Nofap Flashcards
Why is Porn so concerning?
Porn is the most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today. The Internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviors. To have a drug pumped into your house 24/7, free, and children know how to use it better than adults – it’s a perfect delivery system if we want to have a whole generation of addicts who will never have the drug out of their mind.” – Dr. Mary Anne Layden
The porn industry
Additionally, the University of Sydney surveyed 800 regular porn users in a 2012 study and found that 43% started viewing porn regularly between the ages of 11 and 13, spending between 30 minutes to 3 hours a day watching porn.”
“To meet this demand, every 30 minutes a porn film is made in the United States. Every second 30,000 people are viewing porn. 43% of all Internet users online right now are watching porn – that’s 102,434,567 people.
In 2015, the world’s largest porntube site Pornhub reported that 4.4 billions hours of porn was watched, which is 2.5 times longer than humans have walked this earth.”
How porn rewires your brain
We become what we think about all day long.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you watch porn your brain thinks you are having sex. Horniness is the evolutionary drive that pushes you to do whatever is necessary to have sex and make babies.
Your brain can’t comprehend the difference between watching a video and having real sex. Your brain’s mirror neurons visualize you doing the same thing, and a part of your brain responds as if you were. It’s kind of like how when watching a scary movie we cringe or jump out of our seats. Or a sad movie can make you cry and feel sad. The brain thinks something that you watch digitally is actually happening to you in real life, and it acts accordingly. If you’re watching multiple porn scenes (which is usually the case for most porn binges), your brain thinks you are having sex with multiple partners.”
“To sum it up, all this sex overstimulates your brain, which desensitizes it, causes problems in your sex life, and reduces your ability to enjoy life.
What’s the working of dopamine
Dopamine is a brain chemical that motivates you to do something that your brain thinks will make it feel good like having sex or eating food. Our brain makes us experience pleasure when we engage in these life-giving and enjoyable activities, which have kept humans alive for millions of years.
Your brain uses dopamine, a neurochemical, to train you to recognize activities that are good and bad. When you do actions that your brain says are good for survival, it rewards you with a shot of dopamine that triggers the sensation of pleasure and stimulates memory and concentration. It creates arousal and excitement just before you have sex, pushing you to complete what you started.
For instance, think of a Thanksgiving dinner where you starved yourself all day and finally your aunt said, “Okay it’s ready, everyone grab a plate!”“You sat down and shoved endless amounts of food into your mouth without even chewing because you were so excited. That intense rush? Yes, that’s dopamine.
Or imagine when you saw a woman walking right by you, and she seemed to be the most beautiful woman you’d ever seen, and you got a rush of both excitement and nervousness. Yes, that’s dopamine too.
Or think about when you had a new business idea that you believed would change an industry, and you were the first one ever to think of it… yeah, that’s just dopamine.
Now that we understand what dopamine is and how it makes you feel, the question remains: How does it relate to porn?
The problem with porn is that it gives off a massive shot of dopamine to your brain. It’s too much dopamine for your brain to handle at once because you’re brain was never designed to handle unlimited amounts of porn of highly attractive women with enlarged breasts and perfect to hip-weight ratios. It’s simply unreal and too good for your brain too handle.
“The dopamine rush as you’re watching porn encourages you to masturbate to produce even more dopamine. Simultaneously, you release even more happy chemicals in your brain like serotonin and dopamine, which ends in an orgasm.
Why would anyone not enjoy this?
It’s easy, it feels good, and it’s free… and that’s exactly the problem.
Sexual arousal is nature’s number one priority driven by dopamine. Your brain starts to crave more and more, causing you to watch more and more porn.
Sexual stimulation and orgasm give our brains’ reward systems the biggest natural shot of dopamine of all. This makes sense. That big dopamine shot from an orgasm then goes on to wire our brain’s reward system to encourage us to repeat whatever behavior we did to get sex so we can continue to get sex in the future.
But the problem is you’re not having sex at all, and your brain cannot differentiate the difference between porn and real sex remember. It thinks you’re winning in life when you’re watching porn, so it’s reacting as it should. Don’t blame your brain. Your brain thinks you’re mating with real women, so it encourages you to go do whatever you just did to get that stimulus again since it’s wired to do that.
