I can’t overcome my lust no matter how hard I try

Our pornographic nervous systems

Illustration: Susanna Gentili/The Guardian

Recently, a beloved student of mine told me that no matter how hard he tries, he cannot overcome lust. I wrote him the following.

This won’t be a sermon on the morality of sex. Sexual passion is perfectly normal and healthy. What’s happened in our time is simply that sex has become overvalued to a degree unprecedented in human history. Sexual desire is no longer allowed to rise and fall with the natural rhythms of life. It is artificially inflated, constantly triggered and kept at a pitch far above what the human nervous system was designed to sustain.

It’s important to understand just how groomed we all are. By the time a man gets his first girlfriend, he has seen hundreds or thousands of naked women online. And it’s not like eating a greasy cheeseburger, where you can burn off the calories later — you can never erase those women from your mind. They are forever part of your mental life. That’s why a pornographic culture is so insidious, it’s a permanent carry-on with you.

You don’t cross the bridge from promiscuity to monogamy the same person. It isn’t a switch you flip. Years of erotic variety don’t evaporate at the altar. It leaves grooves in the mind. And a mind conditioned on novelty and variety will not rest easily in the sameness of monogamy without a fight.

So if you struggle with lust, go easy on yourself. Your nervous system is busy trying to undo a decade of grooming.

When enjoyed in proper measure, sex is incredible and joyful, but when stretched beyond that, your consciousness shrinks. Sex, like any pleasure, plateaus quickly. The more you have of it, the less it satisfies. What you’re doing is taking a limited animal good, like food or sleep, and stretching it beyond its natural limits.

No matter how much you enjoy food, for example, you know you’re very limited in how much you can consume in a day without destroying your body. The same is true of sex, but with much more subtle consequences.

There’s a point for everyone when pleasure stops being refreshing and starts becoming destructive. Everyone recognizes this as they grow into their adulthood. Life naturally becomes more serious and deep, and this is a beautiful thing. We naturally seek more depth, coherence, meaning and focus. Once we reach a certain age, a life that revolves around pleasure becomes deeply unrewarding.

When you’re 19, you can live almost entirely in the realm of animal pleasures and feel satisfied. Food, sex, play — it’s all intoxicating. By 30, living in the realm of animal pleasures will have you feeling like a hollow shell of yourself.

That’s why our animal needs sit at the bottom of the ladder of fulfillment. They’re the least important in terms of our humanness, in terms of our human potential.

Part of the curse of having to work (bullshit) jobs we don’t care about is that the lower pleasures function almost as therapy. The more draining and meaningless your work, the more you crave cheap pleasures. You need to vegetate just to return to baseline.

You’d think that those who managed to escape the grind — those who live in relative financial comfort — would immediately jump at the chance to graduate to higher pleasures (more creating, more learning, more loving, more growing). Instead they use their wealth to upgrade their animal pleasures (better food, better sexual experiences, better entertainment). Such is the folly of man.

The profound consequences of lust

The dimming of the mind. This, in my opinion, is the greatest reason to forever close the door of lust. I wrote about this last year, about how I remember watching porn as a teenager and finding that when I had returned to my studies, I took much less pleasure in them. The same book I’d been fascinated by the day before now felt more dull. It was like someone had turned down the brightness in my mind. I remember I could still do mechanical type thinking, but my most powerful, lucid and deep thinking was cut off from me. I don’t know how to explain it, but the highest registers of my mind were less available to me. Even if I kept to a rigorous scholarly routine, it didn’t matter. I realized something that day: I could either enjoy lust or I can enjoy the full powers of my mind. Anyone in a lustful state knows the feeling — there’s a difficulty concentrating, there’s a slight restlessness, your values are less important to you. The philosophical and religious traditions are filled with commentary on the connection between sexual excess and impaired judgment. Muslim polymath, Al-Ghazali, wrote that an erection removes two-thirds of one’s intelligence. Aristotle observed that sexual passion can turn even a wise man irrational. The mind requires a certain interior stillness to operate at its highest level. The problem with lust, like all compulsions, is that it doesn’t terminate once it’s satisfied, it continues to agitate. It continues whispering to you. Something to always remember — the line between a healthy pleasure and a compulsion is that one refreshes and restores you, the other scatters and dulls you. Ask yourself: after I’ve indulged in this pleasure, are my higher motivations weakened? When I return to my life, do I still feel the siren song of that pleasure? Does it still tug on me? Harass me?

The weakening of the will. Intemperance in one area of your life will lead to intemperance in other areas. The more a person lies at work, for example, the more lying will show up in their personal life. The more undisciplined you are sexually, the more undisciplined you will be in your habits, your routines, your work.

Spiritual death. There’s a kind of spiritual and emotional murdering of the opposite sex that happens. The opposite sex loses its specialness and significance. Think back to when you were 15, 17, 18 and how much reverence you had for the opposite sex. There was a mystery and a radiance about them. Now contrast that with the lame, flat and often fatigued dating experiences many people have today. We seem to have lost the vocabulary to talk about this. We seem only able to talk about STDs and consent, but not about the spiritual aging that takes place. In my classes, many of my young students are already old and tired, even at the age of 22. They’re erotically exhausted. There’s a weathered quality to them. As though something has been spent. This comes from consuming the opposite sex like cheap products. This comes from endless exposure and stimulation.

