Neuroplasticity and Porn Addiction: How the brain is changed through your actions and attention
Learning about neuroplasticity was a major turning point in my life. Understanding how the brain functions not only helped me realize that I was the source of major problems in my life, but it also gave me a deeper understanding of why I was suffering in the particular ways that I was, and gave me a clear pathway to heal from the mess I had gotten into.
In this article I hope to share some of the insights that I had in relation to my porn addiction and how understanding neuroplasticity played an important role in my recovery.
My existential crisis & making the connection to porn
I knew that I had problems way before I learned about any of the neuroscience behind addiction. I had problems focusing and regulating my attention, and was struggling with social anxiety, stress, and mild depression. Sexual shame was also a big issue for me. Whenever I would have sexual desires, masturbate, or use porn, there was deep sense of shame associated with those behaviors, which was only exacerbated by isolating and hiding. I also noticed issues cropping up in my relationships, like constantly seeking novelty in my partners, or being very perfectionistic with my partners and having unrealistic expectations of what they should look like.
I could see that I was having these issues in my life, but I didn’t necessarily know why these issues were there, or how to fix them. I didn’t make the connection to my daily porn use. I just thought this was part of who I was at my core.
But there was a moment in my life when everything shifted. I started with an existential crisis — a moment when I became aware that I was deeply unhappy — despite things looking fine from the outside. Even though I was experiencing success in my academic pursuits, and had lots of friends and romantic connections in my life, I still wasn’t actually fulfilled. My life felt empty. I had this moment of realizing, “If I don’t change something about the way I’m living, I’ll never be happy.” And so I started reading about the topic of happiness, found books on positive psychology, and eventually learned about some of the science behind living a more fulfilling life.
And I remember reading this one book that talked about neuroplasticity. There was this passage in the book that quoted the famous neuroscientist Donald Hebb, who said this: neurons that fire together, wire together. That one sentence blew my mind. I started to understand that the more you use certain neural pathways, the stronger those neural pathways become. So, for example, if you are constantly thinking thoughts of anger, you are going to be strengthening the neural pathways associated with anger. If you are constantly thinking thoughts of greed and craving (or lust), you’re going to be strengthening those thoughts and those neural pathways in your mind.
Decades ago it was thought that your brain developed when you were a child and teenager, and then in your late teens your brain stopped developing and it was all fixed from there. This is where we get some of the sayings, like, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” But what we know now is that you are constantly forming new connections and new neural pathways throughout your life. That the brain is plastic.
Understanding the brain is pivotal for recovery
Another way of looking at neuroplasticity is this: what you think, do, and pay attention to, changes the structure and function of your brain. You are fundamentally changing or rewiring your brain simply by where you’re placing your attention. What you put your attention on will grow certain neural pathways. This is the foundational understanding of neuroplasticity. And it is so important in recovery from addictive or compulsive behaviors, because when you realize the implications of this, that whatever you think about strengthens those neural pathway, it is hard to ignore than the consequences of something like a daily or nightly porn habit.
If every night you’re logging on and watching porn for 30 minutes or an hour, you are hardwiring or strengthening those pathways for lust, craving, and objectification of women. And particularly with something like lust or craving, strengthening those pathways is building that fire of suffering. Because suffering is essentially when you are grasping after things to be a certain way. So for example, when you desperately want to sleep with someone and you can’t, or you don’t have it yet, or when you desperately want something to be gone from your life, but it’s not. Any kind of that clinging to wanting things to be a certain way or resistance or aversion to the way things are creates suffering. By constantly fueling lust, we are fueling the fire of suffering as well.
(Side note: It’s important to understand that there is a difference between desire and craving. There’s nothing wrong with desire, it’s not suffering on it’s own. You can have a desire for freedom, or for world peace, or for safety. It’s the craving, the clinging, the thirst for a particular experience that creates suffering.)
If we want to live a life that is filled with contentment, gratitude, love, kindness and compassion, we have to train our brain in those directions, we have to strengthen those neural pathways. For many of us, our most habitual thought patterns are things like judgment, criticism, craving, greed, jealousy. The first reaction that happens when we see something that we want or we experience something we don’t want is these unhealthy habit patterns. If we wish to live a more fulfilling life, we need to be aware of what we are doing with our mind and with our attention.
This basic concept (paying attention to which mind-states I was cultivating in each moment) was so transformative for me because it made me realize how powerful my thoughts were. What you are doing with your thoughts creates your future. If you’re constantly looking at what you don’t have, you are fueling those fires in your mind, and that creates your mental habits, and your mental habits create your character, and your character creates your destiny.
One quote that I really love related to this was said by the Buddha over 2,500 years ago:
What you frequently think and ponder upon becomes the inclination of the mind.
This is essentially the same as what we now know as neuroplasticity. The more you think certain types of thoughts, the more the mind becomes inclined in that direction. The more you think thoughts of lust or craving, your mind starts to habituate towards those kinds of thoughts. On a molecular or cellular level, you’re actually strengthening the synaptic connections between neurons. Every moment of your attention is important. For example, going onto Instagram and lusting after girls in bikinis, you’re strengthening that fire of lust in the mind. It might not be porn, but it’s still creating a pathway in the mind that is taking you away from happiness, and towards wanting what you don’t have.
Creating new pathways in the mind
When it comes to using neuroplasticity to our advantage, there is a quote that comes from Thoreau that shows us what to do. He says,
A single footstep will not make a path on the earth. So a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
You are in control of your mind, and if you want a certain type of thought pattern to dominate your life, you have to think those thoughts again and again and again. If you want your life to be filled with gratitude, then thinking one moment of gratitude isn’t going to replace the years of habitual thinking of lust and greed and craving and selfishness. This is what the training of meditation does for us. We cultivate wholesome mind-states again, and again, and again. Building into our core these qualities that we want to permeate our lives. Qualities like contentment, patience, compassion, gentleness, strength, and perseverance. We are like gardeners sowing these seeds of these beautiful crops.
That’s the understanding that we need to have in relationship to the mind: being a gardener. If you don’t understand neuroplasticity, or what’s going on in the mind, you might think meditation is not that important. But once you just look at how much time are you spending cultivating certain thought patterns versus the thought patterns you wish to dominate your life, then it becomes obvious that spending at least five or ten minutes a day cultivating thoughts intentionally is important for creating the kind of future that you want. If you want a future where your habitual mind state is contentment or gratitude, the only way to do that is to strengthen those neural pathways.
If you do nothing, or if you keep watching porn, or lusting after girls on Instagram, you’ll continue to strengthen the pathways of not having enough, of always wanting more. The choice is yours, and it comes down not only to your actions, but also your thought patterns and your attention.
I hope that this has inspired you to be mindful of where your attention is and what you’re doing with your mind on a day-to-day basis. You might not be looking at porn anymore, but maybe you’re still swiping on dating apps hours and hours a day, or looking at girls in bikinis on Instagram, hours and hours a day. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but just be aware of what kind of crops are you cultivating in your mind moment by moment. Understanding neuroplasticity is the key to cultivating a strong mind and healthy future.
On a related note, 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.
