5 realizations about porn that made me decide to give it up
I was around 10 years old when I first started looking at pornographic material. I remember obsessing over sexy superheroes in my comic books and browsing the lingerie section of the catalogues that came in the mail. Eventually my home got dial-up internet and I was able to download pornographic photos and videos from the internet.
By the time I got to college I was watching hardcore internet porn on tube sites, sometimes for an hour, occasionally for a couple hours, practically every night. Porn was my secret escape, it was my medicine, a way to soothe my insecurities and give me relief. It made me feel like I was in control. Using porn was compulsive, automatic. It was just what I did at night before bed.
When something has been a daily part of your life from the time you are 10 years old, you don’t always see how it changes you over time. It’s like gaining weight slowly over a decade, each day you get just a little bit heavier, imperceptibly, but after a decade there is a massive difference, you can barely recognize who you are anymore. At some point I could no longer ignore what was happening, and how far off center my life had become. The hints and realizations began to pile up and I started to see more and more clues that my daily porn habit was causing problems my life.
In this article I will talk about a few realizations I had that made me decide to ultimately give up watching porn.
5 realizations I had about porn that made me decide to give it up:
1. No amount of porn would ever provide me with lasting satisfaction
Don’t get me wrong, porn is exciting. It’s pleasurable, captivating, and it just feels good. It hits directly on those dopamine and adrenaline buttons in your brain. There’s always something new and exciting to watch, and it makes you forget about your real life problems.
The question isn’t whether or not porn feels good, the question is, is it giving you what you truly want? If you are like most men, chances are what you really want, deep down, is to feel connected to your purpose, to be grounded at your core, and to love and feel loved by those around you. To live a deeply fulfilling life, one that has meaning, where you are helping others and growing each day. Porn doesn’t give you any of that. It might give you momentary satisfaction or escape, but it doesn’t last (and in fact if ruins your ability to find satisfaction in other things because of the way it fries and overloads your dopamine system).
The truth is, pleasure (on its own) can’t provide lasting satisfaction. Rather it’s like the cherry on top of an already fulfilling and meaningful life. I know because I’ve tried it (and so have countless others…). Relying on sugar, porn, video games, social media, status, validation... They all feel good, but they’re all fleeting sense pleasures that don’t provide lasting happiness. Hedonism just doesn’t work as a long-term strategy. How many depressed celebrities do we need to look to to see that more pleasure doesn’t bring more happiness?
At some point in my life, I started shifting my focus from wanting temporary satisfaction and relief to wanting long term happiness and fulfillment. I came to realize that all the porn I was watching would never actually be enough. It doesn’t matter how much porn you watch, or chocolate you eat, the sense of satisfaction quickly fades.
Porn could never give me what I wanted, which is to feel that sense of deep inner peace and fulfillment.
2. Watching porn was hardwiring lust and craving into my mind
There was a moment in my journey when I realized that lust itself was causing me suffering. I’m not talking about desire or attraction, which can actually be beautiful, rich, and fulfilling experiences. I’m talking about craving, or thirst for sexual experience. That particular flavor of desire that is needy and clingy and desperate. It’s the silent voice in the mind that says “I must have this, and if I don’t get it, then I can’t be happy.”. It’s narrow, constricted, and tight. Compare this to contentment, which is spacious, grounded, and expansive.
This is of the key realizations I had when I discovered the concept of neuroplasticity, and started seeing that I was actually strengthening my lust and craving every time I looked at porn. I remember this quote that said, “Neurons that fire together, wire together”, which made it clear to me that I was hardwiring lust into my mind, and deepening my addiction to sexual imagery and to sense pleasure.
I realized I was creating my own suffering, laying the bricks of my own prison. Over a decade of watching porn had caused my brain to be a lust machine. The pathways of craving in the mind were like superhighways. It felt like a faucet that I couldn’t ever turn off. When I started realizing that I actually wanted to feel things like contentment and inner peace, I knew that porn was molding my brain in the wrong direction, and that I needed to stop.
3. Porn was giving me a distorted view of sex, intimacy, and women’s bodies
Most men start watching porn from a very young age, long before they start becoming sexually active with partners. Because most men start so young, porn has an incredibly powerful influence on men’s views on sex and intimacy. For better or worse, porn is one of the primary forms of sex education for young boys (and girls as well).
But the thing no one tells you when you’re first getting into porn is that it’s a fantasy. It’s not real sex, and definitely not real intimacy. Porn is largely created by men, for men, and for the sheer dopamine hit it releases. It’s not created to give you a sense of how to act as a good sexual partner, or how to treat a woman with respect, or how to make a woman orgasm. In porn we get taught that women are always ready and willing for sex, that women always want it harder and faster and rougher, and that there’s no such thing as conscious communication before or during sex. Just think, have you ever watched porn video where the woman turns down sex and the man respects that wish? Of course not! It wouldn’t be porn then.
