How Chastity Transforms Your Life
And why impurity is harming you more than you think.
I‘ve given lots of talks on chastity to youth groups over the past few years, and it’s always interesting to realize how many misunderstandings there are about chastity. The main one is that most people view chastity as a restrictive rule that is all about what you shouldn’t do:
Don’t have sex before marriage. Don’t watch porn. Don’t lust. Don’t, don’t, don’t.
But this framing is completely backwards. Chastity is an active virtue, which isn’t even primarily about restriction, but about transformation and about properly ordering your sexuality. This ordering of your desires makes you more like God intended you to be, and it clears your intellect, your will, and your soul from the cloudiness that sin causes.
Chastity goes beyond the spiritual realm. Of course it’s absolutely necessary to save your soul (and yes, unrepented mortal sexual sin can be enough to separate you from God’s grace). But even if that weren’t true, the practical benefits alone—which most people don’t even know exist—would be more than enough reason to pursue this virtue.
I didn’t always live chastely, but thanks to God’s grace, I do now, and in this article I want to share with you all the things that change for the better when you commit to pursuing purity.
How Chastity Transforms Your Entire Life
#1: Chastity transforms your relationships
Unchastity trains you to use people for your own pleasure. Porn, hookup culture, uncontested lust, all of it conditions you to see others (especially women) as objects for your gratification. Chastity fixes this:
With women: You stop filtering every interaction with a woman through the lens of sexuality. As you start to purify your heart by pursuing chastity, you stop seeing women as things to be possessed and you start seeing them as God made them.
With men: Your friendships naturally deepen because you’re not enslaved to comparison, competition over women, or superficial sexual talk. Most of the conversations in groups of men nowadays are about sex and women. When you practice chastity, you make space for more elevated topics of conversation and for your friendships to deepen through the common pursuit of virtue.
The most important transformation that occurs in your relationships is that you stop seeing people through the lens of disordered sexuality and see them as integrated humans with dignity, made in the image of God. For example, those who watch pornography frequently slowly allow it to convince them that every relationship, every conversation, every interaction has a sexual component to it, when that is obviously not the case. It’s really crazy to notice just how much unchastity poisons your relationships, but this only becomes clear when you’ve practiced chastity and seen the difference for yourself.
The main point is this: When you stop seeing people through the lens of 'what can I get from them,' you can finally, truly love them. Real love: willing their good, not using them for pleasure and gratification.
#2: Chastity transforms your self-worth
Sexual incontinence destroys your self-respect. Every time you fall for the lies of the enemy and pursue disordered sexual acts, you are making yourself less human and giving into your animal nature. Slowly, you start to accept (unwillingly and subtly), that you can’t control yourself, that your desires rule over you, and that you are not good enough to have the ordered sexuality God calls you to have.
Chastity helps you rebuild your subconscious sense of dignity and agency. When you prove to yourself that you can say no to impulses, and sacrifice empty, immediate pleasure for the sake of a higher good, you develop a deep confidence that carries over into every area of your life.
Your integrity and sense of identity also change:
You become a man of your word to yourself and God. You stop living a secret life, and become coherent in what you preach and what you practice.
Your worth and your identity stop being tied to sexual conquests or female attention/validation. You start rooting your identity on God and not on any external factors.
A man enslaved to sexual impurity, on a deep, sometimes even subconscious level, stops respecting himself, as he knows he’s controlled by his appetites and would betray his principles when temptation comes. The chaste man, on the other hand, walks with his head held high because he knows where his identity comes from, he knows God has strengthened his self-control, and knows he’s not hiding any skeletons in his closet. Bear in mind, this confidence isn’t pride, but the healthy self-respect that appears when you know you’re doing the right thing and living coherently.
#3: Chastity transforms your masculinity
In a world in which maintaining chastity is so difficult (because the enemy has made sure that we encounter temptation at every step), the man who manages to develop the self-control needed to live a chaste life immediately stands out.
Masculinity is built by doing challenging things for the sake of a higher good, and living chastely is one of the hardest challenges to overcome in the modern era. But that just means it’ll make you a much stronger, more virtuous man.
True masculinity requires self-governance, sacrifice, and the ability to delay gratification, and chastity builds all of those at once. I recommend you read this article where I dive deep into how chastity builds true masculinity:
#4: Chastity purifies your intellect
Lust clouds your judgment. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that “the flesh acts on the intellective faculties, not by altering them, but by impeding their operation in the aforesaid manner.” 1 In other words, sexual sin prevents you from using your brain capacity properly.
Think about that for a second: Sins of the flesh make you more stupid. When you understand that, you realize why so many people seem to have lost all common sense in the modern world: their flesh is clouding their intellect.
Chastity purifies your mind, making you sharper, more focused, and more capable of pursuing truth. The specific transformations that occur are:
Mental clarity: Porn addiction and other forms of sexual disorder create brain fog. Chastity clears it. You can focus on difficult tasks, think through complex problems, and pursue intellectual work without constant distraction.
