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Thanks to @Duff for sharing this book. If it matches your addiction, I recommend reading as-is.
Otherwise, I edited it into a generic book since it says licensed under creative commons.
https://easypeasymethod.org/
PART 1
DO NOT JUMP CHAPTERS
This open source book will enable you to stop using immediately, painlessly, and permanently without willpower or any sense of deprivation or sacrifice. It won’t place any judgement, embarrassment, or pressure to undergo painful measures.
In fact, there’s absolutely no need to cut down or reduce your usage whilst reading; doing so is actually detrimental.
You might be apprehensive about the very thought, or one of the millions actively attempting to quit. If so, perhaps what you’ve already read goes against everything you’ve ever been told, but ask yourself if what you’ve been told has worked? If it had, you wouldn’t be reading this book at all.
Perhaps you identify with the following questions:
If you’re a user that depends on it at all and for any reason, all you need to do is read on. If you’re here for a loved one, all you need to do is persuade them to read this book. But if unable to persuade them, read the book yourself. Understanding the method assists getting the message across and preventing your children from starting. Don’t be fooled by the fact that they don’t have access to it now – all do before getting hooked.
DO NOT JUMP CHAPTERS
Like myself, you’ve probably succeeded with streaks of various lengths, but have always eventually succumbed to illusory urges. I’m pleased to report this method works entirely differently, and has been the only method that has worked.
Or perhaps, you’ve been linked this book by a concerned party and are skeptical. Firstly, thank you for at least looking at it. This will be expanded upon shortly, but please briefly recall the first time you did it. Did you expect that you’d return to it for the rest of your life? According to my own informal studies on the matter (pestering friends to read this book), it is equally as effective for the casual user as it is for the heavy. It’s not terribly long, with high chances of large gains, so I beg you to continue reading.
The method described is:
You might find this impossible to believe, but this sentiment is echoed by many people.
If you’re expecting this book to ‘scare’ you into quitting using the various health issues users risk, such as dysfunction, unreliable arousal, loss of interest in reality, brain hypofrontality, and the blinding accusation that it’s a filthy, disgusting habit and you are a stupid, spineless, weak-willed jellyfish, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Those tactics never helped me to quit and if they were going to help you, you’d have quit already.
Conventional methods of quitting advocate using willpower, or ‘diet’ substitution methods such as ‘using once every n days’ and cutting down consumption. Some sites list peer-reviewed research about neurotransmitters and neuroplasticity, and while these sites are informative, many are aware of the health risks and choose to do nothing, though such material is typically avoided. Ultimately, they are equally ineffective as they don’t actually remove the reasons for using. Ultimately, turning something into a forbidden fruit isn’t how you treat it.
This method works differently. Some of the things about to be said might be difficult to believe, but by the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll not only believe them, you’ll wonder how you could have ever been brainwashed into believing otherwise.
There’s a common misconception that we choose to use. It’s true that we choose to set up the use. Occasionally I choose to go to the cinema, but I certainly didn’t choose to spend my whole life in the cinema theatre. Originally, curiosity and human nature took me there, but I wouldn’t have started had I known I’d become addicted, causing the decline of my health, happiness, and relationships. “If only I’d heard about dysfunction on my first visit!”
Take a moment to reflect, did you ever make the ‘positive’ decision that you need it? Or that you should use it? Or, that at certain times in your life, you couldn’t enjoy a good night’s sleep or perhaps even pass an evening after a hard day at work without it? Or that you couldn’t concentrate or handle stress without it? At what stage did you decide that you needed it, that you needed it permanently in your life, feeling insecure, even panic-stricken without it?
Like every other user, you have been lured into the most sinister and subtle trap that man and nature have ever combined to devise. There’s not a person alive, whether a user themselves or not, that likes the thought of their children using it to cope or for pleasure. This means that all addicts wish they had never started. That’s unsurprising: no one needs it to enjoy life or cope with stress before they get hooked.
At the same time, all users wish to continue to use. After all, nobody forces us to set up the use. Whether they understand the reason or not, it’s only users that decide to do it.
If there were a magic button the user could press to wake up the following morning as if they’d never tried it, the only addicts tomorrow would be young people still ‘experimenting’.
The only thing that prevents us from quitting is FEAR! Fear caused by the belief that we’ll have to survive an indeterminate period of misery, deprivation, and unsatisfied craving in order to be free from it. These spawn from irrational beliefs, both learned and acquired, such as:
It’s fear that a night all by yourself will be miserable, spent fighting uncontrollable impulses. Fear that the night before exams will be a night from hell without it. Fear that we’ll never be able to concentrate, handle stress, or be as confident without our little crutch and that our personality and character will change.
But most of all, fear that ‘once an addict, always an addict’: that we’ll never be completely free, spending the rest of our lives craving the occasional use at odd times. If, as I did, you’ve already tried all the conventional ways to quit and have been through the misery and torture of the ‘willpower method’, you’ll not only be affected by that fear, you’ll be convinced you can never quit.
If you’re apprehensive, panic-stricken, or feel that the time is not right for you to quit, let me assure you that your apprehension and panic isn’t relieved by use — it’s caused by it. You didn’t decide to fall into the trap, but like all traps, it’s designed to ensure that you remain trapped. Ask yourself, when you first used it, did you decide to come back to it as long as you live? So when will you quit? Tomorrow? Next year? Stop kidding yourself! The trap is designed to hold you for life. Why else do you think all these other addicts don’t quit before it ‘kills’ their lives?
I’ve referred to a magic button; it works just like that magic button. Let me make it quite clear, it isn’t magic, but for myself and others who’ve found it so easy and enjoyable to quit, it seems like it!
The warning is as follows: This is a chicken and egg situation: every addict wants to quit and every addict can find it easy and enjoyable to quit. It’s only fear that prevents users from attempting to quit. The single greatest gain is to be rid of that fear, but you won’t be free of that fear until you complete the book. On the contrary, your fear may increase as you continue reading, which might prevent you from finishing it. Take this comment from one woman.
“I’ve just finished reading. I know that it’s only been four days, but I feel so great, I know that I’ll never need to use again. I first started to read your book five months ago, got half way through and panicked. I knew that if I went on reading I would have to stop. Wasn’t I silly?”
You didn’t decide to fall into the trap, but be clear in your mind: you won’t escape from it unless you make the affirmative decision to do so. You may already be straining at the leash to quit, or you may be apprehensive about the very thought, but either way, please bear in mind: YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE!
If at the end of the book you decide that you wish to continue to use it, there’s nothing to prevent you from doing so. You don’t even have to cut down or stop using it whilst reading the book, and remember, there is no shock treatment. On the contrary, I have only good news for you. Can you imagine how Andy Dufresne felt when he finally escaped from Shawshank Prison? That’s how I felt when I escaped from the trap, and that’s how the ex-users who’ve used the method feel. By the end of the book, that’s how you’ll feel! Go for it!
Everyone can find it easy and enjoyable to quit it, including you! All you have to do is read the rest of this book with an open mind; the more you understand, the easier it will be. Even if you don’t understand a word, provided you follow instructions, you’ll find it easy. Most importantly, you won’t go through life moping for it or feeling deprived, and by the end of the book the only mystery will be why you did it for so long.
With the method, there are only two reasons for failure.
Failure to carry out instructions. Some will find it annoying that the book is so dogmatic about certain recommendations, such as not to try cutting down or using substitutes. I certainly don’t deny that there are many who have succeeded in stopping using such ruses, but they’ve succeeded in spite of and not because of them. Some people can make love standing on a hammock, but it isn’t the easiest way. The numbers for opening this trap’s lock are in this book, but they need to be used in the correct order: going from one chapter to the next and not skipping chapters.
Failure to understand. Don’t take anything for granted, question not only what you’re told, but your own views and what society has told you about it and addiction. For example, those who believe it’s just a habit, ask yourself why other habits — some of which are enjoyable — are easy to break, while a habit that feels awful, costs energy, time and virility is so difficult to break. Those that believe you enjoy it, ask yourself why other things that are infinitely more enjoyable you can take or leave. Why do you have to have it? Why does panic set in when you don’t have it?
The method is about to give you the knowledge on how easy and enjoyable it is to quit it. Like many others, one of my greatest triumphs in life has been escaping the trap. There’s no need to feel depressed, on the contrary, you’re about to accomplish something that every user on the planet would love to achieve: FREEDOM!
REMEMBER, DO NOT SKIP CHAPTERS.
Don’t read this book like a normal book, it’s very short, and you should be able to finish it within a couple of hours. Most people benefit from highlighting or taking notes, and usually recommend rereading it a few times to fully solidify the lessons.
This book’s objective is directing you into a new frame of mind. In contrast to the usual method of stopping — whereby you start off with the feeling of climbing Mount Everest and spend the next few weeks craving and feeling deprived — you start right away with a feeling of elation, as if cured of a terrible disease. From then on, the further you go through life, the more you will look at this period of time and wonder how you ever used it in the first place. You will look at other users with pity, as opposed to envy.
Provided that you’re not someone who had never become addicted (reading for your significant other) or had quit (or is in the fasting days of a “diet”), it’s essential to keep using until you have finished the book completely. This may appear to be a contradiction, and this instruction to continue using causes more objection than any other, but as you read further your desire to use will gradually be reduced. Take this instruction seriously: Attempting to quit early will not benefit you.
Many don’t finish the book because they feel they have to give something up, some even deliberately only reading one line per day in order to postpone the evil event. Look at it this way, what have you got to lose? If you don’t stop at the end of the book, you’re no worse off than you are now. It’s by definition a Pascal’s Wager, a bet taken where you have nothing to lose and high chances of large gains.
Incidentally, if you haven’t used it for a few days or weeks, but aren’t sure whether you’re a user, ex-user, or a non-user; or you find your desire to use it has dwindled as you’re absorbing the material, then don’t use it whilst reading. In fact, you’re already a non-user, but we have to let your brain catch up with your body. By the end of the book, you’ll be a happy non-user. The method is the complete opposite of the normal method, where one lists the considerable disadvantages of using and says:
“If only I can go long enough without it, eventually the desire will go and I can enjoy life again, free of slavery.”
This is the logical way to go about it, with thousands stopping every day using this method. However, it’s very difficult to succeed for the following reasons:
Stopping the use isn’t the real problem. Every time you finish your session, you’ve stopped using it. You may have powerful reasons on the first day of your once-in-four diet to say “I don’t want to use it anymore.” All users do, and their reasons are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. The real problem is day two, ten, or ten-thousand where in a weak moment you’ll have ‘just one peek’, want another, and suddenly you’re an addict again.
Awareness of the health risks generates more fear, making it more difficult to stop. Tell a user it’s destroying their virility and the first thing they’ll do is reach for something to surge their dopamine, or even using it.
All reasons for stopping actually make it harder. This is due to two reasons. First, we’re continually being forced to give up our ’little friend’ or some prop, vice, or pleasure (whichever way the user perceives it). Second, they create a “blind”. We do not use it for the reasons we should stop. The real question is, why do we want or need to do it?
With the method, we (initially) forget the reasons we’d like to stop, face the use problem and ask ourselves the following questions:
The beautiful truth is that all use does absolutely nothing for you whatsoever. Let me make it quite clear, it’s not that the disadvantages of being a user outweigh the advantages, it’s that there are zero advantages to using it.
Most users find it necessary to rationalise why they use, but the reasons they come up with are all fallacies and illusions.
First, we’ll remove these fallacies and illusions. In fact, you’ll soon realise there is nothing to give up. Not only that, but there are marvellous, positive gains from being a non-user, with well-being and happiness only two of these gains. Once illusions that life will never be quite as enjoyable without use is removed — realising that not only is life just as enjoyable without it but infinitely more so — and once feelings of being deprived or missing out are eradicated, we’ll go back to reconsider increased well-being and happiness — and the dozens of other reasons for quitting use. These realisations will become positive additional aids to help you achieve what you really desire: enjoying your life free from the slavery of addiction!
All users feel something evil has possessed them. In the early days, it’s a simple question of “I will stop, just not today”. Eventually we progress to believing we haven’t got enough willpower to stop, or that there’s something inherent in it we must have in order to enjoy life. Addiction is like clawing our way out of a slippery pit: As we near the top, we see the sunshine, but find ourself sliding back down as our mood dips. Eventually we set up use, and as we use, we feel awful.
Ask a user, “If you could go back to the time before you became hooked, with the knowledge you have now, would you have started using it?”
“NO WAY!” would be the reply.
Ask the confirmed user, someone who defends it and doesn’t believe it causes injury to the brain or downregulation of dopamine receptors: “Do you encourage your children to use it?”
“NO WAY!” is again the reply.
Use is an extraordinary enigma. As said previously, the problem isn’t explaining why it’s easy to stop, it’s explaining why it’s difficult to stop. The real problem is explaining why anyone does it after getting insights on neurological damage. Part of the reason we start is because of the other tens of millions already into it, yet all of these people wish they hadn’t started in the first place, telling us it’s like living life in second gear. We don’t quite believe they’re not enjoying it, as we associate it with freedom or being ‘educated’, and work hard to become hooked ourselves. We then spend the rest of our lives telling others not to do it and trying to kick the habit ourselves, often thinking we’re unique in this.
We also spend a significant proportion of our time feeling hopeless and miserable. Using makes us prefer and long for it, even when reality is available. Through the constant surge and fall of dopamine induced by the use, we sentence ourselves to a lifetime of isolation, irritability, anger, stress, fatigue, and dysfunction. Using it, we end up feeling miserable and guilty.
In fact, reading about its addictive and destructive capabilities here and on other sites makes us even more nervous and hopeless! What sort of hobby is it that when you’re doing it, you wish you weren’t, and when you aren’t, you crave it? Users despise themselves every time they read about hypofrontality and desensitisation, every time they use behind their trusting partner’s back, and every time they can’t bring themselves to exercise after a daytime session. An otherwise intelligent and rational human being spends all their days in contempt. But worst of all, what do users get from having to endure life with these awful black shadows at the back of their mind? Absolutely nothing!
You might be thinking “That’s all very well, I know this, but once you’re hooked on these things it’s very difficult to stop.” But why is it so difficult? Some say it’s because of the powerful withdrawal symptoms, but as you’ll soon come to learn, the actual withdrawal symptoms are very mild in fact. And this is evident when you consider that many users have lived and died without realising they were addicts.
Enjoyment has nothing to do with it either. I enjoy crayfish, but I never got to the point where I had to have crayfish every day. With other things in life, we enjoy them while we’re doing them, but we don’t sit around feeling deprived when we’re not.