Even if you are watching “homemade” porn, you are still getting a highly distorted view of sex because no one is posting the bloopers, or anything about the messiness of real human connection. Even with homemade porn, you as a user are still searching for whatever particular niche or genre or porn you are into, so you’re still getting a distorted view of sex. In a survey of the top films on the homepage of Pornhub, something like ~90% of the top videos were violent, abusive, or degrading towards women. There’s no way around it, porn is simply a poor representation of real sex and intimacy.
In addition to the distorted view of sex, porn gives you a unrealistic expectations of women’s bodies. Instead of real women, with a bit of belly fat, cellulite, and body hair, you become accustomed to perfect porn-star bodies, with make-up, implants, and photoshop. This was a big realization for me, as I was seeing how perfectionistic I was becoming with my partners bodies, and how I was sabotaging my own happiness because of my need for perfect bodies in my partners.
Porn was giving me false expectations of sex, intimacy, and women’s bodies, and this was another reason I decided I needed to quit.
4. Porn was depleting my energy and my ability to focus
There is another problem with unwanted porn use that doesn’t necessarily get as much attention, and that’s simply that it’s an energy and time drain. Even if there were no negative consequences or long-term problems with porn, it would still be a huge distraction and time suck, pulling resources away from more important aspects of your life.
When I was in college, porn was my favorite way to procrastinate. It ate up most of my free time (as well as time that wasn’t free, when I should have been studying or working or going to the gym). I sometimes imagine what I could have done with all the time I spent on porn. If I had spent that energy elsewhere I could have learned a new language, grown a business, or mastered a sport or a craft. The possibilities are endless. Instead, I spent my energy hunting for new images of naked women on screens.
And even when it wasn’t the time being spent, it was also a drain on my energy and emotional resources. We know now that ejaculating and masturbating actually depletes you. Studies show that excessive ejaculation lowers your testosterone, and I can personally attest to feeling more exhausted and drained after a porn viewing session. Your brain feels fried, your confidence is drained and your motivation to get out into the world is depleted. I also found that it lowers my mental and emotional resilience, made me more irritable, and less likely to be emotionally available for others.
Particularly if you are single, and one of your aspirations is to find a long-term partner (or even just date casually), then porn is stealing your energy away from that. You lose your motivation to get out there and talk to women, to get out of your comfort zone.
If you care about using your time and energy in ways that support your growth, using porn on a daily basis just doesn’t make sense.
5. Porn was making me search for novelty in my relationships, rather than depth of intimacy
One of the interesting things about modern day porn is that it’s very different from porn of the past. Rather than a VHS tape, or a magazine, where you have one actress, or maybe a couple actresses, at your finger tips, modern day porn exists on tube sites which emphasize variety, accessibility, and volume. In case you haven’t seen porn recently, imagine Youtube, but instead of cat videos, bloopers, and tech reviews, you have a seemingly infinite variety of sexual content videos. Every single scenario you can imagine is on there. If you can imagine it, chances are you can find it.
Most men, and I was definitely one of them, treat a porn viewing session like a hunt for a unicorn, searching for specific key words or genres, scrolling through hundreds or thousands of thumbnails, looking for the best video and scene to finish on. On any given night you might see thousands of different women, and each new clip, or new position, produces a little dopamine dump in the brain. What’s the effect of this? You end up getting addicted to novelty. Every night you want a new video, something better than the previous night, more exciting, more attractive, more taboo. It’s not intentional, but it’s just how the brain changes over times.
This is one of the signs of any addiction, that you get desensitized, habituated to the standard “dose” or experience, and need higher and higher doses of your drug to get the same effect. You need a video you haven’t seen before. Plain vanilla sex with the same woman you’ve seen again and again just doesn’t cut it.
Again no one is doing this intentionally, but because of neuroplasticity, this actually rewires your brain and you end up treating real life situations in the same way. I could see in my own life how I was unintentionally approaching my dating life like I was approaching porn. Always looking for someone new, someone fresh. I would get bored easily, not because anything was wrong with the woman, but because my brain was hardwired to want something new.
One of my key insights was in realizing that I didn’t want to be jumping around from relationship to relationship all my life. Instead I wanted a single partner that I could grow with and deepen in intimacy and vulnerability and trust. When you are only focused on novelty, that kind of connection can’t happen.
So there you have it. Five keys insights or realizations that I had that helped me decide to quit porn. Not because porn is boring, and not because it’s evil. But simply because it was clearly no longer supporting me in building a life that I loved. I hope this helps you gain some clarity on your own life and whether porn is helping you or holding you back.
If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching and getting support to heal from compulsive behaviors and bad habits, just go to my website, jeremylipkowitz.com/intro, and sign up for a free discovery call to see if coaching is a good fit for you.
