Do I have to quit altogether to use a Willpwr+ app?

You make the call.

Our opinion is that you have to do what works, and you need to be totally honest with yourself to make the decision. If your habit involves activities that aren’t ok even if frequency is reduced, like hiring prostitutes or betraying your partner in some way, or risking debt and financial ruin, then there really isn’t a choice-- you have to stop your negative habit altogether. Talk to the spouse who caught her hubby in bed with the neighbor and heard him say, “Yeah, but honey, I used to do this a lot more than I do now…”

Similarly, if you already know that you can’t control your habit for more than a few days or a few weeks --- then again, there really isn’t another choice. Clearly, uncontrolled dependence on a negative habit has significant health, financial, and social consequences that everybody except the most entrenched individuals readily see.

But there are lots of folks who don’t fit into those obvious circumstances. There’s a very long controversy, currently still ongoing, about whether addictive habits must be stopped altogether or whether a person can learn to control them.  AA and NA groups and the official position of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) have long believed that if you are addicted, there is no possible way to succeed unless you stop altogether. They believe that to suggest otherwise is dangerous and inappropriate.

Researchers such as Dr. Michael Levy and Stanton Peele, PhD., JD, strongly disagree with the AA and NIAAA stance, however,  and point out that many people are scared off from ever attempting to control their addiction because they’ve heard that they will have to stop forever. Moreover, such researchers point to success stories and estimate that about a third of former addicts can achieve good control over their substance and not relapse at higher rates than those that abstain altogether. The response to that evidence by adherents of total abstinence is that people who can adjust and become moderate users of a substance were never truly addicted in the first place.

Now what about so-called behavioral addictions such as sexual excess or anxious overeating? Here the controversy is less obvious because nobody says you have to stop having sex or you have to stop eating in order to recover. So in one way, you HAVE to learn to be a controlled consumer of your habit.  On the other hand, it is WHAT you are consuming, porn, extra-partner affairs, etc. that needs to stop if you value your present or future relationship.

One thing everybody agrees upon is that the notion of just “cutting back” is highly misleading. If you have a compulsive substance or behavioral problem, you can’t just simply cut back. If controlled drinking will work for you, you will need to learn how to use the substance safely and you will need to break the pattern of using the substance to cope with other life problems. That doesn’t happen by just deciding to “cut back.”