Why Is Pornography So Addictive?

why is pornography so addictive in this video we're going to talk a little bit about the processes that go on physiologically and emotionally when looking at pornography and why it can become such an addictive force you guys i get this question a lot in my practice people are always coming into my office and wondering how and why pornography can be so addictive and i want to walk you through this today from the perspective of what it's like for most people that i work with and how pornography addiction actually forms and what keeps them stuck so your typical story is this you have a 9 to an 11 year old kid who is curious who's just starting to hit the maturation process and looking for ways to understand their body and why they're having certain feelings and how things work and most often these children stumble into their first exposure to pornography around the age of 9 to 11. when that happens the child is curious it's often while doing homework it's usually innocent but when they see it they have a mixed reaction where part of them says wow this is interesting and something inside of me is happening and these kind of physical feelings are starting to happen and on the other hand they feel this sense of confusion not knowing what they're seeing and they don't have a template to fully understand it yet and it makes them feel kind of weird and that mix of emotion is a hard thing for that child to navigate inevitably over time that child starts to find it more often and might start to seek it out mostly out of curiosity and that curiosity might be tied to some education because they're wondering how things work and what they're actually seeing and they're it's tied to their feelings and then as they grow they learn that it feels good that sexual response that we have is powerful and it feels good and it comes with all sorts of brain chemical that feel really great and so that child goes from being curious to starting to use it for entertainment sometimes not even fully understanding their own sexual response physiologically yet and over time that entertainment starts to teach the brain that if it happens to help me with boredom or stress it might help me with anger or sadness or rejection or anything else painful and that's where the beginning of the hook starts to happen with the addiction is this when it goes from being an educational slash curious thing to an emotional coping thing that's where the brain starts to say i need more of it and i know how to cope now and it teaches us to cope by turning to that process in this case pornography that lets us have that relief from the feelings that we're having the pain that we're going through that struggle that we're feeling and over time our brain starts to develop this process where every time i feel bored angry lonely tired stressed hungry it kicks on that response that says you know how to cope with it the triggers start to form i call it the pull it's like an emotional force like a magnetic force that says i know where to go i know what to do to get this relief that i need and then we start to move into rituals that set up the acting out those rituals start to build anticipation and those rituals are things like creating time to be alone with my device or checking my email that then leads to going to facebook that then leads to a few side clicks on the side and then leads to a feeling that i've already messed up that then leads to the pornography all those little rituals over time actually become part of the process of the build up to the acting out and it becomes this habit that forms it becomes really powerful and as the habit forms it takes less and less work to do it it happens automatically and so the brain doesn't need a lot of work or decision anymore it becomes just this normal habit and the habit then kicks off this response in the brain so that when i go and i pursue pornography i get flooded with a bunch of chemicals the ones that you hear about mostly are dopamine and the dopamine response puts on that like drive for us and it feels really good and it floods us and then we have that sexual response and the release that happens with orgasm as well when we act out that also floods our brain with chemicals i think they say that the sexual response floods our brain with about 400 times the amount of dopamine that's normal in our brains it's about the same amount of dopamine that happens when somebody takes heroin and so it feels really good and we get that sense of relief and over time what happens is the more we pursue it the brain starts to catch on and say it's smart and it knows it doesn't want to kill us and so it says hey you're overloading my system and so inside the brain there are the neurons that are there that move chemicals across different cells it starts to pull off some of the receptors from those cells so that it can't quite pick up enough and so what happens with an addiction is that when i go and i pursue my addiction and i pursue pornography i get high in a sense i feel really good and then i come down and then sometimes i drop below what would be normal and then i need to get more to get come up and eventually it's this little s shaped wave that eventually moves me to a place where i feel like i'm going to have to go and act out just to feel normal and a lot of people that i work will say yeah i'm not going to be able to concentrate at work unless i act out or i'm not going to be able to go to sleep tonight unless i act out and in a sense the pursuit of the pornography and the brain flood that comes becomes this almost dependence just to feel like i'm going to function over time so besides the physical there's also an emotional process that seems to happen for people and this happens a lot with people that i work with in the sense that they're doing something now that a part of them doesn't really want to be doing there's a part of them that doesn't feel right about it there's a part of them that feels you know like it's whether sometimes it's like religious beliefs but sometimes it's just an internal sense of self that knows that that it's not really a healthy way to go and try to cope with life sometimes there's this internal sense of self that they know they're involved in an industry that is in the business of using people like commodities instead of treating people like people and so they don't necessarily want to do it but they can't seem to stop themselves from doing it and their feelings about that keep them stuck to it because they feel bad about themselves and the more critical they are on themselves the more pain that they feel about themselves the less they believe in themselves the more likely they are to find themselves back doing the very thing that they don't want to be doing and almost proving themselves right and so that's how an addiction forms over time is is that the mental game starts to go into a place where we feel helpless and hopeless we're judging ourselves instead of meeting ourselves with compassion and understanding we have the physical response that's coming that's very powerful and it feels really good and i'll be honest you know most of us have experienced pornography and know the power that comes when when you watch pornography there's a power to it it does feel good it's just that it's not effective for long-term coping and it takes us away from being able to live life on its terms because we start to disappear and find selfish ways to cope instead of learning how to live life on its terms and have good emotional coping skills so that's how an addiction forms to pornography it's a pretty insidious thing if you ask me because i believe that it's done by an industry that's smart and they want you and your children to be exposed to it at about the time that they're learning to grow and mature because they know that they're going to be the ones that get to educate your kids the way that we were educated through the pornography industry instead of getting it through a true source namely our parents and the people that actually care about us and once they start to educate us and inundate us with it we become dependent on it and that's how the addiction forms if you're watching this video and you find yourself struggling with an addiction to pornography check out the free recovery kickstart course on lovestrong.com it'll give you the resources that you need to get started on overcoming the addiction thank you so much for being here with me if you found this to be valuable for you please hit the like and subscribe button if you're facing particular struggles that you need help with or roadblocks that you're running into please submit a question i'd be happy to answer it for you [Music] you