Harmful effects of porn on the brain

Harmful effects of porn on the brain.

Porn is Addictive:  

Like any addiction, be it smoking, overeating, alcohol consumption, gambling, drugs etc porn addiction also disturbs the natural balance of a healthy brain.

Why is porn addictive?

Obviously, because it releases chemicals that are pleasure inducing by nature. Like eating chocolate or ice cream, porn viewing is also pleasurable. But it releases way more dopamine than any other substance and in a short time.

As far as consuming ice cream or any other food craving is concerned, after a limit, we stop having it, either hunger is fulfilled or brain naturally rejects further consumption. We cannot eat any sugary food items the whole day, no matter how tasty it is.  But with porn, we can be stuck on it for hours, endlessly looking out for the stuff that stimulates us maximum and this can go on until ejaculation happens. But again when we are slightly bored or anxious, the images keep playing in the mind and tendency to fall for it and again go back to porn is high. We continue it until total exhaustion.

Inability to embrace withdrawal symptoms is another reason why people fail at attempts to stop watching porn. The unavoidable discomfort that naturally arises in this phase tends to force one to keep relying on porn itself as a temporary escape from this discomfort.

There is an in-built cue-routine-reward system in the brain which was necessary for the survival of human species in ancient times. Cue is a ‘trigger’, a routine is something that is often done when there is a particular ‘trigger/cue’ and reward is the final result achieved after following the routine for a cue. Here we are talking about the routine ‘porn-watching’, trigger/cue can be different for each individual, and the reward is a pleasure.
The cue can be boredom or some other discomfort or being alone in the bedroom or thought of a woman etc. Once a particular ‘cue-routine-reward system’ is formed in the brain, there is a tendency for it to be repeated, no matter how harmful it can be.

Loss Of Connections and Isolation: 

 What we get from porn is a high dopamine rush which is part of the activation of reward circuitry in the brain, so instead of talking to people or connecting with people, a porn addict might just try to get the same feeling or even more 'high' through porn. This creates a kind of isolation, guilt, and secrecy that you are doing something wrong, which could lead to loneliness, and also worsens depression. Often when we are addicted, we keep repeating the cycle endlessly hoping against hope that this will be the last time. Drive for making intimate connections get replaced with a drive for the temporary relief through porn, but leading to more loneliness in the long term.


Disrupts the natural bonding ability: Instead of being taken through the mouth and then into the bloodstream, porn is a drug that we take in through eyes and ears. It releases chemicals like dopamine at a high level, leading to addiction and dependency.

Watching porn can release an excess amount of chemicals associated with lovemaking and bonding which is supposed to be released when partners make love. The risk here is that the brain can get conditioned to only release these chemicals with high hardcore porn materials whereas failing to feel the same with a woman or partner.

Acquiring Wrong Information:  

The means of female orgasms depicted in porn are rarely the case with real women outside porn. We are being loaded with wrong ideas of what a woman actually prefers when it comes to orgasm and the ways in which she would prefer to be aroused by the male partner. When you as a youngster had sexual urges for the first time, you would not have naturally visualized some of the extreme scenes including unnatural sex (you did not even have to imagine such dirty things to have an erection before watching porn) until you were introduced to it through porn or some of your friends telling it to you. Unless a girl is equally addicted to porn from a young age and believes that what is shown in porn is the real sex and real men are like that, you might have a tough time in reality when having sex with a real woman.

Wrong Sexual Script: 

The natural conditioning and ideas of lovemaking, bonding, healing, empowering sexual acts with the partner gets replaced with unnatural script learned through continuous watching of porn. Leading to more eroticism, objectification, promiscuity, and misogyny. Seeing your partner as a mere object of pleasure and destroying the possibility of an awakening of real love and security in the relationship. 


Outlook Towards Woman:  

There is a risk of conditioning yourself to just see women as an object of pleasure and a means to release frustration, to such an extent that we even forget that they are also emotional and complex human beings like we forget ourselves as if our life depends on porn-induced pleasure.

There is a natural tendency to be attracted to the opposite sex, which is in our very biology just for the mere sake of reproduction and it should not be confused with pleasure addiction, pervertedness and sexual violence often injected through porn culture.


Criminal Mentality:  

When we are addicted to violent sex scenes depicted in the porn videos, to the point that we only derive relief through such violent contents, it increases our chances to be desensitized to violent sexual crimes that a person can be unconsciously motivated to act out sexual crimes in real life. Most rape cases, gang rapes, any such related violent cases were reported to be done by people who had been regularly exposed to pornography.

If you are a regular porn viewer and have a little awareness of yourself, then you would have noticed in yourself that you started off with magazine pictures, soft porn and gradually moved onto harder and more sadomasochistic content to derive the same pleasure you achieved once through soft porn. Not that everyone will end up as criminals; people with little control over impulses might act out under the possible circumstances.


