Ep #40: How To Stop Watching Pornography FOREVER

[0:00:09.6] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. The only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here is your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

[EPISODE]

[0:00:32.6] KA: What’s up my brothers? Welcome back to the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. I’m your host, Kevin Aillaud, and today we’re getting crazy, we’re getting vulnerable, that’s the word I want to use. Today, we’re getting vulnerable because today I’m going to talk to you guys, I’m going to let you guys in, you’re going to get to know a little bit more about me, because today we’re talking about pornography.

Last episode, last week was an episode all about buffering, the episode before that was about health and buffering was mentioned and I mentioned to you guys in that episode that for me, for my life, I have used buffers. I’ve used a lot of buffers but my main three buffers were sleeping, THC, Marijuana and pornography.

I want to talk about pornography today. I know there’s a lot of you guys out there that are dealing with pornography as a buffer and it’s a big one, it’s a big detriment to our relationships. We’re going to get into this today but first of all, very quickly, just in case you didn’t hear the previous episode. A buffer is an external object, it’s an external substance, let’s put it that way.

Or something that we do, it’s an activity that we use to avoid feeling a negative emotion. You guys know the universal truth, you know that our thoughts create our emotions and our emotions drive our actions and our actions determine our results.

[0:02:06.7] KA: Our results then reinforce our thoughts, right? We have this loop. Now, if we’re thinking something, we’re thinking a thought that we believe and it’s causing a negative emotion, we don’t want to feel that, right? We don’t want to feel bad. We don’t want to feel that negative emotion.

What we do as in the A line, as our action is to buffer, is to go do something that is going to give us a shot of dopamine. Dopamine is that pleasure chemical. Dopamine is the chemical the feeling of happiness. Dopamine is the emotion and happiness is the feeling that we get from it, right? Pleasure.

We go to pornography or these buffers to avoid feeling that negative emotion and pornography is a buffer because it’s sex. We get a dopamine hit from sex. Again, buffers come from places where we get dopamine hits. Eating, drinking, again, sex, television, you know, exercise, spending. These things are what is what we do to avoid the negative emotion because we give ourselves that synthetic pleasure, that false pleasure to override the negative emotion by putting in that buffer, right?

Because pornography is sex, you get a dopamine hit from it. Now, here’s the rub, here’s the thing guys. No pun intended. Here’s the thing. When you watch pornography, your brain doesn’t know the difference between watching pornography, that visual intake on the screen or on the television, on the computer or magazine or whatever and actually having sex.

[0:03:50.1] KA: Now, the body knows the difference in terms of some type of arousal and the chemicals that are happening but if you’re watching pornography and masturbating, then your brain thinks that you are doing what it’s seeing. What you’re actually getting is a heavy concentration of dopamine.

Your brain gets a little bit of dopamine from having sex with one woman, your brain gets a little more dopamine from having sex with multiple women. When you start watching pornography, now you’re getting flooded with dopamine. All different scenes, all different types, all different stories.

Whatever’s going on, on the scene, you’re jumping from scene to scene or maybe you’re looking at multiple sites, multiple clips. Your brain is being flooded with dopamine. It’s a buffer because it’s very easy to avoid negative emotions. You get large amounts of this pleasure from it.

Now, it’s also easily accessible. Look, this ain’t the 80s, right? We’ve got the Internet, you don’t have to go to the store and get a magazine or a video, a VHS tape. You have instant access to pornography. We have the Internet, right? It’s available to everyone everywhere that has WiFi and a computer.

[0:05:07.4] KA: Because the ease of access has increased, we see more and more people buffering with pornography and not just men guys, there’s a lot of women out there starting to do this too. Why do people buffer with pornography? Well, obviously, it’s to not feel a negative emotion, right?

Because that’s why you buffer in the first place. Let’s go deeper. Why pornography? Why not alcohol? Why not food? Why not drugs? Why not video games? Pornography tricks the brain into believing that you’re having sex, right? Pornography tricks the brain into that sexual dopamine. Really, people choose pornography for a connection, because they desire connection, because they lack connection, because they want to feel connected to someone or to multiple people.

Depending on what’s going on. That connection, that intimacy is why pornography is sometimes chosen as the buffer. Obviously if I want connection or intimacy I’m not going to the refrigerator or to grab a beer or to play video games but I might because you know, I may not be aware of my thoughts, I may not know that what I want is connection.

