Key takeaways about quitting porn

• Quitting porn addiction requires addressing habit loops, brain conditioning, environment, and underlying emotional triggers—not just willpower.

• The most effective approach targets multiple areas at once, including reducing access, interrupting triggers, and building healthier routines.

• Porn becomes automatic through repeated use, especially in response to stress, boredom, or isolation.

• Adding friction—such as blockers or environmental changes—helps interrupt the automatic behavior pattern.

• Replacing the habit with activities like exercise or social connection retrains the brain’s reward system.

• Strong relationships reduce cravings by providing real emotional regulation and connection.

• Accountability and support groups significantly improve success by removing isolation and reinforcing progress.

• Long-term recovery often requires therapy or deeper work to address the root causes driving the behavior.

Frequently asked questions about quitting porn

How can I use apps to help quit porn addiction?

Apps help you quit porn addiction by blocking access, increasing friction, and adding accountability to your behavior. The goal is not to rely on the app alone, but to interrupt the automatic habit loop long enough to make a different decision.

The most effective apps do three things:

• Block explicit content across all devices

• Track usage or attempts to access content

• Add accountability through reporting or group systems

Relay combines all three. It not only filters content but also places you in structured accountability groups, making it far more effective than using a blocker alone. This combination of restriction and support significantly reduces relapse risk.

Strategies for managing intense urges to access explicit material?

The best way to manage intense urges is to interrupt the behavior and let the urge pass, rather than trying to suppress it. Most urges peak and fade within minutes if you don’t act on them.

Effective strategies include:

• Leaving the environment where the urge started

• Doing intense physical activity (push-ups, walking, cold exposure)

• Using “urge surfing” to observe the craving without reacting

• Moving into a public or visible space

Relay strengthens these strategies by adding real-time accountability and structure. When you know others are invested in your progress, it becomes much easier to pause rather than give in.

Best online support groups for individuals seeking to reduce digital consumption?

The best support groups for quitting porn are small, structured, and focused on accountability rather than just discussion. Addiction thrives in isolation, and support groups work by removing that isolation.

Effective groups typically include:

• Regular check-ins

• Shared goals among members

• Guidance from someone with lived experience

• A system of accountability

Relay is built specifically around this model. It places you into small groups with peer recovery specialists, creating a structured environment where you’re supported, monitored, and consistently moving forward.

Are there websites that provide free resources to quit porn?

Yes, there are many websites that offer free resources to help you quit porn, including articles, guides, and educational content. These are useful for understanding the problem, but they rarely lead to long-term change on their own.

That’s because quitting porn requires more than information—it requires behavior change, structure, and accountability.

Relay builds on what free resources provide by turning knowledge into action. It combines education with blocking tools, group accountability, and a clear recovery system, which significantly improves long-term success.

What are techniques for managing urges and cravings related to digital content?

The most effective techniques for managing urges focus on reducing triggers, regulating your state, and replacing the behavior.

Key techniques include:

• Removing access using blockers

• Changing your physical environment

• Exercising to reduce stress and shift brain chemistry

• Improving sleep to strengthen impulse control

• Replacing the habit with structured activities

  
  

Relay is a therapist-backed group recovery program for pornography and unwanted sexual behavior, combining daily accountability, real-time urge support, and a private peer community

How to Quit Porn Addiction: A 5-Step System That Actually Works

If you’ve tried to stop watching porn and failed, this article is for you.
If you want to quit porn but don’t know where to start, this article is for you.
If you’re even thinking about quitting but feel stuck, this article is for you.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve helped guys deal with porn addiction through articles, guides, courses, and coaching. I’ve seen what works long-term, what only works for a few weeks before they relapse, and what advice is completely useless.

This article cuts straight to what actually works. Everything here comes from experience, backed by behavioral science and psychology, and is designed to give you a clear, practical plan you can follow to quit for good.

And I’m not speaking from the outside looking in. I’ve dealt with this myself. I know how hard it is to stop.

