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what are the worse effects of watching porn on Brain and health?
what are the worse effects of watching porn on Brain and health?
The effects of porn are devastating.
Pornography is ravaging marriages. In our culture porn is treated as
if it’s harmless, but it’s not. Porn will wreck the arousal process in
your brain and end up wrecking your sex life in marriage.
I receive emails everyday from women who are desperate to fix their
marriages, but they don’t know what to do. They married men who never
seem to want sex. Or their husbands are never satisfied. Or their
husbands call them boring or unattractive. And the root of many of these
problems is porn.
Here’s the really devastating part: Because so much of what
porn does to you happens chemically in the brain, the porn use doesn’t
have to be going on NOW to have these effects. A boy who grew
up on porn in his teens, and then managed to stop watching it in his
twenties (with occasional relapses) will still suffer from many of these
things.
The good news: There is healing! You can rebuild those chemical
pathways to arousal. But first we have to understand 10 ways that porn
affects the brain, and thus wrecks many couples’ sex lives. And so
today, on Top 10 Tuesday, I thought I’d share:
The Top 10 Negative Effects of Porn on Your Sex Life
And remember–women use porn, too! While some of these apply just to men, many of them apply to both genders.
For sources of these claims, see the graphic at the bottom of the post. They’re all listed there.
1. Porn Means You Can’t Get Aroused by “Just” Your Spouse
Do you remember reading about Pavlov and his dog in Psychology?
Pavlov would give the dog a nice juicy steak, but right before he did he
would ring a bell. He conditioned the dog to associate ringing the bell
with getting great food. Eventually Pavlov took the food away, but kept
ringing the bell. The dog kept salivating at the bell, even though
there was no steak, because the dog associated the bell with the food.
The same thing happens when we see porn. Porn
stimulates the arousal centers in the brain. When it’s accompanied by
orgasm (sexual release through masturbation), then a chemical reaction
happens and hormones are released. In effect, our brains start to associate arousal with an image, an idea, or a video, rather than a person.
When you don’t watch porn and save yourself until marriage, then all
of those chemicals and hormones are released for the first time when
you’re with your spouse, and it causes you to bond intensely (and
sexually) to your spouse. But when you spend a ton of time teaching your
brain to associate arousal and release with pornography, your brain
can’t associate arousal and release with a person anymore. Either you
have to fantasize about the porn, and get those images in your brain, or
you have to watch porn first. Often people can “complete the act”, but
it’s not intense for them the way porn is. You’ve rewired your brain,
and now you’re salivating at the wrong thing.
2. Porn Wrecks Your Libido
It’s only natural, then, that many people who use porn in the past,
or who use porn in the present, have virtually no libido when it comes
to making love to their spouse. The spouse is not what turns them on,
and so the natural drive that we have for sex is transferred somewhere
else. I get so many emails from young women in their twenties who say, “my
husband and I were both virgins when we married, and I thought he’d
want sex all the time. But after our honeymoon sex went to maybe twice a
month, and that’s only if I pressure him. He says he just isn’t
interested.” With so many men growing up on porn, this is just to be expected.
3. Porn Makes You Sexually Lazy
In porn, everyone is turned on all the time. You don’t have to make any effort to arouse someone; it’s automatic. There is no foreplay in porn.
And so if your spouse isn’t aroused you start to think that it’s
somehow their fault. There’s no expectation that we will have to “woo”
someone or be affectionate and help jumpstart that arousal process. It’s
almost as if we approach sex as two different beings and we’re just
using each other, rather than thinking of each other. And thus we never
learn how to please the other or become a good lover because we’re
always thinking that the other is somehow “frigid”. Pornography teaches
you that sex is about getting my needs met; it isn’t about meeting
someone else’s needs or experiencing something wonderful together.
4. Porn Turns “Making Love” into a Foreign Concept
Those arousal centers and pleasure centers in our brain are supposed
to associate sex with physical pleasure and a real sense of intimacy.
But the intimacy doesn’t happen with porn, and so the pleasure is all
that registers. Thus, porn makes sex all about the body, and not about intimacy.
In fact, the idea of being intimate isn’t even sexy anymore; anonymous
is what’s sexy. We may call “having sex” “making love”, but in reality
they aren’t necessarily the same thing. Someone who has used porn
extensively often has a difficult time experiencing any intimacy during
sex, because those arousal and pleasure centers zero in only on the
body. And that’s another negative effect of porn: porn users often need
to objectify or degrade their partner in order to achieve pleasure, the
exact opposite of intimacy.
