BlockMyself
Year plan

Quit without going cold turkey.

A twelve-month challenge for people who have tried stopping outright and keep snapping back. One narrow, mainstream outlet stays open for the year. Everything else closes tonight. Nothing to completion.

365 days 6-month fallback Printable month sheet

Who this is for

Most advice says stop everything today. For plenty of people that works, and if it works for you, do that; it is simpler than this. This page is for the people it has not worked for: you stop, you last a few days or a few weeks, something tips you over, and the restart turns into a binge that undoes the lot.

The idea here is to stop fighting on two fronts at once. The porn, the searching and the hunting close completely, from tonight, with the filters underneath them. One narrow door stays open for a year: an ordinary film with a sex scene in it, on a service you already pay for. It is deliberately a worse version of what you are leaving, and that is the point. It gives the urge somewhere bounded to go while the habit of hunting dies, without handing it back the thing it actually wants.

This is a bridge, not a destination. The outlet is open for the quitting year and then it closes too. If you reach month eight and find you have stopped using it, close it early.
If you have a partner, tell them the plan before you start, including the outlet. A rule they know about is a rule. A rule they do not know about is a secret, and secrets are where this habit lives.

What closes tonight

Just because something is not a porn site does not make it allowed. The line is drawn around looking for it, not around which website happened to serve it.

Out, completely

  • Porn sites, tube sites, cam sites, and anything a filter would classify as adult.
  • Nudity anywhere online: galleries, "art" sites, forums, subreddits, Telegram and Discord channels, OnlyFans-style accounts and their free previews.
  • Image search. Google Images, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Pinterest. Not for anyone, not for anything you would be embarrassed to be seen typing.
  • Social feeds used as a search engine: scrolling X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit or Tumblr for skin, following accounts that exist to post it, the "explore" and "for you" tabs during an urge.
  • AI image generators and chatbots used for sexual content.

Also out, even though it is "not porn"

  • Edging on YouTube or any video site: searching "scene", "compilation", "best of", an actor's name plus a word you know, and bouncing between near-misses for an hour.
  • Sites and apps that catalogue nude scenes by actor, and clip compilations cut from films. A scene cut out of a film is a clip, and clips are porn for the purposes of this plan.
  • Late-night cable softcore: the "after dark" and "after hours" catalogues, and any film where the story is a pretext, the acting is an afterthought, and the whole thing exists to get as close to porn as the rating allows.
  • Screenshots, downloads, saved clips, and your own old collection. Delete it tonight and empty the trash.
  • Erotic fiction and audio, if that is a door for you. Be honest about your own doors.
If you are negotiating about whether something counts, it counts. The plan only works because the closed list is wide and the open one is narrow. Widen the open list and you are back to where you started with extra steps.

The one outlet that stays open

When an urge comes and it is not passing, you may watch a mainstream film that has nudity or a sex scene in it. Here is exactly what that means.

  1. A real film, with a story. Something that had a cinema release or a proper production behind it, with a cast you could name, reviews, and a plot that would still be a plot with the scene cut out. If you would not watch it with the sound on, it is not a film for this purpose.
  2. On a mainstream service you already pay for. Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Max, Disney+, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, or the equivalent where you live. Not a "free movies" site, not a torrent, not a clip on YouTube, and not the late-night catalogue on a premium cable channel.
  3. You may choose it for who is in it. That is allowed. The hunt moves into the catalogue, where it is slow, bounded and leaves a record. Check the IMDb Parents Guide, under Sex & Nudity, before you commit, so you are not scrubbing through a film you do not want to watch to find out.
  4. Watch it as a film. From the start, through to the end, on the television if you have one. Scrubbing to the scene, replaying it, pausing on it and screenshotting it turn a film back into a clip, and clips are closed.
  5. Log it. Date, title, service, on the month sheet. A year from now you want to be looking at a list of films, not a list of nights.
  6. When it ends, it ends. No second film, no "just checking" another title's Parents Guide, no drifting to a search bar. If the urge is still there, that is what the urge plan is for.
Series work the same way, with one extra condition.

