is masturbation ruining your life i'm dr trish leigh neuroscientist and sex addiction coach
in this video let's break it down so first i'm going to talk about masturbation having not to
do with sex and everything to do with something else then secondly we'll talk about what's
happening in your brain when you masturbate and why you need it then third stay with me because
lastly i will give you a brain tip strategy and actually today's is twofold so let's dig in
okay number one masturbations not about sex it has everything to do with self self-soothing
it is a self-soothing technique so if you think about it logically you found
masturbation when you were young likely when you were a child or an adolescent or teenager
and it felt good so when you first found it and especially if it was coupled with pornography
or anything like that it is this massive super normal stimulus and it delivers this
dopamine deluge a flood of dopamine which is the pleasure seeking neurotransmitter
it gets dumped into your brain and it makes your brain and your body feel better than ever before
so what happens is that initial response when you were young was a self-soothing technique for
the difficulties of childhood or your teenage years and for many people they can remember that
first time that they found porn and the first time that they masturbated and how good it made them
feel self-soothing okay so now you fast forward many years later it might be 5 10 15 20 it might
be decades later and you are hanging on to this self-soothing technique so what do you need it for
this is the question for you what are you self-soothing you're either self-soothing
something that's happening to you in the present or you are hanging on to the self-soothing
technique for the things that happen to you in your past and we'll dig into that in the brain
tip strategy but for now masturbation is about self-soothing to offset stress and boredom okay
let's move on to number two what's happening in your brain when you masturbate to make it so that
it's a self-soothing technique well i already told you that when you masturbate your brain
gets flooded with dopamine now dopamine makes you feel good in the moment dopamine kind of hits hard
and fast but then it goes away and the way that the reason that i call it the pleasure seeking
neurochemical is because it gives you pleasure in the moment but it keeps you seeking for
more that's why you have to continue to go back for more and more masturbation you might have to
increase the intensity of the pornography that you're consuming you might have to masturbate
with more intensity to be able to get the same level of arousal it is because the reward center
in your brain is becoming desensitized and that means you need higher levels of sensitization
unfortunately what that means is you're basically frying out the reward center in your brain
every time you masturbate think about that that is how it damages your brain one of the ways at least
so when you masturbate you're flooding your system and it's giving you all that dopamine to feel good
unfortunately that's the a of an a b effect the b is that it creates a dopamine deficit in your life
you teach your brain all the dopamine is in masturbation none of the dopamine is in my world
and you should be able to get albeit lower levels of dopamine from work from your relationships from
your hobbies from engaging in the world but if you get stuck in a compulsive masturbation habit
what happens is you no longer go into the world to engage you've taught your brain that isolating and
masturbating is where the dopamine is and that's how the compulsion continues and the intensity
increases and the need or the dependency for masturbation continues and grows
okay so number three what can you do about it you do not need to stay stuck in this masturbation
cycle i know it can be difficult and challenging at the beginning but i also know that you and your
brain are stronger than that you can do this and this is the start are you ready for it number one
now remember masturbation's not about sex it's about self-soothing so figure out
what are you self-soothing dig into your past and find the traumatic experiences big or small
no thing is too silly what's traumatic to you might not be traumatic to me but if it
leaves its mark on your nervous system it in fact is trauma and the reason i say that is people say
this seems silly but i've been hanging on to this for 30 years well if you've been hanging onto it
it's not silly it traumatized you it left its murk and it's time to let it go so figure out
what those things are can be family dysfunction it can be bullying it can be not feeling desired
it can be not feeling part of the group it can be a small t trauma it doesn't have to be big find it
find how it's played itself out over your lifetime and don't look too hard if there's nothing there
you don't have to dig up stuff that isn't there but generally speaking there's stuff there from
our past that's lingering in our nervous system the way to get rid of it is to resolve it
to process it and integrate it so it leaves your brain and nervous system
and generally it involves forgiveness and i know that's difficult forgiving the people who have
wronged you by understanding the limited capacity that they had to be able to be good to you and to
give you what you need or that they wronged you because they didn't have the tools to deal with
life but you're here getting the tools to deal with life secondly once you figure out what you're
self-soothing from the past or the present you need to find new self-soothing habits healthy ones
like exercise like joining groups that make you feel good like playing your musical instrument
like doing puzzles like shooting darts like cueing up some billiards like going for a walk digging
your toes in the grass hiking water skiing paddle boarding whatever you like to do go into the world
to find the dopamine so you can self-soothe in a healthy way crank some weights do some push-ups
that's an easy way body weight training okay so the second part of the brain tip strategy is
realize masturbation's about getting dopamine so when you stay away from masturbation
that pattern's going to unwire you're not going to be driven back to it because you're breaking
the pleasure seeking cycle and especially if you're getting dopamine from the world you're
rewiring your brain not to go back to masturbation but instead to go into your life so you have to
figure out what you're self-soothing in the past or the present and find new ways to self-soothe
and preventively give yourself dopamine from your life it will work it may take some time
and extend yourself some grace through the process but it will work if you stay the course okay i
hope that helps you out and as always if you re if you're looking for help on this journey reach out
to me dr trish i have programs of different shapes and sizes that i've designed just to help people
leave porn and masturbation behind and as always remember control your brain or it'll control you