Is porn messing with your head?
We all know and see how porn affects your bodies. But have you ever thought about what does porn do to your brain?
Partnered sex is like nutritious food. It nourishes your body, mind, and soul. But porn is like junk food. It is tempting, addictive, and instantly available. It is easy to develop the habit of overconsuming porn. And just as junk food harms your body, porn can cause real damage to your mind.
Porn can create habit pathways in your brain by messing with your dopamine reward system. It affects the neuroplasticity of your brain and compromises your judgement. Research has shown that porn makes the reward areas of your brain light up – just like any other addictive substance. It also causes psychological and mental health issues that affect your quality of life.
We know this all sounds scary! Fortunately, there is a way out of this. You can reverse the effect of porn on your brain and restore it.
What Does Porn Do to Your Brain?
Your brain is not a static organ. It keeps evolving and changing as you experience the world around you. This process of changes in the brain is known as neuroplasticity.
When you are doing a pleasurable and repetitive activity, your brain alters itself. Your brain makes itself more efficient in doing such intense activities. So, the next time you do the activity, your brain can perform efficiently. This is like the adage – practice makes perfect.
But, your brain’s neuroplasticity can be affected by porn’s supernormal stimulus. Basically, porn gives your brain a disproportionate and exaggerated version of sexual desire. So, with repeated exposure, your brain’s neuroplasticity redefines what it considers normal when it comes to sexual activity.
Eventually, the ‘normal stimulus’ of real-life intimacy can not compete with the supernormal trigger of porn.
Porn, Dopamine, and More: What Happens When We Watch Porn?
In order to understand what does porn do to your brain? You need to know about the link between porn and dopamine.
The neurons and chemicals in your brain work together like a supercomputer to manage various physiological functions. Specifically, while watching porn, your brain is subjected to a powerful neuro-cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters.
Primarily, when you watch porn, your brain releases dopamine. This chemical activates the pathways in your brain associated with pleasure, learning, emotion, and craving. Once this pathway is built, your brain creates the urge or craving to watch porn and get your dopamine fix.
Porn and sexual activity trigger the release of oxytocin and vasopressin. These chemicals create a link between your long-term memory and the experience of sexual pleasure associated with porn. When you watch porn, your body also releases Norepinephrine (adrenaline) and endorphins, which give you a ‘high’ or heightened sensation of pleasure. After sexual release, your body releases serotonin, which helps to relax and calm you.
These chemicals are produced as a natural effect during partnered sex. They help to create memories and habit paths to increase desire and attachment between romantic partners.
Your body also releases the same chemicals when you watch porn. Moreover, as porn is designed to be hyper stimulative, the chemical reaction is stronger. With porn, the sexual cravings develop into a desire and dependency on dopamine.
Over time, your brain builds a tolerance and seeks more and more dopamine hits to achieve sexual pleasure. As a result, your brain is stuck in the dopamine reward loop, and you escalate your porn habit.
8 Scary Effects of Porn on Your Brain –
Apart from messing up your dopamine reward system, porn affects many cognitive areas of your brain. While these effects are not irreversible, their consequences are sure scary –
1. Porn is Addictive
Medically speaking, excessive porn consumption is classified as a compulsive behavior and not as an addiction. But porn has the exact same effect on your brain as an addictive drug such as alcohol. Research has shown that the brain activity in porn addiction is similar to that of drug or alcohol addiction. porn releases chemicals such as oxytocin and dopamine to activate your brain’s reward pathways.
2. Supernormal Dopamine Reaction
Chemical dopamine creates links between your habits and reward. So, when you perform certain activities (exercise, sex, eating), dopamine activates the reward centre of your brain. Excessive porn consumption results in a disproportionate dopamine response in your brain. As a result, your brain builds a tolerance to porn, and its dopamine regulation breaks down. So, your brain begins to seek more extreme stimuli to trigger the dopamine reaction.
3. Impairs Judgement and Impulse Control
The brain’s prefrontal cortex is in charge of key executive functions such as decision-making and impulse control. Excessive porn use can rewire the prefrontal cortex and impair your judgement. Although termed as ‘adult entertainment’, porn can make your brain more juvenile.
4. Harmful Effect on Mental Health
Research has linked porn consumption with mental health issues such as anxiety, stress, depression, and low self-esteem. Porn can also cause feelings of shame and guilt. Social withdrawal is another mental health consequence of porn, which makes the porn problem worse.
5. Porn Makes You Unethical
Your prefrontal cortex also regulates your sense of morality. So, when porn consumption compromises this area of your brain, you will lose your moral compass. Research has shown that people who watch porn are more likely to lie and make unethical decisions.
6. Normalizes VIolence
Porn glorifies abuse and normalizes dubious consent and violent sexual behaviour. People who watch porn are less likely to intervene during a sexual assault and more likely to support sexual violence. Men who watch porn are more likely to victim blame the survivors of sexual assault and commit acts o sexual violence.
7. Misogyny and Female Objectification
People who watch porn are more likely to objectify and dehumanize women. Research has shown that men who watch porn are likely to exhibit aggressive attitudes and aggressive behaviour towards women.
8. Risky Sexual Behavior in Teenagers
Porn puts young adults at risk of neurological, physiological, and psychological issues. exposure to pornography at an early age accelerates sexual development and increases the chance of developing promiscuous sexual attitudes.
