Launch HN: Atmana (YC S21) – An app to help cut down on compulsive porn usage
Compulsive porn usage is a taboo topic. Millions of people want to get away from this behavior, but it's an embarrassing problem to discuss socially. Those who are struggling tend to get anxious and lonely which increases the chances that they further indulge in compulsive porn watching. This is the classic addictive cycle.
After discussing with many psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as our users, we have built features that help the user with: (1) Accountability: accountability to one's goals is quite important to succeed. With this in mind, we have a buddy system. Users can add a friend who controls the content allowed on the device and gets daily reports on what kind of content was accessed. (2) Judgement-free support: we have a community of over 100,000 people who are trying to overcome their porn problems. Users can participate anonymously in our community. This reduces shame/stigma and helps people get support from peers. (3) Blocking: We have an inbuilt blocker in our app which cuts out all ways to access porn and we have built it quite robustly so that there are no easy ways for most users to bypass it.
I've spent the last 3.5 years working on apps to do with habits. A colleague and I got started with building apps that we ourselves wanted for becoming healthy, like an app to gamify going to the gym everyday and an app to wake up early. After failing to monetize any healthy habit apps, I decided to work on reducing harmful habits, hoping this would be easier to monetize. I had personally benefited by cutting down porn in my life and it was quite difficult to quit this behavior. Hence I decided to help others who had a similar problem and launched NoPo, a porn de-addiction app. After a year of building many features, I closed it down due to lack of engagement. But after speaking to over 200 users of NoPo, I realized what our app didn’t do, which was: not showing the user their progress, not keeping the user accountable and not blocking porn on the device. After fixing all these issues, I launched BlockerX (https://blockerx.net/), my fifth app, which users are finding valuable in overcoming their porn related problems.
Blocking adult content effectively is quite challenging as users will always find ways to bypass the blocking. The difficulty is to make the blocking robust enough that the user can't bypass it, but at the same time that the blocking only happens on adult content and not others (minimizing false positives). We have done a bunch of optimizations on our Android and iOS apps to make it just right – we consider multiple signals before blocking to ensure the blocking is accurate most of the time.
We have a freemium model. Advanced features on the app require a premium subscription (like ad free experience, unlimited blocking, syncing of blocked items list across devices) but main functionality, e.g. blocking of adult websites, is free to use. Also, our marketing is currently oriented towards 18-to-30 year olds but this is just a starting point. We recognize that these problems are not limited to any age group and want to help everybody we can.
We would love to hear from all of you. If you have faced problems with porn or have seen someone you know face this problem, feel free to share your experiences and feedback. Thanks!
195 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadIt's for that person to decide whether changing their habits is a positive goal to pursue.
> 56 neuroscience-based studies [...] All but one provide support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies.
> Over 60 studies reporting findings consistent with escalation of porn use (tolerance), habituation to porn, and even withdrawal symptoms
> over 40 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli
> Over 80 studies link porn use to poorer sexual and relationship satisfaction
> Over 90 studies link porn use to poorer mental-emotional health & poorer cognitive outcomes.
> over 40 studies link porn use to “un-egalitarian attitudes” toward women and sexist views
> Got it. No evidence.
HOWEVER, many people simply want to change their own behavioral patterns and have a hard time doing it. Will they be measurably "happy" if they succeed? That's not the point. There's value in being able to do something (or stop doing something).
None of these things are ever going to be "quantifiable" in a practical sense.
How rational of you.
effects don't matter, making money matters
This app also doesn’t seem to work as an intervention, it is something the person themselves chooses to use or not.
There are definitely various forms of internet addiction which are growing rapidly and it appears traditional psychiatry hasn't been able to keep up. A community-based approach to address this problem for folks with common goals seems like a good idea. I don't know how I feel about this as a YC "start-up" but there's nothing wrong with the concept which at least tries to solve a real problem.
There are communities on the internet that are specifically for these issues. Light advertisement with the consent of various moderators would not be bad idea. /r/NoFap comes to mind specifically, but also various religious communities where the desire for NoFap extends more from religious obligations would still find this interesting, I imagine.