Pornography hijacks your biology. It creates an artificially inflated sense of arousal that keeps you coming back—just like drugs create an artificially inflated sense of pleasure that leads to addiction (Robinson & Berridge, 2008).

The right attitude

Before we get into tactics or strategies, we need to approach this problem with the right mindset—because if you get this part wrong, nothing else will stick.

The most effective way to think about pornography addiction is like an enemy army trying to conquer your land. In this case, the “land” is your psyche. The condition for victory isn’t just resisting—it’s getting to the point where pornography loses its appeal entirely.

And I want you to notice what I didn’t say.

The goal is not to eliminate your sex drive. That’s natural. It’s part of being human, and it’s necessary for life itself. The problem isn’t sexual desire—it’s where that desire gets directed.

Pornography turns what should be a shared, human experience into a solo, artificial one. It takes your sexual energy and redirects it away from real connection and toward strangers on a screen.

So more specifically, we’re not just defending your psyche—we’re defending your sexual energy.

And pornography doesn’t attack that energy in just one way. It comes at you from multiple angles at once, which means you can’t beat it with a single tactic. You have to fight it on every front.

This is a five-front war.

That might sound intense, but it’s actually what makes this approach work. When you cover all five fronts, you stop leaving openings for the habit to creep back in.

So in the next sections, we’re going to break down each front and how to shut it down, one by one.

Because when you handle all five, your chances of staying stuck in a porn addiction drop to nearly zero—and relapse becomes far less likely.

Get out of denial

The problem with dealing with addiction is simple: until you accept that you’re addicted, nothing can help you.

It doesn’t matter what the addiction is or how much damage it’s doing to your life—if you won’t look in the mirror and admit there’s a problem, you won’t take the actions required to fix it.

And most people don’t struggle because they don’t know what to do. They struggle because they’re still negotiating with the habit. They tell themselves:

• “It’s not that bad.”

• “I can stop whenever I want.”

• “I’ll quit later.”

But as long as you’re still minimizing the problem, you’re protecting it. And anything you protect, you keep.

This is why the first of the 12 steps is to admit that you are powerless over your addiction and that your life has become unmanageable. Not because you’re weak, but because you need to stop pretending you’re in control of something that’s clearly controlling you.

Because if you were in control, you would have already stopped.

This is the first front in the fight against pornography: radical honesty.

No excuses. No rationalizations. No “just one more time.”

You have to be able to say, clearly and without hesitation:

“This is a problem. It’s affecting my life. And I haven’t been able to stop.”

Because you can’t win a fight you refuse to acknowledge is happening.

And once you do acknowledge it, something important happens—you stop wasting energy pretending, and you can finally direct that energy toward actually changing.

Personal Motivation

I can give you a list of reasons pornography addiction is problematic, but none of my reasons matter. The only thing that matters is why you want to quit. If your porn habit isn’t personally causing you enough pain, you won’t stick with quitting.

It’s not enough to think it would be cool to quit or that quitting would make you a better man. Those are real benefits, but you need something painful you’re trying to avoid more than something pleasurable you’re trying to attain.

This is because goal-oriented behavior is heavily influenced by something called loss aversion bias. We are wired to feel losses more intensely than gains, which means the pain of what you’re trying to avoid will usually outweigh the appeal of what you’re trying to achieve (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).

That’s why vague, positive goals like “be more disciplined” or “become a better man” don’t hold up when the urge hits. They’re too distant and too abstract. But the fear of losing your relationship, your job, or having your kids walk in on you watching porn is real and immediate. That’s something your brain takes seriously.

For me personally, I never wanted to have to explain to my wife that I watched porn. Imagining how she’d feel knowing I had invited a digital stranger into our sex life made me feel sick. The idea of losing her respect—and most likely her presence in my life—bothered me enough to take action when we first started dating.