What are the Psychological Effects of Porn on the Brain
Research has shown that watching porn has negative psychological effects on your brain.
Porn consumption is linked to a host of mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Compulsive porn use also causes self-image issues. Porn also desensitizes the viewers and makes them seek more extreme forms and types of pornographic content. Psychologically porn negatively affects your attitude towards sexual violence and objectification.
How Can I Reset My Brain After Porn?
Although the effects of porn are significant, they are reversible. Your brain is a resilient organ that can recover from serious addictive behaviours with sustained effort. Research has shown that it is possible to manage and reverse the desensitization effects of pornography.
Your brain is also a muscle. So, you can train it to resist the temptation of porn. You can teach your brain to redirect its focus onto more constructive hobbies and interests. You have to give the brain enough practice to stay away from porn every day. The more you practice, the better your brain will get at resisting porn.
Abstinence from pornographic content helps your brain to recalibrate the brain’s response to natural sexual stimuli. It can also help with normalizing the dopamine reward system of your brain.
Guilt can act as a motivating factor in recovery from porn, but shame actually increases the porn habit. So, while you recognize the harm of porn, you should not feel ashamed of your struggle with it.
The damage of porn can not be undone in a day. So, you have to be very patient and kind to yourself.
Can porn Affect Your Sexual Appetite? –
Yes. Consumption of porn, even in controlled doses, can affect your sexual appetite over time. Compulsive porn consumption can have serious negative consequences for your sexual desire and appetite.
- Internet pornography provides a supernormal stimulus that influences and facilitates compulsive sexual behaviour.
- In men, higher frequency of porn use is associated with lower levels of sexual self-competence, impaired sexual functioning, and decreased partner-reported sexual satisfaction.
- Increased consumption of internet pornography is correlated with a decrease in sexual desire and low libido.
- People with pornography addiction tend to prefer masturbation over sex with a partner. Men have also confessed to needing pornography to achieve and maintain an erection during partnered sex.
- Research has found that among regular pornography viewers, 28% are at or above the cutoff for hypersexuality.
- 44% of boys believe that porn is a realistic depiction of sex, and online porn gives them ideas about the sex they want to try.
Get Help for Your Pornography Addiction by BlockP
BlockP is a porn blocker that secures your digital space from graphic content. Whether you are using your gadgets for work or entertainment, BlockP ensures that you are not accidentally exposed to pornographic content.
BlockP has the option of custom filters. So, you can block not only images and pornographic websites but also set filters for certain keywords. With BlockP, you can avoid the triggers and successfully resist the temptation of watching porn.
BlockP also gives you valuable insight into your online behavior.
Many times we see porn as just a harmless distraction. This attitude makes us dismiss the seriousness of our porn addiction. The insights from BlockP help you to see the problem accurately. So, you can identify the triggers that led you down the porn rabbit hole and the time you spent indulging your addiction.
FAQ on What Does Porn Do to Your Brain?
1. Does porn cause anxiety?
Yes. There is research that links pornographic binges with increased anxiety and decreased mood.
Porn is still a taboo in most cultures. So, people who consume porn often feel emotions such as shame, guilt, and lower self-esteem. Porn also causes social withdrawal. So, as a result of these emotional and psychological issues, porn can cause anxiety.
2. What are the effects of quitting porn?
Immediately after quitting porn, you will undergo a period of withdrawal. During this period, it is normal to feel depression, stress, and anxiety. This is similar to people experiencing withdrawal from addictive substances. This lasts for a couple of weeks. Once your brain adjusts to this new reality, it resets the habit and reward systems.
3. Is porn bad for your brain
Yes. When we examine the research on what does porn do to your brain, you can confidently say it has a negative effect.
Porn is habit-forming. It affects your brain just like alcohol or an addictive substance. Porn creates a dopamine reward loop in your brain. So, over time, your brain becomes dependent on more extreme kinds of porn to get the dopamine high. It compromises the functioning of your prefrontal cortex. So, porn impairs your judgement and decision-making.
4. Does porn damage your brain
Yes. Porn does cause damage to your brain, but your brain can recover from it. Research has shown that porn consumption affects your brain’s neuroplasticity, i.e. your brain’s ability to rewire itself.
Porn triggers excessive dopamine release, and eventually, your brain builds a tolerance for dopamine. So, normal activities can no longer give you pleasure. You have to continuously escalate your porn consumption to meet the dopamine cravings.
Porn affects your prefrontal cortex and results in impulse-control issues. Excessive porn consumption also creates addiction-like pathways which promote compulsive porn consumption behaviours.
Studies have also linked porn consumption to various mental health issues, such as stress, anxiety, and depression. The objectification and dehumanization in porn is shown to promote misogyny and sexual violence of women. In teenagers, early exposure to porn has been shown to result in promiscuous sexual behaviour.
5. Does porn cause brain fog?
Yes. Porn can cause a form of brain fog where it impairs your judgement.
Brain fog refers to a state of mental confusion and reduced mental clarity. It is not a medical condition in itself, but a symptom of underlying issues such as stress, sleeplessness, anxiety, or hormonal issues.
Research has shown that watching porn affects your prefrontal cortex – the part of your brain responsible for executive functions such as decision-making. So, porn habits can cause a lack of focus and reduced problem-solving ability resulting in brain-fog-like experiences.