Day five was the hardest day so far. But days six and seven were much easier. Why? Because we were on the road all weekend and I had no time to dwell on what I was doing. In fact, the weekend seemed to fly by in the blink of an eye – mostly because I was able to travel without the paranoia that normally accompanies my traveling. But it got me to thinking about my triggers – the things that make me want to act out on my desires for Internet porn and compulsive masturbation. And, after careful thought, I think I have found my primary trigger: boredom.

In simplest terms I can distill it down to an equation:

Boredom + Privacy + Computer + Internet = Internet Porn/Masturbation

Without all three of these elements, I have (virtually) no desire to look at Internet porn or compulsively masturbate. Take away the boredom and privacy, I’m in a room with a computer trying to get shit done. Take away the computer and I’m just bored and alone with no desire. This weekend is a great example. This weekend I stayed busy and didn’t have my computer around me for much of the day. Boom: no desire for porn or masturbation.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve made some changes to my life to increase my chances of success now that I’m at home:

No more taking the laptop in the bathroom. Bathroom is for going or showering alone. Try to avoid being alone (for the time being). I’ve started going to bed earlier when my wife does, instead of staying up later. Keep doors and blinds open as often as possible. Generally, unless I have a good reason for keeping the door to a room closed (such as using the bathroom or working in the garage), I’m going to try to keep the door open. This is especially aimed at my work environment. Internet filtering. Back when I tried this in 2005, I installed a filtering program on my computer. That lasted all of one day because the false positives kept getting in my way and it got to the point where overriding it was just a no-thought exercise I went through. This time, I’m making use of OpenDNS’s family filtering, which enabled me to fine-tune what I filter a little better. The other nice thing I like about this approach is that it requires time to defeat, which is the most critical for me. Generally speaking, I’m smart enough to easily defeat most installed filtering software, but with OpenDNS, if I want to defeat it, I have two options: either log into the interface, turn it off and wait for the change to delegate to all their servers, or change my DNS servers and flush my DNS cache. Either one takes time to do, which gives me time time to really assess what I’m about to do. It’s a circuit breaker.