“How to quit gooning,” does it sound like a strange question to you? To anyone with an active online life, the term “gooning” and questions around it are not so strange anymore.
Earlier, porn use and habits like edging were often dismissed as casual or private. But problematic porn use and associated issues like gooning are becoming more and more visible now.
- Surveys show that 1 in 3 Americans seeks out porn at least once a month.
- The National Survey on Sexual Health and Behavior found that US adults who watch porn do it multiple times in a week.
- 12% of men who watch porn report signs of problematic porn use like cravings and inability to stop.
- 37% of US adults believe that porn is morally wrong, but continue to watch it.
Gooning is an extreme edge of the problematic porn use spectrum. Many people are just understanding the ramifications of it. We are here with a deep dive into how it is different from edging, how it affects your brain, and how to stop gooning.
Key Takeaways
- Gooning is a zombie or trance-like state of compulsive edging assisted by porn.
- Edging or deliberately delaying the climax acts as an on-ramp for gooning.
- The dopamine flooding during gooning powers the compulsive habit loop and makes it hard to quit.
- Recovery from gooning takes 60 to 90 days of quitting porn and edging along with mindfulness techniques like urge surfing.
- A porn blocker like BlockP acts as a first line of defense by neutralizing the triggers to prevent entering into the hypnotic-gooning state.
What Is Gooning?
Gooning is a hypnotic masturbation state where the person loses track of time, self-awareness, and the agency to stop. It is achieved with prolonged edging to prevent orgasm.
While gooning, the person is mentally lost, loses the track of time, and surroundings fade. All attention and energy are fixated on keeping the arousal going and not tipping into orgasm. Gooning is often sustained by porn because it can deliver continued dopamine hits that keep the hypnotic gooning state going.
A member on an online forum put it as, “Never did drugs in all my life. Yet I can go on for 14 hours easily. Even went for 24 hours once… I’m trying to quit forever, and it seems almost impossible.”
Regular porn use or masturbation aims for arousal followed by sexual release. Whereas the purpose of gooning is to maintain high arousal for hours and avoid sexual release.
The Origin of the Word “Gooning”
“Goon” is a colloquial word used to describe a person who has no agency or intelligence. A mindless follower.
In the 2020s, the digital subculture began using the word “goon” to refer to a person who is in a zombie-like state induced by stimulation. A person who has surrendered to the primitive reward center of his brain.
So, the word “gooning” evolved to describe a state of mindless submission and suspension of cognitive functions.
What Happens to Your Brain During Gooning?
When you watch porn, your brain releases dopamine, a neurochemical that tells your brain, “There is a pleasurable experience available; go seek it.”
When you have sex with a partner, dopamine creates an anticipation of pleasure. Once you have the reward, the experience of pleasure completes the dopamine cycle.
People who watch porn often get into the habit of edging – where they postpone their release and stay in an aroused state for longer periods. When there is continuous anticipation of reward (i.e., orgasm), but it never arrives, your brain releases more and more dopamine to keep you in the aroused state.
Over time, as you spend more time edging, your brain keeps getting flooded with dopamine. Repeated dopamine flooding affects your brain just like an addictive substance. It affects the parts of the brain that regulate your impulse control, craving, and emotional regulation.
As you spend more and more time gooning, your dopamine reward system becomes more and more powerful. The parts of your brain like the prefrontal cortex that regulate decision-making and judgment become suppressed.
Gooning puts the person in a trance-like state where their rational brain temporarily stops running.
On top of it, there is the post-gooning session crash. After gooning, dopamine levels crash sharply.
This dopamine crash puts the brain in a state of dopamine depletion, which messes with your mood and motivation. Many people also feel intense shame and anxiety as a result of a post-gooning crash.
What Is Edging And How Does It Lead to Gooning?
Edging is a masturbation technique. When you are edging, you stimulate yourself close to an orgasm but slow down when you are about to orgasm to delay the climax.
When you do this occasionally, it is not dangerous. But what happens when edging for long periods becomes a regular habit?
When you reach orgasm, your brain recognizes it as the reward promised by dopamine. So, it ends the dopamine loop.
But, with extended and repeated edging, your brain begins to treat staying aroused for a longer time as the goal. This creates an open loop of sexual stimulation without release.
Edging also escalates porn use. When you want to stay aroused for a longer time, you will be compelled to keep looking for more stimulating and new content.
In Tantric and Taoist traditions, edging was a way of regulation, a practice of discipline and clarity. But when you indulge in prolonged edging and escalating porn use, it twists your perception of reward.
Your brain begins to think of extended arousal itself as the goal and reward of sexual stimulation. So, gooning becomes automatic, and you will begin to wonder, why can’t I stop gooning?
