How Porn Can Act Like a Drug for the Brain
It’s widely known that tobacco has harmful effects. That’s why it stays behind the checkout counter at a grocery or convenience store, and you must prove you’re an adult to buy it. Porn, conversely, has also been shown to have harmful effects. Yet, it can be accessed online by anyone, anywhere, despite sites claiming to have age restrictions.
Why are we comparing tobacco, a drug, to porn? While you might be surprised at the comparison, porn and tobacco have striking similarities in the ways they can affect a person’s brain.
How Drugs Can Impact the Brain
In each of our brains, there is a system referred to as the “reward center.” It’s the reward center’s job to make you feel good when you do something like eat good food, workout, or kiss. Since you feel good doing those types of things, your brain wants you to do them again and again. And because those things are relatively healthy for you, that’s a great thing!
The problems come when the brain gets tricked.
When a drug or an addictive substance is used, your brain receives a signal that activates the reward center. A large amount of dopamine is released and begins the process for the brain to develop a craving for the drug. Every time the drug triggers a dopamine release, the craving for it grows stronger and stronger. In other words, drugs can hijack the reward center and highly motivates a person to pursue the drug further. Sometimes, these cravings and the focus on the “high” can become more prominent than the pursuit of other healthy and pleasurable things.
Research shows that porn can cause a similar effect on the brain. When a natural “high” is achieved with healthy substances or behaviors, like food, sex, or exercise, your brain automatically switches off the dopamine release and leaves you feeling satisfied and happy. Unfortunately, because addictive drugs and porn act as “supernormal stimuli,” they don’t turn off the dopamine-triggered response, but rather increase it. The consequence is that the reward circuits become desensitized and, according to this article in the New England Journal of Medicine, “dampens the ability to feel pleasure and the motivation to pursue everyday activities.” Instead, particular urges for the drug don’t go away but become more powerful. That’s why it’s so hard to quit habit-forming substances like some drugs.
How Porn Can Impact the Brain
Simone Kühn, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. She did a study on brain activity, specifically looking at what effect pornography has on brain structure. What she found was that the gray matter in the reward center of the brain is smaller, generally, in the brains of heavy porn consumers, indicating that the regular porn consumers may have become more desensitized to rewards. Additionally, the more a person consumed porn, the less connected their reward center was to their prefrontal cortex. In other words, the more porn someone consumes, the less their brains are able to control impulses.
With porn consumption, the brain can follow a very similar pattern as with some drug use. Porn offers an overcharged release of dopamine to the consumer. The brain can then develop a new, higher tolerance level, and crave new, different, or more extreme pornographic images and videos than before. This cycle is what can turn a habit into a compulsion, and even into an addiction in some extreme cases. Once established, for some consumers, quitting a compulsion or addiction is difficult and can lead to withdrawal symptoms, just like when trying to quit drugs.
The good news is that those struggling with porn can overcome its pull and reclaim control. Many consumers with unwanted porn habits have broken free of the cycle, and so can you.
Quit porn for good with Fortify, a free, science-based recovery platform dedicated to helping you find lasting freedom from pornography.*
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