Have you ever thought about the aftermath or consequences of watching porn often? Do you worry a lot about that? Well, here I am going to dive deep into how porn affects your brain and how it changes you!
How does porn affect your brain?
Recent research on pornography is showing that high speed internet porn, that is opening up multiple tabs of pornography and getting the false virtual feeling of havign multiple partners at a click. Research is now showing that this era of high speed internet porn is actually causing structural changes to our brain that are similar to addiction, which is scary!
In one of the researches carried out, they did a brain scan that showed structural and functional changes in the brains of users of high speed internet which mimic and look very similar to that of brains of people with addictions of heroin, methamphetamine etc. So what is causing this? Well, what happens is that, when we have a nice reward infront of us, for example chocolate, a nice car, ice cream, sex etc which result in our brain pumping out a hormone called dopamine. Dopamine is a neuorotransmitter which provides motivation and drive.
So, when your eyes are scrolling through different tabs of porn sites, your brain is so excited that it is telling you, oh man, this is great, let's do it, its ok etc while dumping dopamine. So when you have this much dopamine floating in your brain, it also releases a molecule called delta FOSB and this molecule starts changing or rewiring your brain. So now your brain is associating sex/pornography with this amazing, almost a high feeling. This excessive dumping of dopamine in your brain is creating this pathway leading to addiction related brain changes. These 4 changes are sensitisation, desensitisation, hypofrontality and dysfunctional stress circuits. Sensitisation, which is, being more sensitised to these stimulus. Next one is desensitisation, this is that, with densiitisation, you get used to the stimulus and you crave for more extreme porn. So simple or normal things that used to give you pleasure before in life, dont give you any pleasure anymore. So the next change is hypofrontality. Our distinguishing factor compared to other mammals is that, we have a part of a brain that can override our primal instinct. So for example, if you were a tiger and you see a femal tiger, your brain would tell you, oh man i need to have sex with this tigress right now, and i will move forward with that mission, not caring about anything or anyone. However, we humans don't do that. When we have a thought like that, our prefrontal cortex tells that, oh wow, stop right there, what do you think you doing, have you thought about this? do you know what would happen if you did this, blah blah blah, you get my point. So when we develop this pornography addition, we erode this ability of our prefrontal cortex to override these primal instincts and we would find it very difficult to think clearly.
The last change i want to talk about is dysfunctional stress circuits. So food is a good one to give you as an example. Food can be highly addictive, everyone goes on a sugar binge every now and then. What happens when you are stressed? well, you go straight to that food. So when we are stressed, we get dysfunctional stress circuits when you have these particular addictions. So at this stage our brai is wired to seek and satisfy addiction under stress and it has an intense urge to soothe this problem. This is exactly what happens when you are addicted to porn, your brain immediately seeks for solution and aaha, our brain knows where to get that happy feeling!
Other common porn addiction problems include decreased sex drive, decreased intimacy with sexual partners (multiple porn stars/intense scenes stuck in mind), erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, delayed ejaculation etc. Hmm quite scary isn't it? Comment down below what do yout think!Labels: brain change, porn addition