Gooning vs. Edging: Key Differences Explained
Frequent edging puts you at risk of developing the habit of gooning, but they are not the same thing.
Edging
Edging is a behavior. It can even happen for a short time where you masturbate and delay the climax but don’t enter the gooning state. When a person is edging, it is about sexual pleasure, where the person is still in control.
Gooning
Gooning is a psychological and neurological state that can last for hours. When a person is gooning, he shows a lack of agency. It is a trancelike state where the person experiences a genuine loss of self-awareness.
To give you a simple analogy – edging is the match and gooning is the fire. When you light a match, you won’t start a fire every time, but a spark always has the potential to start the fire.
How to Stop Gooning: 7 Practical Steps
Porn and compulsive edging often play a key role in making gooning feel like a habit you can’t quit.
So, if you want to know how to stop gooning, you should address the triggers and behaviors that lead you to compulsive masturbation and edging.
Step 1: Name It
You might be tempted to dismiss the gooning sessions as “I just got carried away,” but you know, in your heart, that it is not the truth. You have experienced the loss of self-awareness and the post-gooning dopamine crash.
Break the silence and shame that you have about the gooning habit. Name it. Admit that you have a problem and you want to be free of it aloud – if only to yourself.
Step 2: Identify Your Triggers
If you truly want to know how to stop gooning, you should first identify what creates the compulsive and automatic urge within you.
Usually, porn, masturbation, and gooning act as an escape from something we are struggling with in real life. It could be relationship trouble. Or you might be stressed or feeling anxious. Many times simply being bored could be a trigger.
Initially masturbation and gooning feel like an easy escape. But, as the habits solidify, your behaviors become automatic whenever you come across the triggers. So in order to break this cycle, you should first know your triggers.
Whenever an urge hits, HALT and ask yourself, Am I –
Hungry?
Angry?
Lonely?
Tired?
This simple exercise helps you identify your true need and meet it in a healthy way.
Step 3: Add a Digital Barrier
When you have got into a habit of gooning, your ability to control your impulses is compromised. So, willpower alone can not keep you safe from triggers.
What you need is a porn blocker like BlockP that filters all explicit content, be it nudity or porn. It interrupts the automatic craving and gooning before you enter into the trancelike state.
A digital barrier like BlockP restores your agency to control your behavior.
Step 4: Interrupt the Edging Behavior
Edging is the starting point of gooning. So, unless you stop edging, you will not know how to stop gooning.
- Quit porn and masturbation: Avoid the temptation at the first step itself.
- Have an emergency plan: No edging is ideal, but you cannot always do it perfectly. So, have a strategy that interrupts when you catch yourself edging.
- Your environment: Sleeping alone or keeping your phone by your bedside at night increases the temptation for gooning.
Step 5: Replace Dopamine
Giving your brain access to healthy sources of dopamine is important for long-term freedom from gooning.
- Immediate: When you feel the urges rising, do 10 pushups or take a cold shower. It gives an instant hit of dopamine, which breaks the hold that gooning has on your brain.
- Long term: You need to give your brain healthy dopamine with activities like regular exercise, creative hobbies, learning something new, and interacting with your friends.
Step 6: Practice Urge Surfing
Urges usually come in waves; they start, build up to a rise, peak, and slowly fall off. Most urges will peak around 15 to 20 minutes and pass.
What you need to learn is to ‘surf’ the urges without acting on them. It’s a mindfulness technique where you observe the urges and acknowledge the urges, but you do not resolve them. Your goal is to just let the time pass so that the urge also passes.
Step 7: Address the Root Cause
The tough emotion, toxic job, or relationship struggle that is driving your gooning behavior will make you vulnerable to the triggers.
If you find healthy ways to address the root cause through therapy or by joining support groups, only then can living without gooning become a reality for you.
How Long Does It Take to Stop Gooning?
Even when you know all the strategies for how to stop gooning, don’t expect to quit gooning instantly. Remember that like in the case of compulsive porn and masturbation habits, your brain and body need time to break from the habit loop.
Weeks 1–2
The lack of dopamine when you quit gooning creates a dopamine crash. Motivation will be low, and cravings will feel intense. This is a withdrawal-like phase where you are at a high risk for relapse.
The online triggers like nudity and explicit content are particularly risky during this initial period. Using a porn blocker like BlockP can support you by keeping you safe online.
Weeks 3–6
Cravings become less constant, and you can experience periods of clarity. Many people can feel a positive shift in mood and energy.
Months 2–3
When you learn how to quit gooning and stop for 60 to 90 days, the benefits of not gooning become more noticeable. Your brain’s dopamine sensitivity begins to return to normal levels, and sexual responses also begin to normalize.
