Your Brain on Porn (4 page)

Curious as to who was linking to the new resource I began tracking my visitors. I was astonished.

Links to the new site popped up in threads all over the web, often in other languages. Men worldwide were looking for answers. At present, YBOP gets as many as 20,000 unique visitors a day. Forums

for people quitting porn are popping up and growing rapidly. The largest and oldest English-language forum is Reddit/NoFap (2012) with some 116,000 members at present. Reddit/PornFree boasts 17,500, NoFap.org 21,000, and YourBrainRebalanced 11,600. The same phenomenon is occurring internationally. For example, in China, two forums combined currently have more than 800,000

members struggling to recover from internet porn's effects.
[10]

Wherever men congregated one could find them debating porn's effects. Threads – sometimes thousands of posts long – appeared on websites for bodybuilders, ‘pick-up artists’, university alumni, those seeking medical advice, car enthusiasts, sports fans, recreational drug users, even guitarists!

Most guys could not believe porn was the culprit behind their symptoms until months after they quit:

After years of porn, I was having trouble with erections. It had been getting worse and
worse for a couple years. Needed more and more types of porn stimulation. I was really
worried, but the anxiety just pushed me deeper into more extreme porn
.
Now, the more I go
without porn, masturbation, fantasy and orgasm, the more difficult it becomes to
not
get an
erection. LOL. No ED problems or weak ejaculations like I had just a few months ago. I have

healed.

Even after quitting and seeing improvements, many were still sceptical. They returned to internet porn – only to see their problems gradually (or swiftly) recur. And even though anonymous online forums were buzzing, no one wanted to talk about it publicly:

Young guys won't go to doctors talking about ED. Porn-induced ED and porn addiction
are our personal secret. We're too anxious, ashamed, confused and angry to create awareness

of these issues. We hide in the shadows because we individually don't want to be seen to exist.

Therefore we collectively aren't thought to exist.

For some, quitting triggered distressing, unexpected withdrawal symptoms:

Here's what I'm dealing with: irritability, fatigue, inability to sleep (even sleep aids don't
help much), trembling/shaking, lack of focus, shortness of breath, and depression.

*

I've battled a few addictions in my life, from nicotine to alcohol and other substances. I've

overcome all of them, and this was by far the most difficult. Urges, crazy thoughts,
sleeplessness, feelings of hopelessness, despair, worthlessness, and many more negative
things were all part of what I went through with this porn thing. It's a wicked awful thing that
I will never have to deal with ever again in my life
–
ever.

If you don't realise such symptoms are connected with quitting, but you
do
notice that returning to porn relieves them, then you are strongly motivated to keep using porn. I'll come back to the withdrawal-symptom hurdle in the recovery chapter.

Most alarmingly of all, those with erectile dysfunction who quit porn often reported temporary, but absolute, loss of libido and abnormally lifeless genitals. Even men with no ED sometimes experienced temporary loss of libido and mild sexual dysfunctions soon after they quit:

I have absolutely no sex drive. No spontaneous erections. It's a very strange feeling when

you look at a beautiful woman and in your head you have your normal thoughts like ‘Wow,
she's beautiful. I would like to get to know her!’ and yet you have no sexual thoughts or
intentions. It's a very strange and for me quite a scary experience. It's like you've been
castrated.

Unless guys had been warned about this ‘flatline’, fears of permanent impotence sent them rushing back to cyberspace to attempt to salvage their manhood. Escalating to more extreme porn, even with a partially flaccid penis, seemed a small price to pay to stem the total loss of libido. Porn use seemed like a
cure.

Many, however, were horrified to discover that they
couldn't
override the flatline by returning to porn. They had to wait until their libido returned naturally – which sometimes took months.

Interestingly, male rats who copulate to sexual exhaustion also show evidence of a mini-flatlin
e[11]
before their libido returns. Is the porn-induced flatline biologically related? Researchers study rats because their primitive brain structures are surprisingly similar to ours. As developmental molecular biologist John J. Medina PhD says, animal research ‘acts as a guiding “flashlight” for human research, illuminating biological processes’.
[12]
In other words, researchers aren't studying rats to help
them
with their addictions, erections and mood disorders.

Happily, once warned about the possibility of a temporary flatline, most guys powered through it

with relative equanimity:

About my flatline. When people say they feel like their cock is dead, they aren't
exaggerating. It literally feels lifeless. It feels like a burden to have to carry it around.

As tube sites became more popular and more widely accessed, a flood of younger guys in their

early twenties and late teens arrived with the
same
sexual dysfunctions as the older visitors. Rapidly, they comprised the majority of visitors to the websites where men were complaining of what they understood to be porn-induced sexual dysfunctions.

The Other Porn Experiment

In 2012, guys their early twenties began to set up online forums dedicated entirely to experimenting with giving up internet porn in hopes of reversing porn-related problems. Often they found that it helped to cut out masturbation temporarily too. Indeed, many were unable to masturbate without porn, at least early in the process. Their goal was to give their brains a rest from chronic overstimulation via internet erotica. They called their approach ‘rebooting.’

The best-known English-language forum is Reddit/NoFap. Other popular English-language forums

include Reboot Nation, Reddit/PornFree, YourBrainRebalanced and NoFap.org
.[13]
Women are welcome at all of them and their numbers are growing too. I've been monitoring some of these forums since their inception because members frequently link to YBOP.