God made sex to actually unite us and draw us together; He even gave
us a bonding hormone that’s released at orgasm so that we’d feel closer!
But if that hormone is released when no one is present, it stops having
its effects. Sex no longer bonds you together.
5. Porn Makes Regular Intercourse Seem Boring
An alcoholic drinks alcohol for the “buzz”. But after a while your
body begins to tolerate it. To get the same buzz, you need more alcohol.
And so the alcoholic begins to drink harder liquor, or drink larger
quantities.
The same thing happens with porn. Because porn teaches us that sex is
all about the body, and not about intimacy, then the only way to get a
greater “high” or that same buzz is to watch weirder and weirder porn. I
think most of us would be horrified if we saw what most porn today
really is. It isn’t just pictures of naked women like there used to be
in Playboy; most is very violent, extremely degrading, and very ugly.
“Regular” intercourse is actually not depicted that often in porn,
and so quite frequently the person who watches porn starts to get a
warped view of what sex really is. And often they start to want weirder
and weirder things.
Now, I’m not against spicing things up,
and I do think lots of things can be fun! But when we’re wanting “more”
because we’ve programmed ourselves to think “the weirder the sexier”,
there’s a problem.
6. Porn Makes it Hard to Be Tender When You Have Sex
It’s no wonder, then, that people who use porn often have a hard
time being tender when they have sex. Sex tends to be impersonal,
rushed, and “forced”. I’m absolutely not saying that all porn users rape
their wives, but porn itself is often violent. There’s no foreplay.
There’s no waiting to arouse someone. It’s just taking what you want.
Being tender means to be loving. It’s to give and to express
affection. Because these things aren’t paired with sex in the porn users
brain, tenderness and sex no longer go together.
7. Porn Trains You to Have Immediate Gratification and Have a Difficult Time Lasting Long
With porn, when you’re aroused you reach orgasm very quickly, because
porn users tend to masturbate at the same time. Thus, orgasm tends to
be very fast. The porn user hasn’t trained his body to draw out sex so
that his spouse can get pleasure; his body is programmed to orgasm
quickly. Many porn users, then, suffer from premature ejaculation.
Some porn users go to the other extreme when they start suffering from erectile dysfunction.
They have a difficult time remaining “hard” enough during sex because
the stimulation isn’t enough. In their case, orgasm can take an
eternity, if it’s possible at all.
While both seem like polar opposites, the simple fact is that sexual
dysfunction of some sort is one of the big negative effects of
pornography.
8. Porn Gives You a Warped View of what Attractive Is
Sex is supposed to bond you physically, emotionally and spiritually
with your spouse. But if porn has made the chemical pathways in your
brain go haywire, then sex becomes only about the body. And porn shows
you that only certain body types are attractive. It’s not about the
whole person; it’s just a certain type of person.
If a woman gains even ten pounds, then, she’s no longer attractive,
and the porn user has an honest to goodness difficult time getting
aroused, because he associates only a certain body type with arousal.
Porn has taught your brain that sex is only about the body, and not
about the relationship, so if someone’s body isn’t exactly right, no
arousal happens.
9. Porn Makes Sex Seem Like Too Much Work
All of this combines to often make sex with your spouse too much
work. You’re not aroused; you find your spouse not attractive; sex is
blah; and sex requires you to make an effort for your spouse, while
you’re used to immediate gratification.
Thus, many people who use porn retreat into a life of masturbation.
Even if the porn use stops, they often find it easier to “relieve”
themselves in the shower than to have to work at sex.
10. Porn Causes Selfishness
All of this causes a spiral of selfishness where the person ignores
his spouse’s needs and is focused only on getting what he wants, and
getting it instantly. Often this manifests itself in other areas of the
relationship as well, where the spouse becomes annoyed if they have to
wait for something, or if they don’t get what they want. Porn has sold them the message: you deserve pleasure when you want it. You shouldn’t have to work to get what you want. Your needs are paramount.
It’s no wonder that shows up in other areas of your relationship.
People who think that porn is harmless and simply helps people “get
in the mood”, or “relieves frustration”, are kidding themselves. The
chemical processes in our brains are really complicated, and when you
start messing with them, it’s really difficult to develop a healthy
sexuality again.
