Doing a NoFap Reboot on Easy Mode means abstaining from pornography alone. It does not include masturbation, sex, or orgasm. The only principle is not consuming pornography.

The question of if that is enough to reach the desired outcome can only be answered by the individual. It also requires deciding on a desired outcome, beyond just removing pornography.

The alleviation of porn addiction’s symptoms, for instance. I will pose some ideas and thoughts throughout this article for that purpose.

An honest internal reflection and asking yourself if you are ready to make the choice to give up porn are what begins a NoFap Reboot. Outside sources like this article are also helpful in informing that decision by providing another perspective.

Let’s start by first talking about what a NoFap Reboot is.

The NoFap Rebooting Challenge

NoFap is a widely popular sexual health community whose cornerstone is the Rebooting concept and challenge. Typically 90 days, it aims to ‘reboot’ one’s mind like a computer. The goal is to return to a natural and healthy sexual lifestyle that enriches your life. This is opposed to a porn addiction that is self-destructive or negatively impacts your quality of life. A reboot consists of abstaining from behavior, and not giving it up for life.

The three main modes of NoFap Rebooting boil down to this:

• NoFap Easy mode: No porn, but you can still orgasm, either via masturbation and/or sex.
• NoFap Normal mode: No porn, and no masturbating, orgasm via sex is allowed.
• NoFap Hard mode: No porn, no masturbating, and no orgasm.

The different modes are designed for each person to select from themselves, NoFap does not prescribe anything. Someone who has a healthy marriage and sex life but experiences porn and masturbation addiction may opt for normal mode. An individual not in a relationship or looking for one may opt for hard mode. Someone may decide on NoFap easy mode if they struggle with pornography but not masturbation or sex addictions.

NoFap Easy Mode

So NoFap Easy Mode, why does it exist or is it just taking the easy way out? Is it less effective? Well, porn addiction can be a complex beast to overcome. There can be a lot going on, more facets of it than one may realize. From using it to soothe or avoid emotional pain, to the primitive instinct to reproduce, to the unprecedented ease of access to it.

Who is Easy Mode for?

Easy Mode is for those primarily struggling with porn in any form, more so than sex or masturbation. However, that’s likely not most people who’ve started looking into NoFap. Masturbation usually accompanies porn, let’s be honest.

That said, all cases of porn usage are not the same; the reasons it started, and the negative consequences, to the actual porn consumption act itself. Some people may watch porn for an hour session at the same time each day. Others may consume porn for 5-10 minute intervals but six times per day, any time they can.

Choosing Easy Mode can work for both aforementioned cases. But that does not mean that both couldn’t also do well or perhaps even better by just going for NoFap Normal Mode. We’ll get into why in the next section how Easy Mode can go awry.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to porn addiction. To answer the question of who Easy Mode is for, Easy Mode is for anyone who chooses it. If you sit without distraction and think about yourself and your porn habits, you’ll find the answer. You may not always entirely like it, but you’ll find it.

What Can Go Awry in Easy Mode

The thing about an Easy Mode NoFap reboot is that it requires a large degree of honesty with yourself. With masturbation still in the picture, it is entirely possible to still practice that and daydream about porn. The scenes, actors, or even replaying porn in your head. The modality of PMO, which stands for Porn – Masturbation – Orgasm, is still very much accessible to you.

Often when problematic porn usage is examined, it breaks down to a repeated acting out of PMO. PMO is the crux of the issue and where the negative consequences come from. Whether it is being used to soothe emotions, feed a libido, or find ‘intimacy’, PMO is the component we aim to remove from your day-to-day. This is what facilitates the ‘reboot’.

Back to the notion of Easy Mode requiring honesty. If one goes from suggestive content on social media to masturbating to porn-type thoughts, PMO is arguably still occurring. And nearly guaranteed, it’s negative consequences. And then one is nudged towards one simple choice to return to porn.

Honesty is required in two forms, firstly in that PMO was the issue and it needs to cease. Secondly is recognizing and not overlooking when you are tempted to act it out, even without pornographic video or whatever your old fix was. The second part keeps you off the slippery slope of admitting defeat and going back to full-fledged porn usage and consequences.

What Easy Mode Specifically Offers You

Sexuality and Sexual Identity

While the last section painted a picture of what could go wrong, there are certain things you stand to gain from an integral attempt at Easy Mode. One example, which may sound foreign at this point, is masturbation that doesn’t require fantasy thoughts.

Instead, one can be satisfied by celebrating their own sexuality. It may sound egotistical or ridiculous, but what if you masturbated to yourself instead of porn? This takes a certain amount of self-esteem and self-love but can be a marvelous thing if someone reaches that point.

Reduced but Meaningful Masturbation

Also, with porn removed from the picture, masturbation may not seems as appetizing. One may not be urged to do it daily, or multiple times per day. This is not a bad thing. It can allow a person to relocate the meaning of masturbation, without all the extra stimulation the porn industry conjures up and hooks you with. By being more infrequent, some meaningfulness can be restored to masturbating. Without porn’s falsified intensity, masturbation loses some of its shine but gets back to actual reality.

