Get up, wash, drink some water, and tell one person before you go to sleep. That's the whole instruction for tonight. Not a plan, not an explanation, not a decision about whether any of this was ever going to work. The hour after is where the next episode gets built, and the way to not build it is to stop being alone in it.
The next hour, in order
- **Change your physical state.** Stand up, leave the room, wash your face. You are currently in the exact position and mood that produced the last twenty minutes, and staying there is how one becomes three.
- **Drink water and eat something if it's been hours.** Unglamorous and it does more for the next sixty minutes than any amount of resolve.
- **Send the message.** To whoever already knows. It can be four words. "It happened again tonight." You are not asking them to respond well or at all. You're breaking the secrecy, which is the part that keeps the loop running.
- **Write down four facts, without commentary.** The time, the device, the network, and what you were feeling in the ten minutes before. Four lines, no verdicts about yourself. This is data collection, and it's the only genuinely productive thing available to you tonight.
- **Go to bed.** Do not make decisions after midnight about who you are. Everything looks structurally different at eight in the morning and you already know this.
That's it. Everything else can wait, and the things you want to do instead are mostly the loop asking for a turn.
Why the shame is the dangerous part
Here's the mechanism, and it's worth understanding because it explains why willpower keeps losing.
The episode ends. The feeling that arrives is not mild regret, it's contempt, and it's specifically contempt about who you are rather than about what you did. That's unbearable, so within a day or two you need relief from it. And the fastest, most reliable relief available, the one that requires nothing from anyone else, is the exact behaviour that produced it.
That's not a character flaw. It's a loop, and it has been observed. Research on men in residential treatment describes shame as ["a well-documented consequence"](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29333201/) of compulsive sexual behaviour that increases the likelihood of relapse, and found that higher dispositional mindfulness weakened the link between the behaviour and the shame. Which in plain terms means: the ability to observe what happened without turning it into a verdict on yourself is protective.
An international expert panel on compulsive sexual behaviour reached the same place from the treatment side, opposing approaches that would ["increase the experience of discrimination, stigma, and moral incongruence"](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11214846/). Shame is not a treatment. It is part of the problem being treated.
None of that means "it's fine". It means the punishment you're about to administer is not a consequence, it's fuel.
The one useful question tonight
Not "why am I like this". Not "what's wrong with me". Ask instead: **which route did I use?**
Every episode used a specific device, on a specific network, at a specific hour, reached through a specific path. The work is to close that one route, not to renew a general promise about being better.
- Which device was it? Was it the one you blocked, or the one in the drawer you forgot about?
- Were you on home wifi or mobile data? Router filtering does nothing on 4G.
- Did you undo a block? If so, whose passcode was it? If it was yours, that's the whole finding.
- Did the content arrive without you searching for it, through a feed or a message? A site blocklist has nothing to say about that.
Tomorrow, close that one gap properly. [Blocking porn on every device](/guides/pornography/blocking-porn-on-every-device) has the layers and, more usefully, the list of where each one leaks.
What not to do
**Don't reset a counter to zero and treat everything before it as void.** Eleven days of changed behaviour happened. They do not unhappen because day twelve went badly. The all-or-nothing accounting is precisely what turns one episode into a fortnight, because if the streak is already ruined there's nothing left to protect until the next clean start.
**Don't make a bigger promise.** Ninety days, no phone in the bedroom ever again, a total ban on being alone. A promise made at 1am from a position of self-disgust has a predictable shelf life, and breaking it becomes the next piece of evidence against yourself. Make one small change you'd bet money on keeping.
**Don't do a full confession to your partner tonight.** If they need to know something, they need to be told properly, when you're not in this state and they're not being handed it at midnight. That conversation has its own preparation, in [telling your partner about porn](/guides/pornography/telling-your-partner-about-porn).
**Don't decide the whole attempt was pointless.** It's the loudest voice in the room right now and it's the least reliable one.
**Don't spend an hour reading about it.** Including this page, past the point where it's useful. Close the tab, send the message, go to bed.
Tomorrow morning
Three things, none of them heavy.
Look at the four facts you wrote down. See if they match anything from the last few times. Patterns show up fast once you have three or four entries, and [when do you reach for porn](/guides/pornography/when-do-you-reach-for-porn) turns them into something actionable.
Close the one route. Just the one you actually used.
Then put something in that hour for the rest of the week. Not a rule, a thing. A walk, a call, a series with a person in the room. The empty slot is the vacancy the pattern was hired to fill.
If you want the general version of this, [what to do after a relapse](/spaces/what-to-do-after-a-relapse) covers the first hour, day and week across any compulsion.
If it's happening most weeks
At some point the honest read is that the current setup isn't holding, and the answer is not a sixth app.
Two things move the needle at that stage. A person who receives the information routinely rather than only after a disaster, and professional support. On the second, be careful who you pay: in the UK "counsellor" and "psychotherapist" are not protected titles, and the Professional Standards Authority states that psychotherapists ["are not regulated by law, but can choose to join an Accredited Register."](https://www.professionalstandards.org.uk/practitioners/psychotherapist) Ask which register, look it up yourself, and ask what they think about pornography in general before you book a second session. [SAA, SLAA or therapy](/guides/pornography/saa-slaa-or-therapy-picking-support) goes through the routes and what each one believes.
And if tonight has gone past frustration into something darker, that's not a thing to sit with alone until morning. Samaritans is 116 123, free, any hour, any reason. In England you can also call 111 and press option 2 for urgent mental health support.
Common questions
**Do I have to start counting from zero?** Only if you choose a system that says so. Counting days is motivating for some people and brittle for others, and the brittleness is what turns one bad evening into a fortnight. If your counter makes a slip feel like a total loss, the counter is now working against you.
**Why do I always do it again right after feeling terrible about it?** Because the relief from feeling terrible and the behaviour are the same lever. That's the loop, and it's documented rather than personal. Interrupting it means finding another way to discharge the shame quickly, which in practice means telling someone within hours rather than days.
**Should I tell my accountability partner every time?** Yes, and agree it in advance while you're calm, including the part where you tell them after rather than only before. A contact you can only message when you're winning is a contact you stop messaging in week three.
**How do I stop the spiral once it's started?** Physically first. Leave the room, wash, eat, message someone. Insight is not available to you in that state and trying to think your way out is what keeps you sitting there. Do the small physical things and let the state change before you attempt any conclusions.
Sources
- [Brem et al., Mindfulness, 2017](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29333201/). Shame as a documented consequence of compulsive sexual behaviour that raises relapse risk, and mindfulness as a moderator of that link.
- [Assessment and treatment of compulsive sexual behaviour disorder, Sexual Medicine Reviews](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11214846/). An expert panel's opposition to approaches that increase stigma and moral incongruence.
- [Professional Standards Authority](https://www.professionalstandards.org.uk/practitioners/psychotherapist). Psychotherapists are not regulated by law in the UK and can choose to join an Accredited Register.