Anyway, on a technical level, how do you deal with apps like Reddit/Twitter which have tons of porn content without the user leaving for external links that you can block? How do you monitor that?
Media addiction is a manifestation of something, not the root cause.
Removing all carbs from your home forces you to get out of the house to get junk food. During that time or because of the effort involved you may be able to control your emotions and make a better decision. The problem with porn is that it is so easy to get another way Phone, Another computer, saved locally on your hard drive.
I used to think fat people were fat simply by choice. I mean, they are the only ones lifting the fork, right? But I no longer think it's this simple. We are the result of billions of years of evolution in a world where food was scarce. Those who didn't compete for food perished. Those who ate as much as they could when it was available survived. Nobody got fat because it was simply not possible.
Sex is similar. We are descended from males who mated with as many women as they could. Maybe not all men are like me, but there is a part of my brain that literally wants to mate with every attractive woman I see. Obviously this is not possible for many reasons, but like all men, I do have as much sex as I possibly can, it's just not that much (not more than once a day). But you can read stories from rock stars and the like who do have access to much more sex and it can ruin their lives. This high availability is analogous to the high availability of food in modern times.
Porn provides this high availability for normal people. It's like constantly available junk food. Even if I don't go looking for it, I am surrounded by it everywhere I look. Every other Youtube video is a woman with cleavage in the thumbnail. It's like being a fat person constantly surrounded with a buffet wherever I go. And remember, it's porn. It's not like I'm surrounded by cabbages and carrots, I'm surrounded by cakes and biscuits.
I fail to see how climbing a mountain or starting a business or any of the other wholesome pursuits you might be thinking of would curb the desire to eat or mate. The underlying problem here is deeply rooted in our animal brains. The best way to curb the eating problem is to ensure food isn't available. Don't keep any ready-to-eat food in your house. The best way to curb the sex problem is exactly the same.
Not quite. We are descended from sexual pairs whose children survived long enough to reproduce. Often, it took at least both mother and father to keep children alive. And human female reproduction selects for males who stick around, primarily by hiding most signs of ovulation, unlike many other mammals with obvious signs of momentary fertility.
But you're not wrong either. Both male and female reproductive strategies want to maximize number and viability of offspring, but the female cost is much higher than the male cost in time and energy, so males can theoretically roam more easily. In the past, mobility and low populations generally limited that ability (though Genghis Khan managed). That's the disconnect between prehistoric and modern humans that porn and dating apps exploit.
I only partly agree. I have two children. We are loving parents and provide them with a stable house, lots of food, plenty of attention. They have friends, toys, games, books, musical instruments, bikes, and a whole neighborhood to explore. We are an extremely typical middle-class household.
But left to their own devices, they will happily spend every waking hour in front a screen, watching videos or playing video games. There most certainly _is_ something incredibly mentally addicting about passive content consumption. It doesn't need a root cause, just like you don't need one with alcohol and other substance addiction.
(And because this is HN, I am obliged to point out that I'm not saying media addiction can't be triggered by some other factor. Only that a trigger is not required to cause the addiction.)
To use your example of mild boredom: boredom is felt by everyone yet most people choose healthy choices over addictive behaviour. Is there simply some luck in how we are exposed to an addictive experience or do some people seek addictive rewards to overcome some greater pain?
One of the problems with porn is that it's so easily accessible. With alcohol or cigarettes or dieting it helps to have the thing out of site, ie don't buy it. But with porn, you can hop on any of the many available devices and in seconds get access to new videos every day. Also porn is very easy to hide. it's a lot harder to hide cig smoke, being drunk or high.
I think that's the beauty of this app - it has a strong blocker that makes porn not as accessible and the community aspect makes it hard to hide.
In my experience, kids who has plenty of access and exposure to multiple different hobbies tend to chose to spend their time on hobbies rather than passive consumption. I know one example where the parents goal was a minimum of 2 hobbies at any time when the kid grow up so that if they lost enthusiasm for one they can always refocus on the other. Together with school activities, homework, and dedicated (and planed) social time between the parent and child, there simply isn't much time to choose passive content consumption.