Some say:
“It’s educational!” So how has it made you grow as a person? “It’s satisfaction!” So why does it isolate you and make you feel insatiable cravings? “It’s a feeling of release!” Release from the stresses of real life? Ok, for an hour, before it all comes crashing back on you? And what stresses has it solved? “It helps me sleep” So why can others sleep just fine without it? There are many scientifically demonstrated methods to fix sleep, and more so.
Many believe that use relieves boredom, but boredom is a frame of mind. Use will habituate you to novelty-seeking in no time, causing you to become increasingly bored until you finally participate in that wild-goose chase.
Some say they only do it because their friends and everyone they know does it. If so, pray that your friends don’t start cutting their heads off to cure a headache! Most users who think about it come to conclude that it’s just a habit. This is not really an explanation, but having discounted all the usual, rational explanations, it appears to be the only remaining excuse. Unfortunately, it’s equally illogical. Every day of our lives we change habits, some of them very enjoyable. We’ve been brainwashed to believe that using is a habit and that habits are difficult to break.
Are habits difficult to break? Drivers in the US are in the habit of driving on the right hand side of the road, yet when travelling overseas they break the habit with hardly any aggravation whatsoever. And when you get a new job you take on a different routine, so your habits change. These may take some getting used to, but it is nothing like breaking a life long struggle with addiction. We make and break habits every day of our lives, so why do we find it difficult to break a habit that makes us feel deprived when we don’t have it, guilty when we do, one that we would love to break anyway, when all we have to do is stop doing it?
The answer is that use isn’t habit, it’s addiction! That’s why it appears to be so difficult to ‘give up’. Most users don’t understand addiction and believe that they get some genuine pleasure or crutch from use. They believe they’re making a genuine sacrifice if they quit.
The beautiful truth is that once you understand the true nature of addiction and the reasons why you use it, you’ll stop doing it, just like that. Within three weeks, the only mystery will be why you found it necessary to use it as long as you have and why you can’t persuade other users how nice it is to not be a user!
Use is a subtle and sinister trap that man and nature have combined to devise. Some of us are even warned about the dangers, but we can’t believe how we aren’t enjoying it. But what gets us into it in the first place? Typically it’s free samples from those who share. That’s how the trap is sprung. If instead it warned us of the dangers of what we were getting into before even making that first taste, then the alarm bells would scream.
Once this process has started, we are trapped. From now on we spend the rest of our lives trying to understand why we do it, telling our children not to start, and at odd times trying to escape ourselves. The trap is designed such that we try and stop only due to an ‘incident’, whether loss of a career or relationship, shortage of drive, or just plain feeling like a leper. As soon as we stop, we have more stress due to withdrawal pangs, and with the method we relied on to remove that stress now unavailable.
Our resolve for quitting then proves to be shaky. After a few days of torture we convince ourselves that we’ve picked the wrong time to quit, deciding we’ll wait for periods without stress, which upon arriving removes our reason for initially stopping. Of course, that period will never arrive fully, and we begin to believe that our lives tend to become more and more stressful. We leave the protection of our parents, and the stresses of work, homemaking, mortgages, buying shelter, and raising children begins to crowd our lives. But this is an illusion. The most stressful parts of any creature’s life are actually early childhood and adolescence.
We tend to confuse responsibility and stress. A user’s life automatically becomes more stressful because use doesn’t relax us or relieve stress, as some try to make us believe. It’s just the reverse, causing us to become more stressed as we continue using, with every guilt laden late night aftermath piling more straw onto the camel’s back. Even users who kick the habit — as most do one or more times throughout their lives — can lead perfectly happy lives yet suddenly become hooked again. Wandering into the maze, our minds become hazy and we spend the rest of our lives trying to escape. Many do succeed, only to fall into the sinister trap at a later date.
Solving the problem of addiction is a riddle. It is complex and difficult. But once you see the answer, it’s simple and fun, and you wonder why you didn’t think of that! The method contains the solution to this puzzle, leading you out of the maze, never wandering in again. All you have to do is follow every instruction to the letter. However, if you take a wrong turn by jumping chapters, or blazing through the book at lightning speed without carefully making a deliberate effort on your first time reading, then the rest of the instructions are pointless.
Anyone can find it easy to stop, but we must first establish the facts. No, not facts designed to scare you, there’s already more than enough information out there. If that was going to stop you, you’d have already stopped. But why do we find it difficult to stop? Answering this requires us to know the real reason we’re still using it, boiling down to two factors. They are:
Users are intelligent, rational human beings. They know they’re taking enormous future risks so they spend lots of time rationalising their ‘habit’. But users in their hearts know they’re fools, knowing they had no need to use it before becoming hooked. Most remember that their first ‘taste’ was a mix of revulsion and novel curiosity. They then specialise in locating and filtering, working hard to become hooked.
Most annoyingly, there’s the sense that non-addicts aren’t missing out on anything and find the situation laughable. By dismantling these factors in the next chapters, you too will understand the sinister trap!
Instant and highly accessible use keeps the brain’s reward mechanism producing dopamine for significantly longer than normally possible. Scientifically, this is called the Coolidge effect, which you might already be aware of.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with feelings of wanting, with actual pleasure produced by opioids. More dopamine, more opioids and more action. Without dopamine, actions such as eating don’t feel pleasurable and aren’t completed, with high fat and sugar foods producing the highest chemical release.
Dopamine is also released in response to novelty. This floods the limbic system (reward circuit), so the first time you use, you act, rewarding and triggering another flood of opioids. Incentivised to get as much dopamine as possible, the brain stores this as a script for easy recall and strengthens neural pathways through the release of a chemical called DeltaFosB. Now, the brain calls up these pathways in response to cues, alone time, stress or even feeling a little down and suddenly you’re ready to take a ride on the ‘water slide’. Every time this is repeated, more DeltaFosB is released so the water slide is greased, alive and easier to ride down the next time.
The limbic system has a self correcting system to trim the number of dopamine and opioid receptors when frequent and daily flooding of dopamine is detected. Unfortunately, these receptors are also needed to keep us motivated to handle daily life stresses. Nominal amounts of dopamine produced by natural rewards simply don’t compare to use and aren’t as efficiently absorbed by the decreased receptors, leading you into feel more stressed and irritated than normal. This process is known as desensitisation.
In this cycle you crossed the ‘red line’ and triggered emotions such as guilt, disgust, embarrassment, anxiety and fear, which in turn raise dopamine levels even higher and cause the brain to misinterpret these feelings.
A fleeting feeling of security is all that’s needed to get through a rough spot in life, but will your desensitised brain be able to catch that drop of destresser that a non-user’s brain is able to use?
Dopamine flooding acts like a quick acting drug, falling quickly and inducing withdrawal pangs. Many users have the illusion these pangs are the terrible trauma they suffer when trying or being forced to stop. In fact, they’re primarily mental since the user is feeling deprived of their pleasure or prop.
The actual chemical withdrawal from use is so subtle that most users have lived and died without realising they’re addicts. Many users have a fear of addiction, yet that’s exactly what they are, addicts. Fortunately it’s easy to kick, but you first need to accept that you are, in fact, addicted. Withdrawal from use doesn’t cause any physical pain and is merely an empty, restless feeling of something missing, which is why many believe it’s something to do with desire. Prolonged, this feeling becomes nervousness, insecurity, agitation, low confidence and irritability. It’s like hunger, for a poison.
Within seconds of engaging in a session, dopamine is supplied and the craving ends, resulting in a feeling of fulfillment as you whiz down the water slide. In the early days, withdrawal pangs and their subsequent relief are so slight we’re unaware of them. When we become regular users, we believe it’s because we’ve come to enjoy them or gotten into the ‘habit’. The truth being that we’re already hooked but don’t realise it. The little monster is already in our brains, so every once and a while we take trips down the water slide to feed it.
All users begin seeking it for irrational reasons. The only reason anybody continues using it, whether they’re a casual or heavy user, is to feed that little monster. The whole conundrum is a series of cruel and confusing punishments, but perhaps the most pathetic aspect is the sense of enjoyment a user gets from a session, trying to get back to the sense of peace, tranquility and confidence their body had before becoming hooked in the first place.
You know that feeling when a neighbour’s home alarm has been ringing all day — or some other minor persistent aggravation — then the noise suddenly stops and marvellous feelings of peace and tranquility wash over you? This isn’t really peace, but the ending of an aggravation. Before starting the next session our bodies are complete, but then we begin forcing our brains to pump dopamine and when we’re done and it begins to leave, we suffer withdrawal pangs. These aren’t physical pain, merely an empty feeling. We aren’t even aware it exists but it’s like a dripping tap inside our bodies.
Our rational minds don’t understand it, but they don’t need to. All we know is that we want it and when we use, the craving goes. However, the satisfaction is fleeting because in order to relieve the craving more use is required. As soon as you use, the craving starts again and the trap continues to hold you. A feedback loop, unless you break it!
The trap is similar to wearing tight shoes just to obtain the pleasure of taking them off. There are three primary reasons why users can’t see it this way.
This ‘back to front’ reverse process makes all drugs difficult to kick. Imagine the state of panic of a heroin addict without any heroin; now picture their utter joy when they can finally plunge a needle into their vein. People who aren’t addicted to heroin don’t suffer that panicked feeling.
The heroin doesn’t relieve the feeling, it causes it. Similarly, non-users don’t suffer empty feelings of needing it, or panic when they cannot access it. Non-users can’t understand how users possibly obtain pleasure from it. Eventually, users can’t understand either.
We talk about use being relaxing or satisfying, but how can you be satisfied unless you were dissatisfied in the first place? A non-user doesn’t suffer from this unsatisfied state, while the user isn’t relaxed until they’ve satisfied their ‘little monster’.
An important reminder — the main reason that users find it difficult to quit is due to the belief they’re giving up a genuine pleasure or crutch. It’s essential to understand that you’re giving up absolutely nothing whatsoever. The best way to understand the subtleties of the use trap is comparing it with eating. The habit of regular meals causes us to not feel hungry between, only aware of hunger if the meal is delayed. There’s no physical pain, just an empty insecure feeling recognised as hunger. The process of satisfying our hunger is a very pleasant experience.
Use appears to be almost identical, but it’s not. Like hunger, there’s no physical pain and the reward mechanism behaves in similar ways, but it’s this similarity to eating that tricks the user into believing there’s a genuine pleasure or crutch. Although eating and use appear to be very similar, in reality they’re exact opposites.
Is eating a habit? If you think so, try breaking it completely! To describe eating as habit would be like describing breathing as a habit — both are essential for survival. It’s true that people have the habit of satisfying their hunger at different times with varying types of food, but eating itself isn’t habit. Neither is use. The only reason a user sets up the use is trying to end the empty feelings the previous session created, at different times with varying escalation.
On the internet, use is frequently referred to as a habit. The method also refers to the ‘habit’. However, be constantly aware that use isn’t habit, it’s addiction! When we start to use, we have to force ourselves to cope with it. Before we know it, we’re escalating.
As with any other drug, the body tends to develop immunity to the effects of the same old use, our brain wanting more or something else. After prolonged use, it ceases to completely relieve the withdrawal pangs that the previous session created. There’s a tug of war occurring in this paradise: you want to stay on the safe side of your ‘red line’, but your brain is asking you to escalate use.
You feel better after engaging in this session, but you’re more nervous and less relaxed than someone who never started, even though you’re living in a supposed use paradise. This position is even more ridiculous than wearing tight shoes because as you go through life an ever-increasing amount of discomfort remains after taking the shoes off. Because the user knows the little monster has to be fed, they themselves decide the time, which tends to be on four types of occasions or a combination of them:
Boredom / Concentration — Two complete opposites!
Stress / Relaxation — Two complete opposites!
What magic drug can suddenly reverse the very effect it had minutes before? The truth is that use neither relieves boredom and stress nor promotes concentration and relaxation. If you think about it, what other types of occasions are there in our lives, bar sleep?. The human body is the most sophisticated object on the planet, but no species, even the lowest amoeba or worm, survives without knowing the difference between food and poison.
Through natural selection our minds and bodies have developed techniques for rewarding actions that multiply and sustain humanity. They’re not prepared for supernormal stimuli that are bigger, brighter and edgier than anything found in nature, since even the most muted two-dimensional image causes us to become aroused. But repeatedly look at the same image and you won’t be. In real life, checks and balances ensure you do something else but use has no such limiter, causing you to spend your life addicted!
It’s a fallacy that physically and mentally weak people become users, the lucky ones being those who found their first instance repulsive and are cured for life.
Enjoying escalating use is an illusion, merely keeping our novelty ‘monkey’ within the ‘red line’ of ‘safe’ use in order to get our dopamine fix. Like heroin addicts, all they’re really enjoying is the ritual of relieving those pangs.
The reason why most continue using is because although we know the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages, we believe there’s something in use that we actually enjoy or that it acts like some sort of prop. We’re under the illusion that after we stop using there will be a void, certain situations in our lives never being quite the same. In fact use not only provides nothing, it subtracts.
Why is it then that many users find it so difficult to stop, going through months of torture and spending the rest of their lives pining for it at odd times? The answer is the second reason, brainwashing. The neurotransmitter addiction is easy to cope with, most users going for days without use on business trips or travel, unaffected by withdrawal pangs. Their little monster is safe in the knowledge you’ll use as soon as you return to your hotel room. You can survive your obnoxious client and your megalomaniac manager, knowing the fix is there for your taking.
A good analogy is that of the cigarette smoker. If they went ten hours of the day without a cigarette they’d be tearing their hair out, but many smokers will buy a new car and refrain from smoking in it. Many will visit theatres, supermarkets, churches and being unable to smoke causes them no problems. Even on trains and airplanes there have been no riots. Smokers are almost pleased for someone or something to stop them smoking.
Users will automatically refrain from using in their parents’ home during family gatherings and other events with little discomfort. In fact, most users have extended periods during which they abstain without effort. The neurological little monster is easy to cope with even when you’re still addicted. There are millions of users who remain casual users all their lives and they’re just as addicted as the heavy user. There are even heavy users who’ve kicked the addiction but have an occasional use, greasing the water slide to be ridden down at the next dip in mood.
As said previously the actual use addiction isn’t the main problem, it’s simply acting as a catalyst to keeping our minds confused over the real problem – brainwashing. Don’t think the bad effects of use are exaggerated, however; if anything, they’re sadly understated. Occasionally, rumours circulate that the neural pathways created are there for life, with the right mix of chance and stimulus sending you down the life-ruining water slide again, but these are untrue. Our brains and bodies are miraculous machines, recovering within a matter of weeks.
It may be of consolation to lifelong and heavy users that it’s just as easy for them to stop as casual users, and in a peculiar way it’s easier. The further it drags you down, the greater the relief. When I stopped I went straight to zero and didn’t have one bad pang. In fact, the process was actually enjoyable even during the withdrawal period.
But first, we must remove the brainwashing.
