Your Brain On Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction

Unfortunately, many healthcare providers still assume that porn use cannot cause symptoms like depression, brain fog, low motivation or anxiety

When you remove a source of pleasure from the brain, it is like taking away the leg of a table. The whole thing becomes rocky and unstable. The brain has two options: one, to make you hurt like hell in every way it can think of to ‘encourage’ you to put the table leg back again, or two, to accept that the table leg is really gone, and figure out how to re-balance without it. Of course, it tries Option One first. Then, after a while, it gets to work on Option Two, all while still pushing Option One. Eventually, it seems like the brain re-balances, giving up on Option One, and fully succeeding at Option Two.

Exercise is known as a ‘beneficial stressor’. That is, stressing your system slightly causes it to respond with enhanced feelings of wellbeing. Some rebooters report that beneficial-stressors reset the brain’s sensitivity to pleasure. Visit www.gettingstronger.org for the physiology behind exercise, intermittent fasting, daily cold showers, and so forth.

It was a bad habit, reinforced by neurochemicals, but nothing mysterious or ethereal. I realized that I already had the power to control my actions. And so I did. I realized that the life I wanted to lead was incompatible with porn use, so I made that decision. ‘Simply’ doesn’t mean easily, of course.