But I’m highly likely to search out sexual connection through pornography than through video games or food. When I lack that, when I feel a lack of connection with myself and with other people, a lack of intimacy with myself and with other people, pornography is often times a buffer of choice.

[0:06:42.1] KA: Another reason is because of dominance and power. There’s a lot of dominance in sex, there’s a lot of power in sex and it especially in pornography, there’s a lot of that as well. If you’re feeling out of control of yourself, if you’re feeling weak, if you’re feeling doubtful of yourself, it’s very easy to turn to pornography to feel powerful, to see power, to see dominance.

That’s why pornography is chosen as a buffer. But it’s also a buffer chosen for guilt and shame. Because, it is a buffer that creates more guilt and shame. Now guys, I want you to understand that most buffers are going to create guilt and shame if you don’t want to be doing them.

Look, if you love playing video games and you love going to Comic-Con and that’s like up your lifestyle and identity, then you probably don’t feel guilt and shame around video games and you probably don’t want to stop playing them. But if video games are ruining your relationship and you’re lying to your wife about how much you’re playing them and you’re not spending time with her and she’s always on you about it.

You want to stop spending so much time but you feel compelled to be in front of a computer or a console, then that is where that guilt and shame comes in. Because you’re doing this activity and you don’t want to be, you feel guilty, you feel like you’re doing something wrong. With pornography, it’s the same.

We turn to pornography when we feel guilty about something, when you feel shameful and then that buffer increases those emotions, we feel more shame and more guilt around that activity itself. Guilt and shame will turn people towards pornography but it’s also a pornography causes.

[0:08:21.4] KA: Now, the other reason that people turn to pornography as a buffer is because of fear of abandonment and lack of connection. I kind of mentioned that before guys. Pornography, again, it’s sex, right? It’s how we connect, we want to connect, we want to be intimate, we want to be with another person sexually, you want to feel that oneness, right? That greatness.

When we fear abandonment, when we feel – when we’re in a relationship and we fear losing that relationship or when we’re not in a relationship and we feel lonely, isolated, alone, and we feel abandoned. Pornography is a buffer that a lot of people turn to. Lack of connection. Don’t feel connected to myself, I won’t feel connected to my spouse, my significant other.

If I don’t feel connected to her, where do I go, I don’t want to cheat on my wife, I won’t cheat on my girlfriend so I go look at pornography. I try to get connected there. That’s another reason why people turn to pornography. Now, here is where we get vulnerable. Here’s where we get intimate guys. Because pornography was my buffer. I told you guys before but I’m going to tell you more, all right?

I’m going to give you the story. I found pornography at the age of 10. I was a very young boy. I was actually at a buddy’s house, he was a friend of mine, he did a paper route, I did paper route with him and one day we were at his house and he had a book and it was like an instruction book on how to have sex but it had a naked man and a naked woman so it was pornographic.

[0:09:52.3] KA: Now, that was my first introduction to pornography and I want you to know that at 10 years old, I kind of already knew what that was, right? I already knew about sex, I had this idea about sex already and I was still in that environment of – I was still in that violent environment.

I don’t know if you guys knew this but I went through a lot of physical abuse as a child for many years and when I was 10 years old, I was still in that abuse, I was still being abused daily, pretty violently, pretty physically. It was very easy for me to find solace if you will, find connection in pornography.

The way I had – look, I was a 10 year old boy, the way I had seen it was my mother had abandoned me, she was gone all the time, she’d left me with this abusive stepfather who beat me up and my little brother up every single day. I thought that I had done something wrong, I was in shame, right? I thought I was broken and that there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t protect my little brother, I couldn’t protect myself.

I thought, I felt guilty because I couldn’t protect my little brother. I felt out of control, I didn’t know what to do. I felt connected with no one, not even myself. I mean, a 10-year-old boy. Pornography was easy, right? It’s like of course, I can be connected with something, with my brain, with my mind and these pictures, these images because at that time, I’m an old man but back then, I was you know, there was no Internet.

[0:11:24.5] KA: Everything was magazines, VHS. It was all connection through images, right? It was because of my fear, it was because of my lack of safety, my lack of connection with myself and all that shame and guilt. Here’s the thing guys. I remained, from that age of 10, I remained a sex addict in some form or another up until my late 30s. Now, again, I’m 40 years old, okay?

When I say late 30s, I mean like, a few years ago. Right around the time I started doing causal coaching. Because when I made that transformation, when I removed my buffers and saw the alpha state, things changed for me. But I lived with it for most of my life guys and I’m getting very deep with you because I want you to know that no matter how long you might be living with a buffer, you can always change.

