A concrete tip for staying away from porn - Use a badge and a calendar

This post is part of an ongoing series of posts about staying away from porn

Use a badge and a calendar

If you look over at the sidebar, you'll notice an "Add Badge" link. =======>

By following the directions at that link, you can get a badge that appears next to your name while on this site, which shows how long your "streak" of porn abstinence is. This can be a surprisingly powerful tool, and has strengthened the motivation of many people.

Many have asked questions of the form "I just did X. Should I reset my badge?" The badge means different things to different people, and different people have different rules for choosing to reset it. Some only reset when they look at hardcore porn. Some reset whenever they do something that makes their recovery more difficult, like purposefully exposing themselves to triggers. By taking that approach, resetting the badge becomes a powerful tool for recovery, setting up real consequences for behavior that makes their recovery more difficult than it otherwise would be. Always remember that recovery from porn is about more than surviving temptation, it's about thriving, and having a higher quality of life. Better to have a lower badge number and a smoother road, than a high badge number and white knuckles.

The badge is a nice tool to keep you on the straight and narrow, but it doesn't really give you the big picture of your progress. If you have a 30 day streak and then slip, suddenly that badge shows "1 day", which can be demoralizing. Or worse, you may understandably be tempted to not reset your badge because you don't want to lose credit for that month of hard work. So it's nice to have another tool for tracking your progress, one that shows you at a glance when you're doing well overall. One such tool is the calendar. The best and simplest online calendar that I've seen is Don't Break The Chain. When you can see that you've been pornfree for 29 out of the last 30 days, it puts your relapse into perspective, and makes you less likely to beat yourself up and enter a downward spiral of discouragement. It also makes you less likely to fall into the trap of all or nothing thinking: "Hey, if I'm gonna reset, I may as well get it out of my system and have some fun for a few hours.".