Pay attention this is when it gets even more dangerous…
The Internet gives you an unlimited variety of sexual experiences. This variety means that when viewed, dopamine shoots to your brain, training you to search for more and more porn.
And what you once found arousing over time will no longer be arousing. You develop a level of tolerance to past experiences. So you search for different types of novel porn such as anal, gangbang, incest, teen, cartoon porn, and so on to give you that same level of dopamine rush you now need to ejaculate.
This tolerance can take years to develop, but it’s very easy to develop since the pleasure reward system of your brain loves watching porn, masturbating, and orgasms.”
“Neurons firing and wiring together are also how our habits are formed. When you receive a shot of dopamine after receiving some reward – whether food, sex, or novelty – your brain strengthens the neurons that fired and wired together to achieve the reward so that you will repeat the process and can get it again in the future. The rewiring involves connecting the cues and behavior that led to a pleasurable reward.
This cue behavior reward connection is what author Charles Duhigg calls The Habit Loop. Cues cause dopamine to release, such as sitting at a computer alone late at night. Or it means surfing Instagram or some other social media outlets where you see half-naked women. Or cues to watch porn come when you’re just feeling a little depressed, bored, distracted, or stressed.
Repeat this circuit for a few days or weeks and you’ve got a connection that leads to you checking out porn without even thinking about it – and worse, you can’t control it. It can become difficult to control because it’s now wired into your brain. Porn surfing simply becomes a habit.”
“Throughout most of your brain’s evolution, sex was a limited commodity, and it was a good survival strategy to look for sex whenever possible. Now that you have access to an infinite amount of sex online, this is no longer a good strategy.
Too much sexual stimulation has health risks of its own like reduced sensitivity to dopamine, which reduces the enjoyment of activities you once found pleasurable.
The only way for you to feel “good” again is to continue watching heavier and heavier scenes of porn such as gangbangs, abuse, incest, and double penetration, which sends you into a downward spiral of porn addiction.
Yes, porn rewires your brain.”
Why porn is more dangerous than cocaine and heroin
Everything in the world is about sex except, sex. Sex is about power.” – Oscar Wilde
Speaking before the U.S. Senate in 2004, Dr. Jeffrey Satinover stated, “Modern science allows us to understand that the underlying nature of an addiction to pornography is chemically identical to a heroin addiction.”
Cocaine and heroin provide an instant rush of dopamine to your brain, giving you that euphoric feel good effect.
So does porn.
But porn is more dangerous than cocaine and heroin because unlike most addictive behaviors such as alcohol, drugs, and gambling, porn has no barriers. Psychologists and addiction experts have found that if an addiction meets fewer and fewer of what is known as the three As of addiction, it’s easier to become an addict:”
“Accessibility
Affordability
Anonymity
Most addictions, like alcohol or drug addictions, will have one or two of those. But cost is often the biggest barrier for most addicts. But what is astounding is that porn meets all three conditions:
Accessibility: You can go online and watch unlimited amounts of porn within seconds.
Affordability: It’s free.
Anonymity: It’s on your phone or computer and no one will ever know.
Knowing this can help you understand why porn is so dangerous.
The environment for a porn user to become an addict is the easiest of all known addictions in the world.”
“Your brain views sex as a top priority, not alcohol, drugs, or gambling. When you give a porn user unending novelty for free, he will abuse it not because something is wrong with him but because it’s wired into his DNA.”
“And since your brain cannot differentiate the difference between porn and real sex, then the porn user is only doing what he is supposed to do. It’s not his fault that he is aroused by porn and watches dozens of scenes.”
“Let’s take this example for instance. The main barriers of alcohol are the age limit, the cost, and the hangover. What if at any age, with the press of one button, you could order an endless amount of alcohol to your house, no one would ever know how much you drank, and the next day you would have no hangover?
Yes, in that case we would all be alcoholics.
Now imagine a world where every type of alcohol was free and no matter how much you drank it cost you nothing… This is the world of porn, since there is no age limit (enforced), it costs nothing, and no one will ever know if you watched it.
Psychologists say addictive behaviors will meet some barriers. We’ve already discussed cost. But there’s also the barrier of privacy. If you drank a bottle of whiskey before or during work, then people would know something was wrong with you and you’d get caught.”
