How do you fight an enemy you never knew you had in the first place? How do you swim against the tide and hope to get upstream? In this post, we take an in-depth look at the dangers of watching porn.
Where do I start this? This has been a revelation for me for the past 5 years and along the line and through the rigors of quitting porn, I have garnered a lot to say about this issue.
Sometimes I just want to stand on top of a building and scream my lungs out to people to stop watching porn.
I want to tell the government to make it a constitutional law for parents to install porn filters on their children’s devices until they are 21 years of age.
That’s how much it should mean to us as a society. High-speed internet porn has been an instrumental tool in making my generation mediocre.
This is the new menace in town and it is perfectly hidden in our blind spot that before we know what’s going on, it’s already etched its root in our brains.
What you will learn
What I wish my parents had done in my household when I was young
• Told me about the dangers associated with porn and effects it’s going to have on my life.
• Installed porn blockers and internet filters with accountability on the devices I have access to.
Here are the dangers of watching porn I wished I had been told when I was growing up and maybe I wouldn’t have become a porn addict.
Porn takes over your brain
We will go on a very short neurological journey of the way that frequently watching porn can adversely affect the brain.
Dopamine pathway hijacking. Making porn very addictive
The first thing that porn does to the brain is that it messes with your reward circuit and hijacks it. Because it floods the brain with an unhealthy amount of dopamine, the number of dopamine receptors is reduced and porn watching ultimately becomes the only thing you want to do all the time because it is the only thing that rewards you.
You start chasing dopamine hits through porn much like a junkie chase a drug high.
Brain fog and inability to focus
This is known as the porn fog that always clouds your mind when you become addicted to porn. Your mind is constantly replaying porn scenes you have watched in the past and you continually fantasize about every little thing you see.
I think you will agree that it is pretty hard to concentrate and focus on a task at hand when your mind is always thinking porn.
Hypofrontality; which leads to compulsiveness, inability to delay gratification, and depletion of working memory and short-term memory
Porn addiction leads to hypofrontality which is a common condition amongst addicts. This is the reduction in the volume of the frontal region of the brain. This frontal region of the brain is also known as the CEO of the brain.
It is responsible for an array of cognitive functioning which gets impaired when you watch porn too much. It is responsible for willpower, working memory, short-term memory, ability to focus and concentrate, and the ability to delay gratification.
As regards your willpower, if you would like to know how it works, and how to boost it specifically for breaking your porn-watching habits, you can get this manual I’ve written here
Porn takes over your relationships
Excessive porn watching leads to emotional detachment from the rest of the world. It causes numbness in other activities that allow you to bond with fellow humans.
It makes you lonely
Since porn watching cannot be a group activity, you tend to do this alone in your bedroom. You tend to spend hours alone in your bedroom watching porn when you can be spending that time interacting with others.
Also, porn has the allure that can make you want to choose it over hanging out with friends or being outdoors.
It makes you lie to loved ones and this holds you back from forging healthy relationships with them
The effects of porn are not only limited to you and it can also affect those that you love. You are always indoors watching porn and when your parents or wife ask what you have been up to, the next course of action is to lie.
It has been found that 56% of divorces cases are because one of the partners became addicted to internet porn. also, according to sciencemag, divorce rates double when people start watching porn.
When you become addicted to porn, you are not free. You are always watching the door and scared of being found out if someone should accidentally walk in on you. You are always worried about the shame you will feel if you are found out by your spouse or family.
Gives you an unconscious huge amount of shame
Because of all the lying and deceit associated with porn use, there is a shame factor that comes attached to it. And shame has a way of holding us back from expressing how we are feeling to our loved ones.
For instance, a husband that keeps lying about his porn habit to his wife will feel guilt which will result to shame on an unconscious level. And unconscious shame has a subtle way of weighing us down and holding us back in forging a trusting and healthy relationship with our loved ones.
Might escalate social anxiety disorder (SAD)
Another thing that excessive porn watching does is that it can escalate a case of Social Anxiety Disorder. Dopamine has been associated with being an introvert or an extrovert.
