What about the opposite?
Kill of your taste buds with dangerous chilli and concentrated artificial sweeteners until cake and celery taste the same. Squick yourself out until your libido crawls into a corner to never ever come out again. Learn to love a genre of music that sounds just like tinnitus, then turn the volume up a lot. Oversaturate your brain with information until it just flows through you. Read about the most horrifying atrocities in history until your heart turns to stone.
Some of these are obviously silly. But less extreme versions of a similar principle with a bit of common sense added have seems occasionally useful in some contexts.
Learn to love a genre of music that sounds just like tinnitus, then turn the volume up a lot. Oversaturate your brain with information until it just flows through you.
From my perspective as a fan of acoustic music, many modern listening habits resemble your proposed over-saturation technique. People used to be surrounded by naturally occurring noises, or noises resulting from ordinary activity. Music was something to be sought out and treasured. With the exception of the rich and powerful, many people from the past would find the notion of tuning out me...
... or "How to Operate Your Limbic System", or "A Practical Guide to Superstimulus". That's how I see it, anyway.
Your Brain on Porn is a website mainly dedicated to exposing the addictive aspects of pornography; interpreting this in light of the blind idiot god; and then forming a community around "rebooting", or prolonged abstinence that allows the brain to re-sensitize itself to, at the least, non-fetishistic sexual pleasure. By consistently NOT accessing whatever circuit is driving one's, well, drive, one sends this loop into atrophy. Eventually, one becomes able to quit. And then one finds alternatives.
Here is why I find this site so valuable: frequently during the arguments the site owner sets up, he doesn't just bring up pornography as the culprit here. To form his clauses he draws upon research on addictions to junk food, or video games, and then tries to draw parallels to porn's effects: the escalating need of novelty due to rapidly declining pleasure response.
So I don't think it stops with porn. For me, any superstimulus is a bad superstimulus, despite the fact that some sirens are more necessary to listen to than others. It could be worth reflecting on what would actually count as a superstimulus; and then asking if one would benefit from a long hiatus from that stimulus. I'm not sure how long that cycle would be, but many "rebooters" proclaim seeing effects after three weeks, up to three months. It might not be enough to simply manage akrasia, as there could still be a chronic sensitivity problem in place. That would require time.
Here's what I thought of, so far.
Superstimulus List:
- Reduction of social anxiety. (Socially dominant monkeys have a greater density of dopamine receptors in the striatum than their less-dominant counterparts. I'm not saying that abstaining from porn will turn you into the CEO of a corporation with three girlfriends and a gimp -- I wish! -- but it sure as hell wouldn't hurt.)
- Clearer focus. (This may come from lack of wont than an actual greater ability to focus, which is fine.)
- Greater motivation.
Think of it like this: if all your adaptive needs are fulfilled, what incentive is there for your body to maximize your fitness? For all it knows, you've done a great job: you are now in the dreaded Comfort Zone.
Abstinence puts one outside of the realm of comfort, but not to the point of putting one in harm's way. It requires no "push", just self-awareness; something I would consider as the lowest hanging fruit of self-improvement.