“Yet if you watch porn no one will ever know, and surprisingly the porn usage is mostly done on mobile devices, why? Because it’s typically viewed in the privacy of your room. I bet your friends and family have gone years without ever knowing that you’ve been watching porn and that you may have a problem with it.
Now because the barriers are so low, and it’s a free-for-all online, there’s the perfect environment for an addiction to develop.
Let’s get this clear: Porn is a sexual stimulant and it’s the most dangerous kind of stimulant in the world.
Porn use and drug use have a lot in common. When cocaine users escalate their behavior, they need bigger and more frequent hits of cocaine. When porn users escalate their behavior, they need more extreme porn more frequently. You need a bigger dose to keep generating the same dopamine reward.”
The 3 types of porn users
“The three different types and stages of porn use are the casual user, the at-risk user, and the addict.
The casual user watches porn for fun. It’s an occasional distraction depending on life circumstances but not too extreme nor does it block out important activities. It’s more of an enjoyable distraction, a sporadic form of escape or relaxation that is NOT as satisfying or meaningful as real intimate connections. The frequency of use is driven by life-changing events.
For the casual user, there is no history of neglect or abuse. Porn and online sexual experiences are not sustained because they feel unrealistic, and he’d rather pursue real relationships with women. He doesn’t experience any shame or high levels of guilt after watching porn.”
“An at-risk user will have periods of intense engagement, and it is a distraction from other life challenges. But he does know how to put a limit on it or stop when he starts to experience more serious consequences.
The at-risk user will typically keep it as a secret in exchange for looking good or being accepted, although he may have a potential history of abuse for recreation, spending, gambling, sex and other high intensity behaviors as a result of reacting to life stressors. The main difference that makes an at-risk user different from an addict is that the at-risk user has the ability to stop when he sees it’s becoming a problem. An addict has lost the ability to choose to stop.
Addicts turn to digital sexual fantasies to fill an emotional void. They cannot stop negative behaviors even when they are not helping their life or even have a desire for change.
They know what they’re doing is hurting them, yet they still keep doing it. They typically are depressed or are experiencing severe emotional challenges or have a history of substance abuse, childhood abuse, neglect, family dysfunction, ”
“Yes, an addiction is a compulsion to continue self-destructive habits despite serious consequences with an inability to control cravings.”
“Whatever actions you do daily, whether good or bad, will become a part of who you are and have associated consequences.
Porn addicts spend on average 11 hours per week engaging in porn – on some weeks it’s double that. It becomes an addiction when someone loses control and can’t limit porn viewing and when they move to alternative genres of porn to get the same type of stimulation they received in the past.
Using porn was all about having a good time, escaping worries and pleasures, and getting a chance to do things one couldn’t do in real life. Yet most men don’t stop to think that what they are doing is slowly becoming a habit and a daily ritual. Over time, men develop a relationship with porn, and porn easily slips into the role of ‘significant other.’ In this case, a man can be intimate or in a relationship with another women, but porn is what he truly desires and obsesses about.
And as the porn addiction develops, men find themselves easily becoming irritated and depressed, isolating from other people, sexually objectifying people, neglecting important areas of life, having problems with sex in real life, constantly feeling bad[…]”
Why is it so hard to stop watching porn
“Scientist recently showed that methamphetamine and cocaine hijack the same reward center nerve cells that evolved for sexual conditioning. Put simply, addictive drugs like meth and coke are compelling because they hijack the precise mechanisms that evolved to make sex compelling. And guess what, so can porn.
Sexual arousal is nature’s top priority and raises dopamine the highest of all natural rewards. Your brain starts to crave and then loses control, and negative consequences soon follow.
We’re more inclined to be addicted to food and sex than we are to alcohol and drugs because nature wired humans this way. Humans can survive without alcohol and drugs but not sex and food.”
“In the study “Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated With Pornography Consumption” published in the Psychiatry Journal, experts at Germany’s Max Planck Institute found that more porn use correlated with less grey matter and reduced reward activity when viewing porn.
In other words, porn use weakens the prefrontal cortex, which reduces willpower so that you can easily succumb to more porn use and other addictive behaviors. This makes it easier to give up on other goals in life.
