45. Web Blockers: Are They Helpful or Harmful in Overcoming Porn Addiction? Exploring apps like Covenant Eyes and BlockerX

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45. Web Blockers: Are They Helpful or Harmful in Overcoming Porn Addiction? Exploring apps like Covenant Eyes and BlockerX

Welcome to another episode of the Unhooked podcast, the place to learn how to break free from compulsive behaviors and bad habits, so that you can create the life you want.

Today's episode explores a crucial topic: 'Should you be using web blockers in your fight to break free from porn?' Inspired by conversations with clients, we'll unravel the benefits, challenges, and deeper strategies around this issue.

In this episode, you can expect to learn:

1. Behavioral Architecture and Habit Change: Discover the concept of behavioral architecture and why relying solely on willpower to break habits is ineffective. Understand how the environment and triggers play a pivotal role in habit formation and change.
2. The Role of Web Blockers: Explore the argument for using web blockers, like Freedom and CovenantEyes, as a tool for limiting triggers and making it harder to access addictive content. Learn why they're important, especially during the early stages of recovery, to aid in healing and rewiring neural pathways.
3. Balancing External Support and Inner Transformation: Uncover the potential pitfalls of relying solely on web blockers. Understand that while they can provide initial support, lasting recovery demands a deeper commitment to inner work. Learn why cultivating inner freedom, self-restraint, and integrity is essential for long-term success.

Join me on this journey of self-discovery and empowerment as we navigate the intricate landscape of overcoming addiction, harnessing behavioral change, and finding true inner freedom. 

A quick reminder to support the podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. Your feedback fuels this mission. And if you're ready to take control of your journey and seek guidance through coaching, sign up for a free discovery call using the link in the show notes. 

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Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/JeremyLipkowitz

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About Jeremy:

Jeremy Lipkowitz is a meditation teacher, coach, and digital habits expert on a mission to empower men to reclaim their minds, thrive in their relationships, and embrace a life of integrity. His impactful work in helping men break free from porn addiction has been featured in places like Men's Health Magazine and Livestrong. With a decade of meditation teaching and coaching under his belt, he's enabled countless men to break free from the chains of addiction and step into their true potential. He is the founder and creator of the Unhooked Recovery program, a 30-day intensive reboot for men looking to break free from addiction at the root. 

Transcript

So welcome ladies and gentlemen to another episode of Unhooked. I'm your host Jeremy Lipkowitz and it is A beautiful sunny day here in Amsterdam. I just have a few weeks left in Amsterdam before I start traveling again. I will be headed to New York, and then to Bali after that, to visit some friends and do some work around the world.

So, I am very excited. to be traveling again and also, you know, a little bit sad to say goodbye to my home here in Amsterdam. It's been a wonderful place to get some work done, do some recordings, hang out with friends, go rock climbing, do all of those things that I love to do. So that's just a little life update for you.

Has nothing to do with the topic for today, which is should you be using web blockers? In your fight to break free from porn. And this episode has been inspired by some recent conversations I've been having with a few of my clients on this topic of web blockers. And they've been asking, you know, should they be using them?

Are they important? And so I wanted to do an episode just exploring the ins and outs of web blockers. When you should use them. When you shouldn't use them. When they will be helpful and when they might be actually holding you back from deep, long term recovery. So that is the topic I want to explore today.

If you're new to web blockers, you know, there are many different kinds that you can use. There's a lot out there on the market. Essentially, they are some kind of app or technology that prevents you from accessing certain sites. And so they might specifically be around porn and preventing you from Logging in or accessing adult content, where there might be more general, uh, web blockers, things like Freedom, which is an app that's designed more for focus and productivity, things that might be preventing you from logging into Facebook or news websites, more in the realm of productivity and focus.

There's also other ways to get kind of the same benefits of just logging into your settings and removing certain functions. Um, deleting certain, uh, apps like safari, you can take that off your phone. So the different, different ways that you can get into this, but web blockers as an idea is some way of preventing you from accessing certain sites or certain, uh, kinds of apps.

