The honest audit

The first time I sat down and worked out the actual number, I closed the laptop at 1am and felt embarrassed in a way I hadn't expected. Not because the number was extreme. Because it was higher than the version of it I'd been carrying around in my head for years. I'd been rounding down by half without noticing. Most men I've talked about this with do the same.

This module isn't a confession booth. It's a stocktake. The job is to write down what's actually happening, in numbers, before deciding whether anything should change.

The number

Pick the last fortnight. Count the sessions. Not "ish". The actual number.

Most men land in one of three brackets:

• A few times a month. Functionally invisible. You'd struggle to notice if it stopped.
• Two or three times a week. The middle band. Plenty of men live here without it touching anything else, and plenty more live here while quietly noticing it touches their sleep, their attention, their sex life.
• Daily, or close to it. The number that tends to come with the other markers in this module.

Where you actually sit matters less than the gap between where you sit and where you've been telling yourself you sit. That gap is the first piece of information.

The time

Now the harder number. Not the act. The time around it.

Count the search. The scrolling. The tabs opened and closed. The 11pm "I'll just check" that becomes ninety minutes. The morning replay. The bookmarked thread you reread on the bus.

Most men, asked how long, say "a few minutes". The honest count, when they actually time it for a week, is closer to forty-five. Sometimes more. The act is short. The orbit around the act is the part that's eating your evening.

The escalation

Here's where most audits get vague. They don't have to.

Compare what you searched for at twenty-five with what you search for now. Are the categories the same? Is the intensity the same? Is the kind of thing that does the job for you the same kind of thing that did the job a decade ago, or has it shifted somewhere you wouldn't have predicted?

This isn't a moral question. It's a calibration question. The brain habituates to what it's repeatedly shown. A taste that needs more salt every year is information about the kitchen, not the eater. If your search history has drifted somewhere you'd be uncomfortable explaining to a therapist, you don't need to feel bad about it. You need to notice it.

The role it plays

The most useful question in the audit, by some distance, is the simplest one: what is it doing for me?

There are usually four honest answers, and most men have a primary plus a secondary:

• Stress release. The work day was long, the inbox is open at 9pm, the body wants something to flatten the spike before bed.
• Sleep aid. The simplest pharmacological interpretation. It's a sedative that arrives without a prescription.
• Boredom filler. The Tuesday night with nothing on, the Sunday afternoon, the rainy weekend.
• Intimacy avoidance. This one's the rarest to admit and the most worth knowing. The version of you that uses it specifically because it asks nothing back. Most partnered men who have a porn problem have an intimacy-avoidance problem first.

You can have a daily habit that's pure stress release and a twice-a-week habit that's eighty percent intimacy avoidance. The number on its own won't tell you which kind you've got. The role tells you what to do next.

The cost, if any

Some men do this audit and find a habit that's costing them nothing they care about. That's a real outcome.

Most men do the audit and find one or two of the following, quietly:

• Real-world libido is duller than it used to be. Your partner notices before you do.
• The first thing you reach for when you're bored or wired isn't a book or a walk or a call. It's the phone.
• You can't quite remember the last time you went a full week without it.
• You've already tried to cut down once or twice and it lasted nine days.

If two or more of those are true, the audit has done its job. The rest of this Journey is the protocol for turning the volume down.

Three rules for the audit itself

• Write the numbers down. Phone note, paper, doesn't matter. Don't carry them in your head; the head edits them downward by the time you wake up.
• Don't share them. Not yet. Not with your partner, not with a mate, not in a forum.
• Don't make a decision off it tonight. The point isn't to act. The point is to have the actual information.

Count it. Time it. Name what it's doing for you. Then we'll talk about what changes if you take a month off.

Further watching

• The great porn experiment | Gary Wilson | TEDxGlasgow
• Consequences of a dopamine-fueled society | Anna Lembke full interview | Dopamine nation