Month 3 and Beyond
This is the lifestyle change stage where practicing how to stop gooning becomes a new normal. Now your brain can rewire to build new habit pathways that help you stay away from gooning and porn.
What to Do If You Relapse
Even if you know all the strategies for how to quit gooning, there will be moments where you may go back to the old habits. Cravings might overwhelm you, or you might not be able to resist a strong trigger.
Relapse is expected to be a part of your recovery. If you are addicted to gooning and have a relapse, you should not let it become a shame spiral. You should also not abandon your recovery because of a relapse.
Then what do you do if you relapse when you are practicing how to stop gooning?
Accept
Accept that relapse is a part of your road to recovery. Yes, you slipped back into the old habit, but you are still in recovery, and you can pick yourself up, and you can continue.
Analyze
Treat it as data. If you analyze the circumstances that resulted in a relapse, you can identify exactly what went wrong and how you can protect yourself in the future.
Restart
Don’t wait for tomorrow or Monday to get back to your efforts on how to stop gooning. You had a slip-up, and it’s done – it’s in the past now.
Reactivate your porn blocker. Reach out to a loved one or a professional that is supporting you through recovery.
How can BlockP help you?
Quitting porn and masturbation helps you prevent edging and gooning. It is like you are interrupting your urges before they can develop into powerful cravings. To achieve this, you should block the triggers on your phone and computer.
BlockP is the best 18+ content blocker to support you on your recovery from gooning.
Block Porn
BlockP instantly blocks millions of adult websites – even the new ones or the ones that are not indexed. There is also a blocklist where you can add any number of keywords and websites that you want to block.
Block Your Triggers
BlockP uses AI-powered filters to detect and block sexual content in real-time. It can detect not just porn but also nudity and semi-nude content. So, you can stay completely safe online.
Prevent Relapse
Imagine you have a moment of intense craving and you try to watch porn. Without BlockP it would result in a relapse. But BlockP keeps you safe by
- Blocking porn in incognito mode and guest mode
- Password protection for porn blocking settings.
- Prevents uninstalling the porn blocker or rebooting the phone
- If you try to access an adult website, BlockP redirects you to a page with a custom motivational quote.
Accountability Partner
BlockP reinforces the digital barrier to porn by letting you add an accountability partner. They can set a secret password to stop you from changing the BlockP settings. They will also get a notification in case you try to sneak porn.
Community Support
BlockP helps you break the shame and isolation of the gooning habit with support from its Reddit and Discord communities.
Better Digital Habits
Just like lifestyle changes, you also have to change how you use your phone and computer.
- BlockP has a focus mode where you can restrict social media apps or any other app that distracts you.
- Create a whitelist of allowed websites and allow access to only those websites.
- Setup time limits for websites that tend to hijack your time.
- You want to use YouTube or Facebook for work but are getting distracted by reels? With BlockP, you can restrict specific distracting parts like short videos or autoplay on social media.
FAQs on How to stop gooning
1. What is gooning?
Gooning is a trance-like state, and a person loses self-awareness, rational thinking, and awareness of time during gooning. It is achieved by extending the period of edging during masturbation.
2. What is a gooner?
A gooner is a person who regularly engages with the habit of gooning achieved through extended masturbation and edging with the help of porn.
3. Is gooning the same as porn addiction?
Porn addiction often accompanies gooning, and there is an overlap between the two. But porn addiction and gooning are different.
4. Why is gooning so hard to stop?
Once you are in the zombie-like gooning stage, you lose control over rational thought. Your prefrontal cortex that helps you control impulses and regulate your behavior goes offline. So, you will find it difficult to stop gooning.
5. Why do I feel horrible after gooning?
During gooning your brain is flooded with high levels of dopamine for often hours. Once you stop, the dopamine crash is immediate and sharp, hence the horrible feeling.
6. Is it okay to goon every day?
Daily gooning exposes your brain to a lot of dopamine and results in your brain becoming sensitive to dopamine. Over time, you will have to watch more porn and extend the gooning sessions longer in pursuit of the initial dopamine hit. It will make you like an addict who keeps chasing the next hit.
7. What are the benefits of not gooning?
When you stop gooning, it helps your brain fix the dopamine reward system. You will get back the focus and clarity that was lost.
8. Can gooning cause erectile dysfunction?
The specific condition called pornography-induced erectile dysfunction (PIED) can result from frequent gooning.
9. How long does it take to recover from gooning?
You can notice the benefits of quitting gooning within 30 days. Most people can quit gooning and recover within 60 to 90 days.