And today, again, I want to answer this question. Should you be using these blockers? Are they helpful? To answer this question, it's important to understand two important topics, one which I'll call behavioral architecture and the other which I'll just label as unconditional freedom. So these are two of the topics that we're going to be exploring on the podcast today that are important.

to understand the answer to this. So the first behavioral architecture, this is something that I talk about often on this podcast. I also talk about in my course, but it's essentially the understanding that we have now that if you want to change your habits, if you want to, for example, cultivate a healthy habit, or if you want to break free from a bad habit, we understand now that willpower alone is not enough.

And in fact, if you rely on willpower alone, then it's, you're going to fail because willpower is a limited resource. Eventually, you're going to run out of it. And instead, what's more important than willpower is what we call behavioral architecture. Or you can also think of it as stimulus control. The idea here is that the environment that you're in and the triggers that you're seeing in your environment are in many ways more important than your willpower.

So for example, if you want to break free from sugar, you know, if you're addicted to sugar and you're trying to change the habit of not eating so much sugar, but you keep walking by the donut shop. On your way to work, it's going to be much harder to break free from that habit. You know, you're going to be tempted, the trigger's going to come up, the cravings are going to come up more often.

And so you're going to be more tempted. And so to be smart about this, you can architect your environment so that maybe you don't walk by the donut shop or the cookie shop on your way to work. You don't put junk food in your house so that when, you know, when you open your fridge, it's just carrots and hummus and eggs and protein.

Another example of this is let's say you want to be using your phone less, particularly at night. And so if you leave your phone in the bedroom and if you plug it in right next to your bed, again, it's going to be hard to break free from that. But if you leave your phone outside the bedroom, you're removing that stimulus, you're removing that trigger, and it's going to be much easier to avoid looking at your phone.

This is something that also is covered in the podcast I did about the science of lasting behavior change. And one of the important topics is making your new habit. as easy as possible. The flip side of this, you know, the other side of the coin is making the bad habit that you want to break free from as hard as possible is going to help you in your recovery.

So what this looks like is, for example, if you make it hard to access porn websites, it's going to be easier to stay away from them. If you put in these barriers, if you put in web blockers and just make it hard to get access to porn, it's going to be much easier to stay away from it and to stay clean.

So this is one of the main arguments for using web blockers, you know, that they're very important for limiting your stimulus control, limiting the amount of triggers that you're seeing and just make it hard for you to access. One of the reasons that porn is so addictive is it's just so easy for so many people to access.

It's literally just pulling out your phone and typing in a few letters and hitting enter, and you've got porn. Sometimes you don't even need to do that. You just open your phone and it's there. So, web blockers are very important, particularly in the beginning of your recovery. As you're, you know, giving your brain time to heal, as you're starting to rewire some of these neural pathways, it's important to give yourself a fighting chance, you know, give yourself time to heal by putting these barriers in place, you know, putting up the barriers against you just opening up your phone and accessing it very easily.

So that is the argument for. using web blockers. Again, there's a lot of different web blockers you can use. Um, there's some that I mentioned earlier, like freedom is one that I used a lot. And this is where you can just limit certain websites. There are ones that are more involved and specifically around porn.

So covenant eyes is one where you are kind of giving access to your what you're looking at to someone else that will actually send the data to this other person. It's kind of like you have that accountability knowing that somebody else is going to be looking at what you're watching. So, that's the argument for WebBlockers, and I highly recommend to use them, particularly in the beginning.

But, and here is the but, there are two problems with WebBlockers. The first problem is that cracking the code to the WebBlockers, or finding loopholes, It's very easy and becomes a game in itself, you know, so we live in a society where it's so easy to access porn. If it's not on your phone, you can find it somewhere else, right?

And so if you're just relying on web blockers, there's going to be many times where you find a loophole or where you make finding the loophole a game that is addictive on its own. And so that's one problem is it's, there's always going to be cracks in the system and it's never, you know, uh, it's never.

