This Is Your Brain on Porn: Pornography Addiction, Society, and the Brain

I have been watching porn since I was 12. A few times in my life I thought it was a problem. As the years go by I see friends with serious addictions to cocaine. I never understood how they could let there lives get so low. I have used addictive drugs in my teen years. I have been clean for a long time with no thoughts of using any drugs. I can even be in a room with drugs and I don't even want to use them. Tonight I finally understand addiction. I thought I was safe from addiction. Porn has been my addiction. Reading about chemical addictions I have the same symptoms. The worst is part of porn addiction is knowing you have a problem. 12 years of watching porn almost daily I just had this revelation. Its also very private. No one really knows how frequently you are watching it. No one comes to you saying you have a problem with watching porn. I think of how many hours I have wasted on it compared to being high or drunk with my friends. The amount of pleasure from porn greatly exceeds the total hours of being drunk or high. Pleasure that dose not last more then a second exceeds my total life drug use. This has mostly been a affirmation of my problem. I now see that any addiction looms in the dark. Never fully coming out till you really look at yourself. I understand why people get hooked to heroin, coke, and alcohol. However these addictions being very serious and life threatening, the symptoms are the same. I don't know who will ever read this comment. It actually dose not matter to me because this was a great way for me to spill my guts to myself. Its been like looking in a mirror. Seeing your true ugly side. The person taking there time to read this might be wondering what my next step will be. For I am as well. I plan on following what a lot of alcoholics do. Some kind of self 12 step program. I don't think there is a support group like AA around here. Perhaps this will forever be a internal struggle. I feel like a beast is inside of me that drives me to it. It has caused me to have very little interest in a lot of things I love to do. Why practice doing something when I can sit on my computer and look at porn all night. This is a disgusting habit for so many reasons. Porn/masturbation addiction is just as serious mentally as alcoholics and other serious addictions. It is available 24/7 on the internet. People can go on binges just as coke heads do. Putting this at the same level as a coke head may help me fight this. I have spent over 12 years of my life building neurological bridges in my brain to support engaging in pornographic material. I will forever keep what I have written here to remind myself what I never want to forget. Knowing that if someone reads this they will ask themselves I wonder if he is succeeding. I promise to you and to myself that I will not falter. This is a promise, my pact with God and everyone that no longer will I fall prey to my own undoing. Thank you.

thanks for your honesty. Im going through the same thing. I been an addict for 8 years. I saw all my hopes and dreams fly out the window. I wanted to be a doctor and even though I was very successful in high school, my depression led me to waste my college years looking at porn in depression and seclusion. I tried to use guilt as a way to punish myself so I would stop, but that only furthered my addiction for me as I used porn as a stress reliever. I saw all my hopes and dreams fly out the window as I wasted the first three years of my college.

I know am still an addict, but have decided to take a diffferent outlook when it comes to my addiction. I am learning and understanding the physiological basis behind pornography addiction and I understand now my compulsion, why and how it works.
What has worked for me is having a positive outlook on my addiction. I have weened my self off, but have ocassional relapses, and I am okay with that. I look forward to a future In which I now believe that I still deserve a wonderful and beautiful wife, that I am capable of being a great father, and that I also cand be a servant for God.

My dreams are coming alive again as I removed a accessible computer from my life and am forced to go to public university computer labs. I am applying to medical school soon, and I am confident I will be a doctor.

