Sexual attraction to a specific person is driven by your brain’s reward system, and you can’t simply switch it off with willpower. But you can weaken it deliberately over time by changing your habits, your thought patterns, and how much access that person has to your attention. Most crushes and intense attractions fade within a few months when you actively work against them, though deeper infatuations can take 18 months to 3 years to fully resolve.
Why Your Brain Makes This So Hard
When you’re sexually attracted to someone, your brain’s reward circuitry is doing exactly what it evolved to do. A network called the mesolimbic system links certain sensations, like seeing that person or hearing their voice, to a flood of dopamine. That dopamine reinforces the feeling and pushes you to seek more contact. It’s the same system involved in other pleasurable experiences, but attraction layers on additional hormones like cortisol (which heightens your awareness and creates that anxious, electric feeling), oxytocin (which deepens bonding), and norepinephrine (which causes the racing heart and sweaty palms). The combination makes sexual attraction feel more intense than almost any other reward your brain produces.
This is important to understand because it explains why “just stop thinking about them” doesn’t work. You’re fighting a neurochemical feedback loop. Every time you see the person, fantasize about them, or even check their social media, you’re giving that loop another hit of dopamine. The strategy, then, isn’t to suppress the feeling through force. It’s to starve the loop of fuel until it weakens on its own.
Cut Off the Dopamine Supply
The single most effective thing you can do is reduce contact with this person as much as your life allows. Every interaction, no matter how brief, reactivates the reward circuit. If you work together or share a social group, you obviously can’t disappear, but you can stop volunteering for the optional stuff: the after-work drinks, the group chat banter, the Instagram story replies.
Digital contact counts. Scrolling through someone’s photos, rereading old messages, or watching their stories all register in your brain as “contact with the rewarding stimulus.” Muting or unfollowing them isn’t dramatic. It’s practical. You’re removing triggers from your daily environment so your brain has fewer opportunities to fire up the loop.
If complete distance isn’t possible, keep interactions brief and functional. The goal is to make this person boring to your reward system. Novelty is one of the strongest drivers of attraction, and when every encounter becomes predictable and low-stimulation, your brain gradually stops treating them as special.
Stop Feeding the Fantasy
Fantasy is where most of the damage happens. You can limit real-world contact to five minutes a week, but if you’re spending an hour a night replaying scenarios in your head, your brain doesn’t know the difference. It releases the same dopamine whether the experience is real or imagined. Research on habituation confirms that when a person can vary and embellish the stimulus in their own mind, it retains its novelty and intensity. You’re essentially refreshing the attraction every time you let a fantasy play out.
When you catch yourself in a fantasy, the most useful technique borrows from cognitive behavioral therapy: notice the thought without judging it, label it (“that’s the attraction thought again”), and redirect your attention to something that demands focus. Not something passive like watching TV, but something active: a phone call, a workout, a task that requires problem-solving. The redirection needs to compete with the fantasy for your brain’s attention.
This gets easier with practice. You’re not trying to never have the thought. You’re trying to shorten the amount of time you spend with it before you move on. Over weeks, the gap between “thought arrives” and “I redirect” shrinks.
Reframe How You See Them
One commonly suggested approach is negative reappraisal: deliberately focusing on the person’s flaws, annoying habits, or incompatibilities with you. Researchers have tested this by prompting people to answer questions like “What is an annoying habit of your ex?” while measuring brain activity. The results were mixed. Negative reappraisal didn’t significantly reduce feelings of infatuation or attachment in the short term, but it did appear to decrease the brain’s motivated attention toward photos of that person. In other words, it may not instantly change how you feel, but it can reduce how magnetically your brain is drawn to them.
A more reliable version of this is to challenge the idealized image you’ve built. Attraction often involves filling in gaps with your best-case assumptions. You imagine they’d be the perfect partner, the perfect lover, the perfect complement to your life. Write down what you actually know about this person versus what you’ve projected onto them. Most of the time, you’ll find the fantasy version is carrying most of the weight. When you see that clearly, some of the spell breaks.
Redirect Your Energy Deliberately
Sexual attraction generates real physical energy: restlessness, heightened arousal, a craving for stimulation. If you don’t channel that somewhere, it circles back to the person. Exercise is the most straightforward outlet, not because it’s a cliché, but because intense physical activity competes directly for the same neurochemical resources. A hard run or a heavy lifting session burns through cortisol and generates its own dopamine, giving your reward system something else to latch onto.
Investing in new social connections helps too. Oxytocin and vasopressin, the bonding hormones that reinforce attraction, are also released during close friendships, meaningful conversations, and physical affection with people you trust. Deepening other relationships gives your brain alternative sources of the connection it’s craving.
Some people find that allowing themselves to be attracted to other people, even casually, helps break the fixation on one person. This isn’t about forcing a rebound. It’s about reminding your brain that the person you’re attracted to isn’t the only source of that feeling. Novelty resets the reward circuit. When your brain encounters a new, interesting person, it naturally redistributes some of its attention.
Give It a Realistic Timeline
There’s no precise data on how long it takes to get over a purely sexual attraction, but psychologists generally estimate that crushes fade within a few months when you’re not feeding them. More intense infatuations, the kind where you think about the person constantly and it disrupts your daily functioning, can align with what psychologist Dorothy Tennov called “limerence.” That state averages 18 months to 3 years to fully resolve, though active effort shortens the timeline considerably.
Your body does go through a kind of withdrawal. When the dopamine and oxytocin hits stop coming, you may feel flat, restless, or even mildly depressed for a while. This is your brain recalibrating to its baseline. It’s uncomfortable but temporary, and it’s actually a sign the process is working. The neurochemical association is weakening.
Progress isn’t linear. You might go two weeks feeling fine and then see the person unexpectedly and feel the full force of it again. That doesn’t mean you’re back at square one. It means your reward circuit got a fresh trigger. As long as you don’t follow up by seeking more contact or retreating into fantasy, the spike will pass faster each time.
When the Attraction Feels Uncontrollable
If you’ve been actively working on this for months and the thoughts still dominate your day, or if the attraction is causing you real distress, a therapist who works with cognitive behavioral approaches can help. The core techniques involve gradually exposing yourself to triggering thoughts or situations while resisting the urge to engage with them compulsively. Over time, this trains your brain to tolerate the discomfort without needing to act on it or ruminate.
Persistent, intrusive sexual thoughts that feel ego-dystonic (meaning they don’t align with what you actually want) sometimes overlap with obsessive-compulsive patterns. A therapist can help you distinguish between normal attraction that’s overstaying its welcome and something that needs more structured intervention. The strategies are different, and knowing which one you’re dealing with saves you a lot of frustration.