The Lasting Effects of Pornography
Choosing to quit your addiction to pornography can be quite the struggle. Your brain and body will fight against you heavily as you work towards purging your porn watching habits from your life. As a result, it’s not uncommon for people to relapse a few weeks or even days after trying to quit.
The changes that pornography and, along with it, masturbation have on your brain isn’t something that clears up over night. Both your body and mind have to go through a transition process from porn-fueled to porn-free. Below are some lasting effects your body will have to face months after you’ve quit watching porn. Knowing this information can help prepare you for the long recovery ahead (NOTE: This article will be very blunt, you’ve been warned).
The Change on Your Body
If you watch TV for any length of time you are likely to have to sit through a commercial promoting either Viagra or Cialis. These pills, meant to help men with erectile dysfunction (ED), are on all the time and use to be marketed at older men, but this is no longer the case. Studies have shown that ED effects 26% of men under 40 years old and half of those men, the study shows, suffered from severe erectile dysfunction. Why is this? Various psychological factors play a part in ED, and pornography is one of them.
The more you watch porn, the more your brain builds up a tolerance to it, much like someone who is addicted to drugs. As you use drugs your body builds up a tolerance and demands more quantity of input for the same quality of output or “high”. The same is true of porn. Your brain gets used to the input of multiple partners doing anything you can imagine, making it difficult to adjust to intercourse with one partner. As a result, you may find it difficult to climax or even have an erection for some time after you’ve stopped watching pornography and/or masturbating.
You simply have to tough this out. Don’t turn back to pornography to find release, you will only prolong your problem. Weather the storm, and eventually through the course of weeks to months, having normal sexual intercourse, your body will go back to normal.
The Change on Your Mind
Pornography rewires the way you think and while that rewiring can be undone, it takes some time to undo.
You won’t suddenly stop looking at women as objects when you quit porn.
You won’t stop lusting after others when you quit porn.
You won’t stop desiring porn as an outlet after you quit porn.
You will have to fight every day to control your thoughts. Eventually the chemicals in your brain will go back to their normal levels and, through the porn cleansing process; you will begin to start seeing people as people again. You’ll become less irritable and lonely. You will get back to normal, it just takes time.
Quitting pornography is only the first step in the arduous journey of becoming clean. This information isn’t here to discourage you, but to prepare you for that journey. When you decide to quit pornography you are choosing to benefit your life and the lives of those around you in physical, emotional, and even spiritual ways. Don’t quit because it gets tough. Stay the course, fight through the difficulties, and at the end of it all you’ll find yourself porn free and all the happier for it.
Need to talk? We’re listening.