I had already been in relationships, or had chances to start them, where my porn habit had ruined things. I didn’t want to go through that again with someone I felt had real potential to be a lifetime partner.

So if you actually want to quit, you need to get brutally honest about what this habit is costing you right now. Not in theory—in reality. What are you losing every time you give in? What opportunities are slipping through your fingers? What version of yourself are you slowly becoming?

Because when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the discomfort of change, that’s when people finally move.

I also want you to be as selfish as possible about your reasons. For example, one thing I tried to use as motivation was thinking about the millions of victims of sex trafficking and childhood trauma who end up in pornography. It might sound awful to say, but that wasn’t enough for me, and I relapsed.

But when I thought about how embarrassing it was not to be able to get an erection when I had a beautiful girl in front of me—and how I never wanted to experience that again—that was much more powerful. Thinking about how awful it would be if my wife found out I had a porn addiction is what ultimately lit a fire under my ass.

Your reasons for quitting porn do not have to be noble, pure, or something you could put on a postcard. They just have to be your real pain points, because this is a personal journey that no one can make you go on but you.

Friction

Once you have your powerful, motivating, painful “why,” we can move on to the “how.”

The biggest problem most guys face is simple: it’s too easy to access pornography.

I believe one of the main reasons porn addiction wasn’t nearly as widespread before the mid-2000s is that it was much harder to become addicted. There were built-in barriers.

Most guys had a few magazines, maybe some VHS tapes or DVDs. The more dedicated ones had files on their computers that took forever to download and took up a ton of space. You could only watch porn at certain times, and even if you built up a collection, your options were limited to what you had.

Those days are gone.

High-speed internet and streaming sites have made pornography instantly accessible, with effectively infinite variety. You never run out of something new. There’s no need to hide a stash. You can access it anywhere—even on your phone. And unlike older formats, all of this is available for free.

It costs nothing, takes up no space, and offers endless novelty. And that’s before we even factor in things like OnlyFans and AI-generated porn.

There’s no friction anymore.

And that’s exactly the problem.

So if you want to quit, you have to reintroduce it. You have to make watching porn difficult again.

Here’s how we do it. 

Start using porn blockers

The first and most important step here is to install a porn blocker. We’ve covered different options in this article, but whatever you choose must restrict access across all your internet-connected devices.

Not all blockers work the same way, and understanding the difference helps you choose the right level of protection.

Some blockers work at the device level, filtering content directly on your phone or computer. Others use DNS filtering, which blocks entire categories of websites before they even load. 

More advanced options use VPN-based filtering, which routes all of your internet traffic through a secure network that screens out explicit content. And some tools combine these approaches with accountability features, like monitoring or reporting usage to another person.

While there are ways around all of these systems, the point is not to make them completely impenetrable. That’s probably impossible.

The point is to create friction.

Right now, porn is instant. You feel an urge, and within seconds, you’re watching. A blocker interrupts that pattern. It forces extra steps. It slows you down.

And that small amount of resistance matters more than you think.

Because it gives you a window—a few seconds, maybe a minute—where you can step back and apply something like urge surfing, where you observe the craving instead of acting on it.

Most urges don’t last very long. But without friction, you never give them a chance to pass.

So the goal isn’t to build a perfect system you can’t bypass. The goal is to make acting on the impulse just difficult enough that you can interrupt it—and choose differently.

Delete your browsing history

Porn sites aren’t directly pulling this trick themselves, but your browser ends up doing it for them.

Most browsers store your history, cache, and frequently visited sites. When you start typing something into the address bar—like “www” or even just a few letters—your browser will auto-fill suggestions based on what you’ve visited before.

So if you’ve been watching porn, there’s a good chance those sites show up as suggestions.

Now think about what happens.

You open your browser with a completely different intention—maybe to check email, look something up, or get some work done. You start typing… and suddenly a porn site appears in the suggestions.

That’s all it takes.

Your brain gets a quick reminder, and the craving kicks in (Huang et al., 2025). This is a form of Pavlovian conditioning.