Understand how dopamine works and you understand why you are attracted to porn.
Porn acts as a substitute for actual sex, but your brain doesn’t know that. It reacts to a picture or video of a naked woman the same way it does to a real life naked woman or real sex. Your brain ramps up dopamine levels, driving you to orgasm whether that climax is fostered with another human being or is self-induced through masturbation.
Dopamine explains why certain types of porn are more compelling than others, and how in extreme cases men prefer porn to actual sex.”
“When looking at a pornographic image, the brain becomes habituated to that stimulus, simply injecting more novelty and getting more dopamine. A porn video is more intense because the live action activates your mirror neurons, making you feel like you’re the one having sex.
The stronger the stimulation, the bigger the shot of dopamine to the reward system, which means the greater desire to watch that porn video.
Porn offers the sexual novelty that dopamine has hardwired you to seek. The more you find new sexual experiences, the more dopamine you get, which reinforces the desire to look for even more sexual novelty. Porn’s easy access to new experiences is the main reason why it is so hard to stop watching porn.
Men also receive a shot of dopamine whenever we encounter a new attractive woman other than our current partner. Our brains are hardwired to seek out as many different (novel) sexual partners as possible. Males are biologically driven to reproduce with as many different females as possible to create as many babies as possible, with as much genetic variation as possible to increase our possible blood lines.
“Men have a constant need for something new. For example, studies show that if you put a male rat in a cage with a female rat, very quickly he’ll start having sex with the female rat. But after a while he’ll slowly reduce the frequency of sex and then eventually stop.
The moment you put a new female rat in the cage, the male rat will begin having sex with the female and then slowly the same thing will happen again. This leads to less and less sex over time and then eventually no sex at all. This trend will go on and on even if the male rat is tired or is starting to hurt himself with too much sex.”
“The drive for multiple new sex partners – which provides an extra burst of energy and arousal with each novel partner – even when you already have an available and willing one is known the Coolidge Effect. The effect happens in all mammalian brains (although in male brains slightly more than females). The Coolidge Effect is the key to why porn is so exciting and addicting.”
“With porn, you have access to new women with one click, for free and, no one will ever know. Every time you indulge in porn, your brain thinks you’ve found the evolutionary goldmine that stimulates your brain to keep on consuming more and more porn despite not knowing that you are watching a video.
Binging brings an evolutionary advantage. Thousands of years ago, if you found a berry plant, then you’d eat the entire plant since you would likely never find another anytime soon. Now with porn, it’s like mating season yet it is a 24/7 mating season that never ends due to the unlimited availability of porn. The evolutionary advantage of binging is now a disadvantage. Porn is the junk food of sex except that the junk food is free and in your pocket 24/7.
Sex was a limited commodity throughout most of your brain’s evolution, and it was a good survival strategy to go for sex whenever possible. Now that you have access to an infinite amount of sex online, this is no longer a good strategy. Too much sexual stimulation has health risks of its own: reduced sensitivity to dopamine, which reduces your overall[…]”
“The brain releases a level of neurochemicals that your brain can’t handle and was never designed to handle. It’s an artificial, supercharged response to a natural urge to have sex.”
“Porn can become your greatest need and your greatest liability. The more pornography a man views, the less freedom he has over what he thinks and pursues in his life. He becomes enslaved by porn because he has rewired his brain to consume more and more porn. To put it bluntly, when you cannot let go of what controls you, you have become less human, not more.”
Social porn
Porn is all around us, and we live in a hyper-sexual world today because, well, sex sells, and the corporate giants are well aware of this.”
“Social porn is the gateway to hardcore porn online. If girls you follow on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, pose half-naked, the image induces erotic thoughts. That’s essentially porn.”
“Stop finding pleasure in looking at other people’s lives and being a spectator in this world and get to work on creating the life you truly want. You can start now and be in an entirely different place in just a few years or you can stay the same.
The choice is yours because if you don’t … well, let’s get into that right now…”
Desensitization of real life
“Porn addiction steals joy from other areas of your life since it impacts the value you get from rewards. And it becomes increasingly difficult to enjoy things that you once enjoyed.
To better understand this idea, think about this: Your brain transfers dopamine along paths of linked nerve cells. Normally this dopamine moves from one to the next without any problems, leading to a positive experience.
