Hello G’s! Let’s start this blog post with a quote from Aristotles:

“I consider the one who conquers his desires as more courageous than the one who conquers his enemies. For the hardest victory is victory over oneself.“

And that’s precisely what the topic is about! For those who wish to cease consuming these unreal videos, for those who aspire to invest in genuine relationships with real partners—the physical contact, the sensation of the warm skin of their loved ones— for them, it’s a battle against the greatest temptation ever—themselves!

And we believe that everyone knows precisely how much consumption of pornography is too much. We recommend completely ceasing this habit and instead investing in strategies to advance your relationships. If you aren’t in one, focus on meeting new people, engaging in conversations, interacting genuinely, and perhaps even seducing them to foster honest and profound connections.

Nowadays, it’s all about the nature of our brain and how it interacts with cues in a tremendously changed and radical environment. It’s about the impact of chronic overconsumption of sexual stimuli, which are readily available on demand and in endless quantities. Wherever, whenever, and however you want – streaming videos are ubiquitous.

And what this does to our brain, we want to illuminate in this blog post. In another blog post, we will provide strategies on how to stop the consumption.

Are you ready? Then let’s get started!

A few numbers

The phenomenon of pornography has developed so rapidly that it’s challenging to stay current. For example, a study from 2008 reported that 14.4% of boys had already been exposed to pornography before the age of 13.5. That’s over 10 years ago!

In 2011, when the statistics from the aforementioned study were recorded, early exposure skyrocketed to 48.7%. A cross-sectional study conducted in 2017 on Australians aged 15-29 reported that 69% of boys and 23% of girls watched pornography for the first time at the age of 13 or younger. And the most alarming finding:

All surveyed men and 82% of women had viewed pornography at some point. Similarly, the 2008 study showed that daily consumption of pornography was rare (5.2%), but by 2011, it had nearly tripled to 13% of adolescents watching pornography daily or almost daily.

In 2017, 39% of men (more than a third!) and 4% of women (aged 15-29) watched pornography daily, often on their smartphones. This represents a significant increase, and we can likely anticipate further growth in 2024.

This undermines the theory once again that men are more visually oriented than women, who tend to rely more on literary works or pure imagination. For those of you who wish to delve deeper into the topic, we recommend visiting the following website: Studies on Porn Consumption and Sex Addiction – Your Brain in Porn (yourbrainonporn.com)

Our Brain and How It Is Affected by Pornography

Many of the symptoms described by men, and later also by women, strongly suggest that pornography alters their brains and makes significant material changes. Psychiatrist Norman Doidge explains in his bestseller “The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science”:

“Men who came to me for treatment had been seduced into pornographic training sessions that met all the conditions for the plastic alteration of brain maps. Since brain cells that fire together wire together, these men had wired the new images into the pleasure centers of their brains in massive exercise sessions and brought the enthusiastic attention necessary for neuroplastic change. Every time they felt sexually aroused or masturbated to orgasm, a burst of the reward neurotransmitter dopamine strengthened the connections their brains had made during the training sessions. The reward reinforced the behavior, and at the same time, they did not have to fear the embarrassment they would have felt if they had bought a pornographic magazine in the store. This behavior brought no punishments, only rewards…

…What they found exciting changed with the new themes and scenes presented to them by the internet, altering their brains without their awareness. Since plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for the new, arousing images expanded at the expense of what had previously excited them. This was likely the reason they found their partners less attractive. My porn patients undertook withdrawal after understanding the problem and realizing they were reinforcing it neuroplastically. Gradually, they felt more drawn to their partners again.”

Coolidge – Effect

And what we can read through this text above is an effect called the Coolidge Effect. It illustrates, as a vivid example, how relentless sexual novelty can influence behavior. This effect is observed in mammals, from rams to rats; here’s how it works:

One places a male rat in a cage with a receptive female rat. At first, one can observe a veritable mating frenzy. Then, gradually, the male’s interest in this female wanes. Even if she wants more, he’s had enough. However, if one replaces the original female with another, the male immediately springs back to life and bravely fights to fertilize her.

One can repeat the process until the male is completely exhausted. Reproduction has the highest priority for genes, hence there is a greater genetic diversity. A prime example is the male Antechinus, a mouse-like creature from Australia, which becomes so frenzied during mating that it destroys its own immune system and subsequently dies.

In comparison to humans, this is of course not as obvious, but parallels can still be seen. And here again, we can argue that from an evolutionary psychology and biological perspective, humans are not actually made for monogamy.

The preference for new partners contributes to driving the use of internet pornography. It revolves around the allure of novelty on both the physical and psychological levels. And even our neurotransmitter dopamine is influenced by novelty and is released more strongly. Let’s delve a little deeper.

Reward System and more

Primitive circuits in the brain control emotions, drives, impulses, and unconscious decisions. They perform their work so efficiently that evolution long before humans saw no need to change them. The desire and motivation to have sex largely stem from the neurochemical substance dopamine. It reinforces the core of a primitive part of the brain known as the reward system. There, they experience desire, pleasure, and also form addictions.

This ancient system compels youto do things that promote your survival and pass on your genes. At the top of the list of human rewards are food, sex, love, friendship, and novelty. For example, this is also illustrated in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where the lowest level represents these needs.

These are referred to as natural rewards, as opposed to addictive chemicals that hijack this cycle, such as amphetamines.