Every family is different and it is not a universal cure for anything, but I think it demonstrate that kids do not simply choose passive content consumption out of an addiction. They chose it when it seems like the best option among the accessible/experienced alternatives.
I do wonder if there's a way to take constant screenshots of the screen, use a ML model to recognize any "porn" and then disable it.
It's a terrible idea but my mind immediately went to it.
Reading the comment you are replying to, I don’t think they were trying to say it didn’t, but that it’s different now (for the reasons they enumerated)
> People wouldn't be addicted to sex if the media wasn't shoving it down your throat
Just read the Illiad to see how sexual obsessions have driven people since the dawn of history.
Pervasive sexually explicit (by today's standards) imagery most definitely has existed to varying degrees throughout antiquity.
I like the idea of an app to help porn addiction though. People can become addicted to anything, and another tool in the toolbelt for those people is nice and wholesome IMO.
a) Those are not pervasive at all. Pottery and statues are expensive and slow to produce and are found only in specific places.
b) Those are all low-level representations with a totally different purpose. A fertility statue is not comparable to a constant stream of young girls in bikini on Instagram.
"Fertility statue addiction" has never been a thing.
I have a room full of phallic statues from various tribes that proves this wrong.
Also I don't know how familiar you are with fertility statues, but a lot of them actually function as dildos too. And you can DEFINITELY get addicted to those!
How do you know? I'm not asking rhetorically, I'm genuinely curious how you know this. We do have ancient myths about people falling in love with statues.
Also, FWIW, I do not see any of these Netflix show recommendations with significant sexual undertones. Then again, we also do not watch any of the fake reality TV, "dating" shows, or other drama-based programming.
Then on the other hand, glorifying violence is no problem whatsoever. To the extreme situation we have now where showing a nipple is pure evil but shooting someone in the face is badass. I just don't get this.
Not that I care very much, Americans are free to arrange their society as they see fit. But the problem is that American morals tend to spread a lot due to cultural sharing, like movies.
What evidence do you have for this?
The other part of me that thinks this it's like giving up. I think to truly not care you need true abundance (action).
Also extremes like pre-scanning incoming images on social media for semi-mature content and then blocking it, I do see that aspect.
It is a thing though "simping" i.e. OF or Hololive on YT(this is less sexual more on the social replacement aspect), etc... getting sucked into that... thankfully I have not personally done that. But I am still a lonely man that is true. Couple minutes of the pixel release and I'm on my way.
Compulsive behaviour of any kind is terribly harmful and undesired porn watching is even worse because it is humiliating (to oneself) and destroys self-esteem…
Wish you the best.
It's laughable that you think the solution to a problem like this is to share one's own vulnerabilities with a faceless private company.
Support groups help in real life, not over some app where a faceless entity's purpose of existence is to extract your money.
It's true that our society has commodified and mechanized a lot of what used to be, and arguably should still be, human relations. But we shouldn't let the good be the enemy of the better. Your comment reminds me of a Launch HN from last week of a startup that provides advances to blue-collar workers on their wages (in a better way than payday loans). They had a story of some guy who ran out of gas, signed up for their app from the side of a highway, and got enough money to get gas and keep going. My first thought was: people shouldn't be paid so little that that can happen to them in the first place. On the other hand, those economics aren't going away soon, and it was much better for that man that the app existed, instead of staying stranded on the side of the road.
In that case the active ingredient (the drug, one might say) was money and in this case it's sex, but either way, the startup is (presumably) doing some good, even if the broader context isn't changing much. I'm sure a lot of us feel queasy about the mixture of for-profit companies and helping people—but this is the nature of the web of economic and social relations in which we're all embedded. Non-profits have their own problems and it's certainly not the case that they are somehow immune from that web or pure of it. Quite the opposite.