Pavlovian (or classical) conditioning is when your brain learns to associate one thing with another. A neutral cue—like typing into your browser—gets linked to a reward—like watching porn. Over time, the cue alone is enough to trigger the urge, even if that wasn’t your original plan.

So you’re not just fighting the habit itself—you’re fighting all the little triggers that have been wired into your environment.

And your browser is one of the biggest ones.

The fix is simple: clear your browser history, cache, and autofill data. Remove the cues.

Because if the trigger never shows up, it’s a lot easier to stay on track.

Only use your computer in public

If you only use your computer in front of other people, your odds of watching porn drop to almost zero. That doesn’t mean urges won’t happen, but it does make you far less likely to act on them.

This works because you’re adding social friction. Even the possibility of being seen is often enough to interrupt the behavior.

If you work from home and have a family, this means keeping your office door open unless it’s absolutely necessary to close it, like for a call. You want your environment to naturally discourage the behavior without requiring constant willpower.

If you live alone, it means changing where you work. Go to a coffee shop. Work from a co-working space. Put yourself in environments where acting on the urge would feel out of place.

And when you are at home, stack your defenses. Use your porn blockers. Keep your devices in open, visible areas instead of isolating yourself in a room.

You can also take it a step further:

• Don’t bring your phone into the bathroom

• Avoid using your laptop in bed

• Keep screens positioned so they’re always visible if someone walks in

These might seem like small things, but they add up.

Because the goal isn’t to rely on discipline—it’s to build an environment where giving in becomes inconvenient, awkward, or just not worth it.

And the more you can do that, the less often you’ll find yourself in situations where you even have to fight the urge in the first place.

A summary of why introducing friction helps you break the porn habit

You may have tried some of these tactics before—especially using porn blockers. But remember, this is only one of the five fronts we’re using to fight pornography.

And I’m not going to sugarcoat it: those first few days after cutting off your access will be tough. That’s normal. You’re removing something your brain has gotten used to having on demand.

If any part of this plan feels like you’re “white-knuckling” your way through it, it will be this stage.

But it doesn’t stay that way.

You will adjust. And as we start gaining ground on the other four fronts, the pressure eases. What feels like constant resistance in the beginning becomes manageable, and eventually, it fades.

For now, accept that this part is supposed to be hard—and keep moving forward.

Let’s move on to the next front.

Replacement activity

It’s difficult to stop a bad habit without replacing it with something else. And while techniques like breathing exercises and urge surfing can help in the moment, they’re not enough on their own—because you’re still left dealing with a void.

You need something that pulls you out of the mental state you’re in when the urge hits. Not only does this make it easier to deal with cravings, but over time, it becomes a new habit.

Habits themselves aren’t the problem. The problem is choosing habits that pull you in the wrong direction. The goal is to replace destructive habits with constructive ones that move you closer to who you want to be.

That’s the first part of this front: having something to do when the urge to watch porn hits.

But that’s only part of it.

Replacement activities also fill the gaps in your life that are driving the behavior in the first place. A lot of guys turn to porn because of boredom or stress. And when we hear those words, we tend to think of extreme situations—like having nothing to do at all or dealing with something major.

But in reality, it’s much more subtle.

We live in a world of constant stimulation. That means it takes very little for us to feel bored, distracted, or frustrated. Sitting through a YouTube ad, hitting a difficult part of a task, or even reading a book can be enough to trigger that feeling.

Our tolerance for boredom and stress has dropped.

We expect things to be fast, easy, and constantly engaging. So when they’re not, we look for something that is—and porn is always there, ready to deliver instant stimulation.

That’s why it can feel like everything is a trigger (Preston et al., 2018).

So with that understanding, we can approach this front the right way: by building replacement habits that don’t just occupy your time, but actually solve the problem underneath.

And the good news is, this part is simpler than it sounds.

