Six Negative Impacts Porn Can Have on You and Your Relationship
Porn has become extremely prevalent in the world of the 21st century. The popular porn website Pornhub recently announced that it receives nearly 42 billion visits to its website annually. Taking into account that there are only around 8 billion people on earth, that is a huge number.
Many people, don’t understand, however, how destructive porn can be to their own psychological health and their relationships. And even if they do, millions of them find themselves trapped in a downward spiral which they don’t fully understand, and from which they find it very difficult to escape.
What is porn?
According to dictionary.com, porn is “sexually explicit videos, photographs, writings, or the like, produced to elicit sexual arousal (often used attributively)”.
The negative impacts porn could have on you and your relationships
There are a number of ways in which porn could negatively impact on both your own emotional and psychological wellbeing and your relationships. Let us examine some of these.
1. It is addictive. Porn stimulates the brain’s ‘reward’ center to release ‘pleasure’ chemicals such as dopamine that make you feel good. Over time, however, this continuous release of dopamine causes your brain to develop tolerance, just like with any other drug. This means you have to consume more and more to achieve the same effect.
That pleasant feeling of ‘liking’ is gradually replaced with a much stronger urge of ‘want’. And if you try to stop, you develop unpleasant withdrawal symptoms just like with physical drugs. How this works is that, with the aid of a protein known as DeltaFoxB, this ‘wanting’ system actually stimulates the formation of new brain connections that save the experience in your memory so you would want to repeat it again...and again.
2. Withdrawal. As you are sucked deeper into this web of addiction, you often lose sexual interest in your partner. It becomes difficult for you to derive the same level of pleasure from a sexual encounter with the same person day after day, and you increasingly start living in the fantasy world porn is creating for you.
3. All-consuming The next stage of porn addiction is where it not only starts affecting your relationship with your partner, but it also starts crowding out other aspects of your life. You begin shirking responsibilities that are ‘unpleasant’ in favor of the ‘pleasant’ feelings you experience when watching porn. You would e.g. start to neglect your studies and seeing your friends less.
4. Hiding. When this happens, porn addicts would often realize there is a serious problem, and then try to hide it from their partners, friends and colleagues. This further erodes the relationship of trust between them and these people.
5. Shame. Many people believe that porn addicts should be named and shamed, particularly if they get involved in even more harmful subsets of this industry such as child porn. They view this as a form of shock therapy that will hopefully bring the porn addict back to his or her senses.
For someone who struggles with porn addiction this can be a very traumatic experience though - which is why so many of them desperately try to prevent other people from finding out about their problem.
6. Psychological problems. The daily struggle of trying to satisfy their cravings for more porn and yet keep it away from their partners and others cause many porn users to develop psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, and a poor self-image.
There is help
There is no need to carry the burden of your struggle with porn alone. An experienced therapist that specializes in sex therapy and addiction can help put you on the road to recovery. All you have to do is to make the decision to get help.
Sources:
https://fightthenewdrug.org/i-wish-i-could-talk-to-my-partner-about-struggling-with-porn/
https://fightthenewdrug.org/is-feeling-shame-about-watching-porn-a-good-thing/
https://fightthenewdrug.org/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-20-something-porn-addicts-porn-binge/
https://fightthenewdrug.org/why-consuming-porn-is-an-escalating-behavior/
https://fightthenewdrug.org/how-porn-affects-the-brain-like-a-drug/
https://theeftclinic.com/eftblog/thebirdsandthebees
https://theeftclinic.com/eftblog/2020/1/23/connection-the-viagra-for-women
https://theeftclinic.com/eftblog/2018/12/21/romantic-love-vs-lasting-connection-and-bonding