The Truth Behind Pornography Addiction
Many of us want to stop watching porn.
We can try to use tactics and willpower. We could put away our devices before going to sleep. We could fight off the urges to pick up a device and watch it. But to stop watching it in a lasting and efficient way, we may need to address the underlying causes and improve our general condition. This is true not just for pornography, but for other drugs.
Drugs get used more and more because people over time are less excited by the same amount. The large dopamine (or excitement) released by the drug wears down dopamine receptors, making them need more to get the same effect. When drug users stop getting the initial effect of the drug they are hooked on, they need to use the drug more.
But drug users first bring the drug into their lives to escape reality. So if they can improve their real world environment and mental state, they can remove the cause of general drug use and more easily withdraw from their current use. Otherwise, tactics and willpower will only go so far, and even if they bring one drug out of the picture, a replacement would be quickly found.
For many young adults, the drug of choice may be heavy use of pornography: instant, limitless sexual novelty. Over time, we find out it comes with costs like time and energy — like other drugs. So, many of us may want to stop watching it. But without improving reality, doing so will be hard. Tactics and willpower alone will be hard. And even if some succeed in no longer watching it, without a better reality they may over time find another drug to replace the new gap in their lives — the reality they tried to escape before, that has remained the same.
What we must try to do is confront the pains first turning us to pornography — or any other drug for that matter — and wash them away.
If you try to stop watching porn without improving your reality, you’ll see how hard it is. We can only get so far on sheer willpower and tactics like device separation.
For me, getting rid of porn while improving my reality may have improved my life. I have much greater attention and mental energy without the porn. No other change in my life would otherwise explain the obvious benefit I experienced from that point onward.
Pornography streamlines access to novel sexual stimulation, artificially allowing us to masturbate and ejaculate more often. We release sexual energy unnaturally frequently, which we wouldn’t without the access to such novelty. But now without porn, and less masturbation and ejaculation and visual overstimulation, I have much more energy and receptivity to stimulation, allowing me to be much more enthused with romance and all aspects of my life.
I realized that sexual content on social media may’ve led to the porn use. So I explored ways to reduce my use of social media. I stopped checking social media notifications. I let the right number pile up to 99 and then reset to 0, again and again. While I miss out on certain social information, I control my use much better now and the benefit is worth the cost. Detaching from social media may have changed my mental environment, making it easier to withdraw from porn.
The truth behind eliminating pornography addiction is that willpower only does so much. It helps to improve your environment and address other things underlying use of pornography.
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