Jamie would meticulously schedule his days round discovering time alone to observe porn and masturbate—usually as much as 5 instances a day.
The 32-year-old Michigan engineer, who didn’t wish to use his actual identify because of privateness considerations, first watched porn on the impressionable age of 12, however by no means realized he had an issue till simply after his father’s funeral three years in the past.
“I did not shed a single tear,” he says. “I did not know methods to react fortunately or sadly to something.” That’s when his porn consumption spiraled—mixed with stress, anxiousness, and melancholy—and he locked himself in his room “all day.” The one factor that appeared palpable, he remembers, “was that rush of dopamine” delivered by an intense session of hardcore porn viewing. However for Jamie, who’s Christian, these fleeting moments of porn-fueled transcendance have been adopted by far deeper lows, together with suicidal ideations.
This previous March, Jamie says his associate angrily confronted him over his compulsive porn consumption, accusing him of mendacity and committing adultery.
Jamie’s “whole world got here down.” He admitted he felt that he was addicted, begged for her forgiveness, briefly moved again in together with his mom, and renounced porn. That’s when he discovered Relay, an app created by a pair of Mormon school college students that claims it could actually assist folks “take again management from porn, in the future at a time.” Jamie promised his associate he would by no means watch porn once more—and she or he gave him one probability.
The app offers a complete plan to cease watching porn, with movies by therapists, every day journal prompts, reside group sharing periods, and a operate to deal with severe urges. Customers even hold observe of one another’s porn-free streaks, with a “Reside Milestone” ticker. That is all in an effort to assist prospects, who pay $149 per yr for full entry, unpack their underlying points like loneliness and trauma to assist forestall relapse. The app has been downloaded over 110,000 instances, with firm knowledge exhibiting that 89 % of its customers are male.
This month, Relay has partnered with anti-porn advocacy nonprofit Combat the New Drug for “the November Challenge”—a brand new initiative to encourage folks to abstain from porn—with 28,000 sign-ups to date.
The dimensions of pornography use represents “a contemporary epidemic,” claims Relay’s CEO, Chandler Rogers. The 27-year-old was impressed to cofound the app in August 2021 to supply his Gen Z friends a path to cease watching porn. It adopted his personal self-described yearslong habit to specific content material. Rogers, who attended Brigham Younger College in Utah the place he met each his cofounder and chief of employees, says he tried to cease “a minimum of 100 instances, and will by no means go greater than per week with out turning again to pornography.”