Moral reasoning: Sexual sin requires rationalization in the form of constant mental gymnastics to justify behavior you know—deep down—is wrong. This corrupts your ability to reason morally in all areas. Chastity restores intellectual honesty and allows you to think and act coherently with the moral law written in your heart.
Creativity and energy: Sexual energy redirected becomes creative energy. The great saints, artists, philosophers, and builders channeled their sexual drive into their work. You have finite energy, and when you stop wasting it on shallow pursuits, you become free to use that energy to contemplate, create beauty, pray, and develop virtue.
Chastity acts in your intellect by removing your brain fog and allowing you to see things more clearly. The man who lives chastely is able to reason better, to pursue truth more honestly, and to understand his reality more objectively. The mental gymnastics that sexual immorality forces confuse you and mislead you, whereas chastity allows you to see the world with purer, more honest eyes.
How to Live Chastely
When people understand the profound importance of the virtue of chastity, they are usually convinced that it’s a virtue worth pursuing —at least that’s been my experience in the talks I’ve given.
The question that arises naturally then is “but how?”
How can we live chastely in a world that tries so hard to ensure we don’t?
What follows is my best answer plus some battle-tested resources that will help you finally overcome sexual immorality.
Sacramental Life is the Key
The very first thing I want to make clear is that this battle will be futile if you attempt to defeat the foe of lust by relying on your own strength. You need Christ to be victorious. Only He can strengthen you and purify you. You cannot go into battle thinking that you’re strong enough to do this on your own. You are not.
But Christ is.
Learn to rely on Him and to invite Him into this battle, to ask for His grace and strength and call out to Him for help.
That’s the foundation of victory. You can’t white-knuckle your way to chastity. You need grace. The sacraments are the means by which God wants to dispense grace. So use them!
Go to confession often. Beyond helping you stay accountable, confession helps remove power from the sin, by allowing you to experience God’s mercy firsthand. Additionally, when you speak your sins out loud, they also lose some of their power over you. On a more practical note, the examination of conscience required for confession helps you understand your triggers and be more mindful of them. Of course, the most important aspect of the sacrament of confession is the grace that you receive, which is a supernatural help from God Himself. Confession is a non-negotiable if you actually want to change.
Go to mass as often as possible (Sunday Mass is the bare minimum), and receive the Eucharist (if you’re not in a state of mortal sin). Go to adoration and spend some time with Christ sacramented. Look at Him and let Him look at you. Give your struggles to Him and cry out for His help.
Practical Resources to Help You Quit
You also need to surround yourself with likeminded men who are fighting this battle, you need to pray often, read your Bible, and as we said, go to confession, and strive to remain in a state of Grace. That needs to be the foundation upon which you strive to build the virtue of chastity and get rid of this vice once and for all. But it’s also necessary to take practical, decisive actions in order to finally get rid of the vice of pornography addiction and other forms of sexual immorality.
One resource I’ve found helpful is Relay, a Christian app designed specifically for overcoming pornography and sexual sin. It provides structured accountability, evidence-based protocols, and a community of men fighting the same battle.
There’s a ton of positive testimonies of men who have found freedom from pornography addiction, masturbation, and other forms of sexual immorality with the help of the structured, evidence-based protocol that Relay offers. Many men (even some close friends) have also told me personally it made the difference after other methods failed.
If you have been trying other methods and they haven’t worked, I recommend you give this one a try and see if it helps you. You can get a 7-day free trial with the code AETERNUM:
Additionally, and because this article is getting long enough, if you have some questions about Relay or would like me to recommend some other articles/resources, feel free to shoot me a DM or leave a comment on this article. I’ll be more than happy to share whatever I can with you.
One final piece of advice: try to eliminate all triggers from your environment. Social media is designed to show you semi-nude women. Mark every provocative post as “not interested.” Unfollow accounts (even “friends”) who post provocative content. This might sound extreme. But your soul is worth it.
Don’t just clean up your digital environment. Clean up your actual environment too. Throw away movies, magazines, or even books that serve as triggers. Stop going to degenerate parties. Stop hanging out with people who lead you to temptation and sin.
Everything around you can either aid you in your pursuit of virtue, or hinder you. Again, extreme measures are in order here. It’s 100% worth losing those “friends” who constantly cause you to sin. Make sure that your environment fosters purity and beauty instead of lust, temptation and sin.
I hope this article helps you. Stick to the advice, try out Relay, and let me know how it goes. Remember, also, that the only way to fail is to give up, and that all that Christ asks from you is the perseverance to return to Him if you fail.
God is with you, you are in my prayers, and surely too in the prayers of all the men who fight this battle alongside you.
Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
— 1 Corinthians 6:18-20
May God bless you and keep you.
Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,
Juan
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Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q. 15, A. 3
I would echo the recommendation of Relay app: I find it to be very useful
Great post. Many of us have no idea the psychological effects it has on us and our marriages. Abstinence before marriage creates better marriages and a better society as a whole.
The way God intended.