Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 04.1: Mastering Bodily Impulses

What does mastering a bodily impulse look like? Like most things, it's a series of steps.

1) Understand what bodily impulses you have. These include, but are not limited to:

• Hunger and thirst
  
• Sexual satisfaction
• Comfort and rest
• Connection
• Input

Pick one that you want to build control over, either because it's a specific problem for you, or if you don't see a specific problem, just because improvement is always possible. 

Now, I want to make it very clear that I am not claiming this process will help anyone overcome actual medical addictions. If you have a medical condition, get medical help. Don't try to fight that alone, or with amateur help like mine.

2) Define the range of activities that can satisfy those impulses.

• Hunger and thirst
• Food and drink
  
• Sexual satisfaction
• Sex
• Masturbation, possibly including pornography or erotica
  
• Comfort and rest
• Sleep
• Relaxation 
• Hot showers
  
• Connection
• Personal visits
• Telephone calls
• Texting
• Social media
  
• Input
• Movies and shwws
• Reading
• Games
• Music
• Noise

3) Define your baseline. How are you presently satisfying this impulse? In what manners? How often? For how long? To what degree? Are you eating three large meals every day? Are you spending two hours a day on social media? Taking a long hot shower every night? You need measurements, or you can't know that you're succeeding or failing. Be honest, or there's no point. Remember, nobody is judging you here.

4) Define your restriction. Develop a clear plan to regularly pull back from your baseline. Have a final goal, but start small. If you want to restrict your eating, maybe pick one meal, one twelve hour period a week, to eat something small, simple and cheap without any frills, like a very poor person would have. If you want to restrict your sleep, pick one day a week to get up half an hour early. Work up from there toward your final goal.

These practices can be taken to unhealthy extremes, especially fasting, so don't do anything dangerous. Most bodies can go for several days without food, but your particular body might not. Risking your safety is contrary to what you're trying to achieve. Don't give up medications or vitamins!

5) Track success and failure. There can be no shame in this process! Shame makes you lie, and then you may as well just not do it. Own your failures, do better tomorrow, and try a different way to succeed. If your goal is self-control over your sleep, but you keep sleeping in, try a different alarm type, or a different way of sleeping, or drinking a huge glass of water before bed.

Also, be aware of failures in other ways. If you've given up smoking as much, but are now angry all the time, that doesn't mean you've failed, but it does mean you have more work to do.

6) Adjust the restriction as needed. If you're consistently succeeding, try something a little harder. Abstain for longer periods, or more often, or in new ways. If you've hit your restriction goal, but you've developed a secondary problem, work on the secondary problem before increasing your restriction.

If you're consistently failing, change the rule to be still a form of self-denial, but something more achievable. Be creative about what this looks like. Maybe instead of giving up desserts one day a week, you give them up for just two hours after dinner. Or maybe you give up all other sweets except dessert.

If you've hit your final goal, without developing additional problems, congratulations! Keep on your restriction for a while, then return to step 1 and pick a new impulse to learn to control, in parallel to your first one.