Masturbating to porn:  

When finally it's not just viewing, but also to actually masturbate to porn, this goes against our natural conditioning to find a mate and ejaculate for the purpose of reproduction, we begin to depend on porn instead of wife/mate for relieving from sexual tensions.


Desensitization:  

According to studies when people start watching porn, there is a huge flood of dopamine in the brain. And we have receptors that are sensitive to the dopamine released. Over time, the receptors that were once very sensitive become less sensitive and would require more release of dopamine to stimulate the receptors. This is desensitization. And hence each time we would need heavier hard porn stuff to release more chemicals just enough to stimulate the same feeling we had as for the first time with a relatively soft content. 


Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction:  

It is now very easier to understand how erectile dysfunction can occur through frequent porn indulgence since we had understood 'desensitization'. Suppose you use to get an erection from just a porn image earlier, after repeated exposure, your sensitivity towards that image decreases and you find it difficult to have an erection as before, so you would need more hardcore images or videos to get a proper erection along with the release of chemicals.

In other words, the more porn you watch, the more and harder and more graphic porn you need in order to get it up and you find yourself in the same situation when you are to have sex with your wife. 


Combined with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: 

  If a person has an OCD tendency, what can be observed with porn addiction is that, suppose he had reached a stage where he depends on teen pornography stuff for getting stimulated. Each time he is being along with teens or seeing teens, the porn-induced response can be triggered physically along with mental images of porn. Making the person confused and beat himself up with thoughts of being a pedophile etc or might unconsciously act out. The person might be a good person otherwise but the porn memories can haunt him in reality. The person who already has a history of OCD can have a tough time dealing with it.


Overcoming porn addiction.


When it comes to recovery, recovery means to move towards a state of equilibrium as it was before being exposed to the high and low tides of porn indulgence and withdrawal. So the focus is to eliminate porn watching and also dealing with the withdrawal discomforts and incorporating new changes in daily life.

To overcome porn or any addiction is to, first of all, be awake and aware of what is actually happening within you.
Tendencies to watch porn can arise due to many reasons, maybe you feel you are not good and you want to avoid that feeling or due to stress in daily life, work-life stress, boredom, habitual laziness, procrastination habit etc.
So there are triggers/cue that lead you to porn-watching or any other addiction. You have to be aware of your particular cues/triggers. And it is different for each individual.

It's not through will-power without any basic awareness and constant observation of what triggers you into the addiction habit, that one can successfully beat addiction. 


Replacement Strategy:

Maybe your 'cue' could be like you feel angry or feeling tired or lethargic and then you have a tendency to slip into the old toxic habit. So what most people do is they kind of try to display will-power with some unrealistic expectations and after some time they go back to hell (old habit) worse. Instead, a good strategy that you can adopt is to notice your 'cue' and make a decision to do something else (other than old toxic routine). That is 'Replacement'.

For eg: You may be feeling little tired and laying down in your bed, your immediate tendency might be to take your phone and scroll mindlessly forever on facebook without even knowing what is it that you want to look for, or check out for something pleasurable or finally towards a porn site. Instead, you take time to think and write down what all 'Replacement' strategies you can adopt in your daily life situation.

-It could be like watching that movie you had downloaded for over a year and yet had not found the time to play it and watch it.
-It could be blogging about your favorite movies or anything you like.
-It could be searching and preparing a list of the type of movies (obviously not porn movie) that you would like to watch.
-Creating a playlist of songs you might enjoy while going out for a walk. Or even just going out for a walk or cycling.
-Make your dream day list of activities, a day which would be filled with activities you really wanted to do.
-Getting some exercises, stretching etc.
-Reading at least one page of that book you wanted to read.

-Calling a friend or a relative and asking if he is fine.
-Helping your mother or wife in cooking.

-Taking a paper and writing down things that stress you in your life and express yourself fully on the paper. Maybe some options or helpful ideas might pop up in your head.

-Blocking all the porn sites on your phone etc. Find the best app that does the job and install it.

Make at least one change a day first. An example would be, suppose you want to wake up early, but when alarm rings, you might lose it and go back to sleep, instead you just decide to get a glass of water, sit down and drink it first, this becomes a routine change.

Anything is better than mindlessly wasting energy on your toxic addictive routine.


Self Discipline:  

It's not about punishing yourself. It's training yourself to help yourself get over the habitual toxic patterns. Once you have the knowledge on what is actually happening and about all the strategies you can utilize to fight the addiction, then you need to push yourself to be disciplined to actually do it. Knowledge is power but you have to exercise that power in daily life.

