How to Control Sexual Urges: 8 Practical Steps

Learning how to control sexual urges means choosing how you act on them, not trying to stop having them. Urges are a normal part of being human, and a few steps borrowed from research on cravings and self-control are worth trying when one hits.

If you’re quitting porn, urges can be the hardest part. Our guide to how to quit porn covers the whole process, and this guide focuses on urges: why they feel so strong, what research says, eight steps for the moment one hits, and when to get help. Having sexual urges is normal and isn’t a problem in itself. Here, “control” means acting on an urge by choice, whether you’re quitting porn, doing a 30-day challenge, single, or finding that urges feel out of control.

Here’s one caveat up front. No trial has tested these techniques on everyday sexual urges, so the steps below borrow from research on cravings and self-control. The sexual-specific research that exists mostly studied men with compulsive sexual behavior, problematic porn use or hypersexual disorder.

Sexual Urges at a Glance

Question	Short answer
Are strong sexual urges normal?	Yes. Sexual thoughts are common, and having urges isn’t a problem in itself.
What causes sexual urges?	Cues from outside you or from your body can set off thoughts automatically, and pleasurable thoughts tend to be elaborated into vivid images.
Does pushing them away work?	Not reliably. Trying to push a thought away can make it return more often.
What helps in the moment?	Naming the urge and riding it out, giving your mind a competing task, and deciding ahead what you’ll do. The evidence comes from other cravings and from goals in general.
Does therapy help?	Some trials of acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness programs and online self-help found less porn use. They are few, nearly all their participants were men, and long-term results are unclear.
Can a medication cause strong urges?	Possibly. In one study of Parkinson’s patients, impulse control disorders were more common with one class of drugs. Talk with your prescriber before changing anything.
When should you get help?	If you can’t cut back after repeated tries, if urges cause harm, or if they change suddenly.

Are Strong Sexual Urges Normal?

Yes. Sexual thoughts are common, and the research suggests any difference between men and women is smaller than many people assume.

Fisher and colleagues had 283 college students track their thoughts about food, sleep or sex for one week, using a golf tally counter (Fisher et al., 2012). Men reported more need-based thoughts overall, but they also thought more about food and sleep. The authors suggested that any sex difference is smaller than is generally thought, and that reports are likely shaped by sex role expectations.

Hofmann and colleagues collected 7,827 reports of desires from 205 adults over a week (Hofmann et al., 2012). Across several desire areas, desires for sleep and sex were experienced most intensively. Sex was one area among several, so the data don’t measure how often people think about sex alone.

In a nationally representative US survey of 2,325 adults aged 18 to 50, sampled from all 50 states in November 2016, 8.6% met the clinical screening cut point on the Compulsive Sexual Behavior Inventory (Dickenson et al., 2018). Gender differences were smaller than previously theorized, with 10.3% of men and 7.0% of women reporting clinically relevant distress or impairment from difficulty controlling sexual feelings, urges and behavior. That is a screening result, not a diagnosis, and it measures distress rather than how strong urges feel.

For the line between a high sex drive and a problem, read hypersexuality vs. a high sex drive. The debate over whether porn use can become an addiction is in is porn addiction real?

What Causes Sexual Urges, and Why Are They So Strong?

One theory says urges feel strong because cues set off thoughts automatically, and pleasurable thoughts get elaborated into vivid images. Brain studies link stronger desire with stronger responses to cues, but they can’t show cause.

Kavanagh and colleagues proposed the elaborated intrusion theory of desire (Kavanagh et al., 2005). They argue that intrusive thoughts about things we want are triggered automatically by external or physiological cues and by related thoughts. When those thoughts bring significant pleasure or relief, elaboration usually follows, producing sensory images that simulate getting what’s wanted. This is a theory about desire in general, not a test of sexual urges.

In one brain-scan study, 19 men with compulsive sexual behavior and 19 healthy men watched sexually explicit videos. The men with compulsive sexual behavior reported more desire, though they rated how much they liked the videos about the same (Voon et al., 2014). Exposure to those cues was associated with more activity in areas including the ventral striatum, a region involved in reward.

In a 2017 brain-scan study, 28 heterosexual men seeking treatment for problematic porn use showed more ventral striatum activation than 24 heterosexual men without it, but only for cues that predicted erotic pictures, not money (Gola et al., 2017). The authors suggested that problematic porn use may be a behavioral addiction. That is their reading of a comparison made at one point in time, and the cues were not real porn viewing.

The Hofmann study also found that the more often and the more recently people had used self-control earlier that day, the less successful they were at resisting their next desire that day (Hofmann et al., 2012). The authors read this as support for a limited-resource model of self-control. That model is contested, so the finding here is only the pattern.

Why Doesn’t Fighting the Urge Work?

Trying hard not to think about something can make it come back. Research on thought suppression found a small to moderate rebound effect, so a plan for what to do instead works better than a plan to resist.