I have thought many times in my life that i watch too much porn. I realise this mostly when i realise i have so few long and real relationships, and know so few women and cant attach to them either. I watch porn to feel more of a man, and feel like i am one of the guys by doing so, but looking at other guys who do talk to women and can treat them with respect, and dont watch porn, makes me look like crap. I have such a low feeling when i am around women, that i cant open up, and find opening up to be something i can do once every so often in a year, that the memory of when i do stays with me for so long. I started searching for online porn when i was 11 when family members started realising changes in me and soon latched on to what i was doing since i was gone for hours and made it obvious. I thought it was natural for them to know i was doing this, but now i see how detrimental this may have been to our relationship. I cant express myself at all to women, and even girls who feel sorry for me and talk to me i shut them out, making them give up. I look to my past for answers to why i am this way. In first year of high school was when i started searching for porn, when i had no real friends, class mates didnt think much of me, and couldnt express myself to my family. I used to be a really cool kid in primary school years, i knew everyone who was important and made it with the good crouds, and people in high school remembered me for those days, telling me in high schol how much id changed, and how depressed and out of my mind i looked nowadays. When i did start high school, i came into the year late since id been with family in another country (for the 1st time id ever been with em, lived with em for a few months and came back home where there isnt any family relatives except primamry members of family). when i came into high school a week late, all my friends from primary school left me and became really popular in high school. they didnt want to know me, especially since i didnt get 2 say bye to them when i left for holiday in the symmester before high school. Since then i feel like i havent had a real relationship or friend in a long time. Over years, i made class mates my only friends throughout high school, didnt make it with the popular people, and on schol trips that lasted a week, i opened up to people and people got to know me and actually liked me, and even made a girlfriend out of it which didnt last long since i went back to being closed up around her when we got back. I went into a long period of porn where i watched it for nights. I had very strong porno- vision and every girl was sooo fine and i was so high on just the presence of females. I completely had no female relationships then because i surrounded myself with class mates who werent the type of people who mixed with girls. When i started hanging around people who hanged out with girls, i thought there was something wrong with them because they could tlk to girls. Now i am slightly desensitized to porn, but still addicted to it and thoughts of giving up are ever more hopeless, since i feel so depressed when living in a life without porn. Along with all my other issues, hidden in my subconscious, i dont know if i can come off porn. The porno frame of mind i have (that i dream of having sex with a hot stranger like they do in porn clips) and that life can go on as it is, without caring about relationships, as long as i have this dream, is becoming ever so fictitious, and depressing to me that this cant ever happen, and that i can have no relationships that mean anything because i hold on to this dream. One year in my life I did try to come off porn, but I was such a weird person, that people wondered if I was gay, because I was so self conscious in my behaviour that made people think this. I still had a porno frame of mind, and began to see people in different ways that were so depressing to me if I think about it now ( I made up really stupid theories in my subconscious mind about people that now I am too ashamed to mention), and must have embarrassed me and my family throughout that year. I always want to forget those times because it was uncontrollable self consciousness that took over me, as a result of removing porn. Now im in college and left the classmates in high school, whom I wouldnt consider friends anymore, and getting very good grades at A level. I didn’t make many friends in the first year of college, since I told myself forget about relationships, and just do work. This lead to long periods of soft porn, but I used it as an excuse as a break from studying and that I deserved it. Still I had few relationships, but came out as a hard headed person who was determined, unlike how I was before college when I was so self conscious. Now in the second year of college, I started thinking about friendships, and let my grades slip.

I dont know why im telling u this, but ive not said that to anyone, i guess this may be why im so sad. pornography and not being able to have relationships has made me this way i guess, but im not sure if one had caused the other in my life.

Just want to post this to look in future so i can have some perspective on this to myself

i just want to thank you for creating this thread. i am truly inspired now to put forth a true effort to eliminate internet pornography and many of the other weaknesses in my life. its amazing how time has flown by and the amount of time wasted on these addictions to think its been near 10 years. i never thought i would be this way that so much of my life would consist of being pornography and recreational drugs. its never too late to turn the switch and i know that there will be a transition period, that my mind and body will go through withdrawal for possibly years. but in the long term picture, it is worth battling - the human mind and body is very resilient. i plan on checking this thread in the years ahead free of these addiction and hope that there are many others attesting to the same commitment to change themselves for the better

I have been watching porn for 17 years now and this is what I realised. I love it. I realised that it is the world around me that creates the guilt and makes me think that there is something wrong with it.It has had no negative effect on my life and all the while I have been watching porn I have succeeded in high school, college and now I have a great job. The most important thing to ask yourself is whether after watching porn you feel relaxed and happy or sad and guilty. If you experience the latter then you have a problem. Never use something as an escape for the problems of life.

I am living with a porn addict! Now after 15 years finally I found out that my husband has been a porn addict. Many time during our marriage I caught him on porn and each time he promised he'll stop but never did. He is saying that he has been doing it to get rid of his stress... I am sexy woman with many guys wanting to be with and didn't cross the line of commitment.
Prior to our marriage we had good sex but as soon as we married we had occasional sex that it was so short that I never got satisfied. He comes from disfunctional family, he didn't have any friend and have hard time making friends. He says he loves me and says that he has been sexually committed to me because he hasn't had any physical contact...
Now finally I started seeking help by going to therapist and sure enough we found that he is a sexual addict. Now that I am ready to leave him once again he is promising that he has decided to stop his porn/self-sex habit. He wants me to trust him...
He is asking for this last chance. His porn habit has been progressing over the years eventhough he was practicing his faith and praying to God. Now he says he has repented... For this exact reason I have no respect for him and don't trust him. He has lied, cheated, betrayed my love, and damaged our beautiful family and future of our kids. If I find a man that I like I will easily move on, and leave him with kids.

Ohh, so i have been watching porn now for roughly 9 years. It started out slow an innocent, but slowly got more and more serious. At first i was very stimulated by the porn i was watching. But after a while it gave me less and less satisfaction. I would work harder and harder to find niche porn so i could get the high. The more work that went into finding a particular kind of porn the more reward i got from it.