It’s released by the sending cell and picked up by the receiving cell’s dopamine receptors. But when on porn, your brain is overstimulated and the sending cell releases too much dopamine at once. This means the receiving cell is unable to handle it. Overwhelmed, the receiving cell drops some of its receptors in self-defense, which reduces its ability to receive dopamine in the future.”.
“So in the future, when experiencing everyday simple pleasures like a hot meal, walking by an attractive woman, playing the guitar, reading a good book, talking socially, your brain isn’t able to receive the dopamine stimulus that it once did, leading to a numbed experience feeling of life.
All in all, excessive porn use leads to less dopamine being able to travel through your brain, leading to desensitization. When this happens, dopamine has a harder time moving in your brain, regardless of the reason it was sent out. This desensitizes you not only to porn but everything in your life that would normally give you pleasure through a dopamine response. Excessive porn reduces dopamine flow, which reduces motivations and makes you feel less excited and satisfied when you do things you used to enjoy.
And with reduced pleasure and motivation from daily tasks, you feel apathetic, lethargic and overwhelmed. Life seems to have lost its luster, and when it reaches a certain stage this apathy becomes full-blown depression where you are reliant on more and more pornography to feel good even if it is for a short time.”
“Nothing you do during your day will come nearly as close to the dopamine rush that you get from porn, so things you once found stimulating are now increasingly boring.”
“Porn just feels right, so it’s this constant urge to consume more porn. You do it, but then soon after you’re bored, so you do it again and again. This spiral of negative actions leads you to feel more guilt and shame about how you’ve spent the last few hours watching porn.”
The soft truth
“Porn has been known to cause these problems in men: avoiding or lacking interest in sex with a real partner, experiencing difficulty becoming sexually aroused with a real partner and maintaining erections, or even unwanted delayed orgasm.”
“Frequent and compulsive masturbation can also desensitize a man to common types of touch and stroke. When this happens, normal vaginal stimulation doesn’t work and it becomes difficult to maintain sexual stamina and interest. If a man continues down the path of watching more and more porn and masturbating, then a real vagina no longer pleasures as good as the grip of your hand and the visual stimulation of the unending novelty of porn.”
“Your body can heal itself from the damage that porn has done over several months or years. Begin that journey and start to experience harder and longer lasting erections and enjoy ejaculation with women in the real world versus porn.”
Looking at woman like sex object instead of Humans
“Most of the people who join the porn industry come from broken homes. Many of the girls are sexually abused. So the porn industry actually lures in these kinds of people to exploit them. So basically when someone is watching pornography, what you’re really doing is contributing to the demise and destruction of adult survivors of sexual child abuse who are on drugs and have physical disease. That’s really what you’re watching because I promise you, nobody in that industry is healthy”
“Bottom line: If you want to have a deep long lasting connection with a woman, then you have got stop and or significantly reduce your porn use and masturbation.”
“If you respond to sexual triggers by turning to porn, then you’ve taught your brain to expect overstimulation whenever those triggers happen. Any sexual trigger now causes a much stronger reaction than the trigger should call for.”
“All in all, porn decreases the quality of your relationships with women in the real world. To achieve the same level of sexual arousal with a woman, you need your sex to become more extreme – more like porn. Partners of compulsive porn users often complain that their partners need increasingly risky, violent, and degrading sexual acts to get off. This puts your partner in a tough position: Do they accept this behavior in fear of losing you or stand up and also lose you?”
“When real sex with real partners becomes less interesting, it forces you to go back to porn because you can get what you want. And porn not only damages your views of women but equally has a negative effect on yourself as a man and here’s why…”
Why Porn Gives you the worst sleep ever
“According to Pornhub.com, the largest tube porn site in the world, porn usage spikes between the hours of 10 p.m. and 12 a.m., which is generally the hours most people go to sleep.
The problem is when dopamine increases at night, it delays melatonin production in your body. Melatonin is the hormone responsible for controlling your sleep and wake cycles.
Melatonin production kicks in around 10 p.m. for most people, so if you are watching porn and masturbating then you are releasing dopamine, which gets you excited, alert, and awake instead of preparing for sleep. So although you may feel relaxed and fall sleep after climaxing to porn, it’s a restless type of sleep.”
