How Porn Negatively Impacts Your Brain, Relationships, and How to Quit
How Porn Effects Your Brain
As soon as you turn it on, your reward centers in your brain turn on. The reward system includes the ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex areas of the brain. Dopamine is secreted through these centers. Dopamine is responsible for seeking, motivation, and pleasure. This is also the reason why people get addicted. These areas light up in any pleasure inducing activity, including music, candy, and drugs. These areas of your brain increasingly get hyper stimulated in response to viewing porn. Your brain creates deeper circuits for the pleasure from viewing this. These are the same reward pathways that become desensitized with more exposure. This means you need increasingly more exposure or variety to get the same pleasure hit. The part of the brain called the Amygdala, which is responsible for emotions and survival, is also drastically effected. What happens is when the amygdala is hyperactive, it seeks rewards. This means their reward pathways have a greater response to sexual stimulus.
How Porn Effects Your Relationships
Porn can significantly change How you view your partner. It creates a scenario that makes it much more likely to cheat on your partner, even if you not in a relationship. Many men fantasize a porn scenario during sex with their partner, bringing them out of the present moment. Also, you may feel awkward around a women because it has a tendency to teach people to objectify the opposite sex, and not see the whole person.
How to Quit Porn
If you decide to quite porn, it’s best to stop all artificial sex stimulation, including social media, fantasy, magazines, and erotic literature. In time, your brain will turn to normal sensitivity. Porn use is actually a symptom of what’s going on internally. We must get to the emotional root cause if were going to heal. For this, we must know what were suppressing in place of porn. This may be past trauma, or feeling you not enough. You can read the stories of people who have done what you want to do, this can show you it’s possible. When stopping any addiction, you want to replace the activity with one of equal or greater value. This can be any activity that restores brain chemistry, like nature, walking, or exercise.
Other tips to stop-
1. Install a porn blocking software.
2. Get rid of all accounts or DVDs
3. Visit yourbrainonporn.com for a variety of tools and science to help you on your journey.
4. Get a new laptop to change your neuro association.
5. If you give in, forgive yourself and press forward.
Leave a Reply