One other thing: to say we're all embedded means we're all embedded. That includes you; I mean, you're expressing your desire for supportive relations to be free of profit motives on a forum operated by a company with profit motives—not only that, the very company that funded just the startup you're dissing, and why? Profit motive. I think it's important for people who care about human relations not to take the stone-casting attitude of pretending to be pure and denouncing others, as if they/we weren't also implicated in the system that has these properties. To pretend otherwise is self-deceptive and for my money that can only add problem, not solution.
If we can't allow profit motives to be mixed with nobler motives and call that a relatively good thing, the endgame of that stance is to leave nothing but profit motives. Of the available options, I think we should take the impure mixed bag.
Doctors also earn money, but they're human beings with actual identities, not legal entities that don't even list contact information on their website, and they're at least sort of bound by professional oaths and privacy laws.
The only reason I would trust a therapist with my personal life details is because of doctor patient confidentiality and there's absolutely no digital record of our conversation.
I think trusting any app or online service with such details is absolutely wrong with zero room for budging, and arguing that "well, maybe this company is okay" is naive to say the least.
If you post snarky, shallow internet rhetoric, of course it will be misinterpreted in all sorts of ways. That's precisely to be expected.
Would you please stop posting like that to HN? It's destructive of what this site is supposed to be for. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully. Other people will be more likely to hear what you actually mean in that case too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They use a VPN config on iOS to monitor traffic, and on MacOS make their monitoring app very difficult to uninstall without an uninstall key (which notifies your accountability partners)
> Compulsive porn usage is a taboo topic. Millions of people want to get away from this behavior, but it's an embarrassing problem to discuss socially.
Definitely: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/ Some folks clearly signal a need for this no doubt, while others who've quit porn, report substantial improvement in their personal relationships, as well.
> Blocking adult content effectively is quite challenging as users will always find ways to bypass the blocking. The difficulty is to make the blocking robust enough that the user can't bypass it, but at the same time that the blocking only happens on adult content and not others (minimizing false positives). We have done a bunch of optimizations on our Android and iOS apps to make it just right – we consider multiple signals before blocking to ensure the blocking is accurate most of the time.
I co-develop an open-source content-blocker for Android based on DNS and IP addresses. The top feature requests have always been around blocking porn and social media. We rely on publicly-curated blocklists for that, so that's one source of lagging indicator where some domains pass through.
Besides, for an Android app to track user's habits (accountability) is achievable, but letting a user never bypass it isn't do-able at all, because the phone and all its Settings are in control of the users themselves. As one example, if users set DNS to point to family.cloudflare.com, they can also unset it just as easily. If the user needs to start the app to track porn/social-media usage, they can also force-stop the app just as well.
A hardware-based firewall like firewalla or PfSense can be more powerful in terms of preventing a bypass network-wide, but it isn't mobile, and its effectiveness is limited to home networks.
So: I am curious (and you stress more than once in your post) how does BlockerX accomplish preventing its users from bypassing block protections?
As to how we prevent bypasses, we have a many little things that overall work really well. E.g. in iOS, if user disables a vpn profile, we have a way to enable this in a few seconds. in android, with a few additional permissions, we can block force stop and many such ways of bypassing. there are 100s of loopholes with a blocker. we have meticulously plugged many of them one by one. and we're still continuing to plug each day.
I’ve always considered it incredibly creepy and suspicious that people even want to get into “nofap enforcement movement”. This is like religious morality policing you would find in places like Iran.
I don’t like it. And think one should do some soul searching over why you need to push your morality on others.
Wait, so you claim it of people who want to quit unspecified "hard drugs", but not alcohol specifically? Attendance to alcoholics anonymous is voluntary (usually, though sometimes a court compels it.) Use of this application is also voluntary. So what's the fundamental difference here?
> groups (esp religious ‘addiction’ services) _organizing_
If this is really key to what you're getting at, then it makes no sense for you to exclude Alcoholics Anonymous from your ire since that is an organized group that is religion-adjacent if not outright religious.
It’s about the people that are building structures to enforce their own morality and dressing it up as helping addiction. Those that prey on those wanting to quit.
You mean, applications that people voluntarily choose to use? You still haven't pointed out any authoritarianism from Atmana.