“This means that your body will start producing melatonin later in the night so when you wake up in the morning at 7 a.m. your body still has melatonin inside. This means you wake up feeling groggy, in a brain fog, and lethargic
Porn preys on these man
Also, men who live out of alignment with what they should be doing with their lives or who live off-purpose (basically wasting time or doing something they shouldn’t be doing with their lives like a bad job or involved in a toxic relationship) are vulnerable to porn addiction.
It can be very easy to just click over on a new tab and start watching porn. It’s fun, gratifying, and of course it’s too easy to acquire that dopamine hit to make you feel good in the moment. The key here is to acknowledge what challenges you have and start working on them to improve your life
Fuck the world, not yourself
“Your semen is your life force, whether you are spiritual or not it does indeed have the power to create life. It takes a tremendous amount of energy, vitality and vigor to create this life force inside man.
Masturbation causes men to be lethargic and tired, lacking in drive, desire, and motivation whereas sex drives us; it is one of the primary reasons we are on this planet — to recreate life for the next generation.
When you masturbate your body feels fulfilled. “Yes we did it!” But abstaining from masturbation can give you a powerful motivation and drive to work harder and develop a stronger desire to succeed in your work and life.
Not to mention quitting porn and masturbation has been also shown to give you more energy, motivation, increased confidence, a deeper voice, more alert, less brain fog”
“Notice how you feel hours and days after you ejaculate. If you’re really stressed out from work and life, then it’s easy to succumb to watching porn and masturbating to release and relax for a bit. But as you live your life with more purpose and meaning you won’t accumulate so much tension from the day.
From this point you will discover that ejaculation actually depletes and weakens you of the life force you need to move forward into life. It’s instant gratification. It feels good in the moment, but you ultimately pay the price in the long run. You can live a good life with countless unnecessary ejaculations but you will not live a great life. You won’t have the inner gusto to be courageous, stand up for yourself, and take risks and act on what you most need to do in your life.”
“I encourage you to have the self-discipline to choose more wisely when you do ejaculate instead of just letting it out anytime you feel horny, whether that is through masturbation or sex with a woman. Don’t become addicted to ejaculation; instead, become addicted to becoming the best version of yourself.”
“When you go to bed at night, the long term fulfillment and satisfaction you’ll get from knowing each day that you put all of your best work, talents, and gifts out into the world will be well worth it and much better than some meaningless orgasm.
Napoleon Hill said it best in his classic, Think and Grow Rich: “The desire for sexual expression is by far the strongest and most impelling of all human emotions. For this very reason this desire, when harnessed and transmitted into action other than that of physical expression, may raise one to the status of genius.”
“If you take a Bull, for example, and castrate it, the Bull rarely moves. Its life force has been stolen from it and it no longer has power. It’s still the same size and shape physically but mentally it’s lost its edge.
When you empty your balls, you empty your life. Keep your balls full to go after the life you want.
Don’t waste your finite energy. ”
Getting away from your computer into the real world
“Put it simply, go enjoy real life not a digital life.
Identify what matters most to you:
What are the top 5 things that matter most to me in my life?
What personal goals do I want to achieve?
What are the values I believe and want to uphold?
Who is most important to me in my life and how do I want to treat him/her?
What personal traits do I want to convey to others?
How would I like to contribute to the lives of people I care about?
How would I like to contribute to my community and society?
In what ways does porn use conflict with my values, beliefs, and life goals?
How much time have you really wasted watching porn? 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years?”
“You could have earned a black belt in a martial art, mastered an instrument, built a 7-figure business, improved your dating life, found the woman of your dreams, or fallen even more in love with your existing partner. All in all, you could have spent that time more wisely mastering some valuable skill set that would have benefited you today and made you a more grounded man.
You create the life you want with the habits you develop.
Get social. Go out. Build and have real relationships. Go into hobbies. Meetups. Travel. Go on adventures. Reach out to old friends and family. Plan trips. Take a lead role in your life and don’t be a bystander of circumstance.
A healthy sex life improves the quality of your life, unlike the quick fix you get with porn. Porn does not have any long-term benefits, just long-term emotional and psychological costs that aren’t even fully understood since it’s a new phenomenon.
This is it.”
