A free self-help tool for giving up porn - by Alex

I struggled long and hard over many, many years with my own internet porn obsession. A combination of counselling and psychotherapy lead me to some profound life changing insights. That ultimately helped me reach a point of no return in terms of giving up using porn, and letting go of the need to have porn in my life.

Now although I wanted to give up using porn, I still wanted to be able to enjoy the benefits of using the world wide web. How could I do this and was it even possible? For me the internet was completely synonymous with porn. That's what the internet was for; a free gateway to endless amounts of porn. Like a playground of sexual fantasy or a sweet shop with far, far too much choice on offer.

So I faced a dilemma: how to use the internet and NOT slip back into my old habits. This was eventually resolved when I stumbled across the process which lies at the heart of the internet, which is technically called DNS.

DNS stands for “domain name system” or “domain name service”, and you might be asking what's so important about DNS.  Well almost every internet based service is dependant upon the DNS system for finding a specific website. Anything anybody does on the internet requires DNS at some point. DNS converts a human friendly website address such as www.bbc.co.uk into a computer readable IP address, which is essential for navigating the internet.

When you sign up with an internet service provider and connect to their network, your computer will usually start using their DNS servers automatically to look up website addresses. But most UK ISPs don't offer their customers any specific filtering of internet sites. Most UK ISPs don't block pornographic websites with the exception of the most extreme sites, which would include child porn or violent pornographic images but leaves literally millions of adult content websites freely available.

The tool to help yourself, see http://www.opendns.com

I stumbled across OpenDNS some time ago, and found that I could register with the service for free and configure all my computers and router to operate through the Open DNS servers instead. So what's the big deal here then?

Well, the free OpenDNS service allows you to filter out any websites you don't want to visit, or want to prevent yourself going back to by way of your old habits. Once you register for free, you will have access to your own online dashboard, enabling you to clearly define which category of filtering you want to set up from mild through to very strong. Or you can even create a custom list of the kinds of web site content you wish to filter out.

Once this is set up it works perfectly. If you were to type in the website address of an old favourite porn site, OpenDNS simply blocks it and displays a notification message. The rest of the internet remains available as before, but without the danger of falling back into your old favourite porn sites.

This system gives you control, and that's the real beauty of this method. It's a great safety net for anyone giving up porn.