Watching porn is normal, and dangerous.
It’s 12:00am.
You’re sitting at your computer, kind of bored. You think about going to sleep.
But not before a quick orgasm.
It’ll help you sleep. It reduces the chance of prostate cancer too.
As your fingers type in your favourite porn depository, adrenaline rushes through every inch of your body. Before you know it, there are 7 tabs open — each with a different girl in a different sex position.
You carefully albeit sporadically decide which girl you’re going to orgasm over tonight. And then you do the deed.
A beautiful euphoria rushes through your bloodstream, eradicating all pain and replacing it with ecstasy. But this euphoria is short-lived.
Slowly, dread and shame crawl up your skin.
You just want the euphoria back.
. . .
Masturbating is Pleasurable
If this tale is frighteningly familiar, you’re not alone. Almost every heterosexual male has lived through this cycle.
To explain this phenomenon and its impacts, let’s start with dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter responsible for controlling the brain’s reward and pleasure centres.
Behaviours such as eating and sex release dopamine because of their necessity to survival. Due to dopamine activating the brain’s reward system, you become more inclined to seek out these behaviours in the future.
It’s most commonly depicted when talking about addiction that drugs like cocaine, heroin and meth are the culprits. But it is now evident that various behaviours which repeatedly reinforce the reward, motivation and memory circuitry can all lead to addiction.
This includes pornography.
Behaviours such as eating and sex release dopamine due to their necessity for survival. It’s no wonder that watching porn, masturbating and eventually reaching orgasm is so pleasurable. Our brains are wired to seek out this behaviour.
. . .
The Come Down: Dopamine Deficiency
Sexual stimuli is the most dopamine inducing activity that you can naturally experience. While enjoying pornography, your dopamine levels raise to around 200% of what is normal.
These abnormal levels of dopamine fuck with your mood.
Watching porn for extended periods of time, keeping your dopamine level so artificially high tricks our brains into thinking this is the new “normal”.
Since our bodies are constantly trying to achieve homeostasis, these consistently high levels of dopamine create plastic changes to the brain, desensitising neurons so that they are less affected by it and decreasing the number of receptors available.
How does this impact your life?
Let’s look an extreme case of weak dopamine receptors.In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University published a study where they artificially stimulated the dopamine receptors of rats so much that they couldn’t enjoy anything except the stimulation given by the scientists. They didn’t even want to eat anymore — leading to death by starvation.
It should be no surprise then, that in humans dopamine deficiency leads to:
- attention deficits
- depression
- lack of motivation
- low libido
- social anxiety
- insomnia
While this list isn’t conclusive, I hope you see where we’re getting at.
If you can enjoy ecstasy right now with porn, why would you spend months and years going to the gym, becoming more intelligent and in general getting your life on track and reap the pleasure then?
Achieving an orgasm through masturbation is effortless. You open up your laptop and in a few mouse clicks and abracadabra!
Porn does not require emotional intelligence. Porn does not require communication with another human being. Porn does not talk back.
Porn is safe.
. . .
So Horny You Can’t Help It
While the late Sigmund Freud communicated some bizarre ideas, his work did have a certain basis in reality. Freud believed that life was built around tension and pleasure — and that all tension was a build up of libido.
This means that subconsciously, we will redirect our motivation for ungratified sexual tension towards other activities.
It should come as no surprise then that many men who have quit masturbating have reported:
- increased energy and motivation
- improved confidence
- increased focus
- better habits
In Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, he speculates that “the men of greatest achievement are men with highly developed sex natures; men who have learned the art of sex transmutation”.
Masturbation kills this tension.
Directing your energy towards activities that better your life is the opportunity cost of masturbation. You could be exercising, reading, writing or an infinite amount of other activities which you can put your mind to.
If porn is making a negative impact on your life, feel free to join NoFap. This community has proven to be useful to me in my journey to quit porn.
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