There was a recent conversation on Twitter where Aus (link) was talking about trying NoFap and quitting porn. RawDog then went on to recommend a resource called “The Easy Peasy Method” (for quitting porn) and I wanted to write a quick post recommending it today.*
* To an outsider those two sentences must have sounded ridiculous!
You can find it using the title of this post and it’s completely free and available in written and audiobook form. I listened to the audiobook over a couple of days and liked it and wanted to recommend it because I’m sure there are a lot of guys out there struggling with porn: it can alter the way you perceive the world and real life stimuli can become less… Stimulating!
From a purely Daygame-POV you should want to eliminate porn because it helps you to find the real world more arousing. If the girl senses that you don’t find her attractive, she’ll reject you unless there’s an enormous value differential. But of course, I’m sure there are lots of people suffering in a much more serious way and would stand to gain much more than just an improvement in their Daygame.
The method itself isn’t really a method – step one, two, three, etc – but focuses on calling a spade a spade; in fact, there are very few literal recommendations in this book and it mostly focuses on getting your head straight. Even the “three weeks” often mentioned in the book aren’t a request to “just try this for three weeks and you’ll see.” Instead, the book promotes a kind-of eureka moment where you suddenly see porn for what it really is: an unmitigated harm to your life; something entirely deleterious. Those three weeks are merely an amount of time within which you’ll probably see that they’re right, and that you were, essentially, a drug addict/user beforehand.
The reasoning behind that eureka moment is described much better in the book but this is my attempt at summarising it (but this summary isn’t enough, I still recommend reading the whole thing):
Porn doesn’t give you anything. You think it does, but you’ve only been brainwashed into thinking you need it. In reality all you’ve done is create an expectation of behaviour in your brain that when you’re stressed/ashamed/guilty/bored/etc, you’ll access porn. The hormone creating these expectations is dopamine but the problem is that less dopamine is released in response to the same stimulus over time. That means in order to get the same dopamine arousal you have to gradually amp up the extreme nature of what you’re watching (if you yourself are a porn user then compare what you watch today versus when you first started). This amping up leads you to need hyperstimulation which in turn leads to a breakdown in relationships and life experience.
In the end you realise that porn isn’t a pleasurable activity and is only you trying to keep the demons at bay, a bit like how smokers only feel normal when they smoke and their state dips until their next cigarette.
I also messaged RawDog to ask if I’d missed anything in this post and he provided this great piece:
I think one thing I’d add is the idea from the book that within you live two monsters.
The little monster, which is what creates the cravings for dopamine. And the big monster, which is the brainwashing that people self-inflict that justifies their porn use (e.g. it gives me ideas, it’s just a bit of stress relief, cleaning the pipes is healthy, etc).
The book does a great job of reassuring us that the little monster is easy to handle, and shows us how to get rid of the big monster. I think that’s why the ideas in this book are so much better than other resources.
Like NoFap is centred around just going cold turkey. That forceful use of willpower can be enough to kill the little monster (cravings go away after a number of days/weeks), but NoFap does nothing to address the big monster. Therefore it’s not a long term solution, and many people who NoFap relapse.
Easypeasy’s selling point imo is its ability to reverse the brainwashing surrounding porn. That’s why the book will get you off porn for life.
The book also gives some really good, visual metaphors and sayings which help you to remember its lessons:
- that porn is a drug just like nicotine or heroin
- that every visit to your favourite site is only “greasing the waterslide” to make the behavioural pattern more entrenched
- that if before you watched porn for the first time someone asked you whether you would do it for the rest of your life, would you continue?
- that watching porn is like wearing tight shoes just for the pleasure of taking them off
I’m not a regular user myself but I want to eliminate porn from my life. And beyond that, there are a few other things I want to stop doing which fall under the same dopamine based hyperstimulation umbrella. It was hearing the phrase “porn does nothing for you” that really got me thinking about these things and seeing where I could apply the lessons in the rest of my life. Ultimately I’m looking forward to resetting my dopamine receptors and, through having a more realistic expectation of life, being happier, healthier, having more time, money, energy, better sleep and better drive.
I’ll end on two requests:
- If you know someone who wants to quit porn then share this resource with them
- If you use porn and don’t want to stop, then please don’t post on the internet in response to guys that do and mock them by saying things like “I already watched some this morning, are you jealous?” Or else link to studies which “prove ” that it’s all in their heads. They’ve made their decision and if it’s such a bad one then they’ll be back anyway, right? Just because someone doesn’t want to do the same thing as you doesn’t make it an existential threat. They’ve identified porn as something harmful to them and want to stop watching it. They’re not imposing themselves on you. If anything you could give it a go to “prove” that it didn’t make any difference.
Yours unfaithfully,
Thomas Crown
*****
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Thomas Crown PUA 
I read “Your Brain on Porn” a couple of years ago. Based on your summary of easy peasy, it more or less says the same thing: porn is an artificial stimuli that numbs the user towards reality. It hits a bit on no fap as well.
Ultimately I’d tell people to experiment with their use, with the first step being to quit cold turkey for a month or so to test their addiction levels.
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I agree. Maybe you wouldn’t even need a month. The benefits of no porn might start showing after only a week
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