You could always change. Again, for me, it was almost 30 years, from the age of 10 till nearly – I would say 25 years, I lived as, in one form or another with some type of sexual buffering or addiction. The negatives, the list is long. I lost jobs because of pornography, I lost relationships because of pornography, I lost jobs because of sex, right? My sexual needs, my depravation around connection. But pornography.

I’ve lost again, relationships, jobs, all kinds of different things. Money, time, I mean, the list goes on and on. What happens when you buffer with pornography? I want to talk to you guys. That’s my story, right? I want to talk to you guys about what happens when you buffer with pornography?

[0:13:11.5] KA: Why is it such – why does it cause so much suffering. What is it? You deplete your ability to connect with people intimately, I talked to you guys a little bit about that already. I’m going to be more specific about that but what I mean generally is just think about what pornography is.

Pornography is that synthetic connection. Pornography is sex. Sex is how we connect with people on the most intimate level. The most loving, the most intimate, the most vulnerable level. When we look at pornography, our brain doesn’t know, as I mentioned, our brain doesn’t know the difference, we are connecting with these people.

We’re connecting with the images that we see. What it does is it depletes our ability to connect because the connection is false, the connection is an illusion. We think we have connection but as soon as the pornography is over, as soon as we close the computer, it’s gone, it’s severed, it’s done.

That false connection, that illusion depletes our ability to connect with real people, right? Not porn stars but real people on any level. But most specifically on an intimate level. We could connect to people on a superficial level, sort of like that small talk, hey, how are you doing? But to really be vulnerable to really be authentic, genuine, open with ourselves, it’s just not there.

[0:14:38.7] KA: Because we lack that ability to be with real people. The other thing that happens when you buffer with pornography is the way you think about women. The women on porn films or whatever they are, magazines, videos, they’re actors, they’re actresses, right? It’s not real and what they’re doing is they’re showing up as objects, they’re showing up as essentially, they’re showing up as sexual objects that are being used by men on these videos.

That is not really what women are, right? Women are human beings like the rest of us, they’re amazing people. Women are our yin to the yang that we are, right? Women are the other half, they’re what – they’re the female to our male, right? I mean, that’s what makes life whole, that’s what the light in the dark is, right? The 50%.

Women are not objects for sexual gratification but that’s what pornography starts to make you think. Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, it starts to put that beta condition sentences in your brain that women are sexual objects, women are just around for sex. Not to be intimate or connect with or be loving or vulnerable or share experiences with. They’re just sex.

That makes it more difficult to connect with them because if you’re just thinking about sex when you’re talking to women, you’re not going to be able to have a genuine conversation. The other thing is how you feel about men. Here’s the other thing guys. When you watch a lot of pornography, you start to see other men as superior in some way or another.

Maybe superior, maybe inferior depending on yourself but most of the time, the men that they cast for porn, the do so for very specific reasons, right? You start to feel inferior to these guys in appearance, maybe in genital size, at the ease of which they’re able to attract women, right?

[0:16:33.1] KA: In a lot of pornographic videos, I don’t know, it’s been years since I’ve seen one but the ones I used to watch, it was almost as if the guy just walked up to the girl, said a couple of words to her and she went home with him. That’s not the way it works. I mean, that’s not the way it works brother.

When you start to watch a lot of that and start to believe that that’s the way it works for other men but not for you. Then it starts to deplete your confidence because other men, it’s so easy but for you, it’s not. You start to feel inferior. You also overdose your brain. You overdose your brain with dopamine from a sexual source and that makes it necessary for you to require more dopamine to become aroused.

This can lead to ED, this could lead to erectile deficiency, pornography can lead to erectile deficiency. If you have – it’s the same as anything else. If you’re drinking, you have three beers and you’re feeling pretty buzzed, you’re feeling pretty good and you have three beers every night for four weeks, then after four weeks, you’re going to drink three beers, you’re not going to feel nothing.

Because you’re going to build up your tolerance, right? You have to drink four beers, five beers, six beers. It’s the same. It’s the same with porn, you start watching a lot of porn, you build up your sexual tolerance and the more you build up your sexual tolerance, then all of a sudden it’s time to go to bed with your wife, you can’t get an erection. Why? Because your brain needs more, it needs more dopamine.

