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THE MORE PORN YOU WATCH, THE MORE YOU NEED

Both having sex and watching porn causes dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for reward and pleasure, to be released.

But repeatedly causing this surge in dopamine – by regularly watching pornography – means the brain become desensitised to its effects.

A study published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2014 found regularly viewing pornography seemed to dull the response to sexual stimulation over time.

This means the brain needs more dopamine in order to feel the same ‘high’, which causes a person to watch more porn, German researchers found.

And a 2011 study, published in Psychology Today, found that these dopamine spikes mean porn-users start needing increasingly extreme experiences to become sexually aroused.

After being exposed to so many lurid images in films, men have become de-sensitised and are increasingly unable to become excited by ordinary sexual encounters.

Pornography is creating a generation of young men who are hopeless in the bedroom, the report concluded.

Further to this research is showing that high levels of porn use reshapes the brain and sexual tastes of users.

How porn rewires your brain

Every thought, feeling, habit, skill, or behavior in your life has a corresponding neuropathway that fires in your brain. These pathways are designed to function optimally. However, as the brain’s reward circuitry gets entangled in a tug of war, the brain rewires itself for addiction and new neuropathways are created.

Every time a person views porn, or eventually even thinks about porn, the burst of dopamine strengthens the connections between cells. The stronger the connection, the easier it becomes for cells to communicate on that path. This idea of the brain changing itself is called neuroplasticity. Whether learning to ski, learning to speak a foreign language, or looking at porn, the more we use a particular neuropathway, the more our brain changes, making the pathway stronger.

These neuropathways are like footpaths across a field of waist-high grass. Walking across the field when the grass is so high requires significant effort. But each time you walk along the path, it gets easier. The grass gets trampled, worn down, and eventually becomes a dirt path.

Someone who doesn’t watch porn, or is not yet addicted, has yet to develop sensitized “weed-whacked” pathways. But the porn neuropathways of someone whose brain is addicted are weed-whacked and trampled down so that they have become the path of least resistance. Porn becomes the path of least resistance in the brain. And the easier the path, the more likely we are to take it, even when we don’t want to. The creation of this path of least resistance is called sensitization.

You can reboot your brain

The good news is, your brain can be changed in a positive and healthy direction. Our brains can be rewired from their addictive patterns. Just as you can reboot your computer and reset the hard drive, you can reboot your brain and restore the sensitivity of your brain circuits. On a computer, it’s as simple as pressing the power button or clicking a pull-down menu to restart. However, rebooting your brain may be the most difficult thing you’ve ever done and why it is important to understand what effect porn has on the brain and therefore also on human functioning.

“Because the human brain is the biological anchor of our psychological experience, it is helpful to understand how it operates.” says William M. Struthers, associate professor of psychology at Wheaton College. “Knowing how it is wired together and where it is sensitive can help us understand why pornography affects people the way it does.”

Here are 7 things you should know about how pornography affects the brain.

1. Sexually explicit material triggers mirror neurons in the male brain. These neurons, which are involved with the process for how to mimic a behavior, contain a motor system that correlates to the planning out of a behavior.  In the case of pornography, this mirror neuron system triggers the arousal, which leads to sexual tension and a need for an outlet. “The unfortunate reality is that when he acts out (often by masturbating), this leads to hormonal and neurological consequences, which are designed to bind him to the object he is focusing on,” says Struthers. “In God’s plan, this would be his wife, but for many men it is an image on a screen. Pornography thus enslaves the viewer to an image, hijacking the biological response intended to bond a man to his wife and therefore inevitably loosening that bond.”

2. In men, there are five primary chemicals involved in sexual arousal and response. The one that likely plays the most significant role in pornography addiction is dopamine. Dopamine plays a major role in the brain system that is responsible for reward-driven learning. Every type of reward that has been studied increases the level of dopamine transmission in the brain, and a variety of addictive drugs, including stimulants such as cocaine, amphetamine, and methamphetamine, act directly on the dopamine system. Dopamine surges when a person is exposed to novel stimuli, particularly if it is sexual, or when a stimuli is more arousing than anticipated. Because erotic imagery triggers more dopamine than sex with a familiar partner, exposure to pornography leads to “arousal addiction” and teaches the brain to prefer the image and become less satisfied with real-life sexual partners.

3. Why do men seek out a variety of new explicit sexual images rather than being satisfied with the same ones? The reason is attributed to the Coolidge effect, a phenomenon seen in mammalian species whereby males (and to a lesser extent females) exhibit renewed sexual interest if introduced to new receptive sexual partners, even after refusing sex from prior but still available sexual partners. This neurological mechanism is one of the primary reasons for the abundance and addictiveness of Internet pornography.

4. Overstimulation of the reward circuitry—such as occurs with repeated dopamine spikes related to viewing pornography—creates desensitization. As Gary Wilson explains, “When dopamine receptors drop after too much stimulation, the brain doesn’t respond as much, and we feel less reward from pleasure. That drives us to search even harder for feelings of satisfaction—for example, by seeking out more extreme sexual stimuli, longer porn sessions, or more frequent porn viewing—thus further numbing the brain.

5. “The psychological, behavioral, and emotional habits that form our sexual character will be based on the decisions we make,” says Struthers. “Whenever the sequence of arousal and response is activated, it forms a neurological memory that will influence future processing and response to sexual cues. As this pathway becomes activated and traveled, it becomes a preferred route—a mental journey—that is regularly trod. The consequences of this are far-reaching.”

6. What makes Internet porn unique? Wilson identifies a number of reasons, including:

(1) Internet porn offers extreme novelty

(2) Unlike food and drugs, there are almost no physical limitations to Internet porn consumption

(3) With Internet porn one can escalate both with more novel “partners” and by viewing new and unusual genres

(4) Unlike drugs and food, Internet porn doesn’t eventually activate the brain’s natural aversion system

(5) The age users start watching porn. A teen’s brain is at its peak of dopamine production and neuroplasticity, making it highly vulnerable to addiction and rewiring.

7. Men’s exposure to sexually explicit material is correlated with social anxiety, depression, low motivation,erectile dysfunction, concentration problems, and negative self-perceptions in terms of physical appearance and sexual functioning.