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, it seems rather strange to me that you focus on porn when social media is a bigger problem.
But that's probably because of my own bias, I've been trying to quit Reddit and other garbage for years.
regarding social media - that's next on our list! porn was the 1st use case and we plan to help people limit social media and gaming in the coming years.
You're not sorry.
I already asked upthread, but since this is here: how do you intend to insure this? For example, how do you insure that minors who have this app installed by their parents or guardians will be able to remove or bypass it, particularly without the parent being able to detect that (and thereby prevent it via threats)?
- I would change the hero text "Helping Millennials Overcome Digital Addictions" to just "Overcome Digital Addictions"
- "millions" is not consistently capitalized.
- "Know more" -> "Learn more"
How do you prevent uninstalling?
The thing is, it was only when I decided to stop having an unhealthy relationship with porn full of negativity and self hatred that I began to focus on my actual issues.
I use porn multiple times a week now, but I make sure to enjoy it, and make sure to think positively afterwards. It is incredible how just shifting your perspective can change things. Porn was not the problem, thinking it was is what put me in a cycle of self hatred.
Now don’t get me wrong, building up willpower and having a foundation to change your life is very powerful, but make sure you are changing the right thing.
A healthy relationship with porn and self love has actually been incredibly beneficial to dealing with my real addiction: gambling.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3RQbsaYfM
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3RQbsaYfM
In about 80% of cases, physical causes can be identified.[2] These include cardiovascular disease; diabetes mellitus; neurological problems, such as those following prostatectomy; hypogonadism; and drug side effects. About 10% of cases are psychological impotence, caused by thoughts or feelings;[2] here, there is a strong response to placebo treatment.
If a patient can not get an erection with their partner but can with porn, the cause is unlikely to be physical.
Sure. Is this a typo though? What do you mean exactly?
What we have here is a glorified set of blockers that could be replaced with a couple of PAC files and a pihole/nextdns. The screen time stuff is builtin to iOS and Android.
If you really think you have a problem with some addiction, TALK TO A PSYCHOLOGIST. From my experience with cognitive behavioral therapy, it's usually the problems have nothing to do with your will-power or the phone/app/game/site itself. It could even have many other side effects on your life that you can't see like anger. There's absolutely nothing that can replace personal treatment with a psychologist. People invest money in many things and I think getting help from a real qualified psychologist rather than a faceless corporation and an "app" is probably the most important investment one can do, besides getting a place to live.
Don't fall for bullshit products like this one. They're usually done by scammers capitalizing on the pains and misfortune of others.
we do have a feature where users can talk to a coach and get their problems addressed.
So, for example, it would be heart-warming to see efforts like this coupled with measures to help tackle some of the underling/driving issues that affect individuals such as unmet emotional needs, loneliness and emotional insecurity. Harm-causing factors from the broader social context also need to be explicitly identified and tackled, such as those social and cultural systems that weaponize and exploit naturally occurring human behaviours in service of various systematic and abusive control mechanisms.
Are you developing this with preventing porn addicting in mind first, or are you treating all addictions equally? (IMO, social media addiction is a bigger problem, but as you probably know several good blocking programs exist)
One of the things few people know about the new "porn addiction" websites, including NoFap and "Fight the New Drug" is that there are connections between these groups and the LDS (ie Mormon) church.
It's less about "addiction" than creating a stigma around pornography use by wrapping it in pseudo-science.
While pornography can be addictive, there are other models than absence and restriction that are shown to help all addiction (not just pornography), and I'm wondering if you'd looked into them, or (frankly) if this is just another LSD-funded scheme to turn people off of the idea of porn.
restriction might help all addictions. But, we need to start somewhere, and we have chosen this specific problem. we plan to launch solutions for compulsive usage of technology products in the coming months and years.
Didn't you take YC money? That sounds external and not bootstrapped to me. Unless they've changed the rules.
https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/research/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3RQbsaYfM
There is no addiction or compulsion unless the person is experiencing direct negative consequences to one's physical, mental, social, or financial well-being. I.E, no professional following a medical definition would touch a diagnosis of pornography compulsion unless there is clear documentation that the viewing has been causing negative consequences for the individual. Most likely they would not diagnose anything related to porn usage at all since neither the international standards nor World Health Organization recognize the diagnosis.