This is the second reason we start using. Understanding this brainwashing fully required us to first examine the powerful effects of supernormal stimulus. Our brains simply aren’t prepared for more use in fifteen minutes than our ancestors had in several lifetimes.
Anti-use movements don’t actually stop people from using. Logically speaking they should, but the simple fact is they don’t. The health risks listed from peer-reviewed studies aren’t enough to stop an adolescent from starting.
Ironically, the most powerful force in this confusion is the user themselves. It’s a fallacy that users are weak-willed or physically weak people. You have to be physically strong in order to cope with an addiction after you know it exists. Perhaps the most painful aspect is that they place themselves as unsuccessful losers and insufferable introverts. It’s likely that a friend could be more interesting in person if they hadn’t put themselves down for seeking self-pleasure.
Users quitting using the willpower method blame their own lack of willpower and ruin their peace and happiness. It’s one thing to fail in self-discipline and another to self-loathe. We’re working on an addiction, not a habit and at no point do you argue with yourself to stop a habit like golfing, but to do the same with use is normalised — why?
Constant exposure to a supernormal stimulus rewires your brain, so building a resistance to this brainwashing is critical, as if buying a car from a second hand car dealer — nodding politely but not believing a word the man is saying.
Most users swear that they only use sparingly and therefore are fine, when in actuality they’re straining at the leash, fighting with their willpower to resist temptations. If done too often and for too long, this depletes their willpower considerably and they begin failing in other life projects where willpower is of great value, like exercise, dieting, etc. Failure in these areas makes them feel miserable and guilty, cascading into using again. If this isn’t done, they’ll vent their anger and depression onto loved ones.
Once you become addicted to use, the brainwashing is increased. Your subconscious mind knows the little monster has to be fed, blocking everything else. It’s fear that keeps people from quitting, fear of that empty, insecure feeling they get when they stop flooding their brains with dopamine. Just because you’re unaware of it doesn’t mean it’s not there. You don’t have to understand it any more than a cat needs to understand where the hot water pipes are: the cat just knows that if it sits in a certain spot it feels warm.
The passivity of our minds and dependence on authority leading to brainwashing is the primary difficulty of giving up use. Our upbringing in society, reinforced by the brainwashing of our own addiction and combined with the most powerful - our friends, relatives and colleagues. The phrase ‘giving up’ is a classic example of the brainwashing, implying genuine sacrifice. The beautiful truth is there’s nothing to give up; on the contrary, you’ll be freeing yourself from a terrible disease and achieving marvellous positive gains. We’ll begin removing this brainwashing now, starting with no longer referring to ‘giving up’ but to stopping, quitting or perhaps the true position, escaping!
The only thing that persuades us to use initially is other people doing it and feeling that we’re missing out. We work hard to become hooked, yet we never find what they’ve been missing. Every time we see use, it reassures us there must be something in it, otherwise people wouldn’t be doing it and the business wouldn’t be so big. Even when they kick the habit, the ex-user feels they’re being deprived when a discussion comes up during parties or social functions. “Use must be good if all my friends talk about it, right?” They feel safe, they’ll just have one use tonight and before they know it, they’re hooked again.
The brainwashing is extremely powerful and you need to be aware of its effects. We’re about to remove this brainwashing. It isn’t the non-user who’s being deprived, but the user who is forfeiting a lifetime of:
What do they gain from these considerable sacrifices? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, apart from the illusion of trying to get back to the state of peace, tranquillity and confidence that the non-user always enjoys.
As explained earlier, users believe they use for enjoyment, relaxation or some sort of education. The actual reason is relief of withdrawal pangs. Our subconscious mind begins to learn that use at certain times tends to be pleasurable. As we become increasingly hooked on it, the greater the need to relieve the withdrawal pangs becomes and the further the subtle trap drags you down. This process happens so slowly that you aren’t even aware of it, most young users don’t realise they’re addicted until attempting to stop and even then, many won’t admit it.
Take this conversation a therapist had with hundreds of teenagers:
As already stated, users tend to relieve their withdrawal pangs at times of stress, boredom, concentration or combinations of these. In the following chapters, we’ll target these aspects of the brainwashing.
The use trap’s big monster is bred through the culmination of many aspects, including societal forces, media portrayals, peers and the user’s own internal narrative. Failure to deconstruct these fallacies whilst using the willpower method eventually leads to feelings of deprivation, leading the user back into the trap. Deconstruction of the imagined value of use is crucial for success and allows you to see where you’re being robbed!
Of importance to note is the link between brainwashing and fear. It’s fear of feeling future withdrawal pangs that create the pangs. Fear is the pang itself. Think about when you’ve had withdrawal symptoms such as sweaty palms, shortness of breath, sleeping problems and an inability to think straight. Now think of similar situations when you’ve had those feelings: job interviews, nerves around an attractive person, public speaking, etc. These are the same anxious feelings the fear causes. Simply put, how can a physical drug still hook people months after stopping? It must be mentally, correct?
Not only great tragedies in life, but also minor stresses drive users into the forbidden ‘unsafe’ area previously excluded. Stresses include socialising, phone calls, anxieties of the housewife with young children, and many others. Let’s take phone calls as an example, particularly for a businessperson. Most calls aren’t from satisfied customers or your boss congratulating you, there’s some sort of aggravation. Coming home to mundane family life of kids screaming and their partner’s emotional demands causes the user — if they aren’t already doing so — to fantasise the relief of use promised that night. They unconsciously suffer withdrawal pangs, destressors weakened and unprepared for additional aggravation. Partially relieving the pangs at the same time as normal stress, the total is reduced and the user gets a temporary boost. The boost isn’t an illusion, the user does genuinely feel better than before, but they’re more tense than they would be as a non-user.
The following example isn’t designed to shock you — The method promises no such treatment — but is to emphasise that use destroys your nerves rather than relaxing them.
Use isn’t relieving your nerves, it’s slowly destroying them. One of the great gains of breaking the addiction is the return of your natural confidence and self-assurance. But this freedom cannot be obtained by continuing to grease the dopamine water slide in ways that undercut your happiness and libido by repeating the same destructive behaviour.
If you’re like many people, it’s become second nature. Similarly, use relieving boredom is another fallacy because boredom is a frame of mind, occurring when you’ve been deprived for a long time or are trying to cut down.
The actual situation is this, when you’re addicted to the supernormal pull of use and then try to abstain, it feels like there’s something missing. If you have something to occupy your mind that isn’t stressful, you can go for long periods of time without being bothered by the absence. However, when you’re bored there’s nothing to take your mind off it, so you feed the monster. When you’re indulging yourself and not trying to stop or cut down, even setting up use becomes subconscious. This ritual is automatic; if the user tries to remember sessions during the last week, they’re only able to remember a small proportion of them, like the very last one or the session after a long abstinence.
The truth being that it increases boredom indirectly because use make you feel lethargic and instead of undertaking an energetic activity, users tend to prefer lounging around, bored and relieving their withdrawal pangs. Countering the brainwashing is important because users tend to use when bored, our brains wired to interpret use as interesting. Similarly, we’ve also been brainwashed into believing use aids relaxation.
Use doesn't help concentration — when you’re trying to concentrate you automatically try and avoid distractions. Therefore, when a user wants to concentrate, they don’t even think — automatically setting up use, feeding the little monster and partially ending the craving. They get on with the matter at hand, already forgetting they’ve used. After years of dopamine-flooding the neurological changes affect abilities such as accessing information, planning and impulse control.
Concentration is also adversely affected as the dopamine receptors are culled due to natural tolerance to the large surges, reducing the benefit of smaller dopamine boosts from natural destressors. Your concentration and inspiration will be greatly boosted as this process is reduced. For many, it’s the concentration aspect that prevents them from succeeding with the willpower method: they could put up with the irritability and bad temper, but the failure to concentrate on something difficult once their crutch is removed ruins many.
Loss of concentration that users suffer when trying to escape isn’t due to the absence of use. You have mental blocks when you’re addicted to something and when you have a mental block, what do you do? You set up use — which doesn’t cure the block — so then what do you do? You do what you have to do, getting on with it just as non-users do.
The moment you stop using, everything that goes wrong is blamed on the reason you stopped. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it, you begin to say “If only I could use now, it would solve all my problems”. You then begin to question your decision to quit and escape from the slavery.
If you believe that use is a genuine aid to concentration, worrying about it will guarantee that you’ll be unable to concentrate. Doubt, not the physical withdrawal pangs, creates the problem. Always remember, it’s the user who suffers pangs, not non-users.
Most users think that use helps them to relax. It doesn’t. The frantic search to get the fix in those ‘dark alleys of the internet’ and the internal struggle of straining at the leash to cross the red line certainly doesn’t sound like a very relaxing activity.
As night rolls in after a trip to a new place or a long day, we sit down to relax, relieving our hunger, thirst and are completely satisfied. The user is not, as they have another hunger to satisfy. Users think of it as the icing on the cake, but in actuality it’s the ‘little monster’ that needs feeding. The truth is that the addict can never be completely relaxed and going through life it gets exponentially worse. Take one online comment from an ex-user:
Every time I hear use addicts trying to justify their addiction the message is, “Oh it helps me to relax.” Take the online account of a single dad whose six year old son wanted to share his bed in the night after a scary movie, but the dad would refuse so that he could have his session.
Here’s another smoking analogy, a couple of years ago adoption authorities threatened to prevent smokers from adopting children. A man rang up, irate. “You’re completely wrong”, he said, “I can remember when I was a child, if I had a contentious matter to raise with my mother, I would wait until she lit a cigarette because she was more relaxed then.” Why couldn’t the man talk to his mother when she wasn’t smoking a cigarette?
Why are non-users completely relaxed then? Why are users not able to relax without a fix for a day or two? Read about the experience of a user taking the abstinence oath and quitting and you’ll notice the struggle with temptations: clearly not relaxed at all when no longer allowed to have the ‘only pleasure’ they are ‘entitled to enjoy’. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to be completely relaxed. Use can be likened to a fly being caught in a pitcher plant, to begin with the fly is eating the nectar but at some imperceptible stage the plant begins to eat the fly.
Isn’t it time you climbed out of the plant?
Most users are aware of the progressive effects use's novelty- and escalation-seeking has on their brain’s reward systems. However, they aren’t aware of the effect it has on their energy level.
One of the use trap’s subtleties is that the effects it has upon us, both physically and mentally, happen so gradually and imperceptibly that we remain unaware of them and instead regard withdrawal as normal. The effect is similar to that of bad eating habits: we look at people who are grossly overweight and wonder how they could have possibly allowed themselves to reach that state. But suppose that it happened overnight — you went to bed trim, rippling with muscles and not an ounce of fat on your body — and awoke to find yourself fat, bloated and pot-bellied. Instead of waking up feeling fully rested and full of energy, you feel miserable, lethargic, and barely able to open your eyes.
You’d be panic-stricken, wondering what awful disease you had contracted overnight, and yet the disease is exactly the same. The fact it took you twenty years to arrive there is irrelevant. Use is the same: if it were possible to immediately transfer your mind and body to give you a direct comparison to how you’d feel having stopped use for just three weeks, that’s all that would be required to convince you. You’d ask yourself, would it really feel this good, or what that really amounts to, “Had I really sunk that low?” You wouldn’t just feel healthier, with more energy, but sporting far more confidence and a heightened ability to concentrate.
Lack of energy, tiredness and everything related to it is nicely swept under the rug of ‘getting older’. Friends and colleagues who also live sedentary lifestyles further compound the normalisation of this behaviour. The belief that energy is the exclusive prerogative of children and teenagers and that old age begins in your twenties is another symptom of the brainwashing, as is being unaware of eating and exercise habits as a result of the compounding effects of dopamine desensitisation.
Shortly after stopping use, the foggy and muggy feeling will leave you. The point being, with use you’re always debiting your energy and in that process, tampering with the chemistry of your limbic system. Killing the ‘little monster’ and closing the water slides takes a little bit of time, but recovering your reward centre is nothing like the slow slide into the pit. If you’re going through the trauma of the willpower method, any health or energy gains will be obliterated by the depression you’ll be going through. Unfortunately, it’s not possible for the method to immediately transfer you into your mind in three weeks’ time, but you can! You know instinctively that what you’re being told is correct, all you need to do is use your imagination!
This is misinformation that seems to make sense, but doesn’t. In order to control your appetite, will you eat at home before leaving to go to a restaurant or party? This is what you’re doing with sessions before social nights, looking tired and not up to your best. Attempting to drown your butterflies with use will only make the problem worse in the long run.
Social night use is occasioned by two or more of our usual reasons for pleasure/prop seeking, social functions at their core being both stressful and relaxing. This might appear to be a contradiction but any form of socialisation can be stressful — even with friends — wanting to be yourself and completely relaxed. There’s many occasions that have multiple factors present at any one time, take driving as an example, since after all, your life is at stake. Stressful, with concentration required for sustained periods of time. You need not be aware of these factors, your subconscious already receiving the message. By the same token, when finding yourself stuck in traffic jams or bored on long highway drives, the promise of a session upon reaching home occupies your mind.
We think that life will never be quite as enjoyable again. In fact, it’s the same principle at work: the sessions simply provide relief from the withdrawal pangs, at some times having greater needs than others, greasing the water slide for the next cue.
Make this clear — it’s not use that is special, it’s the occasion. Once the need for use is removed, such occasions will become more enjoyable and stressful situations less stressful.
Absolutely nothing! Use is difficult to give up because of the fear we’re being deprived of our pleasure or prop. The fear that certain pleasant situations will never be quite the same again. Fear you’ll be left unable to cope with stressful situations. In other words, it’s the effects of brainwashing deluding us into believing that use is a must. Even further, it’s the belief there’s something inherent in use that we need, and that when we stop using we will be denying ourselves and creating a void.
Make this clear in your mind: Use doesn’t fill a void, it creates one!
Our bodies are the most sophisticated objects on the planet. Whether you believe in intelligent design, natural selection, or a combination of both, our bodies are thousands of times more effective than man! We’re unable to create the smallest living cell or the miracles of eyesight, reproduction and various interlinked systems present in our bodies or brains. If this creator or process had intended us to handle supernormal stimulus, we’d have been provided with different reward systems. Our bodies are provided with fail-safe warning devices and we ignore these at our peril.
Another smoker analogy: all of us have seen smokers who develop excuses to sneak off for a crafty puff and we see the true addiction in action. Addicts don’t do this for enjoyment, instead they do it because they’re miserable without it.
Not only is there nothing to give up but massive positive gains to be had. When users contemplate quitting, they tend to concentrate on health and virility. These are valid and important reasons, but I personally believe the greatest gains are psychological:
7.2 Void, the void, the beautiful void
Imagine having a cold sore on your face, so you go to the pharmacist and he gives you a free ointment to try. You put the ointment on and it disappears immediately. A week later it reappears, so you go back to the pharmacist and ask if they have any more ointment. The pharmacist says “Sure; keep the tube, you might need it later.”