[0:17:57.1] KA: It needs all the dopamine that you got from watching the pornography. Pornography can also lead to erectile dysfunction. It also starts to increase your fetishes, right? Because vanilla sex doesn’t seem to cut it anymore, there’s fetishes and fantasies. These things lead to relationship issues because you start to think that fetishes are normal sex and then you want it from your partner.

Pornographic fetishes and fantasies, they’re there, again, they’re acting and they’re acting not all sex is that way. Certainly, if you enjoy fetishes, if you and your partner have a fetish that you both enjoy. I’m not going to step in there and say, that’s – no, don’t do that. That’s not the point.

The point is, if you’re watching a lot of pornography, such that straight sex, vanilla sex doesn’t cut it for you anymore and now you want your wife to be more or your girlfriend to be more adventurous, right? She’s like, I don’t want to be more adventurous, I just love having sex with you. I love the connection that we have, I love the intimacy that we have, I love making love the way we do.

You want more because it’s not cutting it anymore. That’s when it leads to relationship issues, right? Not when both of you have the same fetish, right? Another thing that happens is lies. Lies and deceit. Now, this doesn’t always happen but a lot of guys, I know for me, this is the truth. A lot of guys, and for me, I didn’t want to tell my girlfriend that I was watching pornography.

I didn’t want to tell her; I hid it from her. Because I had shame around it, right? It was shameful for me, I had guilt around it, I thought I was guilty for the behavior and I felt shameful because I was doing it to begin with, right? Some kind of something wrong with me.

[0:19:36.1] KA: Because of that, I lied a lot. I hid the activity and then I lied about what I was doing or whether I was doing it at all. If a girlfriend would ask me, hey, do you watch pornography? I would say no, that’s a lie, a straight lie. I would also hide the behavior. There was a lot of deceit.

Finally, guys, when you watch pornography when you buffer with porn, you waste a lot of time that you could be using to create your future. Now, what happens when you stop buffering? Well, just like any other chemical addiction. Number one, the first thing, the urges hit. You start feeling the urge, the compulsion to go and watch the porn.

Then, the withdrawal sets in with the depravation. Depravation is the emotion of desire of not getting what you want, what you desire. You have desired to watch porn and then you don’t watch it and now you have depravation. Withdrawal is the actual chemical response where because you were getting so much dopamine before, and now you’re not.

The cells of your body are starting to wonder, where did my dopamine go? I need my dopamine. They’re starting to change, they’re starting to physiologically, biologically change. You have the emotional depravation and you have the biological withdrawal.

[0:20:55.2] KA: Then, as if things couldn’t get worse, the negative emotions build up because whatever you were trying to avoid feeling to begin with, with the pornography is going to come back and when those negative emotions start boiling up, then you got to deal with those on top of the withdrawal and on top of the depravation.

You have these intense negative emotions that want to drive you back into the porn, back into the buffer. From here, you have a choice. You can go back to buffering or you could start managing your mind and your emotions. Now, if you go back to buffering, back to square one. If you choose to manage your mind, you’ll increases your connection with yourself and your ability to connect with other people.

You’ll stop seeing women as objects, start seeing them as amazing people. You’ll stop feeling jealous of other men for having what you don’t or perceive to not have what you have. You’ll get the time back, you’ll improve your relationship with your significant other, you’ll allow your brain to arouse your body at lower levels of stimulation, reducing the effects of ED or the need for fetishes and sex.

You will be able to talk to people easier, you’ll be able to open up and be authentic and you’ll not hide behind shame or guilt because these emotions are the ones that are avoided and created with buffering of pornography.

[0:22:17.3] KA: Guys, I want to end this podcast with three ways to stop using pornography to buffer right now. This is what you can take from this podcast right now. I say three ways to stop using pornography but the truth is, there’s only one way to stop using porn to buffer and it’s just to just stop, right? Buffering is an action. In the A line, it’s just not watching pornography, right? It’s just not doing that.

There is no half stop, there is no half action, right? You’re going to stop or you’re going to continue. This is more about three ways to manage your mind after you stop. You’ve made this choice to stop and now we have to go and manage the mind so that you move the desire to ever want to watch pornography.

I recommend using a combination of these three things. I’ve talked about this in other podcast but here we go. Number one, allow the urge, this one is where when the urge to watch pornography comes up, you just allow it to be there, this is called processing emotion, okay? The emotion is desire, the emotion is urge, right? I have the desire, I have the compulsion.