Porn takes over your Sex life
When you watch porn all the time, your brain becomes desensitized and you kind of get attached to only watching porn. As a result of this, a lot of things can happen to your sex life as a result
Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction
Most of us grew up watching high-speed internet porn before having sex for the first time. This makes the probability of getting PIED very high. This might be as a form of premature ejaculation or delayed ejaculation.
As regards your willpower, if you would like to know how it works, and how to boost it specifically for breaking your porn-watching habits, you can get this manual I’ve written here
Objectification of real-life females
Because porn always depicts a female as a submissive sexual object, an avid porn watcher always tend to carry this notion forth to reality which makes it hard for him to see females as people with their own stories and emotions.
Low libido which makes regular sex boring
When you watch porn always, you become numb to regular sexual stuff that used to turn you on. So, regular sex becomes very boring and you kind of always have low libido when it comes to real-life sex.
Coupled with the fact that you most definitely will develop a form of erectile dysfunction as we’ve established earlier, having regular sex becomes a dreaded and tedious task which is not supposed to be so.
A Shift in Sexual Preference
In some not so rare cases, excessive porn watching can result in an individual have a change in their sexual orientation when porn use has become addictive.
As porn use increases in order to satisfy the dopamine craving that the porn addict will always experience, more novel and kinkier porn are required up to the stage that porn genres that are violent, demeaning, or entirely different from the person’s sexual preference will be required to “get off”.
Straight people might start getting off on gay porn and vice versa or more extreme form of porn which the individual would find repulsive in real life.
Bye Bye Emotions and Intimacy
Because porn is not designed to show any emotional or intimate side whatsoever, the brain of the porn addict is gradually trained to also behave like this in real life. Porn is usually sex on cue and the emotional part is always left out, with time, the porn addict starts modeling this type of behavior towards real-life people.
Having unrealistic sexual expectation from oneself and partner
Partners of porn addicts always report that most porn addicts always want to replicate what they have watched in pornographic films.
What porn addicts don’t know is that although the porn world portrays a form of perfection, but behind the scenes, there is rehearsal, scene cuts (for performers to recuperate), make-ups that cover imperfections, enhanced lighting, different camera angles to hide flaws, hard drugs, sexual enhancement drugs like Viagra, and ultimately acting on the performer’s part to depict submission, enjoyment, and satisfaction.
Most people especially guys that get addicted to porn always have an inadequate opinion of themselves when it comes to their sexual side. Over the years, porn would have built up an unrealistic expectation of what is acceptable sexually from them and their partners.
You can learn more about willpower, concentration and focus, and the prefrontal cortex in this manual
Porn takes over your time
14 hours per week down the drain
Watching porn frequently tends to increase porn watching time as usage increases. If you spend an average of two hours daily surfing and watching porn on the internet, that is a whooping fourteen hours in a week. That’s fourteen hours of your life you are never getting back.
Porn takes over your energy when you add masturbation to the mix
You always feel like a lazy f**ck
When you add the birth child of porn, which is masturbation into the mix, the mental, emotional, and physical aftermath is a drainage that zaps your energy like a succubus.
Closing words on the dangers of watching porn
As a society, we have to turn our attention to this.
The disease is real, it is no more something that is just made up. Several pieces of evidence are supporting the adverse effects that porn watching is having on our lives. These evidences are both scientific and real-life people’s.
If you are an avid porn watcher, then you experience some of what is listed above. Take it from me, that is not a good way to live.
Thankfully, people are getting sensitized on the issue of porn addiction and are reporting the benefits of NoFap challenge.
Although it is hard to break the porn cycle once you’ve become addicted, people are doing it.
If you are still struggling with breaking the addiction, get filters up on your devices and make yourself accountable. This is the proven way to ensure success in breaking porn addiction.
In closing, I would like to call the attention of parents to the act safeguarding their children against this addiction by educating them on the negative effects it will have on their lives if they go down that road.
Also, it is your job as a parent to monitor your children’s activities online by installing effective filters on your devices and making them accountable for their activities online. There are good softwares out there that can do these. And this is one of them.
I believe that while I was growing up if these had been done in my household, I wouldn’t have become addicted to porn in the first place.