You apply the ointment and hey presto, the sore disappears once again. But every time the sore returns, it gets larger and more painful, with the interval getting shorter and shorter. Eventually, the sore covers your whole face and is excruciatingly painful, and it’s returning every half hour. You know the ointment will remove it temporarily, but you’re very worried. Will the sore eventually spread over your whole body? Will the interval disappear completely? You go to your doctor and they can’t cure it, so you try other things but nothing helps apart from the ointment.
By now you’re completely dependent on the ointment, never going out without ensuring that you have a tube with you. If you go abroad, you make sure you take several tubes with you. In addition to your worries about your health, the pharmacist is charging you a hundred dollars a tube. You have no choice but to pay up.
You stumble across an article discussing this and find out it isn’t just happening to you, many people are suffering from the same problem. In fact, the medical community has discovered that the ointment doesn’t actually cure the sore, and instead only takes it beneath the surface of the skin. It’s the ointment that caused the sore to grow, so all you have to do to get rid of the sore is to stop using the ointment and it’ll disappear in due course.
Would you continue to use the ointment? Would it take willpower to not use the ointment? If you didn’t believe the article there might be a few days of apprehension, but once you realised the sore was beginning to get better, the need or desire to use the ointment would go. Would you be miserable? Of course you wouldn’t! You had an awful problem which you thought was incurable but now you’ve found the solution. Even if it took a year for the sore to go away, each day as it improved you’d think about how marvellous you felt. This is the magic of quitting use.
The sore isn’t the negatives of use. These are all in addition to the sore. The sore makes us close our minds to all these things — it’s that panic feeling of wanting a fix. Non-users don’t suffer from that feeling. The worst thing we ever suffer is fear, the greatest gain being rid of that fear. It’s caused by your first session, further strengthened and caused by each subsequent one.
Some users are ‘happy’, blinded by their cunning little monsters and so go through this same nightmare, putting up phony arguments to try and justify their stupidity.
It’s so nice to be free!
Usually when users try stopping, the main reasons given are health, religion and partner stigma. Part of the brainwashing of this awful use is the sheer slavery of it; man has fought hard to abolish slavery in many parts of the world — yet the user spends life suffering self-imposed slavery. They’re oblivious to the fact that when they’re allowed to use, they wish they were a non-user. The only time that use becomes precious is when we’re ‘trying’ to cut down or abstain, or when abstinence is forced on us.
It cannot be repeated often enough that brainwashing makes it difficult to stop use, so the more we dispel before we start, the easier you’ll find it to achieve your goal. Confirmed users, who don’t believe that use has any negative effect on their health and aren’t having a mental tug of war are typically younger. Thus, the internal feedback is lost due to the nature of their youth or is too infrequent to be observed and registered.
A better argument for a younger user is the time spent, rather saying “I can’t believe you aren’t worried about the time you are spending.” Generally their eyes light up, feeling disadvantaged if attacked on health grounds or social stigma, but on time…
“Oh, I can afford it. It’s only x hours per week and I think it’s worth it, it’s my only vice of pleasure.”
“I still can’t believe you’re not worried. Let’s assume a half hour daily average which includes the physical drain of dopamine withdrawals, you’re spending approximately a full working day every fortnight. I’m sure you’d agree that half an hour a day is a very conservative estimate. Have you thought about how much time you’ll spend in your lifetime? What are you doing in that time? Developing real relationships? No, you’re throwing time away! Not only that, you’re actually using that time to ruin your physical health, destroying your nerves and confidence in order to suffer a lifetime of slavery, pain, melancholy and peevishness. Surely that must worry you, right?”
It’s apparent at this point — especially with younger users — that they’ve never considered it a lifetime addiction. Occasionally, they work out the time they waste in a week and that’s alarming enough. Very occasionally, and only when they think of stopping, they’ll estimate what they spend in a year which is frightening — but over a lifetime is unthinkable. However, because we’re in an argument the confirmed user will impulsively say, “I can afford it, it’s only so much a week”, pulling an encyclopedia salesman routine on themselves.
Would you refuse a job offer which pays your current annual salary and also gives you a month off every year? Any user would sign in a heartbeat and would get busy finding holiday deals to exotic locations. Figuring out how to spend a full month with no work would be the biggest problem to solve. In every discussion with a confirmed user (and please bear in mind that’s not someone like yourself who plans to stop) nobody has ever taken me up on that offer. Why not?
Often at this point, a confirmed user will say, “Look, I’m not really worried about the money aspect.” If you’re thinking along those lines ask yourself why you aren’t worried. Why in other aspects of your life will you go to great deals of trouble to save a few dollars here and there, but spend thousands killing your happiness and hanging the expense?
Every other decision you make in your life will be the result of an analytical process of weighing up advantages and disadvantages to arrive at a rational decision. It may be the wrong decision, but it’ll be the result of rational deduction. Whenever any user weighs up the pros and cons of using, the answer is a dozen times over, “STOP USING! YOU’RE A MUG!” Therefore, all users are using not because they want or decide to, but because they can’t stop. They have to use, and so brainwash themselves, keeping their heads in the sand.
The strange thing is that though many people would pay good money for gym memberships and personal trainers to build muscles and look sculpted (and many of them in their imaginary (and real) desperation turn to treatments such as boosting testosterone, with dubious and dangerous side effects), there are many people in this group who would benefit from stopping a practice systematically destroying their brain’s natural relaxation systems.
This is because they’re still thinking with the brainwashed mind of the user. Wipe the sand out of your eyes for a moment. Use is a chain reaction and a chain for life, and if you don’t break that chain you’ll remain a user for the rest of your life. Estimate how much time you think you’ll spend on use for the remainder of your existence. Obviously the amount will vary from person to person, but let’s assume it’s a year and a half of work hours. Imagine if there were a cheque from the lottery for a year and a half of your salary lying on your carpet tomorrow? You’d be dancing with delight, so start dancing! You’re about to start receiving those benefits!
If you think this is a tricky way of seeing it, you’re still kidding yourself. Work out how much time you would have saved if you’d never had your first use right at the very start.
Shortly, you’ll be making the decision to use your final session (not yet, please remember the instructions!), remaining a non-user by not falling for the trap again. All you have to do to remain a non-user is not using and avoiding ‘just one use’. Remember if you do, it’ll cost you whatever you estimated your salary gain will be.
If you’re mentoring someone for their use addiction, tell them they know someone who’s refused a job offer that pays their current annual salary and also gives them a full month’s worth of paid time off. When asked who that idiot is tell them, “You!” It’s rude, but sometimes you need to get the point across in a less than polite way.
This is the area where the brainwashing is the greatest with users — particularly the young — who think they’re aware of the health risks but aren’t. Many kid themselves by saying they’re prepared to accept the consequences. If your internet router had a function that played an alarm tone with a warning when you set up use saying — “Up until now you’ve gotten away with it, but if you use another minute your head will explode.” Would you have stayed? If you’re in doubt about the answer try walking up to a cliff, standing on the edge with your eyes closed and imagining having the choice of either quitting use or walking up blindfolded.
There’s no doubt what your choice would be, but by burying your head in the sand and hoping that you’ll wake up one morning and not want to use anymore, you accomplish nothing. Users cannot allow themselves to think of the health risks, because if they do, the addiction’s illusory enjoyment goes. This explains why shock treatments are so ineffective in the first stages of quitting: it’s only non-users who bring themselves to read about the destructive brain changes.
Another common myth is depression or peevishness. Many younger people aren’t worried about their health because they don’t suffer any of the depression or melancholy. The depression or stress isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom. Younger people in general don’t feel the irritability or depression created due to their body’s natural ability to produce more dopamine. As they age or their lives encounter serious setbacks, their already depleted resources are overworked and they’ll experience full-blown symptoms. When older users feel stressed, depressed or irritated, it’s because nature’s fail-safe mechanisms are protecting the nervous system from excessive dopamine-flooding through trimming receptors. The user also develops other neurological changes that keep them in the rut.
Think of it this way, if you had a nice car and allowed it to rust without doing anything about it, that would be pretty stupid. It would quickly become an immovable heap of rust, incapable of transporting you anywhere. However, it wouldn’t be the end of the world as it’s only a question of money. But your body is the vehicle that carries you through life. We all say that our health is our greatest asset — ask any sick millionaire. Most of us can look back on an illness or accident in our lives where we prayed to get better. By being a user, you’re not only letting the rust get in and doing nothing about it, you’re systematically destroying the one vehicle used to go through your entire life.
Wise up. You don’t have to do this. Remember, it’s doing absolutely nothing for you. Just for a moment, take your head out of the sand and ask yourself that if you knew with certainty that your next session would start a process that would make you utterly unresponsive to someone you deeply love, would you continue using? Speaking to the people this happens to, they certainly didn’t expect it would happen to them either, and the worst thing isn’t the disease itself but the knowledge that they’ve brought it on themselves. Try to imagine how people who’ve ‘hit the button’ feel, for them the brainwashing is ended. They spend the remainder of their lives thinking, “Why did I kid myself for so long that I needed to use? If only I had the chance to go back!”
Stop kidding yourself, you have that chance. It’s a chain reaction, if you engage in the next session, it’ll lead you to the next one and the next. It’s already happening to you. The method promises no shock treatment so if you’ve already decided that you’re going to stop, the following won’t be shocking for you. If you haven’t, skip the remainder of this chapter and come back to it once you’ve read the rest of the book.
Volumes upon volumes of research have already been written about the damage use causes to our sex lives and mental well-being. The trouble is that until deciding to stop they don’t want to know. Forums and mentor groups are a waste of time because use puts the blinders on. Users tend to think of the hazards as a hit-and-miss affair, like stepping on a land mine.
Get it into your head, it’s already happening. Every single time you set up use, you’re triggering dopamine-flooding and opioids getting to work. The neural water slides are greased and the ride takes you smoothly through the next steps, your brain having already given in to the script. The nervous system is now flooded by dopamine and since it’s the umpteenth time, dopamine receptors close up and the little monster uses this slight dip in pleasure compared to the last time to drive you further over the red line to escalating use in order to release more dopamine. More novelty, more dopamine and the little monster tells you to keep going. So much use in a single session triggers a supernormal stimulus, injecting more chemicals into the brain and driving you to continue.
The entire time, your receptors are receiving information to shut down in response to the flooding. Use only increases this effect and leads to withdrawal. You’re in denial since the little monster craves for its fix with no real pain and discomfort. The threat of health effects terrifies many, which is why they block it from their mind and overshadow it with the fear of stopping. It’s not that the fear is greater, but quitting today is immediate. Why look on the negative side? Perhaps it won’t happen, having bound to have quit by then anyway.
We tend to think of use as a tug-of-war: on one side is fear, “It’s unhealthy, filthy and enslaving.” On the other side, the positives: “It’s my pleasure, my friend, my crutch.” It never seems to occur to us this side is also fear; it’s not that we enjoy use, it’s that we tend to be miserable without it. Heroin addicts deprived of heroin go through misery, but picture the utter joy when they’re finally allowed to plunge a needle into their vein and end that terrible craving. Try to imagine how anyone could actually believe they get pleasure from sticking a hypodermic syringe into a vein. Non-heroin addicts don’t suffer that panic feeling and heroin doesn’t relieve the feeling, it causes it.
Non-users don’t feel miserable if they aren’t allowed to use — it’s only users that suffer that feeling. Use doesn’t relieve the feeling, it causes it. The fear of the negative consequences doesn’t help users quit, because they liken the feeling to walking through a minefield. If you get away with it, fine, but if you were unlucky you stepped on a mine and faced the consequences. If you knew the risks and were prepared to take them, what did it have to do with anyone else?
Effects of the brainwashing make us tend to think like the man who, having fallen off a 100-storey building, is quoted saying as he whizzes past the fiftieth floor, “So far, so good!” We think that as we’ve gotten away with it so far, one more session won’t make the difference. See it another way: the ‘habit’ is a continuous chain for life with each session creating the need for the next. When you start the habit, you light a fuse. The trouble is, you don’t know how long the fuse is. Every time you give in to a session you’re one step closer to the bomb exploding. HOW WILL YOU KNOW IF IT’S THE NEXT ONE?
Users find it very difficult to believe that use actually causes those insecure feelings when you’re out late at night after a contentious day at home or work. Non-users don’t suffer from that feeling, it’s use that causes it.
Another of the great joys of quitting use is the freedom from the sinister black shadows at the back of our minds. All users know they’re fools to close their minds from the ill effects of use. For most of our lives it’s automatic, but the black shadows are always lurking in our subconscious minds, just below the surface. Several of the marvellous benefits of quitting are conscious, such as the ending of the waste of time and of the sheer stupidity of use.
The last chapters have dealt with the considerable advantages of being a non-user, but in the interest of fairness it’s necessary to give a balanced account. Therefore, the next chapter lists the advantages of being a user.
Otherwise, I edited it into a generic book since it says licensed under creative commons.
https://easypeasymethod.org/
PART 1
Chapter 1 Introduction
DO NOT JUMP CHAPTERS
This open source book will enable you to stop using immediately, painlessly, and permanently without willpower or any sense of deprivation or sacrifice. It won’t place any judgement, embarrassment, or pressure to undergo painful measures.
In fact, there’s absolutely no need to cut down or reduce your usage whilst reading; doing so is actually detrimental.
You might be apprehensive about the very thought, or one of the millions actively attempting to quit. If so, perhaps what you’ve already read goes against everything you’ve ever been told, but ask yourself if what you’ve been told has worked? If it had, you wouldn’t be reading this book at all.
Perhaps you identify with the following questions:
- Do you spend far more time than you originally intended?
- Are you unsuccessful in efforts to stop or limit?
- Has time spent interfered with, or taken precedence over personal or professional commitments, hobbies, or relationships in your life?
- Do you go out of your way to keep it secret?
- Has it caused significant problems in intimate relationship(s)?
- Do you experience a cycle of arousal and enjoyment before and during, followed by feelings of shame, guilt, and remorse after?
- Do you spend significant amounts of time thinking about it?
- Has it caused any other negative consequences in your personal or professional life (e.g. missed work, poor performance, neglected relationships, financial problems)?
If you’re a user that depends on it at all and for any reason, all you need to do is read on. If you’re here for a loved one, all you need to do is persuade them to read this book. But if unable to persuade them, read the book yourself. Understanding the method assists getting the message across and preventing your children from starting. Don’t be fooled by the fact that they don’t have access to it now – all do before getting hooked.
