Porn Addiction and Neuroplasticity

Understanding the Brain's rewiring and how Neuroplasticity impacts Porn Addiction

Imagine your brain as a country’s railroad network. I know, this might sound crazy, but this allegory works. You are responsible for construction & maintenance and currently in your office. Looking at the huge map in front of you, with all these tracks, you dream of a train-network that does not need to be renewed once a year but updates itself. A network that can recognize railroads used all the time and those that are abandoned, responding with new tracks being built and others shut down.

That is how your brain works.

Let me quote Wikipedia: ”Neuroplasticity […] is the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization.” If you learn something new, the neural networks responsible grow with any new input you give them. And they crave more. This is what makes any addiction so dangerous, even though its root cause is highly beneficial. When you learn a new language, your brain releases Acetylcholine and Dopamine, neurotransmitters responsible for feeling euphoric while learning new things. This is why you want to learn more, just repeating what you already know is nothing but boring. The same goes for porn.

You can not use the same weak tracks day by day, there needs to be more, and with every repetition (learning a language/watching porn) the railroad grows. As you watch pornography, you are constantly wiring your brain to respond sexually to images on a screen. Neuroscientist W. Struthers says, “With repeated sexual acting out in the absence of a partner, a man will be bound and attached to the image and not a person.” This leads to two things.

1. Seeking more extreme footage

   The more porn one watches, the more extreme content one needs to feel the same amount of pleasure.

   Or, as one article I read put it:

   “users go hunting for more hardcore porn, to get the [same] effect”

2. Deep memories

   You will never forget the hub. The tracks are so strong that they probably will exist until you are no more. But it is up to you to let them rust and never use them again.

Finally, we see how our porn addiction was created. With every visit to the hub, the tracks got stronger, and new ones were built. Our brain was not prepared for supernatural stimuli such as porn. The harsh reality is that nowadays an average 13-year-old has seen more nude women than all of his ancestors combined. One out of ten hub visitors is younger than 12 years!

How should a brain millions of years old deal with internet porn?

The content these children consume has massive effects not only on their behavior today, but also on their consecutive brain development. There have been multiple studies, indicating that porn has similar effects on parts of the brain, especially those related to impulse control, logical problem-solving, and decision-making, like drugs do.

I could dive even deeper and quote scientific papers I’ve read since the beginning of my NoPMO journey, however, that would be too much. What everyone needs to know is: Porn changes your Brain.

It is not designed for internet porn, and therefore can not deal with porn the way it should. The good news considering neuroplasticity is, that the brain can change. It will change - if you beat your addiction. Nearly all the studies considering Neuroplasticity indicate that by stopping a certain behavior (watching porn) after a certain time, depending on how long one consumed explicit footage, the brain will reset itself nearly to the pre-porn mode.

“Where there is darkness, there is light” ~ Franz von Assisi

This ultimately means that we can defeat addiction with its own weapons. The brain changes, and pathways get stronger the more you consume. They get weaker the moment you stop watching pornography. This process is called rewiring.

In the very next episode, we are going to uncover how to abstain from porn entirely. Stay tuned and do not forget to share this post so we can grow faster!