Overcoming Lust as a Man: Mastering the Fire and Reclaiming Your Path

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Lust Can Either Lead You into the Void or into Liberation

Let’s be real (that’s what we’re here for, after all):

One of the biggest internal battles most men face – often silently and pretty much daily – is the battle with lust.

It’s not that fashionable to talk about it and it’s not easy to admit to but behind closed doors – behind the phone screen at midnight or behind the string of half-hearted relationships and one-night encounters – there it is…lurking and guiding our actions without so much as a second-thought.

If lust is something that you’re becoming tired of letting control you in your own life, then you’re definitely not alone and many men have experienced feeling out of control when it comes to their sexual urges or behaviours.

If you can relate to this then it doesn’t mean that you’re ‘broken’ or that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with you but it is a sign that you do need to get serious about the path you’re walking so that you can start growing REAL.

This article is going to help you understand that lust isn’t just a naughty little itch that you can scratch and be done with – instead, it’s more like a fire.

And when you don’t know how to contain fire, it burns down the whole house.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Lust is about craving things that can never satiate or satisfy you.

Overcoming Lust as a Man: What We’ll Cover in this Article

Lust Can Either Lead You into the Void or into Liberation
Lust: The Fire That Consumes
Ego, Sex, and the Void
The Lust Trap
Sex Is Not the Ultimate (But It’s Still Awesome).
Lust as Fuel for Your Real Life
Step One: Master Yourself
Overcoming Lust: Burn Away the Unreal
Practical Steps

Lust: The Fire That Consumes

Lust is unlike most other distractions – it’s not passive like scrolling social media and it’s not subtle like the games we might be addicted to playing to get a quick ego-stroke and feel good about ourselves.

Instead, it’s raw, it’s animalistic, and a kind of living fire that starts in your gut and demands fuel – any fuel and at any cost – to keep burning.

The more heat this ‘fire’ accumulates as it roars, the more tension builds within you:

It sits in your chest, creeps into your mind, and suddenly you’re no longer able to focus on on what matters because you’re completely restless and can no longer sit still.

It’s in these moments that you choose to open incognito mode or wing that text over to somebody you know that you shouldn’t. You rationalise and make excuses in your head simply to justify a release of the tension the fire has caused you. You know you won’t be able to rest or focus until you get it.

And, really, that’s the whole problem, isn’t it?

Lust makes us feel like we need to consume – that we simply must act on it or it’ll eat us alive or drive us mad.

And that’s exactly what it makes you do when you don’t have mastery over yourself:

You seek release: masturbation, porn, or casual sex, empty relationships that always lead to drama or pointless conflict in the long-run.

What happens after the ‘release’ is perhaps even more interesting:

Numbness, regret, shame, the dull ache that what you really want is still missing, and the knowledge that you’ve just wasted more of your time, energy, and attention.

These (time, energy, and attention) are your three most valuable assets and lust – left unchecked – robs all three.

Ego, Sex, and the Void

Now let’s make something clear: sex is not the enemy. No where near.

In fact, sex – real sex – is one of the most powerful and beautiful experiences available to us as human beings.

On the other hand when you put sex on a pedestal and treat it as a substitute for purpose, connection, and truth then the fire of your lust becomes unbearable and your sexual activity starts to become a prison. That’s when it becomes a problem.

The specific problem is this:

When you’re disconnected from truth (i.e. living in the Void), then your ego starts to steer your life instead of who you are in your realness.

In this state, your ego becomes the part of you that says, “If I can just get laid, I’ll be enough” or “This desire I feel must be satisfied immediately otherwise I’m failing as a man”,

But here’s the truth:

You are not your lust; your lust – like any sensation or emotion – is just something that you HAVE.

You are not your ego’s interpretation of what sex means and when you chase sex – or anything else – from a place of emptiness, you’ll always end up more empty.

The Lust Trap

Let’s break down how the process of lusts fire consumes you a little more:

You feel first flickers of the fire (lust).
You mistake it for something that needs urgent release which makes it burn with even more ferocity.
You feed it something fast and easy (porn, a hook-up, a call to your ex, etc).
You get a temporary hit of relief (which just pours gasoline on the fire in the long-run).
The fire comes back stronger next time.
Repeat.

The more you follow this cycle, the more disconnected you become – from your purpose, from presence, from real relationships.

In short: the more you feed the fire with ego-fuel, the more it owns you and changes the trajectory of your life from real to unreal.

Some men spend their whole lives repeating this cycle and so never get out of the Void…they end up living what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation”.

Is that really the life you want to be creating for yourself?

Sex Is Not the Ultimate (But It’s Still Awesome).

This is a hard pill to swallow in a hyper-sexualised culture:

We’ve been told that sex is the prize and that getting it = success, not getting it = failure, and that more sex = more man.

But here’s the truth again:

Sex is great but it’s not ultimate source of meaning in your life.

If you live as if it is – because you’ve become detached from your core realness – then your identity gets warped around chasing it and you’ll start treating yourself and other people as products to be consumed. You’ll lose the ability to be real with both other and yourself..