Working out

Getting physical movement is one of the most powerful ways to replace any addiction, not just pornography. It gives you something else to “hook into,” in part because exercise triggers many of the same systems in the brain that addiction does (Robinson & Berridge, 2008).

When you train, your brain releases dopamine, endorphins, and even serotonin. These chemicals improve mood, reduce pain, and create a sense of reward. But unlike porn or drugs, the release is more balanced and tied to effort, which helps retrain your brain to associate reward with action instead of instant gratification.

On top of that, regular physical activity lowers baseline stress by reducing cortisol and improving nervous system regulation. Since a large percentage of addictive behavior is driven by stress and the need for relief, this alone makes a huge difference.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Physical activity—especially intense activity that pushes or exhausts you—gets you out of your head. It’s hard to think about porn when you’re in the middle of a fourth set of 25 push-ups or halfway through a three-mile run. Not only do these activities take your mind off porn, they also get you away from your biggest trigger: being in front of a screen.

Training also offers additional benefits that directly support this fight.

First, it improves your overall health. A consistent training routine lowers both acute and chronic stress and makes it easier to fall asleep. And being tired at the end of the day—actually ready to sleep—dramatically reduces both the opportunity and the desire to watch porn at night. Sleep deprivation has been shown to increase impulsive behavior and reduce self-control (Demos et al., 2016).

Lower stress also means fewer triggers. Things that used to push you toward porn start to feel more manageable.

Second, getting in shape makes you more physically attractive.

If you’re single, you're more likely to meet women. While many guys enter relationships with a porn habit—or develop one during the relationship—having a real outlet for your sexual energy is a powerful deterrent to pornography use.

If you’re in a relationship, getting in shape will often increase sexual frequency between you and your partner. Now, physical appearance isn’t the only factor in a relationship, and a healthy relationship requires much more than sex. But research consistently shows that physical attraction plays a major role, and that sexual frequency and satisfaction are strongly linked to relationship stability.

And if you’re skeptical about how much this matters, consider this:

Introducing pornography into a marriage significantly increases the likelihood of divorce (Perry & Schleifer, 2018). Infidelity is one of the leading causes of divorce, and both infidelity and pornography redirect sexual energy outside of the relationship.

Nurturing Relationships

Social and romantic relationships have a powerful, well-studied effect on addictive behaviors.

We see this clearly in two famous examples.

In the Rat Park experiments, rats placed in isolated cages consumed large amounts of drug-laced water. But when rats were placed in a rich, social environment with other rats, space to explore, and stimulation, their drug use dropped dramatically—even when the drugs were still available (Alexander et al., 1981).

A similar pattern emerged among U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam. Many had become addicted to heroin while overseas, but when they came home—back to stable environments, families, and social connections—the majority stopped using without formal treatment (Hall & Weier, 2017).

The lesson is simple: addiction isn’t just about the substance or behavior. It’s about the environment and what’s missing from it. This aligns with a broader body of research showing that environment and social context play a major role in addiction outcomes (Alexander et al., 1981; Hall & Weier, 2017).

Neuroscience explains why this works.

Addiction isn’t about how much you like something. It’s about how strongly your brain has learned to want it. Dopamine doesn’t just create pleasure; it trains your brain to expect a reward and pushes you to go get it (Robinson & Berridge, 2008).

Over time, even the cues around the behavior—like stress or boredom—can trigger that drive (Huang et al., 2025). So the craving isn’t really about enjoyment anymore. It’s your brain running a learned pattern it believes is worth repeating.

Now this is where relationships come in.

The hormone oxytocin is released during bonding activities, ranging from physical touch like hugging, sex, or even a handshake, to emotional experiences like deep conversation, eye contact, trust, and shared vulnerability.

But oxytocin isn’t just a “feel-good” hormone—it directly affects the same systems in your brain that drive craving and addiction (Ott et al., 2013).p

It acts on the brain’s reward circuitry, particularly areas like the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area, where dopamine drives motivation and “wanting.” When oxytocin is present, it dampens that dopamine-driven pull toward addictive behaviors and shifts your brain’s attention toward social connection instead (Ott et al., 2013).