Same services, same standard, watched in order as something you are actually following. Jumping to the one episode everyone talks about is a clip search with extra steps.

There is no number on how often you use the outlet. The sheet will tell you. If it is every night, the outlet has become the habit, and the next month's job is to use it less.

Rule two: nothing to completion

The second half of the challenge has nothing to do with screens. For the year, you do not masturbate to completion. Not with the film, not without it.

The aim is not at all. The challenge, though, is only broken by finishing. If you start and stop, the day still counts. That is deliberate: it keeps a bad ten minutes from becoming a reason to write off the whole streak, and the whole streak from becoming a reason to binge.

Know your own pattern before you lean on that.

For some people "a little" is always an hour, and the hour is where the searching starts again. If that is you, your version of rule two is none, and the sheet should say so.

Nothing on a screen during that time except, at most, the film. Rule one does not switch off because rule two is in play.

The two goals

The big goal is a year: 365 consecutive days inside the rules. The fallback, for anyone who is really struggling, is six months. Two goals exist so that a slip in month three does not throw away months one and two.

  1. A clean day is one where you did not view anything on the closed list and did not finish. Watching a film under the outlet rules is a clean day. An accidental exposure you closed straight away is a clean day.
  2. A slip is anything else. Log it honestly, with what happened, and start the next day clean. One slip is a day. Two in a row is the start of a binge, and the point where you message the trusted person.
  3. A slip resets the streak, not the year. The challenge keeps running. Your next goal becomes six clean months from tomorrow; reach it and keep going to twelve. Keep both numbers on the sheet: the current streak and the total clean days, because the second one only ever goes up.
  4. The year ends the outlet. At 365 days, or earlier if you have stopped using it, the film door closes as well. That was always the plan.

Put the filters underneath it

This plan is a set of rules, and rules alone are what did not work last time. It assumes the technical layers on the rest of this site are already in place, so that the closed list is mostly closed before you have to decide anything.

What the filter handles

  • Porn and nudity sites, through Apple's adult-content filter, filtered DNS, or both. Start here if none of that exists yet.
  • Explicit image results, by forcing SafeSearch and YouTube Restricted Mode at the network or device level. See Apps and platforms.
  • The accounts and apps you would use to get round it: app installs locked, private browsing off, a passcode someone else holds. See Guardrails.

What only the rules handle

  • Edging on YouTube and social feeds inside Restricted Mode. A filter cannot tell a search for a film scene from a search for the film.
  • The streaming services themselves, which have to stay open for the outlet to exist. Their own maturity ratings and profile PINs are weak, and that is fine; the rule covers it.
  • The second half of the challenge, which no device can see.
If image search and scrolling are your main door, consider allowlist mode for the year: nothing loads unless it is on the list, and the streaming services can be on the list. It is the one setup where the closed list is genuinely closed rather than mostly closed.
Two small things that do more than they look. Watch the film on the television, not on the phone in bed; see Shrink the window. And keep the phone charging in another room overnight, because month-sheet slips cluster between eleven and two.

Tell one person

The sheet is for you. The streak is easier to keep if one other person knows it exists.

If there is nobody yet, start anyway, with the sheet somewhere you will see it every day. Then read Trusted person this week.

When you slip

  1. Stop. Close it. Do not finish the session because the day is "already gone".
  2. Write it on the sheet today, with the time and the door it came through. That line is the most useful thing on the whole page, because it tells you what to change.
  3. If it came through a hole in the filter, fix that hole tomorrow: Something got through.
  4. If it came through a door the filter cannot close, change the time or the room instead of promising to be stronger.
  5. Tomorrow is day one of the next streak. The total clean days did not go anywhere.
Two slips in a row is the moment to message someone, not the moment to decide the plan does not work. A plan that gets you from a nightly habit to one slip a month, with a filter and a sheet and a person, is working.

Start tonight

Print the month sheet

One page per month: a list for each day, a year grid of squares, and the rules in a box so the sheet stands on its own.

Put the filter on

Four steps, about twenty minutes, if the technical side is not done yet. The rules need it underneath them.

Read the urge plan

For the nights when the film is over and the urge is not. Written down before you need it.