Worst of all, you’ll sabotage the very thing that actually has the power to help you overcome your lust once and for all:

Real connection with yourself, the world, and reality and the fulfilment and sense of wholeness that this connection brings.

Lust as Fuel for Your Real Life

The way forward starts with a radical shift in your perception:

Learning to see lust not as an enemy to be eradicated but as energy that needs direction.

What probably goes without saying is that the fire isn’t going anywhere because your biology is evolutionarily wired to desire.

The question, then, isn’t whether you’ll feel it but:

What will you do with it?

Will you waste it on fantasy and distraction or will you use it as fuel to grow real?

If you want to stop wasting your time, energy, and attention and live your real life then there’s only one answer.

Step One: Master Yourself

Let’s get practical so you can take this off of the page (or screen) and start overcoming lust like a real one:

1. Practice Self-Discipline

It always starts with the basics:

Semen Retention (or even a conscious reduction in ejaculation frequency) is a powerful way to train your system to build flow rather than leak energy.

This article is a good starting point: Semen Retention Benefits: How this Ancient Practice Can Help You Grow More Real
Avoid Porn: not out of shame but because it wires your brain to associate arousal with fantasy, isolation, and passivity. It hijacks your brain’s reward system and makes it hard for you to stay present and focused in life.

This article will help you understand the mechanics of your reward system: Rewiring the Reward System: From Ego Hits to Realness
Choose real interactions over digital ones: When you do engage sexually, let it be from a place of real connection – not just because you’re horny and restless.

Every time you resist the urge to escape into release, you grow stronger, show yourself you’re in control, and overcome the ego and how it holds you back.

2. Question Your Identity

This is where the first stage of my coaching process – Awareness (Deconstruct Ego) comes in.

Ask yourself some powerful questions that help you to start seeing yourself and your own assumptions:

What does sex mean to me?
What do I believe it says about me if I get it? Or if I don’t?
Who told me that being sexually desirable = being valuable?

Strip away the ego stories and you’ll see that most of them are lies (or, at the very least, illusions):

They’re just distortions we’ve picked up in the Void that have little to do with the actual truth.

3. Embrace Your Shadow

Here’s a truth most men never hear:

Your sexual drive is not ‘bad’, it’s not shameful, and it’s not something to ignore or even ‘purge’ or ‘transcend’.

It’s part of your power as a man and a human being.

The key to tapping into this power is to integrate it – not repress it or worship it.

You do this by working to Accept (the second stage in my coaching model) your Shadow Self: all the ‘parts’ of you that might seem primal, animalistic, or just a mere ‘urge’ to the ego.

When you accept these things (and similar) and learn to guide it toward something that makes you whole then they become something that you can build with – not something that breaks you apart.

The goal is always wholeness over fragmentation – realness, not ego.

4. Take Real Action

Imagine directing all this energy you’ve been leaking because your time, energy, and attention were in the service of lust towards a vision.

Create a vision for you life, break it down into goals, and set daily habits that pull you towards something meaningful.

Let the fire of lust be the engine that drives you, not the trap that drains you.

Your lust wants release and the best way to do this is by giving yourself a transformation.

5. Regulate Your Nervous System

Often, lust spikes when you’re dysregulated and feeling anxious, bored, or stressed:

That inner tension is real but if you don’t know how to sit with it, breathe through it, and process it consciously, then you’ll default to autopilot and reach for a quick dopamine hit.

Learn to regulate your nervous system by learning to truly:

Breathe.
Meditate.
Ground yourself.
Move your body.

Build mindfulness, cultivate presence, and train yourself to to feel your horniness without needing to act on it (this is called Urge Surfing).

When you can hold tension without exploding, you become real (and real is always powerful).

Overcoming lust is about mastering your cravings so you can grow real.

Overcoming Lust: Burn Away the Unreal

Lust isn’t your enemy but the way you’ve been managing it might be:

When you start to see your lust as a powerful fire that can either destroy you or drive you, you gain back your power and put yourself on the path to a real life.

The key is to direct the fire to burn away the ego and to let go of the false ideas you’ve had about yourself and your worth along with any illusions of what sex is ‘supposed’ to be.

Practical Steps

Commit to a 30-day dopamine detox from porn and meaningless sex.
Track your urges and what emotional states trigger them so that you can get to know your fire.
Create a vision for your life that excites you and write it down.
Use the Awareness, Acceptance, Action framework:
- Awareness: Journal about your identity beliefs around sex.
- Acceptance: Explore your shadow with compassion, not shame.
- Action: Replace time-wasting behaviours with value-creating habits.
Practice a daily nervous system reset: try breathwork, cold showers, mindful walks, or yoga.
Get around real people. Find or build a community where real conversations matter and lust isn’t treated as either taboo or a trophy.

You are not a slave to lust.

You are a man capable of transforming that fire into purpose, presence, and power.

It starts when you stop looking for escape and start living for something real.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to overcome your lust and start living your real life, then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you change your own trajectory once and for all.

Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.

It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.

This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).

Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.

Join the 7-Day Bare Ass Minimum (BAM) Challenge and start to implement foundational health habits and a powerful life vision only a week from now.