One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Victor Hugo, who said, "He who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and carries out that plan, will have a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. ... But where no plan is laid, ... chaos will soon reign." If we don't have a plan, we're in trouble in our world today. [MUSIC PLAYING]

We all know that pornography is wrong, OK? That's not a message that a porn user needs to hear. Most often, what they need to hear is, "What can I do--body, mind, spirit--to grow and improve and grow out of this?" So that means body: there is physical and physiological things for us to do to grow and improve. Mind: there's mental, emotional, and, by extension, relational things for us to do to improve and get healthy. And there's spiritual. Well, for some time now in the medical and also social science and clinical communities, we have understood that there are four key components to healing in addiction: biological, psychological, social, and also spiritual. So there has been long-standing appreciation for those four components. The ratio of those components really depends on the individual's need. But all four are necessary to some extent for sustainable sobriety and ultimately healing and recovery. My observation, as a clinician and researcher, has been that very often the biological and medical component tends to be overlooked, especially with these issues related to pornography use. And I strongly recommend, often in my own practice and for those that approach me, that they really take time to make sure that they're ruling out medical conditions that may be contributing to the addictive drive occurring in this situation. We have varying degrees of our ability and our developmental maturity in terms of handling temptation, handling things that come our way. But all of us are more likely to struggle when we're tired, when we are upset, when we are overstressed, when we're hungry or thirsty. When I'm struggling, is it because I'm lonely? Is it because I'm tired? Is it because I'm stressed about something? Is it because something else happened that's making me not feel very good about myself? Did somebody say something that hurt my feelings or rejected me? If I can stop and have those conversations in my head, I can begin to make better choices than just going to the internet and looking up something I shouldn't be looking at. Porn isn't always about sex for men. It's about that escape. It's about that not wanting to deal with uncomfortable feelings or emotions or things in their life. Porn is impersonal. Porn is just--it's just a sensation that helps them escape from things they might not want to deal with. But that takes a lot of self-awareness and healing on their part to understand. Really, the mnemonic that helps me is "blasht," B-L-A-S-H-T. Bored, lonely, angry, stressed, hungry, tired. Those things are going to lead you to do the wrong things. So assessing impulses, I think, means just being aware of what is going on in my mind and in my heart to be able to deal with it in a healthy way instead of the old same way that I've been dealing with things, which is going to the addiction. Once a week we would kind of have a goal setting and talk about struggles that we were going through. And all the time I would just be like, "I'm stressed about midterms." But every once in a while, I would just kind of--I'd feel like I'd be like, "But what's our plan about pornography?" And some of the things were trying to discover personally when both of us felt weak or when both of us were really dealing with negative emotions. And knowing that that was a time when it could strike a lot stronger, and kind of reaching out to friends and not being alone in those vulnerable situations. Or, like, calling or texting people that we trusted and asking them to pray for us became part of that plan. And eventually at one point, Kastle asked me to put a security lock on his phone just because he didn't want the internet anymore and he didn't want some of those temptations to be there, like, right in his pocket. So it became part of our plan. Recovery is where you've found a place where you're finally dealing with the underlying emotions that led to your addiction--when every day, when you realize, "I want to yell at my spouse right now." When you're in recovery, you don't think, "I'm going to yell, but at least I'm not using pornography." Instead, the thoughts that begin to go through your mind is, "I really want to yell at my spouse. Why is that? Oh, yeah. It's because at work, I got in trouble for not filling a quota." "Oh, that's right. I saw an old friend, and they reminded me of the bad person I was in the past." "Oh, yeah, that's because I have a lot to deal with at school right now. So I think those are the negative emotions that are leading me to this." And so recovery is finding a place where you can deal with your negative underlying emotions before thoughts of the addiction come in. For me, recovery is a daily thing. And like I said, abstinence--fantastic. It's a great thing. But recovery connotes a change of heart where it's no longer just, "I'm not doing the behavior." It's "I'm no longer that person who would delve into that behavior." I'm changing the person, not just the behavior. We're all going to have afflictions of one kind or another. Some of them are more obvious. Some of them are physical. Some of them are spiritual. Some of them are mental, etc. These kinds of experiences give us building blocks of our testimony by drawing upon the Savior's Atonement and calling upon His infinite gift of allowing us to repent. We put in place these building blocks, whether it be pornography or any other area in our life that we're trying to improve in. Working through that becomes a great element of our testimony. And so I bear my testimony to anyone who's viewing this, that I want them to know that I know and I have a witness that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ love you and want you to progress and return to Their presence and live with Them eternally. But that's a journey. That's a journey. And we're all on that journey to try and improve. [MUSIC PLAYING]