Young Mormons created an app to help men quit having sex

Jimmy will accurately Schedule his days around finding time alone to watch pornography And masturbation – often up to five times a day.

The 32-year-old engineer from Michigan, who did not want his real name used due to privacy concerns, watched pornography for the first time when he was 12, but never realized he had problem Even after his father’s funeral three years ago.

“I didn’t shed a single tear,” he says. “I didn’t know how to react happily or sadly to anything.” That’s when his porn consumption skyrocketed — along with his stress, anxiety, and depression — and he locked himself in his room “all day.” The only thing that seemed apparent, he recalls, was the “dopamine rush” caused by an intense session of watching porn. But for Jamie, a Christian, those fleeting moments of porn-fueled highs were followed by much deeper lows, including suicidal thoughts.

Last March, Jamie said his partner angrily confronted him over his compulsive pornography consumption, and accused him of lying and committing adultery.

“Jimmy’s whole world has fallen.” He admitted that he felt like an addict, begged her to forgive him, temporarily moved back in with his mother, and abandoned pornography. That’s when he was found relayan app created by a pair of Mormon college students that claims it can help people “take back control of porn, day after day.” Jimmy promised his partner he would never watch porn again, and she gave him one chance.

The app provides a comprehensive plan to stop watching pornography, with therapist-made videos, daily journal prompts, live group sharing sessions, and a function to address dangerous cravings. Users also track each other’s porn-free streaks, through the “Live Milestone” bar. It’s all in an effort to help customers, who pay $149 a year for full access, work through their underlying issues like loneliness and trauma to help prevent relapse. The app has been downloaded more than 110,000 times, and company data shows that 89% of its users are male.

This month, Relay partnered with anti-porn nonprofit Fight the New Drug for “Project November” — a new initiative to encourage people to abstain from porn — with 28,000 sign-ups so far.

The scale of pornography use represents a “modern epidemic,” says Chandler Rogers, CEO of Relay. The 27-year-old was inspired to co-found the app in August 2021 to provide his Gen Z peers with a path to stop watching porn. It came on the heels of his self-described years-long addiction to explicit content. Rogers, who attended Brigham Young University in Utah where he met both its founder and chief of staff, says he tried to stop “at least 100 times, and could never go more than a week without returning to porn.”