About the book
DO NOT JUMP CHAPTERS
Like myself, you’ve probably succeeded with streaks of various lengths, but have always eventually succumbed to illusory urges. I’m pleased to report this method works entirely differently, and has been the only method that has worked.
Or perhaps, you’ve been linked this book by a concerned party and are skeptical. Firstly, thank you for at least looking at it. This will be expanded upon shortly, but please briefly recall the first time you did it. Did you expect that you’d return to it for the rest of your life? According to my own informal studies on the matter (pestering friends to read this book), it is equally as effective for the casual user as it is for the heavy. It’s not terribly long, with high chances of large gains, so I beg you to continue reading.
The method described is:
- Instantaneous.
- Equally as effective for the heavy and casual user alike.
- Causes no bad withdrawal pangs.
- Needs no willpower.
- Requires no shock treatment, aids, or gimmicks.
- Won’t cause you to replace it.
- Permanent.
You might find this impossible to believe, but this sentiment is echoed by many people.
1.1 Warning
If you’re expecting this book to ‘scare’ you into quitting using the various health issues users risk, such as dysfunction, unreliable arousal, loss of interest in reality, brain hypofrontality, and the blinding accusation that it’s a filthy, disgusting habit and you are a stupid, spineless, weak-willed jellyfish, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Those tactics never helped me to quit and if they were going to help you, you’d have quit already.
Conventional methods of quitting advocate using willpower, or ‘diet’ substitution methods such as ‘using once every n days’ and cutting down consumption. Some sites list peer-reviewed research about neurotransmitters and neuroplasticity, and while these sites are informative, many are aware of the health risks and choose to do nothing, though such material is typically avoided. Ultimately, they are equally ineffective as they don’t actually remove the reasons for using. Ultimately, turning something into a forbidden fruit isn’t how you treat it.
This method works differently. Some of the things about to be said might be difficult to believe, but by the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll not only believe them, you’ll wonder how you could have ever been brainwashed into believing otherwise.
There’s a common misconception that we choose to use. It’s true that we choose to set up the use. Occasionally I choose to go to the cinema, but I certainly didn’t choose to spend my whole life in the cinema theatre. Originally, curiosity and human nature took me there, but I wouldn’t have started had I known I’d become addicted, causing the decline of my health, happiness, and relationships. “If only I’d heard about dysfunction on my first visit!”
Take a moment to reflect, did you ever make the ‘positive’ decision that you need it? Or that you should use it? Or, that at certain times in your life, you couldn’t enjoy a good night’s sleep or perhaps even pass an evening after a hard day at work without it? Or that you couldn’t concentrate or handle stress without it? At what stage did you decide that you needed it, that you needed it permanently in your life, feeling insecure, even panic-stricken without it?
Like every other user, you have been lured into the most sinister and subtle trap that man and nature have ever combined to devise. There’s not a person alive, whether a user themselves or not, that likes the thought of their children using it to cope or for pleasure. This means that all addicts wish they had never started. That’s unsurprising: no one needs it to enjoy life or cope with stress before they get hooked.
At the same time, all users wish to continue to use. After all, nobody forces us to set up the use. Whether they understand the reason or not, it’s only users that decide to do it.
If there were a magic button the user could press to wake up the following morning as if they’d never tried it, the only addicts tomorrow would be young people still ‘experimenting’.
The only thing that prevents us from quitting is FEAR! Fear caused by the belief that we’ll have to survive an indeterminate period of misery, deprivation, and unsatisfied craving in order to be free from it. These spawn from irrational beliefs, both learned and acquired, such as:
- It is the only and most important thing in life.
- It is ‘safer’ than real-life because it can’t reject me.
- It is educative and useful.
- Entitlement to a ‘superior’ experience.
- More is always better.
It’s fear that a night all by yourself will be miserable, spent fighting uncontrollable impulses. Fear that the night before exams will be a night from hell without it. Fear that we’ll never be able to concentrate, handle stress, or be as confident without our little crutch and that our personality and character will change.
But most of all, fear that ‘once an addict, always an addict’: that we’ll never be completely free, spending the rest of our lives craving the occasional use at odd times. If, as I did, you’ve already tried all the conventional ways to quit and have been through the misery and torture of the ‘willpower method’, you’ll not only be affected by that fear, you’ll be convinced you can never quit.
If you’re apprehensive, panic-stricken, or feel that the time is not right for you to quit, let me assure you that your apprehension and panic isn’t relieved by use — it’s caused by it. You didn’t decide to fall into the trap, but like all traps, it’s designed to ensure that you remain trapped. Ask yourself, when you first used it, did you decide to come back to it as long as you live? So when will you quit? Tomorrow? Next year? Stop kidding yourself! The trap is designed to hold you for life. Why else do you think all these other addicts don’t quit before it ‘kills’ their lives?
I’ve referred to a magic button; it works just like that magic button. Let me make it quite clear, it isn’t magic, but for myself and others who’ve found it so easy and enjoyable to quit, it seems like it!
The warning is as follows: This is a chicken and egg situation: every addict wants to quit and every addict can find it easy and enjoyable to quit. It’s only fear that prevents users from attempting to quit. The single greatest gain is to be rid of that fear, but you won’t be free of that fear until you complete the book. On the contrary, your fear may increase as you continue reading, which might prevent you from finishing it. Take this comment from one woman.
“I’ve just finished reading. I know that it’s only been four days, but I feel so great, I know that I’ll never need to use again. I first started to read your book five months ago, got half way through and panicked. I knew that if I went on reading I would have to stop. Wasn’t I silly?”
You didn’t decide to fall into the trap, but be clear in your mind: you won’t escape from it unless you make the affirmative decision to do so. You may already be straining at the leash to quit, or you may be apprehensive about the very thought, but either way, please bear in mind: YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE!
If at the end of the book you decide that you wish to continue to use it, there’s nothing to prevent you from doing so. You don’t even have to cut down or stop using it whilst reading the book, and remember, there is no shock treatment. On the contrary, I have only good news for you. Can you imagine how Andy Dufresne felt when he finally escaped from Shawshank Prison? That’s how I felt when I escaped from the trap, and that’s how the ex-users who’ve used the method feel. By the end of the book, that’s how you’ll feel! Go for it!
Finally…
Everyone can find it easy and enjoyable to quit it, including you! All you have to do is read the rest of this book with an open mind; the more you understand, the easier it will be. Even if you don’t understand a word, provided you follow instructions, you’ll find it easy. Most importantly, you won’t go through life moping for it or feeling deprived, and by the end of the book the only mystery will be why you did it for so long.
With the method, there are only two reasons for failure.
Failure to carry out instructions. Some will find it annoying that the book is so dogmatic about certain recommendations, such as not to try cutting down or using substitutes. I certainly don’t deny that there are many who have succeeded in stopping using such ruses, but they’ve succeeded in spite of and not because of them. Some people can make love standing on a hammock, but it isn’t the easiest way. The numbers for opening this trap’s lock are in this book, but they need to be used in the correct order: going from one chapter to the next and not skipping chapters.
Failure to understand. Don’t take anything for granted, question not only what you’re told, but your own views and what society has told you about it and addiction. For example, those who believe it’s just a habit, ask yourself why other habits — some of which are enjoyable — are easy to break, while a habit that feels awful, costs energy, time and virility is so difficult to break. Those that believe you enjoy it, ask yourself why other things that are infinitely more enjoyable you can take or leave. Why do you have to have it? Why does panic set in when you don’t have it?
The method is about to give you the knowledge on how easy and enjoyable it is to quit it. Like many others, one of my greatest triumphs in life has been escaping the trap. There’s no need to feel depressed, on the contrary, you’re about to accomplish something that every user on the planet would love to achieve: FREEDOM!
REMEMBER, DO NOT SKIP CHAPTERS.
1.2 Tips for reading, and final minor notes
Don’t read this book like a normal book, it’s very short, and you should be able to finish it within a couple of hours. Most people benefit from highlighting or taking notes, and usually recommend rereading it a few times to fully solidify the lessons.
Chapter 2 The Easy Method
This book’s objective is directing you into a new frame of mind. In contrast to the usual method of stopping — whereby you start off with the feeling of climbing Mount Everest and spend the next few weeks craving and feeling deprived — you start right away with a feeling of elation, as if cured of a terrible disease. From then on, the further you go through life, the more you will look at this period of time and wonder how you ever used it in the first place. You will look at other users with pity, as opposed to envy.
Provided that you’re not someone who had never become addicted (reading for your significant other) or had quit (or is in the fasting days of a “diet”), it’s essential to keep using until you have finished the book completely. This may appear to be a contradiction, and this instruction to continue using causes more objection than any other, but as you read further your desire to use will gradually be reduced. Take this instruction seriously: Attempting to quit early will not benefit you.
Many don’t finish the book because they feel they have to give something up, some even deliberately only reading one line per day in order to postpone the evil event. Look at it this way, what have you got to lose? If you don’t stop at the end of the book, you’re no worse off than you are now. It’s by definition a Pascal’s Wager, a bet taken where you have nothing to lose and high chances of large gains.
Incidentally, if you haven’t used it for a few days or weeks, but aren’t sure whether you’re a user, ex-user, or a non-user; or you find your desire to use it has dwindled as you’re absorbing the material, then don’t use it whilst reading. In fact, you’re already a non-user, but we have to let your brain catch up with your body. By the end of the book, you’ll be a happy non-user. The method is the complete opposite of the normal method, where one lists the considerable disadvantages of using and says:
“If only I can go long enough without it, eventually the desire will go and I can enjoy life again, free of slavery.”
This is the logical way to go about it, with thousands stopping every day using this method. However, it’s very difficult to succeed for the following reasons:
Stopping the use isn’t the real problem. Every time you finish your session, you’ve stopped using it. You may have powerful reasons on the first day of your once-in-four diet to say “I don’t want to use it anymore.” All users do, and their reasons are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. The real problem is day two, ten, or ten-thousand where in a weak moment you’ll have ‘just one peek’, want another, and suddenly you’re an addict again.
Awareness of the health risks generates more fear, making it more difficult to stop. Tell a user it’s destroying their virility and the first thing they’ll do is reach for something to surge their dopamine, or even using it.
All reasons for stopping actually make it harder. This is due to two reasons. First, we’re continually being forced to give up our ’little friend’ or some prop, vice, or pleasure (whichever way the user perceives it). Second, they create a “blind”. We do not use it for the reasons we should stop. The real question is, why do we want or need to do it?
With the method, we (initially) forget the reasons we’d like to stop, face the use problem and ask ourselves the following questions:
- What is it doing for me?
- Am I actually enjoying it?
- Do I really need to go through life sabotaging my mind and body?
The beautiful truth is that all use does absolutely nothing for you whatsoever. Let me make it quite clear, it’s not that the disadvantages of being a user outweigh the advantages, it’s that there are zero advantages to using it.
Most users find it necessary to rationalise why they use, but the reasons they come up with are all fallacies and illusions.
First, we’ll remove these fallacies and illusions. In fact, you’ll soon realise there is nothing to give up. Not only that, but there are marvellous, positive gains from being a non-user, with well-being and happiness only two of these gains. Once illusions that life will never be quite as enjoyable without use is removed — realising that not only is life just as enjoyable without it but infinitely more so — and once feelings of being deprived or missing out are eradicated, we’ll go back to reconsider increased well-being and happiness — and the dozens of other reasons for quitting use. These realisations will become positive additional aids to help you achieve what you really desire: enjoying your life free from the slavery of addiction!
Chapter 3 Why is it difficult to stop?
All users feel something evil has possessed them. In the early days, it’s a simple question of “I will stop, just not today”. Eventually we progress to believing we haven’t got enough willpower to stop, or that there’s something inherent in it we must have in order to enjoy life. Addiction is like clawing our way out of a slippery pit: As we near the top, we see the sunshine, but find ourself sliding back down as our mood dips. Eventually we set up use, and as we use, we feel awful.
Ask a user, “If you could go back to the time before you became hooked, with the knowledge you have now, would you have started using it?”
“NO WAY!” would be the reply.
Ask the confirmed user, someone who defends it and doesn’t believe it causes injury to the brain or downregulation of dopamine receptors: “Do you encourage your children to use it?”
“NO WAY!” is again the reply.
Use is an extraordinary enigma. As said previously, the problem isn’t explaining why it’s easy to stop, it’s explaining why it’s difficult to stop. The real problem is explaining why anyone does it after getting insights on neurological damage. Part of the reason we start is because of the other tens of millions already into it, yet all of these people wish they hadn’t started in the first place, telling us it’s like living life in second gear. We don’t quite believe they’re not enjoying it, as we associate it with freedom or being ‘educated’, and work hard to become hooked ourselves. We then spend the rest of our lives telling others not to do it and trying to kick the habit ourselves, often thinking we’re unique in this.
We also spend a significant proportion of our time feeling hopeless and miserable. Using makes us prefer and long for it, even when reality is available. Through the constant surge and fall of dopamine induced by the use, we sentence ourselves to a lifetime of isolation, irritability, anger, stress, fatigue, and dysfunction. Using it, we end up feeling miserable and guilty.
In fact, reading about its addictive and destructive capabilities here and on other sites makes us even more nervous and hopeless! What sort of hobby is it that when you’re doing it, you wish you weren’t, and when you aren’t, you crave it? Users despise themselves every time they read about hypofrontality and desensitisation, every time they use behind their trusting partner’s back, and every time they can’t bring themselves to exercise after a daytime session. An otherwise intelligent and rational human being spends all their days in contempt. But worst of all, what do users get from having to endure life with these awful black shadows at the back of their mind? Absolutely nothing!
You might be thinking “That’s all very well, I know this, but once you’re hooked on these things it’s very difficult to stop.” But why is it so difficult? Some say it’s because of the powerful withdrawal symptoms, but as you’ll soon come to learn, the actual withdrawal symptoms are very mild in fact. And this is evident when you consider that many users have lived and died without realising they were addicts.
Enjoyment has nothing to do with it either. I enjoy crayfish, but I never got to the point where I had to have crayfish every day. With other things in life, we enjoy them while we’re doing them, but we don’t sit around feeling deprived when we’re not.
Some say:
“It’s educational!” So how has it made you grow as a person? “It’s satisfaction!” So why does it isolate you and make you feel insatiable cravings? “It’s a feeling of release!” Release from the stresses of real life? Ok, for an hour, before it all comes crashing back on you? And what stresses has it solved? “It helps me sleep” So why can others sleep just fine without it? There are many scientifically demonstrated methods to fix sleep, and more so.
Many believe that use relieves boredom, but boredom is a frame of mind. Use will habituate you to novelty-seeking in no time, causing you to become increasingly bored until you finally participate in that wild-goose chase.