Now i didn't think this was a problem. Even though i didn't have a sexual encounter with a women until my early twenties. I just viewed it as me being a late bloomer. But with my first sexual encounter with a women i realized something was very wrong. She was a very beautiful women, gorgeous breasts, perfect body, petite, everything u could ask for. But for the life of me i couldn't sustain an erection. Even though days before, watching porn, it was no problem from me. This obviously scared the **** out of me. I checked some things out on the net, and thats when i found this stuff on porn addiction, and i realized people were having the same problems as me. As of right now i have absolutely no desire to entertain any more porn and am concentrating 100% on trying to repair what i can. Worst part about this is i have little to no information on the subject. I'm terrified to talk to anyone about it, and am at a complete loss. My only hope is that with time i can heal. You don't know what you got tell its gone. Let this be a warning, if i find any fix, yall will be the first to know.

God, right now i feel like your the only one that can help me. I pray that i may be able to resolve this issue on my own

I'm a porn addict, and it kills me to say that. I have a loving wife, a beautiful baby boy, a fine home, good friends...I'm basically the luckiest man alive. Except for porn. I was 11 when I first caught my first glimpse, back when the non-pay versions of porn were all starred and pixelized.

To the few people who have hailed the entertainment value of porn, SHUT your freaking mouth. You have NO idea what you're talking about. Pornography has DESTROYED families, careers, even lives throughout its history. And I know what you're yelling at the computer screen right now: "Well, if society wouldn't give it such a negative stigma, than none of that bad stuff would happen." Oh, really? What about a new epidemic in Japan, where more and more men are having problems naturally reproducing because they can't climax within a woman? What about the countless hours of productivity dollars lost at the workplace? What about the feeling of self-loathing that a man feels when his wife, children, and family members have rejected him, leaving him with nothing but his lovely Internet porn site and his Colt .45?

To the original Anonymous that posted his very heart-felt comment: this doesn't have to be an eternally internal struggle. There's a free online board where you can go and meet literally hundreds of other people who are struggling in the same valiant way you and I are against this evil. You can start an online recovery journal, get in an accountability group, and start to get your act together. Believe me, I'm working on my 11th day clean, and I'm loving it. It's as hard as anything I've EVER done, but I feel like a real man. Self-actualization, thank you Mr. Maslow, is being who you WANT to be. Not what you happen to slip and slide - and click - yourself into.

The site is www.no-porn.com. I'm not sure if they allow HTML here, so you'll just have to type the URL into your browser yourself. Please check it out, we'll all welcome you there as you recover from this addiction.

Please, PLEASE, don't let calloused and arrogant people talk you out of what you feel. You're on the right track.

For me, an addiction to pornography started when I discovered a "Penthouse" magazine in my father's bedside drawer. I would be very excited upon returning from school to look at the pornographic pictures, and as I flipped the pages, getting more and more excited, until...well, you know what comes next (no pun intended). I anticipated, with excitement, the appearance of the next issue. This foreshadowed my later tendency of surfing page after page, hour after hour, looking for the "perfect" girl. I discovered those Penthouse magazines at the age of 14. Once I hit 16, I was able to buy magazines at the local convenience store, even though, legally, one had to be 18. Walking home, I would feel happy knowing I had a private harem tucked inside my jacket. Once home, it was off to my room, to get down to business. Over a few months, however, I started to feel a bit depressed after looking at the magazines. Cost was a concern, for someone who mowed a few lawns and occasionally babysat. I also started to notice that I was feeling compelled to purchase the magazines. As feelings of guilt and despair grew, I found myself buying a magazine, masturbating, and then putting the magazine in amongst the garbage that was stored outside. I would breathe a sigh of relief, sure that I had ended this pornography addiction. Within a few hours, however, I would be digging through the trash in order to retrieve the magazine. There were times when I convinced myself that what I was doing was perfectly normal. At one point I had an open discussion with 2 close friends, it went something like, "Uh, guys, I feel really stupid asking this, but do you guys masturbate?" "I'm feeling kind of guilty about it." They responded with something like, "Uh, yeah, we do." "But it must be o.k. since we all do it...right?" That conversation made me feel a bit more comfortable with how uncomfortable I felt about pornography and masturbation.
Before the internet, I discovered "free" porn in the form of barely visible scrambled pay TV signals. I would stay up late to catch glimpses of pornography through the distorted television signal. As ridiculous as this sounds, I did not think I had a serious problem. Looking back, I see how many times I chose pornography over relationships. Human beings learn how to build relationships and friendships by participating. Pornography is deceptive because we think that we are participating in something meaningful, when we are not. We are led to believe that pornography is a reasonable substitute for love and friendship, when it is not. For 24 years images of pornography have filled my mind and stolen my time. To stop viewing pornography is a necessary step, but the real task is to learn that which was never learned, about women, and men, and relationships, and truth.