The restlessness of a purposeless life

The rise in promiscuity is deeply tied to the absence of worthy purposes in people’s lives. There’s a remarkable passage from writer Dorothy Sayers on this:

“…in periods of disillusionment like our own, when philosophies are bankrupt and life appears without hope, men and women may turn to lust in sheer boredom and discontent, trying to find in it some stimulus which is not provided by the drab discomfort of their mental and physical surroundings. When that is the case, stern rebukes and restrictions are worse than useless. The mournful and medical aspect of twentieth century pornography and promiscuity strongly suggests that we have reached one of these periods of spiritual depression, where people sleep with each other because they have nothing better to do.”

When higher pleasures are absent from a person’s life, lower pleasures swell to fill the vacuum. People obsess over sex or money or fame when life lacks a compelling “yes.” Nobody has ever denied their vital energies and went quietly and peacefully into the night. That energy will resurface somewhere. Wanting to feel alive will come out in the form of binging entertainment, in extreme promiscuity, in excessive eating, in chronically staying up late for no reason, in seeking out the next drink, the next hook-up, the next purchase.

That’s what Viktor Frankl meant when he said:

“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”

So many people look put together and productive during the day, but as soon as they’re off the clock, they’re racing to catch scraps of aliveness. Instead of building a great self that habitually encounters aliveness every day, because they’re on their purpose, they live in a state of restless anticipation, scanning the horizon for the next injection of aliveness.

You cannot permanently quit those vices that are making you feel alive without giving your vital energies somewhere better to go. Aliveness will be sought out, one way or another. If not in self-actualization, then in self-indulgence.

What people don’t realize is that promiscuity can function as a purpose. It can become an organizing principle. The “city girl”, the “playboy”. These are exhilarating identities. They confer adventure, status, excitement. People build their bodies, their income, their social life around the promise of increased sexual access.

Of course, these are counterfeit purposes and a pale substitute for meaning, no different than building your identity around eating.

Not having a worthy purpose, a worthy “why”, will end up harming every important area of your life.

The problem of distraction, for example, of excessive screen time, is also, at bottom, a “why” problem. It’s a problem of motivation. If I told you that you’d receive $1 million for quitting all screens for three months, every single person would do it in a heartbeat.

People “can’t” stop scrolling because they don’t have a strong enough reason to cultivate an ultra-sharp, ultra-focused attention span. They’re not trying to write the next great novel, direct the next great film, or lead a great new political movement. Or even just be a person who wants to think more clearly and carefully. The same applies to porn addiction, junk eating, etc. You don’t have a strong enough reason to be free from those dopamine traps, to use yourself in the way you want to.

No matter how you spin it, part of you has accepted mediocrity. And that’s a tragedy: because there is work that you, and only you, can bring into this world. There is an excellence in you that remains offline.

With anything in life, you want a “why” and a “how”. Why become a person unperturbed by lust? You must have an incredibly powerful answer to this, far beyond just, “I don’t like how it makes me feel”.

How to defeat lust: don’t fight it

Once your “why” is answered, you want a “how”, a strategy or method. The method I recommend for defeating lust is simple: outlast it. I use this approach with every vice in my life.

You don’t need to fix your whole life, you only need to win today. “Winning the day” means not falling for that one thing you’re working on. That’s it. You might procrastinate on a project, skip the gym, eat poorly, sleep poorly — but if you didn’t fall to your chosen enemy, you won.

If you’re fighting writer’s block, you win the day by just writing something that day. If you’re fighting porn, you win the day if you just get through the day without watching it. If you’re fighting junk food, you win the day by just not eating anything junky that day.

Why this works so well

You might think this approach is too inconsequential, it’s not. It’s the easiest way to overcome the worst habits, because you’re not battling the enemy head-on, you’re simply outlasting it.

Your brain operates on neuroplasticity. Every habit, good or bad, exists as a neural pathway in the body, a web of connections that grow stronger through repetition and weaker through neglect.

When you resist a compulsion, even once, you interrupt that circuit. When you repeat that interruption day after day, the neural pathway begins to atrophy. You’re de-compulsifying that compulsion. Repetition rewires the self. What once required tremendous willpower now becomes easy. Through simple neglect you reduce your greatest enemy down to the size of a toddler.

We rarely make meaningful progress on more than one thing at a time. So if you struggle with both overeating and a pornography habit, for example, it’s wise to allow the overeating to continue — without guilt — while you focus entirely on breaking the porn habit. Slay one dragon at a time.

This doesn’t mean you should abandon holistic discipline. Maintain your general standards, but direct your energies at one chosen front.

For the next 30 days, win the day against lust. If you relapse, analyze (without shame) what went wrong. What triggered it? What safeguards can you put in place to silence those triggers?

If this resonated with your experience, you’ll find my personal coaching and lectures worthwhile.