Some say they only do it because their friends and everyone they know does it. If so, pray that your friends don’t start cutting their heads off to cure a headache! Most users who think about it come to conclude that it’s just a habit. This is not really an explanation, but having discounted all the usual, rational explanations, it appears to be the only remaining excuse. Unfortunately, it’s equally illogical. Every day of our lives we change habits, some of them very enjoyable. We’ve been brainwashed to believe that using is a habit and that habits are difficult to break.
Are habits difficult to break? Drivers in the US are in the habit of driving on the right hand side of the road, yet when travelling overseas they break the habit with hardly any aggravation whatsoever. And when you get a new job you take on a different routine, so your habits change. These may take some getting used to, but it is nothing like breaking a life long struggle with addiction. We make and break habits every day of our lives, so why do we find it difficult to break a habit that makes us feel deprived when we don’t have it, guilty when we do, one that we would love to break anyway, when all we have to do is stop doing it?
The answer is that use isn’t habit, it’s addiction! That’s why it appears to be so difficult to ‘give up’. Most users don’t understand addiction and believe that they get some genuine pleasure or crutch from use. They believe they’re making a genuine sacrifice if they quit.
The beautiful truth is that once you understand the true nature of addiction and the reasons why you use it, you’ll stop doing it, just like that. Within three weeks, the only mystery will be why you found it necessary to use it as long as you have and why you can’t persuade other users how nice it is to not be a user!
3.1 The Sinister Trap
Use is a subtle and sinister trap that man and nature have combined to devise. Some of us are even warned about the dangers, but we can’t believe how we aren’t enjoying it. But what gets us into it in the first place? Typically it’s free samples from those who share. That’s how the trap is sprung. If instead it warned us of the dangers of what we were getting into before even making that first taste, then the alarm bells would scream.
Once this process has started, we are trapped. From now on we spend the rest of our lives trying to understand why we do it, telling our children not to start, and at odd times trying to escape ourselves. The trap is designed such that we try and stop only due to an ‘incident’, whether loss of a career or relationship, shortage of drive, or just plain feeling like a leper. As soon as we stop, we have more stress due to withdrawal pangs, and with the method we relied on to remove that stress now unavailable.
Our resolve for quitting then proves to be shaky. After a few days of torture we convince ourselves that we’ve picked the wrong time to quit, deciding we’ll wait for periods without stress, which upon arriving removes our reason for initially stopping. Of course, that period will never arrive fully, and we begin to believe that our lives tend to become more and more stressful. We leave the protection of our parents, and the stresses of work, homemaking, mortgages, buying shelter, and raising children begins to crowd our lives. But this is an illusion. The most stressful parts of any creature’s life are actually early childhood and adolescence.
We tend to confuse responsibility and stress. A user’s life automatically becomes more stressful because use doesn’t relax us or relieve stress, as some try to make us believe. It’s just the reverse, causing us to become more stressed as we continue using, with every guilt laden late night aftermath piling more straw onto the camel’s back. Even users who kick the habit — as most do one or more times throughout their lives — can lead perfectly happy lives yet suddenly become hooked again. Wandering into the maze, our minds become hazy and we spend the rest of our lives trying to escape. Many do succeed, only to fall into the sinister trap at a later date.
Solving the problem of addiction is a riddle. It is complex and difficult. But once you see the answer, it’s simple and fun, and you wonder why you didn’t think of that! The method contains the solution to this puzzle, leading you out of the maze, never wandering in again. All you have to do is follow every instruction to the letter. However, if you take a wrong turn by jumping chapters, or blazing through the book at lightning speed without carefully making a deliberate effort on your first time reading, then the rest of the instructions are pointless.
Anyone can find it easy to stop, but we must first establish the facts. No, not facts designed to scare you, there’s already more than enough information out there. If that was going to stop you, you’d have already stopped. But why do we find it difficult to stop? Answering this requires us to know the real reason we’re still using it, boiling down to two factors. They are:
- Nature.
- Societal brainwashing.
Users are intelligent, rational human beings. They know they’re taking enormous future risks so they spend lots of time rationalising their ‘habit’. But users in their hearts know they’re fools, knowing they had no need to use it before becoming hooked. Most remember that their first ‘taste’ was a mix of revulsion and novel curiosity. They then specialise in locating and filtering, working hard to become hooked.
Most annoyingly, there’s the sense that non-addicts aren’t missing out on anything and find the situation laughable. By dismantling these factors in the next chapters, you too will understand the sinister trap!
Chapter 4 Nature
Instant and highly accessible use keeps the brain’s reward mechanism producing dopamine for significantly longer than normally possible. Scientifically, this is called the Coolidge effect, which you might already be aware of.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with feelings of wanting, with actual pleasure produced by opioids. More dopamine, more opioids and more action. Without dopamine, actions such as eating don’t feel pleasurable and aren’t completed, with high fat and sugar foods producing the highest chemical release.
Dopamine is also released in response to novelty. This floods the limbic system (reward circuit), so the first time you use, you act, rewarding and triggering another flood of opioids. Incentivised to get as much dopamine as possible, the brain stores this as a script for easy recall and strengthens neural pathways through the release of a chemical called DeltaFosB. Now, the brain calls up these pathways in response to cues, alone time, stress or even feeling a little down and suddenly you’re ready to take a ride on the ‘water slide’. Every time this is repeated, more DeltaFosB is released so the water slide is greased, alive and easier to ride down the next time.
The limbic system has a self correcting system to trim the number of dopamine and opioid receptors when frequent and daily flooding of dopamine is detected. Unfortunately, these receptors are also needed to keep us motivated to handle daily life stresses. Nominal amounts of dopamine produced by natural rewards simply don’t compare to use and aren’t as efficiently absorbed by the decreased receptors, leading you into feel more stressed and irritated than normal. This process is known as desensitisation.
In this cycle you crossed the ‘red line’ and triggered emotions such as guilt, disgust, embarrassment, anxiety and fear, which in turn raise dopamine levels even higher and cause the brain to misinterpret these feelings.
A fleeting feeling of security is all that’s needed to get through a rough spot in life, but will your desensitised brain be able to catch that drop of destresser that a non-user’s brain is able to use?
Dopamine flooding acts like a quick acting drug, falling quickly and inducing withdrawal pangs. Many users have the illusion these pangs are the terrible trauma they suffer when trying or being forced to stop. In fact, they’re primarily mental since the user is feeling deprived of their pleasure or prop.
4.1 The Little Monster
The actual chemical withdrawal from use is so subtle that most users have lived and died without realising they’re addicts. Many users have a fear of addiction, yet that’s exactly what they are, addicts. Fortunately it’s easy to kick, but you first need to accept that you are, in fact, addicted. Withdrawal from use doesn’t cause any physical pain and is merely an empty, restless feeling of something missing, which is why many believe it’s something to do with desire. Prolonged, this feeling becomes nervousness, insecurity, agitation, low confidence and irritability. It’s like hunger, for a poison.
Within seconds of engaging in a session, dopamine is supplied and the craving ends, resulting in a feeling of fulfillment as you whiz down the water slide. In the early days, withdrawal pangs and their subsequent relief are so slight we’re unaware of them. When we become regular users, we believe it’s because we’ve come to enjoy them or gotten into the ‘habit’. The truth being that we’re already hooked but don’t realise it. The little monster is already in our brains, so every once and a while we take trips down the water slide to feed it.
All users begin seeking it for irrational reasons. The only reason anybody continues using it, whether they’re a casual or heavy user, is to feed that little monster. The whole conundrum is a series of cruel and confusing punishments, but perhaps the most pathetic aspect is the sense of enjoyment a user gets from a session, trying to get back to the sense of peace, tranquility and confidence their body had before becoming hooked in the first place.
4.2 The Annoying Alarm
You know that feeling when a neighbour’s home alarm has been ringing all day — or some other minor persistent aggravation — then the noise suddenly stops and marvellous feelings of peace and tranquility wash over you? This isn’t really peace, but the ending of an aggravation. Before starting the next session our bodies are complete, but then we begin forcing our brains to pump dopamine and when we’re done and it begins to leave, we suffer withdrawal pangs. These aren’t physical pain, merely an empty feeling. We aren’t even aware it exists but it’s like a dripping tap inside our bodies.
Our rational minds don’t understand it, but they don’t need to. All we know is that we want it and when we use, the craving goes. However, the satisfaction is fleeting because in order to relieve the craving more use is required. As soon as you use, the craving starts again and the trap continues to hold you. A feedback loop, unless you break it!
The trap is similar to wearing tight shoes just to obtain the pleasure of taking them off. There are three primary reasons why users can’t see it this way.
- From birth, we’ve been subjected to massive amounts of brainwashing telling us it isn’t harmful, so why shouldn’t we believe them?
- Because physical dopamine withdrawal involves no actual pain, merely an empty insecure feeling inseparable from hunger and normal stress, this feeling manifests into a use session as those are the very times we tend to seek it. We tend to regard this feeling as normal.
- However, the primary reason users fail to see use in its true light is due to it working back to front. It’s when you’re not consuming it that you suffer the empty feeling. Because the process of getting hooked is incredibly subtle and gradual in the early days, the empty feeling is regarded as normal and so isn’t blamed on the previous session. The moment you begin your session, you get an immediate boost and become less nervous or more relaxed, so use gets the credit.
This ‘back to front’ reverse process makes all drugs difficult to kick. Imagine the state of panic of a heroin addict without any heroin; now picture their utter joy when they can finally plunge a needle into their vein. People who aren’t addicted to heroin don’t suffer that panicked feeling.
The heroin doesn’t relieve the feeling, it causes it. Similarly, non-users don’t suffer empty feelings of needing it, or panic when they cannot access it. Non-users can’t understand how users possibly obtain pleasure from it. Eventually, users can’t understand either.
We talk about use being relaxing or satisfying, but how can you be satisfied unless you were dissatisfied in the first place? A non-user doesn’t suffer from this unsatisfied state, while the user isn’t relaxed until they’ve satisfied their ‘little monster’.
4.3 A pleasure or a crutch?
An important reminder — the main reason that users find it difficult to quit is due to the belief they’re giving up a genuine pleasure or crutch. It’s essential to understand that you’re giving up absolutely nothing whatsoever. The best way to understand the subtleties of the use trap is comparing it with eating. The habit of regular meals causes us to not feel hungry between, only aware of hunger if the meal is delayed. There’s no physical pain, just an empty insecure feeling recognised as hunger. The process of satisfying our hunger is a very pleasant experience.
Use appears to be almost identical, but it’s not. Like hunger, there’s no physical pain and the reward mechanism behaves in similar ways, but it’s this similarity to eating that tricks the user into believing there’s a genuine pleasure or crutch. Although eating and use appear to be very similar, in reality they’re exact opposites.
- You eat to survive and energise your life, whereas use dims and cuts down your mojo.
- Food genuinely tastes good and eating is a genuinely pleasant experience that we enjoy throughout our lives. Use involves self-sabotaging the happiness receptors and thus destroys your chances to cope and feel happy.
- Eating doesn’t create hunger and genuinely relieves it, whereas the first use session starts the craving for dopamine and each subsequent session. Far from relieving it, it ensures suffering for the rest of your life.
Is eating a habit? If you think so, try breaking it completely! To describe eating as habit would be like describing breathing as a habit — both are essential for survival. It’s true that people have the habit of satisfying their hunger at different times with varying types of food, but eating itself isn’t habit. Neither is use. The only reason a user sets up the use is trying to end the empty feelings the previous session created, at different times with varying escalation.
On the internet, use is frequently referred to as a habit. The method also refers to the ‘habit’. However, be constantly aware that use isn’t habit, it’s addiction! When we start to use, we have to force ourselves to cope with it. Before we know it, we’re escalating.
4.4 Crossing the red line
As with any other drug, the body tends to develop immunity to the effects of the same old use, our brain wanting more or something else. After prolonged use, it ceases to completely relieve the withdrawal pangs that the previous session created. There’s a tug of war occurring in this paradise: you want to stay on the safe side of your ‘red line’, but your brain is asking you to escalate use.
You feel better after engaging in this session, but you’re more nervous and less relaxed than someone who never started, even though you’re living in a supposed use paradise. This position is even more ridiculous than wearing tight shoes because as you go through life an ever-increasing amount of discomfort remains after taking the shoes off. Because the user knows the little monster has to be fed, they themselves decide the time, which tends to be on four types of occasions or a combination of them:
Boredom / Concentration — Two complete opposites!
Stress / Relaxation — Two complete opposites!
What magic drug can suddenly reverse the very effect it had minutes before? The truth is that use neither relieves boredom and stress nor promotes concentration and relaxation. If you think about it, what other types of occasions are there in our lives, bar sleep?. The human body is the most sophisticated object on the planet, but no species, even the lowest amoeba or worm, survives without knowing the difference between food and poison.
Through natural selection our minds and bodies have developed techniques for rewarding actions that multiply and sustain humanity. They’re not prepared for supernormal stimuli that are bigger, brighter and edgier than anything found in nature, since even the most muted two-dimensional image causes us to become aroused. But repeatedly look at the same image and you won’t be. In real life, checks and balances ensure you do something else but use has no such limiter, causing you to spend your life addicted!
It’s a fallacy that physically and mentally weak people become users, the lucky ones being those who found their first instance repulsive and are cured for life.
Enjoying escalating use is an illusion, merely keeping our novelty ‘monkey’ within the ‘red line’ of ‘safe’ use in order to get our dopamine fix. Like heroin addicts, all they’re really enjoying is the ritual of relieving those pangs.
4.5 The High From the Dance Around The Red Line
The reason why most continue using is because although we know the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages, we believe there’s something in use that we actually enjoy or that it acts like some sort of prop. We’re under the illusion that after we stop using there will be a void, certain situations in our lives never being quite the same. In fact use not only provides nothing, it subtracts.
Why is it then that many users find it so difficult to stop, going through months of torture and spending the rest of their lives pining for it at odd times? The answer is the second reason, brainwashing. The neurotransmitter addiction is easy to cope with, most users going for days without use on business trips or travel, unaffected by withdrawal pangs. Their little monster is safe in the knowledge you’ll use as soon as you return to your hotel room. You can survive your obnoxious client and your megalomaniac manager, knowing the fix is there for your taking.
4.6 The Smokers Analogy
A good analogy is that of the cigarette smoker. If they went ten hours of the day without a cigarette they’d be tearing their hair out, but many smokers will buy a new car and refrain from smoking in it. Many will visit theatres, supermarkets, churches and being unable to smoke causes them no problems. Even on trains and airplanes there have been no riots. Smokers are almost pleased for someone or something to stop them smoking.
Users will automatically refrain from using in their parents’ home during family gatherings and other events with little discomfort. In fact, most users have extended periods during which they abstain without effort. The neurological little monster is easy to cope with even when you’re still addicted. There are millions of users who remain casual users all their lives and they’re just as addicted as the heavy user. There are even heavy users who’ve kicked the addiction but have an occasional use, greasing the water slide to be ridden down at the next dip in mood.