As part of this grassroots movement, largely beneath the radar of the mainstream press, thousands of people worldwide have undertaken the groundbreaking experiment of giving up artificial online sexual stimulation (internet porn, web-cam encounters, erotic literature, surfing escort ads, etc.,).

Many have shared their results over a period of months.

This vast experiment has been conducted without controls or double-blind protocols (such trials

would be impossible because researchers would have to ask some participants to stop masturbating

to porn, which is the sort of thing people – whether they're researchers or subjects – notice). It is the only experiment I know of that removes the variable of porn use and compares histories with subsequent outcomes.

Obviously, ‘subjects’ are not randomly chosen. They are people who want to experiment with giving up porn. Also, the vast majority are digital natives, so, as a group they say nothing of the general population. Moreover, although membership on these porn-challenge forums has mushroomed

since the first one started in 2011, they tell us nothing about overall percentages of people with porn-related problems in any age group.

Sceptics sometimes claim that people who experiment with quitting must be motivated by religious reasons. Yet all of the forums named above are secular. The largest of these new forums, and likely youngest in terms of average age, conducted a self-poll a couple of years ago. Only 7% had joined for religious reasons
.[14]

The information these online forums and threads generate is anecdotal, but it would be a mistake

to dismiss it without further investigation. For one thing, the people quitting porn and seeing benefits are surprisingly diverse. They come from different backgrounds, cultures and degrees of religiosity; some are on psychotropic medications; some are in relationships; some smoke and use recreational

drugs; some are bodybuilders; their ages cover a wide range, and so forth.

For another thing, in this informal experiment the subjects generally remove the variable of internet porn use. With the exception of one 3-week, formal experiment, "A Love That Doesn't Last: Pornography consumption and weakened commitment to one's romantic partner"
,[15]
no academic studies have ever removed the variable of porn use. Other porn studies are correlational. They can tell us interesting things about what conditions are
associated
with porn use, but they can't show us what shifts when users remove porn. The latter is one way scientists verify a causal connection.

Existing studies do find that frequency of porn viewing correlates with depression, anxiety, stress and social (mal)functioning,
[16]
as well as less sexual and relationship satisfaction and altered sexual tastes,
[17]
poorer quality of life and health
,[18]
and real-life intimacy problems.
[19]
But so far, researchers seldom, if ever, ask about other phenomena seen regularly on the forums, such as impaired motivation and confidence, brain fog (inability to focus), loss of attraction to real people, sexual dysfunction, escalation to what users themselves describe as more extreme material over time, and so forth.

In any case, people who have been using porn heavily since puberty rarely make the connection

between their porn use and symptoms such as anxiety, depression or weak erections until after they stop using. No matter how miserable they are, porn seems like a way to feel good – a solution rather than a source of problems.

Meanwhile, there's little point in a researcher asking such people if their porn use has caused their symptoms. Porn users have not been given any reason to consider that possibility. Society has already put their problems in neat little boxes that do not take account of internet porn use. Today's porn users are regularly diagnosed with – and prescribed medication for – social anxiety, low self-esteem, concentration problems, lack of motivation, depression, performance anxiety (even when they also can't achieve an erection or climax on their own – unless they use porn), and so forth.

Some quietly suffer with panic that their sexual orientations have mysteriously morphed, or that they must be closet perverts because they eventually can
only
get off to fetish porn, or that they will never be able to have sex, and thus intimacy, because of their sexual dysfunctions. Not to be alarmist, but I read far too many recovery accounts that mention earlier suicidal thoughts. Disturbingly, recent research at Oxford University found that moderate or severe addiction to the internet was associated with increased risk for self-harm
.[20]
Here are comments by three guys:

I have seriously considered suicide throughout my life because of these issues but I was

able to cope until I found out porn was the problem. 115 days later I have finally broken free
of its chains. It's still tough, but I know if I don't use it I'll be able to have sex with my
beautiful girlfriend the next day.

*

Staying off porn really makes a difference! I thought it was impossible to quit porn to the

point of contemplating castration and suicide. Here's one thing I actually didn't know that
helped me out: People who view 'transsexual' porn do it because of all the stimulation, and

even the producers admit that they make this fetish for a straight audience. My thoughts that I
might have been bi/gay were more of an optical/psychological illusion.

*

As a child I was highly athletic, smart, and sociable. I was always happy and had a
million friends. That all changed around age 11 when I downloaded KaZaA and progressed to

nearly every type of porn imaginable (dominatrix, animal, amputee, etc.). I started having
severe depression and anxiety. The next 15 years of my life were completely miserable. I was

incredibly anti-social. I didn't talk to anybody and sat alone at lunch. I hated everyone. I quit
all the sports that I played even though I was top rank in all of them. My marks plummeted to

barely passable. As much as I hate to think about it now, I had even started thinking about
planning my own 'Columbine style' exit to this world.

After people quit using porn, the benefits they report are often staggering. Indirectly, their experience suggests that some brains have been profoundly affected by today's superstimulating highspeed porn. As we'll see, formal research is now starting to bear out their reports.

Given the weight of first person testimony from these forums worldwide, the emphasis should be

on further research that sheds light on the mechanics of what is actually happening. Research could also help sort the porn-afflicted from those with other disorders, such as those stemming from childhood trauma and attachment problems. It goes without saying that not everyone's problems can be traced back to internet porn use. It also goes without saying that an attraction to transgender people, an interest in being dominated, and any number of other things, can form part of a durable and happy sexual identity. The problem is in the effects of porn on the brain, not in any particular aspect of human beings' astonishing diversity in matters of desire.