Surefire way to make sure that you're not getting triggered. So that's one of the problems. But the more important problem is that using web blockers alone doesn't actually address the underlying issues that is causing the addiction in the first place. So it's putting up that barrier, it's putting up that wall, but it's not actually doing the inner work of breaking free from.

Porn and breaking free from the addiction itself. And so for this, it's important to think about where we really want to go in the long term. And I am almost 100% sure that what you really want in life is deep, Inner freedom from addiction, freedom from mental slavery, that you want to put an end to feeling powerless against porn, you know, to put an end to constantly fighting against these urges and these cravings, put an end to the lifelong struggle, you know, you don't want to live your whole life feeling powerless.

to some image on a screen. So the ultimate goal here for most of us is to be completely free from addiction. To no longer worry about what triggers you might see, because you know that no matter what you see, acting out doesn't tempt you, you know, doesn't pull you. It's the kind of freedom where you don't need blockers, where you don't need someone owning the passcodes on your phone, you don't need somebody looking over your shoulder.

It's that freedom that comes from within. And in order to do that, you actually have to do that inner work. You have to build up those muscles of self restraint, of discipline, and also the inner work of, of just breaking free and realizing, hey, this is not actually what I want to be doing. This is not in alignment with my integrity, with my values.

And so if you rely on these blockers your whole life, you'll never get to grow those muscles. You know, a lot of people, they focus all on just stopping the behavior and they're focused just on kind of pushing it out, but they don't actually do the inner work. And in this way, blockers can sometimes be a little bit of a crutch.

You know, you can end up giving your power away to blockers and thinking that the only reason that you are staying free from porn is because of these blockers. And then the moment the wall falls down, you end up acting out. So here again, we need to find a balance just as with, you know, if you break your leg in real life using crutches in the beginning is important, right?

You need crutches to give your leg. time to heal. But once you've done the healing work, you don't want to live with those crutches the rest of your life. You want to actually start putting weight on that leg and start building up those muscles, those leg muscles. It's the same with recovery. You know, in the beginning, using these web blockers as a way to give yourself that freedom, that space to breathe, but making sure you're actually building up those inner muscles, the inner strength.

That will give you the ultimate freedom, that inner freedom. So again, the, the summary here is, yes, web blockers are very helpful, particularly in the beginning, and we know this because of behavioral architecture, stimulus control, what we know about habit change, and it's important to do the inner work. to cultivate a life that is free from addiction from within, where you don't need to rely on web blockers.

For, you know, just as myself, as an example, I don't have any web blockers now. You know, I don't use anything to prevent me from accessing these things, because I've cultivated these muscles from within, where it's like, I don't want to do that stuff anymore. And I've been free from my addiction long enough where it doesn't pull at me.

It will pull at me from time to time, you know, in small ways. But again, you know, I have those muscles within myself. The awareness, the clarity, the integrity, the... Just those muscles of self restraint and discipline and integrity. All of these things have been built up. And so I don't need any web blockers anymore and so that is the long term goal where you can go out anywhere you want and you don't need to worry about what you're going to see or what kind of blockers are up there.

So I hope that that has answered this question for you. I hope that you have found this episode useful. If you want to support this podcast, as always, helpful to just leave a review, go to iTunes, the Apple podcast, scroll halfway down and leave a review. It is So very much appreciated. And if you want support in finding freedom, if you want support in doing this kind of inner work, not just the superficial outer work, but if you want support and you're looking for coaching support, if you're looking for.

One on one coaching support for accountability, then click on the link in my show notes and sign up for a free discovery call with me. We can talk about what coaching looks like. And if it's right for you, this is something that I love doing with my clients to get to see that transformation. So if you are ready to take that step in your own journey, then just reach out and sign up for a discovery call and we'll take it from there.

So that is it for today. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. As always, signing off from Amsterdam, we'll catch you guys on the next episode.