of course it is. It's just my brain looking for the old pathway. It's an urge, not a need, and it will pass.

[00:23:15]And then get up and move toward a better reward for your brain. Something else that's good, that you enjoy, that is good for your body, for your nervous system. Step outside, pour a glass of water, call a friend, or start the thing that you planned, whatever that plan is, for exactly this moment. Go ahead and start that. The wave will crest and it'll pass within about 27 minutes and you'll still be sober.

[00:23:40]And later when your head is clear, then ask, "Okay, what was that trying to medicate?"

[00:23:44]Just do that once, just once, and you've taught your brain something. The old pathway weakens, the new response becomes faster, and the waves arrive smaller, and then they begin to space farther apart. People get free of this addiction. Not by avoiding thinking about the white bear, by just letting the white bear go out of their mind.

[00:24:07]Exit their mind space.

[00:24:08]>> Mhm.

[00:24:09]And you don't have to do that alone.

[00:24:11]That's actually what we mean when we say normalize therapy. Not therapy as a last resort when everything has collapsed, but help as a normal part of how people get free of hard things. So, thanks for being here with us today and keep normalizing therapy.