Relationships

How Porn Changes Your Brain and Causes Sexual Dysfunction

One of the most common and innocuous behaviors is also harmful.

Forty million people in America look at porn regularly. If that’s expanded to having watched porn at least one time, those numbers would be huge. It’s clear that porn is becoming even more popular and prominent. Children are watching porn earlier and earlier, being exposed to adult content that should not be seen by a child. Porn is an epidemic that needs to be stopped.

Porn is believed to be harmless. This belief is not backed by anything — people just assume that their porn habits aren’t causing any harm because they have not noticed anything bad resulting from their porn usage. There are many people, however, whose relationships have been destroyed due to their porn habits. Addiction to porn is also common. Despite common belief, porn is not harmless.

Porn Changes Neural Pathways

Neuroplasticity is when the brain’s neural pathways alter themselves. This is usually due to behavioral changes, such as learning a new language or engaging in cognitive behavioral therapy. Viewing pornography can also change neural pathways.

When a person does something repeatedly, especially when paired with a second behavior, the connection between these two becomes stronger. Similar to how Pavlov trained his dogs to know they were about to be fed when they heard a bell ring, watching porn and masturbating forms connections.

Some frequent pornography viewers will find it difficult to have an enjoyable sexual experience with a partner because they are so used to their sexual pleasure being tied to watching porn, specifically extreme porn. The reward center in the brain is activated when a person does a particular activity, including porn. Their brain now knows that when the person does a specific activity, it will release positive chemicals in the brain. One specifically important chemical is DeltaFosB.

DeltaFosB is commonly associated with addiction but is also helpful for learning new skills. DeltaFosB increases in the brain when a pleasurable behavior is repeated. This can activate genes to cause a long-term addiction to something, such as porn. Once there are high amounts of DeltaFosB in the brain, it can be hard for the person to stop their porn usage.

For people who have porn addictions or are forming them, hope is not lost. It is shown that DeltaFosB can become depleted if the person abstains from watching porn. The chemical can stick around for weeks or months depending on the person and how long they’ve been watching porn, but it does go away after abstaining from porn.

Porn Causes Sexual Dysfunction and Misconceptions

Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels

Want to have amazing, mind-blowing sex? Stop watching porn. There’s a highly common myth that porn “helps sex” because people “learn what to do”. Very false. There are so many resources nowadays for people who are newly sexually active or for people who want to broaden their sexual repertoire. Both of these are incredibly normal, we are just going about it in the wrong way.

Porn is not realistic in almost every circumstance. There is supposedly “feminist porn”, although I do not consider it as such, but the fact is that the majority of people are not watching it, they are watching extreme forms of porn.

From my experience (and others), most women do not moan so loud that the neighbors two doors down can hear. If this is your case, props to you. Scissoring is also not super common in lesbian sex, unlike what we see in porn. If I asked a woman I was hooking up for the first time to scissor, she would think I was nuts.

Sex is not perfect. People bump heads, limbs, everything. Women queef sometimes during sex, men sometimes have a hard time getting an erection, occasionally one person may fall asleep. Sex in the real world can often include laughing and pauses for food (which is not eaten off the other person).

Pornography also generally does not include a lot of consent. I know this because I used to watch pornography. I have never heard either sex partner ask “is this okay?” or any version of that. I have never someone tell the other partner to stop or that something hurts. I also have never seen someone cry during sex, which actually can happen a lot in real life, mainly because the hormones that are released can sometimes allow suppressed emotions to come up. All of these normal aspects cannot be found in the average porn video. For people new to sex who are watching, they are not learning about consent. They think that it is okay to begin penetration without asking or can expect that their partner will act as dramatically as a pornstar does. People think porn is similar to real sex, but that’s incredibly false.