Killing Baby Hitler
The key to overcoming your porn addiction? Curb it before it grows into a tyrant.
Imagine you are sent back in time with the one and only mission to kill Adolf Hitler. What year would you travel back to?
Think about it. You can travel back to 1940, at the beginning of the war, when Hitler has already shown his true face but the regime that so much revolves around his figure hasn’t caused that much destruction yet. Killing Hitler then would likely make you the hero who put an early end to World War II.
The problem with this approach? Good luck whacking Hitler in time of war, when the guy is already worshiped like a God and you have five layers of fervent soldiers protecting him everywhere he goes.
Alternatively, you can travel back to 1889, to the town of Braunau am Inn, and kill baby Hitler when he is just a few months old. As long as you manage to avoid Adolf’s dad Alois, you shouldn’t find much resistance in his mom and siblings, and taking care of the kid would be a breeze.
The problem with this one (other than the ethical issue that is killing a baby, of course) is that getting rid of Hitler at such a young age doesn’t really give assurance that World War II and all the horror that came with it would be avoided. The humiliated and impoverished German population could easily gather around a new figure, likely better but perhaps even worse than Adolf, and your infanticide would have been for nothing. At this point, you would need to be sent back in time again to kill the baby version of the next Hitler, and then repeat this process baby after baby, until all the potential war-starting dictators have been taken care of — tedious work that is, for sure.
The best solution, then? Well, it depends on who you ask, but I personally am all for baby killing.
I still have a very clear memory of one of my last relapses.
One evening I was minding my own business, mindlessly scrolling through Reddit, when my girlfriend left the house to meet some friends. Something snapped inside of me then. I opened a new incognito window and typed in some websites completely on autopilot, starting what would be an hours-long binge and the end of a streak of more than two months.
The relapse seemed to come as suddenly and unexpectedly as the blitzkrieging tanks that invaded Poland, but just like then, the events that gave rise to what happened that day could be traced back in time.
On that same morning, the alarm clock pulled me out of a wonderful dream and pushed me right into a very real and cold bedroom, feeling dazed and dog-tired. I moved to the couch, trying to prolong the rest, and resorted to my phone in order to stay awake. And because nothing keeps me more awake than my reproductive instincts, I decided to open up Instagram and spend the next few minutes checking out girls in my Explore section, until my sleepiness and too much of my time had gone and I felt ready to finally face the day.
Drooling over Instagram that day hadn’t even been a fresh idea. Earlier that week I had already spent some time stalking influencers, and those posts had been populating my fantasies in the days leading to the relapse. Just the day before, a long shower had been the perfect excuse to entertain those thoughts for a while.
Such long showers had lately become more and more common. In them I would mix past memories with imaginary futures, the mental pictures becoming more vivid every day as my horniness grew (by the time I relapsed, I had accumulated more than eight days without having sex).
Behind the dry spell was a busy schedule that left virtually no time and absolutely no energy for sexual relations. A few undesired social commitments and a couple of tough days at work had made the last two weeks some of the most tiresome I could remember in a long time.
The stress, pervasive, intensified during those days until it all culminated in a relapse.
Tracing back my relapse reveals a series of steps, all gradually building on top of each other to lead me to that final porn binge. Every single one of these steps was an opportunity to stop the relapse that I didn’t take — a chance to kill Hitler before he turned into a genocidal dictator.
By the time my girlfriend left that evening, stopping what was to come seemed as improbable as getting hold of Hitler inside his Führerbunker in the middle of Berlin. The events preceding that evening had driven me to the edge and my mind had responded automatically, giving me no chance to reflect.
Perhaps one way to avoid this would have been to stop myself from checking Instagram that morning. It was, after all, what had put me in the wrong mood for the day. Scrolling through those profiles was my gateway drug, a step immediately preceding porn, and avoiding it could have saved me then… but for how long? The impulse to check that app responded to a state of mind that was already on the brink of relapsing. Fighting that impulse was possible but, as a long-term strategy, it was doomed to fail. The solution, then, might have been to take one further step back.
Remember those long showers? They were my way of entertaining triggering thoughts. Fantasizing about girls reinforced the habit of checking them on social media, while reminiscing about old videos directly pushed me towards porn. These constant fantasies kept feeding my horniness and steering it in the wrong direction. Every long shower was a little boy Hitler dreaming of an empire.
Certainly behind this was the fact that I hadn’t had sex for days. My dry spell exacerbated it all, making it harder to keep my mind off the wrong things. The solution to that is obvious — yet having sex, even in the context of a stable relationship, isn’t always an option. Whatever strategy I follow to quit porn therefore should never rest upon sex being a given.
This brings us to what was causing the dry spell in the first place: the busy schedule. All those commitments. The late evenings in the office and the late nights out. The days and weeks of hustle and bustle, with no time to disconnect and rest. In essence, the stress.
That — the stress — was my baby Hitler.
Quitting porn is a war with many open fronts. If you don’t carefully choose the right battles to fight, you are bound to end up losing the war — exhausted, wounded, and beset with attacking thoughts.
Relapses don’t just happen. They never come out of nowhere. Never. Because your addiction doesn’t either.
Tracing back the events leading to a relapse is like performing a dissection of your porn addiction. It is only from this analysis that you can identify what’s at the core of your problems with porn. Once you do, you can use this insight to fight your addiction more effectively.
In the days leading to that relapse, I struggled to keep my mind off porn, but capitulated to the urges to check out girls on social media. I felt bad about browsing Instagram, but gave myself free rein to entertain fantasies every other day. My focus was on not watching porn, yet I was neglecting all the many ways in which I was letting that temptation grow inside of me.
Once I identified the stress at the heart of everything and started managing it, porn stopped being ever-present, and both the urges to relapse and the risky distractions that I was indulging in became much less common.
Kill your baby Hitler. Whatever that is for you. If it’s stress, get better at managing your time, make sure you save time for rest, meditate. If it’s procrastination, build discipline, try not to put too much pressure on yourself, find healthier and more manageable activities to distract yourself when you can afford it. If it’s self-loathing, learn to love yourself, acknowledge the things that you don’t like, find ways to make them better.
Whatever you are using porn to cope with there is always something you can do to work on it, and better ways to decompress when the work gets overwhelming.
Start killing babies, and I promise you things will get easier.
What’s in your math folder?
Do you know the issues that lie behind your addiction?
Are you familiar with the actions that lead to your relapses?
Relapses can help you understand your addiction better. Once you gain this insight, use it to improve your process.
Address the core feelings that push you towards porn and avoid all the steps that take you there. The sooner you stop it, the higher your chances will be to succeed.
Share your insights in the comments below, on social media, or in your favorite porn addiction community, and if you know others that are struggling with porn, help them by sharing a link to this story.
Let’s start a conversation!
Hi, this is James! Thank you for reading!
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