As said previously the actual use addiction isn’t the main problem, it’s simply acting as a catalyst to keeping our minds confused over the real problem – brainwashing. Don’t think the bad effects of use are exaggerated, however; if anything, they’re sadly understated. Occasionally, rumours circulate that the neural pathways created are there for life, with the right mix of chance and stimulus sending you down the life-ruining water slide again, but these are untrue. Our brains and bodies are miraculous machines, recovering within a matter of weeks.
It may be of consolation to lifelong and heavy users that it’s just as easy for them to stop as casual users, and in a peculiar way it’s easier. The further it drags you down, the greater the relief. When I stopped I went straight to zero and didn’t have one bad pang. In fact, the process was actually enjoyable even during the withdrawal period.
But first, we must remove the brainwashing.
Chapter 5 Brainwashing
This is the second reason we start using. Understanding this brainwashing fully required us to first examine the powerful effects of supernormal stimulus. Our brains simply aren’t prepared for more use in fifteen minutes than our ancestors had in several lifetimes.
5.1 Scientific reasoning
Anti-use movements don’t actually stop people from using. Logically speaking they should, but the simple fact is they don’t. The health risks listed from peer-reviewed studies aren’t enough to stop an adolescent from starting.
Ironically, the most powerful force in this confusion is the user themselves. It’s a fallacy that users are weak-willed or physically weak people. You have to be physically strong in order to cope with an addiction after you know it exists. Perhaps the most painful aspect is that they place themselves as unsuccessful losers and insufferable introverts. It’s likely that a friend could be more interesting in person if they hadn’t put themselves down for seeking self-pleasure.
5.2 Problems using willpower
Users quitting using the willpower method blame their own lack of willpower and ruin their peace and happiness. It’s one thing to fail in self-discipline and another to self-loathe. We’re working on an addiction, not a habit and at no point do you argue with yourself to stop a habit like golfing, but to do the same with use is normalised — why?
Constant exposure to a supernormal stimulus rewires your brain, so building a resistance to this brainwashing is critical, as if buying a car from a second hand car dealer — nodding politely but not believing a word the man is saying.
Most users swear that they only use sparingly and therefore are fine, when in actuality they’re straining at the leash, fighting with their willpower to resist temptations. If done too often and for too long, this depletes their willpower considerably and they begin failing in other life projects where willpower is of great value, like exercise, dieting, etc. Failure in these areas makes them feel miserable and guilty, cascading into using again. If this isn’t done, they’ll vent their anger and depression onto loved ones.
Once you become addicted to use, the brainwashing is increased. Your subconscious mind knows the little monster has to be fed, blocking everything else. It’s fear that keeps people from quitting, fear of that empty, insecure feeling they get when they stop flooding their brains with dopamine. Just because you’re unaware of it doesn’t mean it’s not there. You don’t have to understand it any more than a cat needs to understand where the hot water pipes are: the cat just knows that if it sits in a certain spot it feels warm.
5.3 Passivity
The passivity of our minds and dependence on authority leading to brainwashing is the primary difficulty of giving up use. Our upbringing in society, reinforced by the brainwashing of our own addiction and combined with the most powerful - our friends, relatives and colleagues. The phrase ‘giving up’ is a classic example of the brainwashing, implying genuine sacrifice. The beautiful truth is there’s nothing to give up; on the contrary, you’ll be freeing yourself from a terrible disease and achieving marvellous positive gains. We’ll begin removing this brainwashing now, starting with no longer referring to ‘giving up’ but to stopping, quitting or perhaps the true position, escaping!
The only thing that persuades us to use initially is other people doing it and feeling that we’re missing out. We work hard to become hooked, yet we never find what they’ve been missing. Every time we see use, it reassures us there must be something in it, otherwise people wouldn’t be doing it and the business wouldn’t be so big. Even when they kick the habit, the ex-user feels they’re being deprived when a discussion comes up during parties or social functions. “Use must be good if all my friends talk about it, right?” They feel safe, they’ll just have one use tonight and before they know it, they’re hooked again.
The brainwashing is extremely powerful and you need to be aware of its effects. We’re about to remove this brainwashing. It isn’t the non-user who’s being deprived, but the user who is forfeiting a lifetime of:
- Health
- Energy
- Wealth
- Peace of mind
- Confidence
- Courage
- Self-respect
- Happiness
- Freedom
What do they gain from these considerable sacrifices? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, apart from the illusion of trying to get back to the state of peace, tranquillity and confidence that the non-user always enjoys.
5.4 Withdrawal Pangs
As explained earlier, users believe they use for enjoyment, relaxation or some sort of education. The actual reason is relief of withdrawal pangs. Our subconscious mind begins to learn that use at certain times tends to be pleasurable. As we become increasingly hooked on it, the greater the need to relieve the withdrawal pangs becomes and the further the subtle trap drags you down. This process happens so slowly that you aren’t even aware of it, most young users don’t realise they’re addicted until attempting to stop and even then, many won’t admit it.
Take this conversation a therapist had with hundreds of teenagers:
As already stated, users tend to relieve their withdrawal pangs at times of stress, boredom, concentration or combinations of these. In the following chapters, we’ll target these aspects of the brainwashing.
Chapter 6 Brainwashing Aspects
The use trap’s big monster is bred through the culmination of many aspects, including societal forces, media portrayals, peers and the user’s own internal narrative. Failure to deconstruct these fallacies whilst using the willpower method eventually leads to feelings of deprivation, leading the user back into the trap. Deconstruction of the imagined value of use is crucial for success and allows you to see where you’re being robbed!
Of importance to note is the link between brainwashing and fear. It’s fear of feeling future withdrawal pangs that create the pangs. Fear is the pang itself. Think about when you’ve had withdrawal symptoms such as sweaty palms, shortness of breath, sleeping problems and an inability to think straight. Now think of similar situations when you’ve had those feelings: job interviews, nerves around an attractive person, public speaking, etc. These are the same anxious feelings the fear causes. Simply put, how can a physical drug still hook people months after stopping? It must be mentally, correct?
6.1 Stress
Not only great tragedies in life, but also minor stresses drive users into the forbidden ‘unsafe’ area previously excluded. Stresses include socialising, phone calls, anxieties of the housewife with young children, and many others. Let’s take phone calls as an example, particularly for a businessperson. Most calls aren’t from satisfied customers or your boss congratulating you, there’s some sort of aggravation. Coming home to mundane family life of kids screaming and their partner’s emotional demands causes the user — if they aren’t already doing so — to fantasise the relief of use promised that night. They unconsciously suffer withdrawal pangs, destressors weakened and unprepared for additional aggravation. Partially relieving the pangs at the same time as normal stress, the total is reduced and the user gets a temporary boost. The boost isn’t an illusion, the user does genuinely feel better than before, but they’re more tense than they would be as a non-user.
The following example isn’t designed to shock you — The method promises no such treatment — but is to emphasise that use destroys your nerves rather than relaxing them.
Use isn’t relieving your nerves, it’s slowly destroying them. One of the great gains of breaking the addiction is the return of your natural confidence and self-assurance. But this freedom cannot be obtained by continuing to grease the dopamine water slide in ways that undercut your happiness and libido by repeating the same destructive behaviour.
6.2 Boredom
If you’re like many people, it’s become second nature. Similarly, use relieving boredom is another fallacy because boredom is a frame of mind, occurring when you’ve been deprived for a long time or are trying to cut down.
The actual situation is this, when you’re addicted to the supernormal pull of use and then try to abstain, it feels like there’s something missing. If you have something to occupy your mind that isn’t stressful, you can go for long periods of time without being bothered by the absence. However, when you’re bored there’s nothing to take your mind off it, so you feed the monster. When you’re indulging yourself and not trying to stop or cut down, even setting up use becomes subconscious. This ritual is automatic; if the user tries to remember sessions during the last week, they’re only able to remember a small proportion of them, like the very last one or the session after a long abstinence.
The truth being that it increases boredom indirectly because use make you feel lethargic and instead of undertaking an energetic activity, users tend to prefer lounging around, bored and relieving their withdrawal pangs. Countering the brainwashing is important because users tend to use when bored, our brains wired to interpret use as interesting. Similarly, we’ve also been brainwashed into believing use aids relaxation.
6.3 Concentration
Use doesn't help concentration — when you’re trying to concentrate you automatically try and avoid distractions. Therefore, when a user wants to concentrate, they don’t even think — automatically setting up use, feeding the little monster and partially ending the craving. They get on with the matter at hand, already forgetting they’ve used. After years of dopamine-flooding the neurological changes affect abilities such as accessing information, planning and impulse control.
Concentration is also adversely affected as the dopamine receptors are culled due to natural tolerance to the large surges, reducing the benefit of smaller dopamine boosts from natural destressors. Your concentration and inspiration will be greatly boosted as this process is reduced. For many, it’s the concentration aspect that prevents them from succeeding with the willpower method: they could put up with the irritability and bad temper, but the failure to concentrate on something difficult once their crutch is removed ruins many.
Loss of concentration that users suffer when trying to escape isn’t due to the absence of use. You have mental blocks when you’re addicted to something and when you have a mental block, what do you do? You set up use — which doesn’t cure the block — so then what do you do? You do what you have to do, getting on with it just as non-users do.
The moment you stop using, everything that goes wrong is blamed on the reason you stopped. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it, you begin to say “If only I could use now, it would solve all my problems”. You then begin to question your decision to quit and escape from the slavery.
If you believe that use is a genuine aid to concentration, worrying about it will guarantee that you’ll be unable to concentrate. Doubt, not the physical withdrawal pangs, creates the problem. Always remember, it’s the user who suffers pangs, not non-users.
6.4 Relaxation
Most users think that use helps them to relax. It doesn’t. The frantic search to get the fix in those ‘dark alleys of the internet’ and the internal struggle of straining at the leash to cross the red line certainly doesn’t sound like a very relaxing activity.
As night rolls in after a trip to a new place or a long day, we sit down to relax, relieving our hunger, thirst and are completely satisfied. The user is not, as they have another hunger to satisfy. Users think of it as the icing on the cake, but in actuality it’s the ‘little monster’ that needs feeding. The truth is that the addict can never be completely relaxed and going through life it gets exponentially worse. Take one online comment from an ex-user:
Every time I hear use addicts trying to justify their addiction the message is, “Oh it helps me to relax.” Take the online account of a single dad whose six year old son wanted to share his bed in the night after a scary movie, but the dad would refuse so that he could have his session.
Here’s another smoking analogy, a couple of years ago adoption authorities threatened to prevent smokers from adopting children. A man rang up, irate. “You’re completely wrong”, he said, “I can remember when I was a child, if I had a contentious matter to raise with my mother, I would wait until she lit a cigarette because she was more relaxed then.” Why couldn’t the man talk to his mother when she wasn’t smoking a cigarette?
Why are non-users completely relaxed then? Why are users not able to relax without a fix for a day or two? Read about the experience of a user taking the abstinence oath and quitting and you’ll notice the struggle with temptations: clearly not relaxed at all when no longer allowed to have the ‘only pleasure’ they are ‘entitled to enjoy’. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to be completely relaxed. Use can be likened to a fly being caught in a pitcher plant, to begin with the fly is eating the nectar but at some imperceptible stage the plant begins to eat the fly.
Isn’t it time you climbed out of the plant?
6.5 Energy
Most users are aware of the progressive effects use's novelty- and escalation-seeking has on their brain’s reward systems. However, they aren’t aware of the effect it has on their energy level.
One of the use trap’s subtleties is that the effects it has upon us, both physically and mentally, happen so gradually and imperceptibly that we remain unaware of them and instead regard withdrawal as normal. The effect is similar to that of bad eating habits: we look at people who are grossly overweight and wonder how they could have possibly allowed themselves to reach that state. But suppose that it happened overnight — you went to bed trim, rippling with muscles and not an ounce of fat on your body — and awoke to find yourself fat, bloated and pot-bellied. Instead of waking up feeling fully rested and full of energy, you feel miserable, lethargic, and barely able to open your eyes.
You’d be panic-stricken, wondering what awful disease you had contracted overnight, and yet the disease is exactly the same. The fact it took you twenty years to arrive there is irrelevant. Use is the same: if it were possible to immediately transfer your mind and body to give you a direct comparison to how you’d feel having stopped use for just three weeks, that’s all that would be required to convince you. You’d ask yourself, would it really feel this good, or what that really amounts to, “Had I really sunk that low?” You wouldn’t just feel healthier, with more energy, but sporting far more confidence and a heightened ability to concentrate.
Lack of energy, tiredness and everything related to it is nicely swept under the rug of ‘getting older’. Friends and colleagues who also live sedentary lifestyles further compound the normalisation of this behaviour. The belief that energy is the exclusive prerogative of children and teenagers and that old age begins in your twenties is another symptom of the brainwashing, as is being unaware of eating and exercise habits as a result of the compounding effects of dopamine desensitisation.
Shortly after stopping use, the foggy and muggy feeling will leave you. The point being, with use you’re always debiting your energy and in that process, tampering with the chemistry of your limbic system. Killing the ‘little monster’ and closing the water slides takes a little bit of time, but recovering your reward centre is nothing like the slow slide into the pit. If you’re going through the trauma of the willpower method, any health or energy gains will be obliterated by the depression you’ll be going through. Unfortunately, it’s not possible for the method to immediately transfer you into your mind in three weeks’ time, but you can! You know instinctively that what you’re being told is correct, all you need to do is use your imagination!
6.6 Social Night Sessions
This is misinformation that seems to make sense, but doesn’t. In order to control your appetite, will you eat at home before leaving to go to a restaurant or party? This is what you’re doing with sessions before social nights, looking tired and not up to your best. Attempting to drown your butterflies with use will only make the problem worse in the long run.
Social night use is occasioned by two or more of our usual reasons for pleasure/prop seeking, social functions at their core being both stressful and relaxing. This might appear to be a contradiction but any form of socialisation can be stressful — even with friends — wanting to be yourself and completely relaxed. There’s many occasions that have multiple factors present at any one time, take driving as an example, since after all, your life is at stake. Stressful, with concentration required for sustained periods of time. You need not be aware of these factors, your subconscious already receiving the message. By the same token, when finding yourself stuck in traffic jams or bored on long highway drives, the promise of a session upon reaching home occupies your mind.
We think that life will never be quite as enjoyable again. In fact, it’s the same principle at work: the sessions simply provide relief from the withdrawal pangs, at some times having greater needs than others, greasing the water slide for the next cue.
Make this clear — it’s not use that is special, it’s the occasion. Once the need for use is removed, such occasions will become more enjoyable and stressful situations less stressful.