Non-Pornographic Media

NoFap Easy Mode also offers you a real opportunity to examine and clean up your media consumption. With porn removed, you’ll be more cognizant of when you click on a thumbnail because of a beautiful person or find yourself transfixed by someone in public. It removes something you did in private, but it will have an effect on your entire life. Your private, public, social, all parts of life.

Energy

Energy. Easy Mode offers you energy. When you find yourself aroused or feeling called to act out PMO, you can ride that urge just long enough to overcome it. This is called ‘urge surfing’. Oftentimes, especially early on, rebooters notice that energy which was being put towards PMO is still there, still accessible.

Not doing something with that energy is what gives us that uncomfortable feeling, that anxiousness or discontent. By refocusing that energy to work on a project, play with your kids, interact with your partner, go workout, you find a zest to life that you may have lost. In this way, we are harnessing sexual energy for non-sexual accomplishments.

While this may sound goofy or asinine, take a second to think about it. The reason we go to work, maintain shelter, and eat food, is ultimately to go on to reproduce. This is just an extremely plain example of what humans already do.

How Long Does Easy Mode Take?

90 Days. Three months of sustained abstinence from porn is what the NoFap community uses as the benchmark for a reboot. This doesn’t change in Easy Mode, Hard Mode, or Monk Mode for that matter. To really reboot your mind, and see and implement changes in your life, ninety days is recommended. It’s not an arbitrary recommendation, it comes from successful rebooters as well as neuroscience.

Everyone’s heard that it takes 21 days to form a habit, but longer to cement it into a lifestyle. Same idea here. During a reboot, you’ll go through stages. No two reboots are the same, but the beginning will likely consist of a lot of adjustment and overcoming of urges.

Eventually, you’ll realize you haven’t had an urge for a day or two. You haven’t even thought about porn. Instead of noticing how much you desire porn, you notice a lack of desire for it!

And then eventually the urge may return. Or your new lifestyle and the things you replaced porn with will make you content, never to return to porn. Completing a NoFap Easy Mode Reboot is benchmarked at 90 days, but you decide your own parameters.

One word to the wise though is not shortening the duration after you’ve begun. But many people do lengthen it, which is seen more often in Normal Mode or Hard Mode. That is because those remove masturbation and orgasm altogether. From a certain perspective, NoFap Easy Mode could go on for the rest of your life if you entirely cut out porn forever.

Benefits of NoFap

‘Superpowers’

When it comes to removing porn from one’s life, NoFap community members as well as others will sometimes mention gaining so-called ‘superpowers’. I hinted at this concept earlier as we talked about energy. More accurately, taking energy and excitement that used to be put towards porn and instead directing it towards more meaningful and fruitful endeavors.

This can be because of semen retention or hormonal reasons but largely plays out psychologically or neurologically as well.

Once you quit porn and begin to develop even a shred of self-control around resisting urges toward it, a positive feedback loop begins. The negative version of this we all know: watching porn, feeling bad about it, thus setting yourself up to self-soothe with porn again in the future.

But the positive version is just as powerful, if not even more so. Rebooters even report becoming someone they barely recognize, in a good way.

When one is used to putting off important things to watch porn and then not getting the important things done, that’s not a great feeling. So when one begins to act to the contrary, their life can become extraordinary.

It brings a feeling that you are beyond just your typical self, you are not only in control of your choices but excel at your endeavors and life. You get more done than ‘just enough’. NoFap rebooters also refer to it as going Super Saiyan, becoming the best version of themselves.

Social Benefits

Shame, guilt, and even anxiety can be mainstays of problematic porn usage. Not only anxiety but social anxiety as well. Worrying that someone might find out about your porn usage. There can be shame about what type of porn you watched and religious or moral conflicts. Guilt for choosing porn instead of chores, projects, work, or social engagements.

Just like in the superpowers concept, now imagine a direct reversal of negative emotions and anxiety. Instead of shame, feel proud of yourself. Instead of guilt, congratulate yourself on your actions. And lastly, feeling confident and absolved of anxiety because you have nothing to hide.

This will play out differently for everyone, but rebooters report social improvements across the board, directly or indirectly. Namely, better interactions with potential partners. It’s a lot easier to talk to someone you’re interested in when you don’t have a porn habit to hide gnawing at the back of your mind.

Reversal of Sexual Dysfunctions

Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction (PIED) is probably the most common culprit here. ED alone simply means a male having difficulty obtaining or maintaining an erection long enough to have sex.

When it comes to ED that is Porn-Induced, this refers to excessive porn usage skewing expectations or reducing sensitivity to real-life sex. Sex gets rewired from being something physically shared with another person more towards the act of PMO, Porn, Masturbation, and Orgasm. Real sex almost becomes foreign.