In two lab experiments, Wegner and colleagues asked people to try not to think of a white bear and to ring a bell whenever they did. They couldn’t keep the thought out. When they were later asked to think about a white bear, they produced more thoughts about it than people who had been asked to think about it from the start (Wegner et al., 1987). A second experiment found that a specific replacement thought, used as a distraction, reduced later preoccupation with the thought people had tried to suppress. The bear was a neutral image, not a sexual one.

A 2001 meta-analysis of controlled studies also found a small to moderate rebound effect, which varied with the kind of thought and how it was measured (Abramowitz et al., 2001). Small to moderate isn’t the same as always backfiring. For how this plays out with porn thoughts, see why pushing porn thoughts away backfires.

Timing matters too. In a lab study of male college students, lab-induced sexual arousal had a strong impact on their judgments and hypothetical decisions, and they were unable to predict how much it would shape their own behavior (Ariely & Loewenstein, 2006). That is a reason to decide your rules while you’re calm. The study tested arousal and decisions, not an intervention, so treat this as planning advice.

How to Control Sexual Urges: 8 Steps

These steps cover the time before an urge, the moment it hits and the hours after a slip. Most of the research behind them comes from other cravings or from goal-setting in general, not from sexual urges.

1. Decide what control means for you. Pick one goal you can check, such as going porn-free, cutting back on sessions, dropping porn but keeping masturbation, or waiting for a partner. If your reasons come from your faith or your values, write those down too. To see what the research says about frequency, read is it bad to masturbate every day? If Scripture is part of your practice, choose one of these Bible verses about lust and temptation and pair it with a specific next step.

2. Learn your cues. Note the time, the place, what you were doing and how you felt just before an urge. Cues can come from outside you or from your body (Kavanagh et al., 2005), so watch for both. The HALT check asks whether you’re hungry, angry, lonely or tired. It’s a quick prompt from recovery communities, not a research finding.

3. Change the setting before the urge. Keep your phone out of the bedroom, set up a blocker on the devices you use most, and remove the apps and sites you slip on most often. Set these barriers while you’re calm. In the lab study of male college students above, people couldn’t predict how arousal would shift their choices. How to block porn walks through the options.

4. Write if-then plans. Decide in advance what you’ll do when a specific cue shows up, such as “If it’s 11 p.m. and I’m in bed, then I’ll put my phone on the dresser,” or “If I get home stressed, then I’ll walk for ten minutes before I open a browser.” A meta-analysis of 94 independent tests of goal striving found that these plans, called implementation intentions, had a medium-to-large positive effect on goal attainment (d = .65) (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). The authors also noted that a strong goal intention alone “does not guarantee goal achievement.”

5. Name the urge and ride it out. Notice the urge, name it, and watch it rise and fall without acting on it. That is the core of urge surfing. In one trial, 123 undergraduate smokers who were interested in changing their smoking received a brief mindfulness-based urge-surfing instruction or no instruction. Urges didn’t differ significantly between the groups, but the instructed group smoked significantly fewer cigarettes over the next seven days (Bowen & Marlatt, 2009). The authors suggested the technique may change how people respond to urges, and they described their data as preliminary.

6. Give your mind a competing task. When an urge hits, switch to something that takes attention, such as a puzzle, a call or a chore. In a field study, 31 undergraduates carried iPods for a week and reported cravings seven times a day. Playing Tetris for three minutes reduced craving strength by a mean of 13.9 percentage points across several categories, including sex (Skorka-Brown et al., 2015). The effect was small (f = 0.11), and sex was one category among several. Wegner’s experiments point the same way: a specific replacement thought reduced later preoccupation with a suppressed thought (Wegner et al., 1987).

7. Move your body. A short bout of physical activity may be worth trying when an urge is building. In a systematic review and meta-analysis of experiments with temporarily abstaining smokers, short bouts of activity acutely reduced cigarette cravings. The studies varied, but they all pointed the same way (Haasova et al., 2013). That is cigarette craving, not sexual urges, so treat it as a reasonable thing to try rather than a proven method.

8. Expect slips and restart fast. A slip is one moment, not the end of your plan. Write down what happened, tell someone you trust, and make your next choice right away. What to do after a porn relapse walks through the first 24 hours. Then add one layer to your plan, such as a new barrier or a replacement for the time when the slip happened.

How Do You Control Sexual Urges When You’re Single?

The steps above still apply, but when you’re single, focus on connection, sleep, evenings and whether masturbation without porn fits your goal.

If you’re single, your hardest hours may be the ones you spend alone, so start your plan there. Write down the times you usually feel an urge, and decide in advance what you’ll do at each one, using the if-then plans from step 4.

Connection gives your mind something else to attend to, which is the idea behind step 6. Texting a friend, joining an activity or making plans with people you trust are practical ways to fill those hours.