The evolutionary purpose of dopamine is to motivate you to do what serves your genes. The bigger the dopamine surge, the more you want or crave something. If there is no dopamine, you simply ignore it. Calorie-rich chocolate cake or ice cream – amazing. Celery – not really.

Dopamine surges are the barometer by which they determine the potential value of each experience. They tell them what to do or avoid and what to pay attention to. Furthermore, dopamine informs you of what to remember by helping you wire their brain through new or strengthened connections. Sexual stimulation and orgasm together form the greatest natural surge of dopamine and opioids available to their reward system.

Although dopamine is often referred to as the “happiness hormone,” it’s actually about seeking and striving for pleasure, not the pleasure itself. That’s why dopamine levels rise with anticipation (anticipating: “Oh, I’m about to watch a porn… or eat chocolate cake… or go on vacation…”)

So, it’s precisely about the motivation and drive to pursue potential pleasure or long-term goals. It acts in the synapses of nerve cells by binding to receptors to stimulate electrical impulses.

What we truly experience as a reward

The ultimate reward or what we experience as a feeling of happiness is the release of endogenous opioids. These morphine-like chemicals bind to receptors within the reward system. The pleasure of climax seems to arise from a massive release of opioids. For example, that intense “Ahhh” feeling when you enjoy your favorite dessert or drink cool water on a hot sunny day. In contrast, bursts of dopamine push you to finish with an orgasm, finish the dessert, or find a fountain.

So, think of dopamine as desire and opioids as preference, although both are not easy to separate in the brain. As psychologist Susan Weinschenk explained, “Dopamine makes us want, desire, strive, and seek.” but “the dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system. We seek more than we are satisfied. Seeking keeps us alive rather than sitting in a satisfied stupor.”

One of the crucial imbalances in chronic overstimulation and ultimately addiction is that desire and craving increase, while pleasure or preference decrease. Addicts want “it” more, but gradually like “it” less (phenomenon of tolerance – it takes more and more of it and more variety). Addiction can be compared to the desire to go on a rampage.

And that’s also the reason why pornography is so enticing – a vast field of novelty, action, increasingly harder videos, and the benefit of being able to have it whenever we want and for as long as we want. Having more tabs open and clicking on them for hours, we can cycle through more novel sexual partners every ten minutes than our hunter-gatherer ancestors experienced in their entire lives. Of course, reality is different.

Everything plays perfectly into the hands of the dopamine system.

Key stimuli and effects

Many effects of pornography are of a very complex nature and even affect our stress system and our feelings of anxiety. Scientists like Nikolaas Tinbergen speak of supranormal stimuli, which are exaggerated versions of normal stimuli that enhance the characteristics that we find particularly attractive (e.g., sexual novelty). And the pornography industry takes advantage of this, as internet pornography is saturated with them. And often users start consuming pornography before they have any real interactions with the opposite sex, which additionally leads to a derealization.

Studies further show that the anticipation of reward and novelty mutually reinforce each other to increase arousal and rewire the brain’s reward system. Also, the videos, or moving images, cannot be compared to the earlier pornographic magazines. Internet pornography also offers further aspects of derealization, such as exaggerated pounding, double to triple penetrations, artificially enlarged breasts, inflated penises with seemingly endless endurance, gang-bangs, and more.

The worst part is – after years of consumption, people learn to be the third person and not “in the real life middle of it”. This can repolarize the cause of arousal to that level, leading those individuals to find arousal only in watching instead of real interaction.

Signs of excessive arousal

Simply put, the danger lurks when:

• something proves to be particularly “valuable,” i.e., an exaggerated version of something irresistible to humans
• something is readily available in an unlimited, unnatural supply
• something comes in many variations (abundant novelty)
• and we consume it excessively over time.

What else fits in here, for example? Exactly, cheap, readily available junk food. That’s also referred to as a supranormal stimulus. Let me give you a little metaphor: Try chugging down a 1-liter soft drink and a bag of greasy snacks without much thought, but try consuming the caloric equivalent in dried wild meat and cooked roots. Similarly, consider viewers of pornography, who spend hours routinely scrolling through porn sites to find the right video for their climax, with dopamine levels staying elevated for unusually long periods.

The problem with this: The dopamine peak is high, but the subsequent drop is even deeper. And it takes longer for dopamine to recover compared to pursuing “normal” rewards because the total amount of dopamine is depleted, and your body needs time to replenish it.

So, let’s look at dopamine this way: Overconsumption of porn feels like a promise of pleasure, but remember, the message from dopamine isn’t “satisfaction”; it’s “keep going, satisfaction is just around the corner.”

Final words

Of course, one could delve deeper into the matter and elaborate on the neurobiological cores. But that wasn’t our goal! The aim of this blog post is to provide an overview in a concise and understandable manner of what happens in the brain during and after porn consumption and what might lead someone to it.

For those who want to delve deeper, as mentioned above, you can follow the link provided or we recommend purchasing Gary Wilson’s book: “Your Brain on Porn.” There you will learn everything from this blog post and more – making it well worth the investment if the topic resonates with you or even touches on it.

In the next episode, we will address the question of how pornography can be overcome with strategies. And for men we recommend on visiting the following blog post to strenthen your masculine mindset:

Stay strong, dear friends, and focus on your goals! You can do it!

For any questions, feel free to contact us anytime via the contact form, email, or social media.

Conquer and Elevate