What a lot of people also try to imply is that all porn usage causes negative consequences. It is a bit like the prohibition tactic implying that any alcohol consumption causes alcoholism and significant bodily harm. Naturally we won't find a study saying there is no correlation between alcoholism and alcohol consumption, and some of the studies is likely to imply that consumption of alcohol may cause alcoholism. What the more insightful studies show is the risk factors that makes a person more likely to become addicted or get compulsions and what factors gives protection against it. The usual finding in such studies are environmental factors rather than simply consumption.
I'd like to offer my own anecdote, as a completely secular person whose lifestyle would probably invite condemnation, if not horror, from e.g. LDS. I won't describe exactly why they might feel that way, but let it suffice to say that I have spent non-trivial time around people who have done what some call victimless crimes, among other and more legal behaviors.
I find that I feel better emotionally and perform better professionally (and academically, when I was in school) when I refrain completely from this vice. I also find that I have much less intrusive thoughts of the sexual variety, especially at inappropriate times about inappropriate people.
I understand your concern that pseudoscientific and/or religious groups might be exerting this influence. I just wanted to give an example of the opposite.
See these videos [0] [1] where people in the gaming community (which in my experience is very often agnostic, if not atheist) have essentially a group coaching session with a psychologist for their undesired relationships to porn. Very rarely do they mention religion, but quite often do they mention emotional distress, life difficulties, social struggles, and difficulty stopping a behavior they find distressing. Whether or not it's an "addiction" (and scientific discussions related to the debate) I find irrelevant -- they personally wish they could stop and have trouble doing so.
I appreciate your efforts to, as I perceive it, point out potential sources of bias or misinformation. I just wanted to offer a totally secular view of the benefit of and reason why an app like this might have funding and a market.
[0] https://youtu.be/e1ndqAkiQZo
[1] https://youtu.be/lUVeUSIlQiI
"Atmana" invokes imagery of "Atman"and "Mana" particularly for native english speakers; both words are highly connected to spiritual and/or philosophical concepts that most devout members of Abrahamic faiths are not going to be comfortable with.
Sure, if I'd felt more engaged in other areas during my youth, I might not have started consuming porn. And I might not have stopped consuming if it weren't for changes in my life that prompted me to do so. But please, when treating addiction you can't try to solve all the other problematic patterns in a person's life. Often only after resolving the addiction people are enabled to address their other pain-points.
If this app -- and I wouldn't trust that thing on any of my devices -- helps people get off porn when they want to get off of it, I don't see how this is problematic. Or any more problematic than the use of apps for making life decisions in general.
There are many ways to manage one's habits and if something else works for you, good for you. That doesn't invalidate the approach chosen for the app.
I would assume this is similar, if you cut down the porn, it gives you time to clear your head and consider how to adjust your lifestyle to a more healthy balance
The reason that I don't watch porn anymore has very little to do with personal discipline and more to do with a reframing of the people that produce it. Porn commoditizes a powerful part of the human experience. It is, in effect, prostitution. In order to recognize this, I had to have enough life experience to understand what sex is and is not, how people trade parts of their soul for money, and how people compartmentalize and lie to themselves. I also had to understand something about what keeps that machine running. That takes time.
I used to watch a lot of porn. I'm not sure that I would be able to fully convey and distill all the lessons I've learned since then to a version of myself that is 15 years younger and internally screaming for the kind of gratification that sex can bring. The only real way to absorb everything that you need to know is by actually living the experience. I needed to relate to people, to get messy and make mistakes and actually live and learn lessons about myself that you can't absorb through a computer monitor. Women are different when they're actually there with you in a way that you can smell, taste, and touch.
Once you realize that the heart is involved and that's the way that it should be, then you start to look at the Riley Reids or Sasha Greys of the world through a different lens. You see what they've sacrificed. It's not sexy anymore.