Delayed Gratification: 

Another very important thing you need to master is delayed gratification. Our minds want instant gratification, we need to get that satisfaction quickly. This is the drive behind porn addiction too because it does provide instant satisfaction/pleasure for the time being. No wonder most people end up being average and dissatisfied and give up. People who are willing to sacrifice their time and energy for the ‘process’ than impatiently waiting for the final result are the ones who have in-depth clarity and mastery in whatever tasks they undertake. So make it a habit to do things for the sake of doing it with clarity and precision and focus, and not for quickly finishing it and feeling good and then go back to old rituals. Take satisfaction in how deeply you engage in your daily tasks or works or projects or whatever. Focus on quality rather than quantity; quantity will follow behind with time as you acquire mastery over your tasks. The initial boredom has to be embraced before you really begin to be in ‘flow’ with your tasks.

A simple example would be when you prepare an email to be sent to someone, be seriously focused on it, you might be able to learn something that you had been always missing. You can make it better than someone else preparing it mindlessly without any attention. Do not scroll on the phone while preparing the email. If you want to look at the phone, stop everything and look and then come back to your task.

Rewarding yourself periodically:  

Set a small achievable milestone for yourself when you are fighting this addiction. It does not matter how small it is, all you want is to build up this new momentum. So be disciplined as you can and try to execute your days as you had planned without the indulgence in porn and with the addition of new activities into your daily life. And then when a milestone is achieved, acknowledge it and treat yourself with ice cream or a movie or browsing interesting things you like for a short while. But do not reward yourself with pornography. And then get back to your schedule. You cannot just willfully go "cold turkey" without incorporating some conscious changes in your daily life, it would make you more miserable.


Mastery over your sexual urges. 

And to master it, you need it. There is nothing wrong with getting horny. But you need to train your brain to master it. You cannot blame your sexual impulses and beat yourself up for having sexual feelings towards women. You do not deny it or try to push it away. Instead, you accept it and slowly learn to develop a healthy relationship with those feelings. They are not harmful and they are not forcing you to go and watch pornography or immediately masturbate or anything. They just rise and fall like any tides/waves unless you want to engage with it with more thoughts. Slowly it loses its grip over you. Learn to deal with it, develop the skill to channel that energy into some creative tasks or exercise or for improving concentration on your work or studies etc. Unless you learn to channel the excess sexual energy skillfully into other areas of life, sexual tension simply builds up and makes you feel more frustrated.
Listening To Body:

 Do not stimulate your sexual organ unnecessarily always just because you feel bored or tired. Let it naturally happen, let the urges arise when it arises without you forcing yourself to stimulate sexual feelings through thinking too much or searching for images and videos. Be honest and ask yourself if the body is in actual need of sexual stimulation or does it want to just rest or is it just your mind craving for pleasure. And then do something else. Your mind may make stories out of fear that you need to do it, stories like ‘you cannot live without sexual pleasure’ etc because the mind is afraid of ‘known’ coming to end. ‘Known’ is the old habitual activities, you need to be okay with letting go of the ‘known’ for anything better to happen.


Learn to see the beauty as it is: 

When you see a beautiful face, learn to see and appreciate that beauty as it is rather than seeing only through the filter of thoughts and dirty porn memory. If you had been watching too much porn, it would be initially difficult to look at a woman without being polluted by the dirty porn based visual and audio commentaries running in the head. Most of the time we are only seeing the porn based commentaries not the actual reality in front of us.

Forgiveness:

 You might sometimes slip back into old habits. Beating yourself up for it does no good. Do not be afraid of setbacks or failures, just forgive yourself and move on with your plan as early as possible. When you spend too much time thinking over the guilt, chances are you will probably go back to addiction in order to avoid the feeling of being failed or guilt. You cannot go back and undo what was done, instead learn to accept it and do not fight with thoughts of guilt, use it as an opportunity to develop a mature relationship with such difficult feelings.

Identifying Toxic Beliefs: 

Another important thing to notice is how 'guilt' and 'shame' operates in your life. Most of the people have a misunderstanding that if a person can be kept in guilt and shame, he might become good. That's a nonsense idea, 'guilt' and 'shame' itself can be the cause that keeps you trapped in addiction or any other misery.

Guilt says you made a mistake. Shame says you are bad/wrong. Guilt is much less toxic when compared to shame and it's understandable. If you feel you made a mistake, it's fine, you can stop doing it. But when shame operates in you saying you are bad for doing what you did or what you feel, chances are you will always go back to bad things.

So identify your toxic belief/thought patterns, just because you feel anxious or depressed or stressed or felt sexual urges does not mean 'you are bad' for having it, when you have such a belief there is no wonder why you try to escape from that feeling by engaging in porn or other addictions. Beliefs are mostly formed from childhood by wrong interpretation of our brain for the events that happened in life in childhood, just because we were receptive to any beliefs without questioning it, innocently at that age. So if you can get touch with it and even write down and think and question why you are carrying such a belief might be valuable. But it is not easy and it is work as your brain will try to convince you every time that such beliefs are true just because it had somehow become part of your survival mechanism even though it's toxic and totally unnecessary.