Do or do not, there is no try.

There's a certain wisdom in Yoda's most popular phrase.

I used to use a lot of weak language.

I was "trying" to improve my health.

"Trying" to build a better lifestyle.

"Trying" to quit porn and fix my intimate problems.

But was I really doing them?

Kinda.

There was movement in the right direction.

But underneath my word-choice was hidden an unspoken truth:

That I really wasn't giving them everything I had. Not at that time, at least.

🧠 Rewiring Your Mind
Learn how changing your thoughts about porn through cognitive restructuring can break the automatic response patterns keeping you trapped.

Somewhere along the way, that changed. I realized the importance of the words we use and the stories we tell ourselves. It may sound pedantic, but little things like the words we use in our self-talk can have a pretty massive impact on our outcomes. If you're telling yourself a story with weak, wishy-washy, half-in-half-out words, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise when the results are wishy-washy too.

Incidentally, changing my self-talk was a huge part of how I finally quit porn over 4 years ago.

For example:

I stopped telling myself I wouldn't watch it, and started telling myself I'd stay clean instead. Which shifted my focus from not doing something negative, to proactively doing something positive… which is a much healthier thing to program into the subconscious mind.

Another one:

I had these thoughts that I'd use to constantly justify using again. I was tired and needed to fall asleep, everyone does it, I'm single and have needs (or my girl turned me down and I have needs…), I was stressed and needed to relieve some pressure, or whatever other bull-dung. There was a constant stream of ideas that my brain would whip out to rationalize my behaviors. I had to dismantle that thinking and replace it with healthier thoughts…

And there's another big one:

I'd been really harsh with myself. Self-berating, thinking of myself as a loser, piling the shame and guilt onto myself for not being who I wanted to be. But ironically, the more I made myself feel bad like that, the stronger the urges were – because my brain was programmed to use porn as escapism, and those emotions were prime examples of things to escape from.

So I had to learn how to become a better friend to myself.

Thing is, quitting porn is largely an internal battle.

Urges always originate from within, or they originate from some external circumstance… but then that circumstance is just interacting with what's happening inside of you, too.

Many men try to quit by improving their external lifestyle.

Which is good and necessary.

But they completely ignore, don't know about, or don't have the slightest inkling about how to actually do the internal work that'll really take and keep them out of the "porn trap."

Yet, there's no way around that work.

And when you do the internal part right?

The external starts almost taking care of itself, and you can pretty quickly arrive at the point where staying clean feels totally normal and natural — where you don't even want or need that stuff anymore, and are happily living without it.

Everyone needs a helping hand sometimes, though.

I couldn't have done it alone.

And maybe you shouldn't be doing it alone either.

Download the BeFree App today and start changing your self-talk from "trying" to "doing."