Maybe those artists sacrificed something too, but I don't see how it's any different from any average author sacrificing his life to write an all-ages novel.
The worst thing about porn addiction is that there are no physical dealers or substances involved. As long as your body is intact, all you need to become addicted is a screen and enough privacy, two things that are almost always available right before you go to sleep. And even without a screen, you can still use your imagination. Getting past that means finding other things in life to do that are more satisfying.
Even with erotica though, the insidious thing about chronic masturbation is that you just can't see the effect that it has on you. It's happening under the surface. It's happening to your heart. Your inescapable subconscious conscience is going to find a way to give you feedback, and it's going to be hard for you to see it.
People have written about sexual sublimation (in its various forms) for thousands of years because eventually some people have enough experience under their belt to look back and make the connection. You can't really expect a 15-year-old with an infinite porn machine to think to themselves, "Hmm, maybe it would be better for my heart not to mash my junk today." They're hungry, man. They're starving. And in 2021 we're doing everything we can to ensure that teenagers don't make the mistakes that they need to make in order to break free from that tap.
(Not to mention absent fathers, social changes, etc.)
But I do worry about how what sex acts are depicted as normal might scramble our interpersonal relationships. I worry about how implausibly beautiful people might damage our self-esteem. And the increasing integration into "endless scrolling" with a social aspect and the clicky-clicky dopamine feedback cycle is the death blow.
Most of these concerns are close to nil with an erotic short story, by comparison. To brutally chop this down to a simple idea: Monkey see, monkey do. Monkey think abstractly through imagination, monkey imagine but not see and so not do.
After all, don't you think it's telling that, while teen girls are hooked on the image-pornography of fake stardom lives on Instagram, and teen boys are hooked on OnlyFans content and half-clad Twitch streamers, that there is (to my knowledge) no epidemic of compulsive erotic story writing and reading to go with it? Oh, I'm sure some people do spend 12 hours a day at that, but it seems not to tickle our brains in quite the same way. Such things are merely sporadically titillating, not horrifically and compulsively addictive, at least for the typical person.
Sex can be, and I think should be, an emotionally fulfilling experience, but it's not a requirement as long as each person gets their needs met.
Is it ever harmful for employees, who may be recovering from addiction?
I am really interested in the social media blocking. I have been quitting social media for 5 or 6 years now. The hardest for me was Quora, I think. I don't know why, they where like the mafia: "Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in" What worked for me was blocking them on the router and the hosts files[0]. This meant there where two steps to unlocking a blocked site. And for extra friction I used a long router password and don't save it. The longer it takes you to reach the thing, the more opportunity to change your mind.
The good news is that social media addiction is relatively quick and painless to cure. I stopped missing them after about a week.
And there are a lot of positive outcomes from quitting this stuff (especially for doomscrollers and dopamine junkies ;) I have been quitting a lot of stuff recently like sugar, sweeteners, coffee, carbs and processed food! And for a little while it's rough. Quitting anything will be rough for at least a few days. But as you strip away more sources of artificial dopamine stimulation, the body compensates, or maybe you just become more sensitive to it. Real life starts to give you some of that dopamine buzz that you where chasing online (or in a can of diet soda!)
But but now I start to feel little dopamine kicks whenever I take some small positive action like doing some exercise or fasting, or walking past the junk food.
[0] crowd sourced hosts files to block ads, social-media and porn: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
any specific resources/framework/books that helped you along this journey?
I will say this, I am convinced that for a lot of addictions, all you can do is substitute one addiction for another. But if the new addiction is something healthy, then I think that is fine. But if you do become a diet addict, keep it scientific, don't follow every blogspam diet fad.
For social-media, I substituted a typing instructor game. So when ever I felt the urge to go doomscrolling or something, I would fire up a typing game instead. I keep a windows VM on hand just to play TypingMaster. It takes 3-5 minutes to complete one of the training sessions (which is probably less than you would have wasted on twitter). This helps kill the urge, and break the cycle. Plus it makes me a better typist. And when you can do 90wpm on QWERTY, switch to DVORAK.
