Porn - A 21st Century Drug Addiction

I've been thinking about my drug use and possible addictions lately, and i came to a shocking conclusion, Porn is the worst of them! Even smoking comes second to porn in the "how addicted am I?" scale!

So how the hell can porn be worse than a "real drug" in this respect? Well, because porn is some strange-species-of-new-age-cyber-drug-injected-trough-eyeballs-straight-to-your-brain-shenanigan!

Here’s a crash course in how the brain works.

- Inside your brain there’s something called a “reward pathway.”
- The reward pathway’s job is to help keep you alive by rewarding you when you do something that promotes life, such as sex, eating food or achieving something you’ve worked hard for.
- the way it rewards you is by releasing chemicals in your brain
      - mainly one called dopamine, it motivates you to do stuff and is the main neurotransmitter responsible for the cocaine high
      - but also others like oxytocin, also know as the cuddle hormone, released during orgasm and childbirth

Normally, these chemicals are really handy. They help us feel pleasure and to bond with other people, and they motivate us to come back to important activities that make us happy. The awesome part is, the reward pathway can be hijacked!

The way substances make users feel high is by triggering the reward pathway to release high levels of dopamine without making the user do any of the work to earn it.
Want to guess what else does that? Our sweet beloved porn.

So there you go, porn is like a drug, gets you high and even has potential for addiction!

Fun Fact: Like porn, Cutting also releases endorphins and can be addictive by the same mechanism

A Chemical Cocktail 

Oxytocin - Released during orgasm, increases bonding and trust, reduces inflammation, gets you high. I've been wanting to make a post about this for ages...

There's so much to talk about, you can even buy this stuff in nasal spray form and use it before going on a date, YOU will like the other person more after doing this (need to re-find that awesome trip report!)

So I'll leave you waiting for a future post regarding this, meanwhile your can find more delicious info in these links 1 - Wikipedia 2 - Lots of sciency stuff

Dopamine - Basically this make you feel awesome, cocaine floods your brain with this and that's how you get high and addicted.

And that surge of dopamine in your brain is causing more than just feelings. As it goes pulsing through the brain, dopamine helps to create new brain pathways that essentially lead the user back to the behavior that triggered the chemical release.

The more a drug user hits up or a porn user looks at porn, the more those pathways get wired into the brain, making it easier and easier for the person to turn back to using, whether they want to or not.

Over time, the constant overload of chemicals causes other brain changes as well. Just like a junkie will eventually require more and more of a drug to get a buzz or even just feel normal, porn users can quickly build up a tolerance as their brains adapt to the high levels of dopamine that porn releases.

That’s because the brain is trying to protect itself from the overload of dopamine by getting rid of some of its chemical receptors, which act like tiny catcher’s mitts that receive the dopamine released. With fewer receptors, the brain thinks less dopamine is there and the user doesn’t feel as strong a reaction. As a result, drug users need to up the dosage and in the case of porn, users have to find more porn, find it more often, or find a more extreme version—or all three—to generate even more dopamine to feel excited.

And once a porn user becomes accustomed to a brain pulsing with these chemicals, trying to cut back on the habit can lead to withdrawal symptoms, just like with drugs.

While people often think of porn as something that’s been around forever, today’s version of porn is a whole new ball game. Thanks to the Internet, porn now mixes the most powerful natural dopamine release the body can produce with a cocktail of other elements—endless novelty, shock, and surprise—all of which increase the dopamine surge. And because Internet porn offers an endless stream of variety, users can flip to a new image every time their high starts to fade, keeping dopamine levels elevated for hours.

Here's a cool infographic with graphics regarding dopamine spikes in your brain on different activities and drugs

Porn and Behavior

Like drug use changes the user habits and behavior, so does porn.

A few years ago, a researcher named Jim Faust did an experiment with rats. Faust put virgin male rats in cages with female rats that had been sprayed with a liquid that smelled like dead, rotting rat. As it turned out, the drive to mate was more powerful than the instinct to avoid the smell, and the rats hit it off.

Once the male rats learned to associate sex with the smell of death, Faust put them in cages with dowels soaked in the same death smell. Consistently the male rats would play with the smelly dowels as though it were soaked in something they loved.

Since dopamine is released during sex, the rats’ brains wired together the pleasure of dopamine’s release with the rotten smell.

Sounds pretty gross, right? Those rats’ preferences were rewired into their brains with the same process that many porn users’ brains go through when they look at porn. And more often than not, the images their brains are wiring sexual arousal to get more and more extreme.

And that's how the japanese end up creating all that weird porn.

If you find yourself needing to watch bondage, double penetration, gangbang bukake stuff without having any previous genuine interest in those topics.... you may have been porn-zoned

Also be careful to not let the feminazis read this, because apparently porn leads to violence!

Free Drug Samples:

Xhamster
Pornhub
Xnxx
Redtube

Sources and Additional Reading:

Drug Addiction, Dopamine, and Liking vs. Wanting 
Your brain on porn
Fight the New Drug