the neuroscience behind porn addiction, i'm dr trish leigh, cognitive neuroscientist
and sex addiction recovery coach, in this video let's break down how porn impacted your brain the
first and second time that you watched it and how the seeds of addiction were planted then
and they were watered over time by continual consistent frequent and growing in
intensity porn habit so let's dig in how did porn addiction start now for most men and unfortunately
more and more young women now what happens is you find pornography when you are young
and we know the average age of exposure now is between 8 and 11 years old completely terrifying
am i right young kids are becoming addicted to pornography more and more at staggering rates
and it breaks my heart which is why i created the non-profit organization pornbrainprevention.org
so if you're inspired please donate because this world could use all the help it can get okay,
i'm sorry, i digress, let's get back to the neural mechanisms so what happened is when you were young
and you found pornography it flooded your system with dopamine dopamine is the pleasure seeking
neurochemical so what it does is when it floods your system first of all it gives you that rush
that feeling in your brain that you had the first time you saw it that feeling that you never had
before that is the dopamine flooding your system and remember porn is a super normal stimulus more
than you could get anywhere in the real world thus the rush was bigger than you can get from playing
kickball from hanging out with your friends from school so you're young and your brain gets this
deluge and in that first exposure it's more than your brain has ever had so what your brain has to
do is calibrate now let me explain one concept when your system is working well and we'll just
say well for now for sake of argument if your system is working well it's called homeostasis
so your system's got all the neural chemicals flowing electrical energy is being used all the
systems are working as they should to maintain this baseline homeostasis just feeling okay
when you got this rush of dopamine that homeostasis was rocked it kind of rocked
your world there and you felt it but what it also did internally is your system had to recalibrate
itself because of that deluge of dopamine and so it recalibrated itself to go that's more
than i've ever experienced of that i better calibrate for that so then on the second exposure
your brain already readjusted itself because of that exposure and when you're exposed again
your brain actually needs more dopamine than the first time that you were exposed
because of that recalibration neo-homeostasis new homeostasis new baseline when it comes to dopamine
from watching sex on the screen it's very environmental or activity specific
so basically when you watch porn the second time your brain needs more dopamine and guess what
seeds of addiction are planted your brain is beginning to be hooked on that feeling and now
it needs even more dopamine to get there and that's how the seeds of addiction are planted
now pornography addiction is different than alcohol and drugs because most times children are
exposed to alcohol and drugs until later in young adulthood or in you know later teenage years when
when kids are experimenting not at eight or nine when it shows up on their ipad so that's the real
danger of porn addiction is that you're exposed to it at this early age your brain's not ready
to handle this dopamine deluge it recalibrates itself and now it wants more of it and it needs
more and more and more so seeds of addiction are planted so then every time you go back to porn
and masturbate what you're doing is you are watering those seeds and the more consistently
and frequently you water the seeds the more that addiction is going to grow also the more that it
escalates into higher levels of intensity and especially if you're moving into genres that
are not congruent with what you want in your life and are giving you this level of anxiety and you
don't feel good about watching them but they're really hitting the nervous system in terms of
increasing anxiety and arousal you are giving your brain more intensity and what you're doing
inadvertently is tolerance is being built to more you know vanilla or plain types of pornography and
your brain is going to always need these higher levels of intensity to feel the same arousal more
intensity funkier genres equals even more dopamine than before so please remember that because it
means you're flooding your brain out now when you flood your brain out with that dopamine it's not
harmless unfortunately it's damaging your brain because the supernormal stimulus is not normal
it's too much it's not good for your brain so you're knocking out functioning in the frontal
lobe and you're desensitizing the reward center in the middle of the brain what that does is it
makes it so that you can't think it gives you more anxiety it gives you depression
it creates this dopamine deficit in your life so there's lack of motivation you're more stressed
out about your life you might perceive people as attacking you and you become very defensive all
because of the changes in the neurochemicals the new neo-homeostasis your brain has been changed
because of that early porn exposure so let's just say for sake of argument you never watch porn at
8 9 10 11 12 you've never experienced it your brain will grow and develop in a different way
in terms of how it uses electrical energy and in terms of the neurotransmitter cascades that happen
so when you continue to watch porn every single time you do it you're changing the
development of your brain and for the worse obviously and you are making it so that
you're damaging your brain it's just like using a drug over and over from a young age so that is the
neuromechanisms the neuroscience behind how porn addiction starts so then it's watered over time
there's tolerance that is built there are withdrawal symptoms when you try to quit
for most people unless they implement lots of the right strategies with the right support
which is what i'm here for there can be a massive ripple effect of how it plays out in your mental
physical and relationship life so the consequences are real and it's because of the neurochemical
changes okay i hope that helps you understand how that addiction started one more thing and we'll
wrap up is that then what happens is when you go into the screen and you're consuming pornography
not only did you train your brain to hit the easy button to get the dopamine deluge
at the same time you're training your brain to see people as objects so it creates objectification of
people women and men both so we know that that's showing up in people's lives as a major increase
in cheating and infidelity to 300 percent that's what i mean by major and significant we know that
divorce rates and breakup rates are over two times and that's you know from the people who are in
the research studies and are admitting that porn use is in the mix so we know that this can have
devastating effects in terms of objectification and then sex addiction so infidelity
is an escalation type of behavior there's all these other sexual acting out behaviors that
people escalate to after they consume porn so there's sexting webcam sex prostitutes acting out
with other people because every time just about every time if porn's in the mix what happens is
the screen is no longer high enough of a dopamine hit for your brain so your brain the hijacker
in your brain says to you i got a brilliant idea let's not use the screen anymore let's go be with
susie q who's in the world and let's get her to do the things that are in the screen if your partner
doesn't want to do those things we also know that the sex acts from pornography will show up in the
bedroom with you and you can look for a video on this in a few minutes in this playlist that
it shows up in the bedroom and it creates this discontent between partners because if you have
a healthy partner healthy partners don't want to do what you see in porn okay let's stick to
the neuroscience we'll wrap it up there remember if you're looking for help on this journey jump
on over to my website drtrishleigh.com if you want to donate to the cause to help teenagers
pornbrainprevention.org and as always control your brain or it'll control you