If you have a common chemical addiction like smoking, coffee, pain killers, alchohol then the only safe approach is the taper/step down. Measure how much you take now and then commit to reducing that amount by about 10% per week. So you smoke 18 a day instead of 20 in your first week. That's not so hard, right? Whatever you do, NEVER try cold turkey quitting any chemical, at least not before seeing a doctor. Chemical withdrawals range from terrible headaches for coffee, to deadly DTs from alcohol.
[0] http://garytaubes.com/works/books/why-we-get-fat
[1] https://fourhourbody.com
This is terribly wrong information, to the point of causing more harm to people who take it seriously.
The ONLY common addictions that can possibly hurt you physically in withdrawal are Alcohol and Benzodiazapines (Valium, Xanax, Ativan, etc) and a family of related, common tranquilizers). And even then, you have to be a daily user to be at risk of harmful withdrawal... Unless you are actively getting drunk to avoid withdrawal symptoms, you are NOT in this risk group.
It is NOT possible to physically hurt yourself by cold-turkey quitting caffeine, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamines, MDMA, hallucinogens, or opiates. You may feel like you're gonna die, but you simply cannot hurt yourself due to quitting these substances. Mostly, you'll just be uncomfortable.
This distinction is REALLY important, because the fear of withdrawal (and life without a fix, generally) is already hugely terrifying to addicts who realize that they have a problem. But many (too many!) of these people have no access to a trusted doctor, and fear judgement, legal consequences, or termination of care if they seek medical help.
Please correct your comment, and stop feeding uninformed myths that have zero medical basis. Educate yourself before you give people any more advice on how to deal with chemical addictions.
(FWIW, I'm not a doctor, but I've spent plenty of time in 12-step meetings, and used & quit plenty of drugs.)
^ this is generally correct for many of the classes of substances mentioned; however, it is also terribly wrong information concerning Opiate withdrawal.
I'm not sure in terms of case numbers - people can and do die from Opiate withdrawal due to vomiting and diarrhea leading to dehydration and/or heart failure due to elevated sodium levels.
This is clearly very preventable from a harm reduction perspective with the correct information.
However, you, like your peers, are downplaying withdrawal in general. The physiology of addiction is still quite mysterious. Race, gender, age, location and experience all modulate withdrawal symptoms. Just looking at the top 3 consumer addictions you find, e.g.
Caffeine withdrawal symptoms: impaired behavioral and cognitive performance, decreased or increased blood pressure, decreased motor activity, increased heart rate, hand tremor, increased diuresis, skin flushing, flu-like symptoms, nausea/vomiting, constipation, muscle stiffness, joint pains, and abdominal pain https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430790/
Nicotine withdrawal symptoms: anxiety, awakening during sleep, depression, difficulty concentrating, impatience, irritability/anger and restlessness. Slowing of the heart rate and weight gain are distinguishing features of tobacco withdrawal. Although nicotine withdrawal may not produce medical consequences, it lasts for several weeks and can be severe in some smokers. Like most other drug withdrawals, nicotine withdrawal is time-limited, occurs in non-humans, is influenced by instructions/expectancy and abates with replacement therapy and gradual reduction. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1360-0443....
Codeine: Negative emotions, such as depression, anger, or irritability anxiety and restlessness, shedding tears, difficulty concentrating, dilated pupils, headaches, sinus congestion and sneezing, digestive problems, such as diarrhea, bloating, and constipation, stomach pain and nausea, chills or hot flashes, intense muscle aches, bone and joint aches and pains, tremors and shaking, trouble sleeping
For many people, withdrawal symptoms are similar to those of a more severe bout of flu. A person experiencing withdrawal may not be able to work or go to school for several days https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326849
In addition to those symptoms mentioned, there can be significant tertiary affects, as a result of the anxiety, stress and depression, which have been shown to cause acute physical and long term health problems if not treated.
So, at the very least, if you want to go cold turkey, rather than taper slowly, you should do some research on the withdrawal symptoms and how to manage them. Otherwise you are much more likely to fail at quitting.