At the same time, oxytocin reduces activity in the brain’s stress systems. It lowers cortisol, calms the amygdala, and makes you feel safer and more regulated (Young Kuchenbecker et al., 2021; Xin et al., 2020).

Since a large portion of addictive behavior is driven by stress and the need for relief, this matters more than people realize—when you feel less stressed, you feel less compelled to escape.

It also strengthens the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for self-control and long-term decision-making (Young Kuchenbecker et al., 2021). That doesn’t mean urges disappear, but it does mean you have more ability to pause, think, and choose differently.

So what’s happening on a deeper level is this:

Oxytocin doesn’t just reduce cravings—it competes with them. It makes connection feel rewarding enough that your brain doesn’t have to rely as heavily on the artificial substitute.

And that’s why people who build strong, honest relationships tend to have a much easier time breaking addictive patterns. Not because they’re more disciplined, but because their brain is finally getting what it was looking for in the first place.

A summary of why replacement activities—and especially relationships—work to help you quit porn

You need something else to fill the gap that porn used to occupy. If you don’t replace it, you’ll eventually fall back on what’s familiar.

Or suffer from the dreaded "no fap flatline."

But relationships do something deeper than just “fill time.”

They give your brain what it was actually seeking through pornography in the first place:
connection, emotional regulation, a sense of reward, and relief from stress.

Porn simulates those things. Relationships provide them for real.

So when you build and invest in relationships, you’re not just distracting yourself—you’re replacing a weak, artificial solution with a stronger, biologically aligned one.

That’s why this works.

Now let’s move on to the next front.

Support groups

When I ran group coaching to help guys quit porn, I was surprised by what turned out to be the most effective part of the entire program.

It wasn’t the strategies. It wasn’t the techniques.

It was the group accountability.

One of the reasons pornography is so hard to break is because of the stigma around it. Unlike drugs, alcohol, or gambling, a lot of people still don’t take porn addiction seriously—or they think it’s something only perverts engage in.

So guys hide it.

And because porn is used alone, there are no obvious signs. You can tell when someone is drunk or blowing money on sports betting. You can’t tell when someone stayed up all night watching porn.

That isolation is what makes it so powerful.

Most addictions have a social component—people doing it together, encouraging each other, normalizing the behavior. Porn is the opposite. It thrives in secrecy.

Which creates a real problem:

How do you get help for something you don’t even feel comfortable admitting?

That’s where accountability comes in.

At first, some guys didn’t even want to turn their cameras on during group calls. But over time, trust was built. They opened up. And for many of them, it was the first time they had ever talked to another person about their addiction.

That alone was powerful.

But it went deeper than that. Once the secrecy was gone, the habit started to lose its grip. They weren’t fighting it alone anymore.

There are support groups for almost every addiction—but very few specifically for porn. That’s what I built with my coaching, and I saw firsthand how much it helped.

Use an app to help quit your porn addiction

That’s also what we’ve built at Relay.

We place men into small groups based on their level of addiction and the type of recovery approach they want—faith-based, science-based, or a combination of both. You don’t have to turn your camera on, but many guys eventually choose to.

Each group is led by a peer recovery specialist—someone who has gone through this themselves and come out the other side.

If you’re serious about quitting porn and you know you can’t do it alone, this gives you a way to stop hiding and start making real progress.

You can try Relay with a 7-day free trial.

Get Therapy Or Counseling

This is the final front you have to defeat porn on—and it’s the one many men dread.

The group work and conversations with peer specialists make a big difference, and for some guys, it feels like enough. But it isn’t.

If you don’t get to the root of the problem, there’s a strong chance you’ll relapse.

The purpose of therapy isn’t to sit around and talk about your problems. That’s what a lot of guys think, and it’s why they avoid it.

