Pornography has long been a staple of young men’s lives, and it has evolved over time. It has gone from hidden issues of erotic magazines under beds to an easily accessible, multifaceted industry on the Internet.
Right now in our world, porn is easier to access than ever before. Our generation also has access to unlimited photos and entertainment through social media. But what people don’t know is, overindulging in porn has proven to affect the human brain. Continues reading and you will find out how.
Overindulgence: How Watching Porn Is Actively Ruining Your Life
1. It Rewires Your Brain.
According to a study by Cambridge University, researchers have found “compulsive porn users react to porn cues in the same way that drug addicts react to drug cues.”
How it works is the brain has something called the reward circuit, which developed during simpler hunter-gatherer times to produce dopamine for naturally rewarding things like food, sex and connection.
However, there are extreme versions of these rewards, like high-calorie foods or a bombardment of boobs, that provide too much dopamine and can override our natural satiation mechanisms.
The reaction that triggers in your brain from porn is extremely similar to the reaction from drug abuse.
What happens is, your brain has a molecular switch that creates an excessive repetitive cycle, promoting a craving to continue receiving that reward.
This extreme binge cycle of dopamine received through porn produces the same side effects drug addicts have: a numbed pleasure response, hyper-reactivity and the erosion of will power, as your frontal cortex changes.
2. You Build a Tolerance
Like anything that produces pleasure, porn can be addictive. And like anything addictive, you can build up a tolerance for it.
Heavy porn consumption is an arousal addiction, in which you need more or different ways to keep receiving the same high from a dopamine release.
In his TED talk, physiology teacher, Gary Wilson, explains that once you’ve seen the same porn over and over again, your brain wants something different, merely for novelty, shock or surprise.
That’s when you see yourself downloading more porn. It starts out with a man and a woman, and next thing you know, you see yourself downloading extreme porn.
It is known as the Coolidge effect, and dopamine levels surge for each novel image the viewer sees. Every new babe on the screen provides a new blast of dopamine.
This is how high-speed Internet porn varies from porn of the past: You can receive a new dopamine blast with a mouse click, constantly providing yourself with more and more pleasure.
And just like with all addictions, you may be in over your head before you know it.
Porn allows you to explore all of your curiosities, including ones you never imagined being interested in.
The problem with porn addiction is there is no one to see the damage, no one to say whether what you are doing is right or wrong.
This is because people don’t really know what you’re going through unless they snoop your browser history.
One wipe of your search history covers your tracks, and your dirty little secret is safe.
3. It Dilutes Your Real Sex Life
In his TED talk, Wilson describes the differences between real sex and porn. Masturbation and porn focuses on isolation, “voyeurism, clicking, searching, multiple tabs fast-forwarding” and “constant novelty.” while real
Real sex focuses on “courtship, touching, being touched, smells, pheromones, emotional connection and interaction with a real person.”
Over time, your brain adapts to porn because, it becomes exposed to it much more often than real sex.
Excessive abuse can not only change your brain, but it can change your male organ (Pen1s).
That same Cambridge University study found “over 50 percent of subjects (average age: 25) had difficulty achieving erections with real partners, yet could achieve erections with porn.”
Erectile dysfunction is no longer your grandfather’s problem; it’s yours.
How To Fix it?
The craziest thing about all of this is when researchers initially tried to conduct studies on porn use, they couldn’t find any 18- to 25-year-old men who didn’t use porn.
The only thing that has been proven to reverse the damage is to quit porn. Try as hard as you can to.
There hasn’t been enough evidence conducted through real scientific studies to back this data yet, but groups like Wilson’s website and Reddit’s NoFap are grassroots examples that provide testimonials of first-hand success.
Most of the folks have seen results after one to two months, including increased sensitivity in their sex organs and a reversal of their erectile dysfunction.
Another promising result from quitting porn is a decrease in anxiety. As I mentioned above, porn is an arousal addiction, and arousal addiction symptoms are easily mistaken as ADHD, social anxiety, depression, performance anxiety and OCD. That explains why every boy in school has ADHD.
Here is a different way to think about it: When you watch porn, it is you, sitting in a chair, sweaty and naked, typically trying to fornicate with yourself to a glowing screen of images.
That is a very lowly state for the human to have evolved to, and you are so much better than that.
Use your imagination, or get out of the house and find someone who will do whatever your sexuality desires with you.
An old fashioned may be old fashioned, but it’s better than screwing yourself.
Culled from: elitedaily.com