Chapter 7 What am I giving up?
Absolutely nothing! Use is difficult to give up because of the fear we’re being deprived of our pleasure or prop. The fear that certain pleasant situations will never be quite the same again. Fear you’ll be left unable to cope with stressful situations. In other words, it’s the effects of brainwashing deluding us into believing that use is a must. Even further, it’s the belief there’s something inherent in use that we need, and that when we stop using we will be denying ourselves and creating a void.
Make this clear in your mind: Use doesn’t fill a void, it creates one!
Our bodies are the most sophisticated objects on the planet. Whether you believe in intelligent design, natural selection, or a combination of both, our bodies are thousands of times more effective than man! We’re unable to create the smallest living cell or the miracles of eyesight, reproduction and various interlinked systems present in our bodies or brains. If this creator or process had intended us to handle supernormal stimulus, we’d have been provided with different reward systems. Our bodies are provided with fail-safe warning devices and we ignore these at our peril.
7.1 There’s nothing to give up
Another smoker analogy: all of us have seen smokers who develop excuses to sneak off for a crafty puff and we see the true addiction in action. Addicts don’t do this for enjoyment, instead they do it because they’re miserable without it.
Not only is there nothing to give up but massive positive gains to be had. When users contemplate quitting, they tend to concentrate on health and virility. These are valid and important reasons, but I personally believe the greatest gains are psychological:
- The return of your confidence and courage.
- Freedom from slavery.
- No longer having awful black shadows at the back of your mind and despising yourself.
7.2 Void, the void, the beautiful void
Imagine having a cold sore on your face, so you go to the pharmacist and he gives you a free ointment to try. You put the ointment on and it disappears immediately. A week later it reappears, so you go back to the pharmacist and ask if they have any more ointment. The pharmacist says “Sure; keep the tube, you might need it later.”
You apply the ointment and hey presto, the sore disappears once again. But every time the sore returns, it gets larger and more painful, with the interval getting shorter and shorter. Eventually, the sore covers your whole face and is excruciatingly painful, and it’s returning every half hour. You know the ointment will remove it temporarily, but you’re very worried. Will the sore eventually spread over your whole body? Will the interval disappear completely? You go to your doctor and they can’t cure it, so you try other things but nothing helps apart from the ointment.
By now you’re completely dependent on the ointment, never going out without ensuring that you have a tube with you. If you go abroad, you make sure you take several tubes with you. In addition to your worries about your health, the pharmacist is charging you a hundred dollars a tube. You have no choice but to pay up.
You stumble across an article discussing this and find out it isn’t just happening to you, many people are suffering from the same problem. In fact, the medical community has discovered that the ointment doesn’t actually cure the sore, and instead only takes it beneath the surface of the skin. It’s the ointment that caused the sore to grow, so all you have to do to get rid of the sore is to stop using the ointment and it’ll disappear in due course.
Would you continue to use the ointment? Would it take willpower to not use the ointment? If you didn’t believe the article there might be a few days of apprehension, but once you realised the sore was beginning to get better, the need or desire to use the ointment would go. Would you be miserable? Of course you wouldn’t! You had an awful problem which you thought was incurable but now you’ve found the solution. Even if it took a year for the sore to go away, each day as it improved you’d think about how marvellous you felt. This is the magic of quitting use.
The sore isn’t the negatives of use. These are all in addition to the sore. The sore makes us close our minds to all these things — it’s that panic feeling of wanting a fix. Non-users don’t suffer from that feeling. The worst thing we ever suffer is fear, the greatest gain being rid of that fear. It’s caused by your first session, further strengthened and caused by each subsequent one.
Some users are ‘happy’, blinded by their cunning little monsters and so go through this same nightmare, putting up phony arguments to try and justify their stupidity.
It’s so nice to be free!
Chapter 8 Saving Time
Usually when users try stopping, the main reasons given are health, religion and partner stigma. Part of the brainwashing of this awful use is the sheer slavery of it; man has fought hard to abolish slavery in many parts of the world — yet the user spends life suffering self-imposed slavery. They’re oblivious to the fact that when they’re allowed to use, they wish they were a non-user. The only time that use becomes precious is when we’re ‘trying’ to cut down or abstain, or when abstinence is forced on us.
It cannot be repeated often enough that brainwashing makes it difficult to stop use, so the more we dispel before we start, the easier you’ll find it to achieve your goal. Confirmed users, who don’t believe that use has any negative effect on their health and aren’t having a mental tug of war are typically younger. Thus, the internal feedback is lost due to the nature of their youth or is too infrequent to be observed and registered.
A better argument for a younger user is the time spent, rather saying “I can’t believe you aren’t worried about the time you are spending.” Generally their eyes light up, feeling disadvantaged if attacked on health grounds or social stigma, but on time…
“Oh, I can afford it. It’s only x hours per week and I think it’s worth it, it’s my only vice of pleasure.”
“I still can’t believe you’re not worried. Let’s assume a half hour daily average which includes the physical drain of dopamine withdrawals, you’re spending approximately a full working day every fortnight. I’m sure you’d agree that half an hour a day is a very conservative estimate. Have you thought about how much time you’ll spend in your lifetime? What are you doing in that time? Developing real relationships? No, you’re throwing time away! Not only that, you’re actually using that time to ruin your physical health, destroying your nerves and confidence in order to suffer a lifetime of slavery, pain, melancholy and peevishness. Surely that must worry you, right?”
It’s apparent at this point — especially with younger users — that they’ve never considered it a lifetime addiction. Occasionally, they work out the time they waste in a week and that’s alarming enough. Very occasionally, and only when they think of stopping, they’ll estimate what they spend in a year which is frightening — but over a lifetime is unthinkable. However, because we’re in an argument the confirmed user will impulsively say, “I can afford it, it’s only so much a week”, pulling an encyclopedia salesman routine on themselves.
Would you refuse a job offer which pays your current annual salary and also gives you a month off every year? Any user would sign in a heartbeat and would get busy finding holiday deals to exotic locations. Figuring out how to spend a full month with no work would be the biggest problem to solve. In every discussion with a confirmed user (and please bear in mind that’s not someone like yourself who plans to stop) nobody has ever taken me up on that offer. Why not?
Often at this point, a confirmed user will say, “Look, I’m not really worried about the money aspect.” If you’re thinking along those lines ask yourself why you aren’t worried. Why in other aspects of your life will you go to great deals of trouble to save a few dollars here and there, but spend thousands killing your happiness and hanging the expense?
Every other decision you make in your life will be the result of an analytical process of weighing up advantages and disadvantages to arrive at a rational decision. It may be the wrong decision, but it’ll be the result of rational deduction. Whenever any user weighs up the pros and cons of using, the answer is a dozen times over, “STOP USING! YOU’RE A MUG!” Therefore, all users are using not because they want or decide to, but because they can’t stop. They have to use, and so brainwash themselves, keeping their heads in the sand.
The strange thing is that though many people would pay good money for gym memberships and personal trainers to build muscles and look sculpted (and many of them in their imaginary (and real) desperation turn to treatments such as boosting testosterone, with dubious and dangerous side effects), there are many people in this group who would benefit from stopping a practice systematically destroying their brain’s natural relaxation systems.
This is because they’re still thinking with the brainwashed mind of the user. Wipe the sand out of your eyes for a moment. Use is a chain reaction and a chain for life, and if you don’t break that chain you’ll remain a user for the rest of your life. Estimate how much time you think you’ll spend on use for the remainder of your existence. Obviously the amount will vary from person to person, but let’s assume it’s a year and a half of work hours. Imagine if there were a cheque from the lottery for a year and a half of your salary lying on your carpet tomorrow? You’d be dancing with delight, so start dancing! You’re about to start receiving those benefits!
If you think this is a tricky way of seeing it, you’re still kidding yourself. Work out how much time you would have saved if you’d never had your first use right at the very start.
Shortly, you’ll be making the decision to use your final session (not yet, please remember the instructions!), remaining a non-user by not falling for the trap again. All you have to do to remain a non-user is not using and avoiding ‘just one use’. Remember if you do, it’ll cost you whatever you estimated your salary gain will be.
If you’re mentoring someone for their use addiction, tell them they know someone who’s refused a job offer that pays their current annual salary and also gives them a full month’s worth of paid time off. When asked who that idiot is tell them, “You!” It’s rude, but sometimes you need to get the point across in a less than polite way.
Chapter 9 Health
This is the area where the brainwashing is the greatest with users — particularly the young — who think they’re aware of the health risks but aren’t. Many kid themselves by saying they’re prepared to accept the consequences. If your internet router had a function that played an alarm tone with a warning when you set up use saying — “Up until now you’ve gotten away with it, but if you use another minute your head will explode.” Would you have stayed? If you’re in doubt about the answer try walking up to a cliff, standing on the edge with your eyes closed and imagining having the choice of either quitting use or walking up blindfolded.
There’s no doubt what your choice would be, but by burying your head in the sand and hoping that you’ll wake up one morning and not want to use anymore, you accomplish nothing. Users cannot allow themselves to think of the health risks, because if they do, the addiction’s illusory enjoyment goes. This explains why shock treatments are so ineffective in the first stages of quitting: it’s only non-users who bring themselves to read about the destructive brain changes.
Another common myth is depression or peevishness. Many younger people aren’t worried about their health because they don’t suffer any of the depression or melancholy. The depression or stress isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom. Younger people in general don’t feel the irritability or depression created due to their body’s natural ability to produce more dopamine. As they age or their lives encounter serious setbacks, their already depleted resources are overworked and they’ll experience full-blown symptoms. When older users feel stressed, depressed or irritated, it’s because nature’s fail-safe mechanisms are protecting the nervous system from excessive dopamine-flooding through trimming receptors. The user also develops other neurological changes that keep them in the rut.
Think of it this way, if you had a nice car and allowed it to rust without doing anything about it, that would be pretty stupid. It would quickly become an immovable heap of rust, incapable of transporting you anywhere. However, it wouldn’t be the end of the world as it’s only a question of money. But your body is the vehicle that carries you through life. We all say that our health is our greatest asset — ask any sick millionaire. Most of us can look back on an illness or accident in our lives where we prayed to get better. By being a user, you’re not only letting the rust get in and doing nothing about it, you’re systematically destroying the one vehicle used to go through your entire life.
Wise up. You don’t have to do this. Remember, it’s doing absolutely nothing for you. Just for a moment, take your head out of the sand and ask yourself that if you knew with certainty that your next session would start a process that would make you utterly unresponsive to someone you deeply love, would you continue using? Speaking to the people this happens to, they certainly didn’t expect it would happen to them either, and the worst thing isn’t the disease itself but the knowledge that they’ve brought it on themselves. Try to imagine how people who’ve ‘hit the button’ feel, for them the brainwashing is ended. They spend the remainder of their lives thinking, “Why did I kid myself for so long that I needed to use? If only I had the chance to go back!”
Stop kidding yourself, you have that chance. It’s a chain reaction, if you engage in the next session, it’ll lead you to the next one and the next. It’s already happening to you. The method promises no shock treatment so if you’ve already decided that you’re going to stop, the following won’t be shocking for you. If you haven’t, skip the remainder of this chapter and come back to it once you’ve read the rest of the book.
Volumes upon volumes of research have already been written about the damage use causes to our sex lives and mental well-being. The trouble is that until deciding to stop they don’t want to know. Forums and mentor groups are a waste of time because use puts the blinders on. Users tend to think of the hazards as a hit-and-miss affair, like stepping on a land mine.
Get it into your head, it’s already happening. Every single time you set up use, you’re triggering dopamine-flooding and opioids getting to work. The neural water slides are greased and the ride takes you smoothly through the next steps, your brain having already given in to the script. The nervous system is now flooded by dopamine and since it’s the umpteenth time, dopamine receptors close up and the little monster uses this slight dip in pleasure compared to the last time to drive you further over the red line to escalating use in order to release more dopamine. More novelty, more dopamine and the little monster tells you to keep going. So much use in a single session triggers a supernormal stimulus, injecting more chemicals into the brain and driving you to continue.
The entire time, your receptors are receiving information to shut down in response to the flooding. Use only increases this effect and leads to withdrawal. You’re in denial since the little monster craves for its fix with no real pain and discomfort. The threat of health effects terrifies many, which is why they block it from their mind and overshadow it with the fear of stopping. It’s not that the fear is greater, but quitting today is immediate. Why look on the negative side? Perhaps it won’t happen, having bound to have quit by then anyway.
We tend to think of use as a tug-of-war: on one side is fear, “It’s unhealthy, filthy and enslaving.” On the other side, the positives: “It’s my pleasure, my friend, my crutch.” It never seems to occur to us this side is also fear; it’s not that we enjoy use, it’s that we tend to be miserable without it. Heroin addicts deprived of heroin go through misery, but picture the utter joy when they’re finally allowed to plunge a needle into their vein and end that terrible craving. Try to imagine how anyone could actually believe they get pleasure from sticking a hypodermic syringe into a vein. Non-heroin addicts don’t suffer that panic feeling and heroin doesn’t relieve the feeling, it causes it.
Non-users don’t feel miserable if they aren’t allowed to use — it’s only users that suffer that feeling. Use doesn’t relieve the feeling, it causes it. The fear of the negative consequences doesn’t help users quit, because they liken the feeling to walking through a minefield. If you get away with it, fine, but if you were unlucky you stepped on a mine and faced the consequences. If you knew the risks and were prepared to take them, what did it have to do with anyone else?
Effects of the brainwashing make us tend to think like the man who, having fallen off a 100-storey building, is quoted saying as he whizzes past the fiftieth floor, “So far, so good!” We think that as we’ve gotten away with it so far, one more session won’t make the difference. See it another way: the ‘habit’ is a continuous chain for life with each session creating the need for the next. When you start the habit, you light a fuse. The trouble is, you don’t know how long the fuse is. Every time you give in to a session you’re one step closer to the bomb exploding. HOW WILL YOU KNOW IF IT’S THE NEXT ONE?
9.1 Sinister Black Shadows
Users find it very difficult to believe that use actually causes those insecure feelings when you’re out late at night after a contentious day at home or work. Non-users don’t suffer from that feeling, it’s use that causes it.
Another of the great joys of quitting use is the freedom from the sinister black shadows at the back of our minds. All users know they’re fools to close their minds from the ill effects of use. For most of our lives it’s automatic, but the black shadows are always lurking in our subconscious minds, just below the surface. Several of the marvellous benefits of quitting are conscious, such as the ending of the waste of time and of the sheer stupidity of use.
The last chapters have dealt with the considerable advantages of being a non-user, but in the interest of fairness it’s necessary to give a balanced account. Therefore, the next chapter lists the advantages of being a user.
