The Science Behind Porn Addiction

Dopamine is a chemical that makes you feel good. It gives you motivation to seek and search for novelty and rewards. Pornography is full of novelty and has a limitless supply of genres to revive that novelty, which is guaranteed to grant that person a dopamine boost. When a person engages in watching pornography, the brain is flooded with dopamine.³⁷ This makes them feel extremely gratified, and their brain learns to repeat this behaviour in order to feel good.³⁸

However, by engaging with this behaviour too frequently, the brain becomes overwhelmed and the body will produce increasingly less dopamine. This will make the user reach a tolerance level, and they will end up relying on this behaviour to grant their previous high.³⁹ They seek more than they can be satisfied, which leaves them always wanting more⁴⁰, creating a pornography addiction. Pornography in the present day is available 24/7, for free, and it’s easily accessible for anyone, making a porn addiction incredibly difficult to quit. However, it’s not impossible.


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