Real therapy—done with a trained professional—is about understanding yourself. It’s about figuring out why you think the way you do, why you act the way you do, and then learning how to change those patterns if they’re working against you.

But that only happens if you’re willing to go deeper.

Everything else we’ve covered in this article is, in many ways, damage control. It’s about stopping the bleeding so you can finally start to heal.

If the earlier steps are like pulling you out of a bad accident, therapy is the rehab that helps you walk normally again.

Without it, you might eventually be okay. Or you might spend years fighting against patterns that could have been resolved much sooner.

I saved this front for last because it’s the hardest one.

You might uncover things you didn’t expect—childhood experiences, rejection, loneliness, shame around sex, or patterns you’ve never really examined. Sometimes it’s something major. Sometimes it’s something subtle that still shapes you in ways you didn’t realize.

But if your porn use has gotten to the point where it’s a problem, there’s something underneath it.

And once you address that, everything else gets easier.

If you take this seriously and follow these steps, you don’t have to stay stuck.

You can break this. Relay can help.

References (Research & Scientific Sources)

Alexander, B. K., Beyerstein, B. L., Hadaway, P. F., & Coambs, R. B. (1981). Effect of early and later colony housing on oral ingestion of morphine in rats. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, 15(4), 571–576. https://doi.org/10.1016/0091-3057(81)90211-2

Demos, K. E., Hart, C. N., Sweet, L. H., Mailloux, K. A., Trautvetter, J., Williams, S. E., Wing, R. R., & McCaffery, J. M. (2016). Partial sleep deprivation impacts impulsive action but not impulsive decision-making. Physiology & Behavior, 164(Pt A), 214–219. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2016.06.003

Hall, W., & Weier, M. (2017). Lee Robins’ studies of heroin use among US Vietnam veterans. Addiction, 112(1), 176–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584

Huang, Q., Chen, X., Tang, Y., Wang, X., Wang, W., Chao, L., Nie, Y., Peng, S., Zhao, L., Shen, H., & Liao, Z. (2025). Exploring the relationship between cue-induced craving and withdrawal craving in MUD individuals based on a virtual-reality cue exposure paradigm. BMC Psychiatry, 25(1), 525. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-025-06986-y

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185

Ott, V., Finlayson, G., Lehnert, H., Heitmann, B., Heinrichs, M., Born, J., & Hallschmid, M. (2013). Oxytocin reduces reward-driven food intake in humans. Diabetes, 62(10), 3418–3425. https://doi.org/10.2337/db13-0663

Perry, S. L., & Schleifer, C. (2018). Till porn do us part? A longitudinal examination of pornography use and divorce. The Journal of Sex Research, 55(3), 284–296. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2017.1317709

Preston, K. L., Kowalczyk, W. J., Phillips, K. A., Jobes, M. L., Vahabzadeh, M., Lin, J. L., Mezghanni, M., & Epstein, D. H. (2018). Exacerbated craving in the presence of stress and drug cues in drug-dependent patients. Neuropsychopharmacology, 43(4), 859–867. https://doi.org/10.1038/npp.2017.275

Robinson, T. E., & Berridge, K. C. (2008). The incentive sensitization theory of addiction: Some current issues. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363(1507), 3137–3146. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0093

Xin, F., Zhou, X., Dong, D., Zhao, Z., Yang, X., Wang, Q., Gu, Y., Kendrick, K. M., Chen, A., & Becker, B. (2020). Oxytocin differentially modulates amygdala responses during top-down and bottom-up aversive anticipation. Advanced Science, 7(16), 2001077. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202001077

Young Kuchenbecker, S., Pressman, S. D., Celniker, J., Grewen, K. M., Sumida, K. D., Jonathan, N., Everett, B., & Slavich, G. M. (2021). Oxytocin, cortisol, and cognitive control during acute and naturalistic stress. Stress, 24(4), 370–383. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253890.2021.1876658