Sleep is the next thing to check. A regular bedtime and a phone charged outside the bedroom are simple changes to test, and if late-night sessions are part of your routine, see whether masturbating actually helps you sleep.

Whether masturbation without porn fits depends on the goal you chose in step 1. If your goal is to stop porn but keep masturbating, your plan can stay focused on setting and cues. If your goal includes cutting back on masturbation too, plan for those hours the same way you would for porn.

Does Therapy Help With Sexual Urges?

The trials that focus on sexual behavior test therapy and self-help programs. They found less porn use, but they are few, nearly all of their participants were men, and their long-term results are uncertain.

In a randomized trial, 28 men, all but one of them members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, received 12 sessions of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) or joined a waitlist (Crosby & Twohig, 2016). Self-reported pornography viewing fell by 93% in the ACT group, compared with 21% on the waitlist. Complete cessation was seen in 54% of participants at the end of treatment and in 35% at three months. The 93% is a drop in viewing, not a measure of how strong urges felt.

In a randomized trial of 137 men with hypersexual disorder, 70 men had seven weeks of group cognitive behavioral therapy and 67 were on a waitlist (Hallberg et al., 2019). The therapy group had a significantly greater drop in hypersexual symptoms and sexual compulsivity, and greater gains in psychiatric well-being. The authors reported that these effects remained stable at 3 and 6 months, but they called the long-term effects vague because few men answered the follow-up measures.

A 2021 randomized trial tested Hands-off, a six-week web-based self-help program, in 264 people, only 3.8% of them women (Bőthe et al., 2021). At six weeks, the self-help group reported less problematic porn use (d = 1.32) and less porn craving (d = 0.40) than the waitlist. But dropout was 89.4% in the intervention group and 44.7% in the control group, with 34.5% overall follow-up, so the effects may be overstated. The authors called it only a first step.

A pilot study gave an eight-week mindfulness-based relapse prevention program to 13 men with compulsive sexual behavior disorder, with no control group (Holas et al., 2020). Afterward, the men spent significantly less time on problematic porn use, and their anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive symptoms decreased. The authors called for larger studies with randomized control groups.

A 2025 meta-analysis pooled 20 studies with 2,021 participants, most of them including cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy (López-Pinar et al., 2025). Psychotherapy improved problematic porn use significantly more than control conditions did, with large effect sizes, but the effects were small for craving. The authors noted a high risk of bias across the studies and called for more rigorous research, such as randomized controlled trials. For the wider options, see porn addiction treatment.

Can a Medication or Health Condition Cause Strong Urges?

A medication or a health condition might be involved, though the evidence is limited. In one study of Parkinson’s patients, impulse control disorders, including compulsive sexual behavior, were more common with one class of drugs.

In a cross-sectional study of 3,090 patients with treated Parkinson’s disease at 46 centers in the US and Canada, 13.6% had an impulse control disorder and 3.5% had compulsive sexual behavior (Weintraub et al., 2010). Impulse control disorders of any kind were more common among patients taking a dopamine agonist than among those who weren’t (17.1% vs 6.9%). The compulsive sexual behavior figure came from an interview, not a clinical diagnosis, and a cross-sectional study shows an association, not a cause.

A 2016 review of 27 articles reported that the literature points to more risky sexual behavior during manic episodes in people with bipolar disorder than in people with other psychiatric diagnoses (Kopeykina et al., 2016). Its authors also noted that hypersexuality isn’t systematically defined, and some of the older articles date back more than 30 years.

If your urges changed suddenly, especially after starting a new medication or during a mood change, tell your doctor. Don’t stop or change a medication on your own, because your prescriber should decide what, if anything, needs to change. Other conditions that can drive sexual behavior are covered under medical causes of hypersexuality.

When to Get Help

See a doctor or therapist if you can’t cut back after repeated tries, if urges or behavior are causing harm, or if your urges change suddenly.

• You keep trying without lasting change. A therapist trained in one of the approaches above can help you choose a next step.
• Urges or behavior are causing harm. If they’re hurting your relationships, work, money or sexual health, get professional support.
• Your urges change suddenly. Raise it with a doctor, especially after a new medication or a mood change.
• Your mood is low. If you’re having thoughts of harming yourself, or your mood is very low, call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US), or your local emergency number.

The Bottom Line

• Urges are normal. Sexual thoughts are common, and having them isn’t a problem in itself. Control is about how you act on them.
• Plan before the urge. If-then plans and a changed setting let you decide while you’re calm, because arousal shifts choices in the moment.
• Ride it out instead of fighting it. Naming the urge, letting it pass or switching to a competing task beats pushing it away, though that evidence comes from other cravings.
• Therapy can help. Trials of ACT, group CBT and online self-help, mostly in men, found less porn use, though long-term results are uncertain.
• Get help when urges feel out of control. A doctor can check for medical causes, and a therapist can help you choose an approach.

TrueAlly’s daily check-ins and bite-sized learning modules can help you track your hardest hours and practice these steps.

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