It comes from some sort of thought because always emotions are created by our thoughts. We allow that, we allow that desire to be there. Now, what do you think you’re going to feel when you allow desire, without acting on it, depravation. But that’s okay. Because, as you allow desire and allow depravation, these emotions will decrease in their intensity the same way you were increasing your need for more dopamine when you were on the buffer.

[0:23:58.8] KA: Now that you’re off the buffer, the desire and the depravation for the buffer will decrease as you allow more of the emotion to be processed. As you allow more of the urge to be, I recommend allow 100 urges. Allow a full 100 urges without giving in.

If you get to 30 and you go and watch pornography, start from one, okay? Allow yourself 100 urges in a row without reacting, without giving into your urge, okay? That’s number one. Number two, mental rehearsal. This one I love and this is the one that helped me the most. Mental rehearsal is essentially imagining that you are an actor.

You’ve been hired to play a role in a movie and you’ve been given the script, been given the part. This is your part, this is the character you’re going to play and you go through this character and you become this character and you memorize this character’s lines, you memorize this character’s behavior.

How this character is, how all the little nuances of their speech and how they walk and how they talk and how they behave and their past and their occupation and everything about them. Everything about this person, you’re going to play this character.

[0:25:10.6] KA: Now, you do the same thing but the difference is rather than being an actor going to play a character, you are your present person becoming your future person. Your future self is not the kind of person that would watch pornography. The person that you’re playing – as an actor, if I’m going to go play this character, then I’m not going to watch pornography as this character.
For you as your future self, you are not going to watch pornography as your future self. It’s just not something you do. Your future self doesn’t shoplift, your future self doesn’t steal cars. Your future self doesn’t watch pornography, these are things your future self doesn’t do. That’s mental rehearsal, you become, you basically play the role of the person you want to be until you just become that person.

Because you are, because you’re playing that person and you become them. Number three guys is planned joy. Here’s the thing with planned joy, you have to be real specific with it. Planned joy is like, it’s doing the buffer but not on urge, not on compulsion but on planned. If I say okay, I’m going to watch pornography for five minutes on Friday at five PM. Then when Friday at five PM comes around, I’m going to watch pornography for five minutes.

I planned it. Now here’s the thing, I may not want to watch pornography at 5 PM on Friday but because I planned it, I’m going to do it and when you do that, what you do is you start to sever the desire with the action because there is no desire. You just get the action, you take the action, you realize, without the desire, the action is kind of pointless. What’s the point, I’m watching this for five minutes, I turn it off.

[0:26:54.4] KA: There’s no proceeding desire so it just becomes neutral. Almost like pouring a glass of water. I have no emotion about that, I just pour a glass of water. Planned joy but you have to be very clear about it because if you say I’m going to watch pornography at five PM on Friday then it could be very easy to open up your computer and sit there for two hours and basically undo all the work that you’ve just done with your other stuff, with your mental rehearsal, allowing the urge.

Make sure you time cap it. I’m only going to watch for this amount of time because then what you’re doing is you’re closing it, you’re stopping yourself before any type of desire pops up, before that happens. You eliminate that linkage.

All right guys, that’s what I got for you today. Here’s what I want to end with. If you are buffering with pornography, I want to reach out to you right now. Last episode, I reached out to anyone buffering with anything. This week, I want to reach out to you, if you’re buffering with pornography, because I know what that’s like. I know what it’s like brother.

I can imagine how much suffering you’re going through because I’ve been there. If you want to stop watching pornography, if it’s something that you want to remove from your life, if you want to have a better connection with people, if you want to have a better connection with yourself.

[0:28:11.2] KA: If you want to be able to talk to anyone without shame, without guilt, without insecurity, the first step is to remove the things that are creating some shame and some guilt in your life. If you want to get rid of pornography, you want to end this buffer in your life and really start to live in that authentic, genuine lifestyle, bring up for yourself why you feel like you need to buffer with pornography at all.

Because to discover that is to elevate your alpha and observe that beta condition. That is what I’m offering this week, guys who are watching pornography and want to stop, go to my website, click the button to book a 45-minute free consultation. You do not have to live with this buffer, you do not have to live with these emotions, you can have connected intimate relationships with other people and yourself.

That’s what I got for you brother, until next week, as always, elevate your alpha.

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[0:29:23.6] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Alpha Male Coach podcast. If you enjoy what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for unleash your alpha. Your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset. At thealphamalecoach.com/unleash.

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