Treating Pornography Addiction summary

When it comes to breaking pornography addiction, understanding your biochemistry is crucial. While this knowledge may initially make you feel overwhelmed – and possibly even more hopeless – it holds the key to regaining control. So, let’s take a quick look at what’s happening to your brain when you feel the urge to view pornography.

Brains are designed to associate a stimulus with a response. For instance, if you were bitten by a dog as a child, your body might automatically tense up or your heart rate increase when you hear barking.

The same thing happens with pornography. The first time you encountered explicit material, your body likely released an intoxicating cocktail of chemicals, including endorphins, epinephrine, oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin. In fact, the blend of chemicals that brains release when viewing pornography has a similar structure to amphetamines, creating a state of high arousal. Every time you view pornography, your body releases that same blend of chemicals. But this blissful state is short-lived, and withdrawal symptoms from it are harsh. That’s what drives you to view pornography once more, so your body can enjoy chemical bliss again. 

What makes pornography addiction even more complex is that – unlike drug or alcohol addiction – your brain can self-supply its trigger. To set off the chemical reaction you’re craving, all you need to do is anticipate viewing pornography or remember explicit images you’ve already seen. But a helpful quirk of our bodies is that they’re predictable. Once you know that your brain is automatically going to respond to specific stimuli, you can learn to arrest and deactivate its reaction.

When you view pornography, the chain of responses you go through – known as the reaction sequence – always follows the same pattern. First, you encounter the stimulus – perhaps a provocative advertisement on TV. Then you have an emotional response, followed by a thought. So you might feel excited and then think, “I could jump online and look at porn.” 

At this point, your body starts releasing its chemical cocktail. You have a physical response to this; your heart rate increases and you might sweat. Then your rational mind steps in, offering an important moment of reflection. This is your back-up system asking you to properly assess if you really should give in to your urges. 

In this millisecond, your mind juggles arguments for and against. And most of the time, the body triumphs over the mind. Often, this is reinforced by a belief, like “I can’t stop myself anyway, so why try?” Or, “This will definitely be the last time I do this.” Then, the response to that initial stimulus happens – either you view pornography or you don’t.

Developing a deep awareness of your own individual reaction sequence is the first major step to breaking your addiction. Start by reflecting on when you’re triggered. Is it when you see a particular type of image, or when you’re experiencing a specific emotion, like boredom or loneliness? Think about the thoughts and sensations that arise when you encounter your stimulus. Once you’ve uncovered every possible option and feeling, map out your personal reaction sequence on paper, step-by-step. This’ll help you identify when you’ve been triggered, and when there’s scope in your reaction sequence to change your behavior. 

In the next sections, we’ll explore ways you can support yourself in achieving that change.