Put simply, porn gets you off but real sex doesn’t or is at least less successful than it used to be.

I’d like to take a second to say, this is not anything to be ashamed of. Porn has this effect for many reasons; I can pull out my phone at this moment and within two minutes view more arousing naked bodies than my grandfather saw in his entire lifetime. Give me another minute and I’ll see more than a King of the 1600s.

Porn offers not only artificial abundance but also unrealistic content in its points of view, angles, actors, scenes, and scripts.

Everything going on conspires to make it pleasing to the viewer and effective. That’s all fine and dandy, but repeated across time it rewires our sexual expectations and associations. Neurology as well as self-reporting supports this.

The reversal of this is just what you’d think, sex regains its zest whether with a longtime partner or a novel partner. By removing not only the outlet of porn for sexual energy but also its unrealistic content, a sex drive and expectations around it naturally revert. It may take time, and not work fully right away, but certainly works.

And lastly, while I sincerely say that it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it is however something that one must take responsibility for their choices regarding.

The Normal Mode and Hard Mode for Rebooting

The NoFap Challenge’s other two modes are typically more difficult, but that is ultimately case by case. They have one additional stipulation each; Normal mode removes masturbation, and Hard mode removes orgasm altogether, even via sex.

Normal Mode

This is the most commonly attempted mode of a NoFap reboot, and by that probably has the most successful cases. By additionally removing masturbation, it rules out the notion of masturbating to fantasy porn-like thoughts. That alone goes a long way to keep a rebooter on track and not slip back into old behaviors.

With its tighter constraint than Easy Mode, it requires more effort but offers more potential positive changes. Without masturbation, you’ll have to find activities and ways to fill your time. Sex is still allowed, so those with a partner or looking for a partner still have that outlet.

One pitfall that can occur in Normal Mode is more so for those without a partner but not exclusive to them. It is basically where they become obsessed with sex, dating, or finding potential partners. This is treading close to sounding like a sex addiction. It’s not always the case or even always bad, but just something to keep in mind.

There may be an adjustment period between the amount of time you spent thinking sexually to the quantity of that which can be satisfied with sex. Over time, this will even out or you’ll learn to not be as distraught over it.

Hard Mode

NoFap Hard Mode is for most the most difficult at least initially. But with great effort, can come great reward. Removing orgasm entirely brings about a real opportunity for self-reflection of one’s sexuality and mindfulness towards past and present actions regarding it.

Hard Mode is probably best suited for those already not sexually active, but with a supportive partner it is entirely possible. While being a more narrow path to take, there is also less grey area to get pulled into and begin to backslide.

This level of the NoFap Challenge is a beast in itself but can bring about a beautiful, fulfilling reboot. You can find out more about that in our NoFap Hard Mode article.

Identifying Urge-Causing Situations

This is something that will be individual for each rebooter, but there are some commonly reported examples I’ll share here.

• Social Media: It’s not uncommon for rebooters to find themselves scrolling through attractive people’s posts on social media. By the nature of it, you can end up going into a rabbit hole of sorts with this, and feel urged to watch porn.
• Avoiding Negative Emotions: Boredom, depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem are simple examples. This is a large topic, but finding positive outlets and remedies for emotions can be key.
• Arriving Home or Being Alone: Sometimes porn is used after a stressful work day, or at that point in the day you’re usually alone. After identifying these times, take steps to plan different activities. One can ‘cope ahead’ of a potential urge -before- it happens.
• Before Bed: Some people, myself included, developed a habit of watching porn right before bed to facilitate falling asleep. While it works for a while, it’s easy to end up doing more harm than good. There is a concept of ‘sleep hygiene’ which is worthwhile looking into if this is an area you identify needing help in. It just refers to setting your sleeping area and activities to promote restful, healthy sleep.
• Objectifying Real-Life People: It is not unusual to notice someone’s beauty in public. That’s a component of being human, and in and of itself is not wrong. But if you find yourself looking too long, or near always looking at certain body parts, perhaps that’s something to take control of and actively work on.

In Summary: Is the Easy Mode of NoFap Enough?

Ultimately, only you’ll know if the Easy Mode of the NoFap Challenge is going to be an effective way to reboot your mind, sexuality, and day-to-day life. It’s not anything to be prescribed by a doctor, NoFap, or even me. The main point to think about however is this: is masturbation a large component of my porn addiction? If the answer is yes, perhaps commit to Normal Mode.

But if the answer is no or kinda, maybe Easy Mode is for you. Or for those with a partner, discussing it with them can be largely helpful. Open honesty in this area goes far to facilitate healing and rebooting.

It’s entirely possible while masturbating to keep your thoughts tame, thinking of your current or past partner, or celebrating yourself. Only you’ll be able to determine how that goes for you, and I’m surely not going to tell you how to masturbate. So, is Easy Mode enough? Well, ask yourself and then take the challenge to find out.