8 Signs You Are Addicted To Porn and How To Solve It

addicted to porn

Remember when you were young kids, at sleepovers, you would find the knob on the TV that was the “special naughty channel,” and laugh at the late-night adult stuff. But today, in these modern times, porn addiction is literally rife. In fact, it is concerning because porn addiction is not just casually watching something late at night before you go to bed.

Real porn addiction comes with serious complications because it can play havoc with your mental health as well as your relationships; with those closest to you, and it can affect your work and your physical health. Years back, in 1986, the Surgeon General said “A panel of clinicians and researchers concluded that pornography does stimulate attitudes and behavior that lead to gravely negative consequences for individuals and for society and that these outcomes impair the mental, emotional, and physical health of children and adults.”

Lots of people who watch say, “But … does it matter?”

Yes, it absolutely does matter [1]. When you make use of porn, you suffer from these porn-related effects:

Mental health

Your age is probably low at your first sexual encounter
You have no worries and accept the ‘rape myth’ and other sexual deviances
You experience less relationship and sexual satisfaction

Physical health

Excessive pornography viewing is correlated with decreased brain mass
Erectile dysfunction
Mood disorders

Consider this

By 2015 there were over 2.5 million porn sites. Fast forward to 2022, and we have 2.5 million people that visit the most popular porn sites every 60 seconds!

8 signs that you have a porn addiction and how you can solve it

You will experience personality and behavioral changes

Someone who is addicted to porn will no longer engage or even enjoy things they once did as normal. It’s a major warning sign of addiction. Of course, it could be related to other issues like physical or mental illness. But personality change is definitely a sign of porn addiction [2] – it comes with aggression, no longer interested in hobbies, activities, your usual hangouts, or friends.

You are secretive and lie about the amount of time you spend or even that you are watching it

The shame of being addicted makes a person become secretive in their behavior – they don’t want their family and friends to know. In fact, some of them become obsessed with privacy. They become frantic, for instance, that others should not touch their computer or phone, and become hugely angry if they know someone has touched their stuff. Usually, they will refuse to share their pin number and passwords.

You can’t stop using and watching porn even though you know about the negative consequences.

Many porn addicts often say they feel as if they live a double life. But they are powerless to stop and find themselves masturbating all the time to porn. Sometimes they try and maintain normal activities. If you are someone addicted to porn and you lose your job because you have been caught watching porn, but you carry on watching it, you can count yourself as having a porn addiction.

The more you watch porn, the more explicit it will need to be to become aroused

People addicted to porn will use plenty of time watching porn videos. Porn addicts generally need to get hold of even darker types of porn to satisfy themselves. For instance, your spouse might be a heterosexual male. But he can’t achieve an orgasm while watching porn between a man and a woman having sex. Now he needs more variation to become aroused.

Time just gets wasted

Porn addicts spend massive amounts viewing it. Sometimes a day can go past that nothing else gets accomplished. They become lazy and lethargic, disconnected from their family. They don’t care much about anything else and don’t seem to be interested in anything else. They will suffer from lethargy to go to work or school due to addiction-related problems

You don’t want sex with your spouse anymore [3]

Being addicted to porn can cause a guy to lose interest in real sex. He might well start finding criticism with his partner’s body and find her less attractive than he once did. He might become unresponsive to any romantic advances from his partner. She is no longer good enough or attractive enough. She is likely to notice that he has become distant and disinterested when she wants intimacy from him. This is because he has developed unrealistic expectations and ideas about sex.

You start to feel pain as a physical result of porn addiction

Yes, it is true. You might suffer from sitting too much, masturbating too much, and your wrist, neck, and back are ‘giving in.’ Perhaps you have started experiencing headaches or eye problems. Then there’s the emotional pain, or financial pain – financial pain as you realize you need to keep on purchasing higher quality content to satisfy your addiction. You complain about money problems that you have created for yourself, but you are not willing to disclose why.

Your health is suffering

Porn addiction and excessive masturbation could lead to:

Premature ejaculation problems
Erectile dysfunction when you are with a real-life partner because you have become dependent on certain porn fantasies to stimulate you
Porn addiction can affect the brain [4]
There is a connection between pornography addiction and depression [5]
You will find it very difficult to form intimate relationships which aren’t sexually related, but mental and emotional as well

Natural and other ways to treat porn addiction

1. Quit — cold turkey.

2. Ask for accountability.

3. See a qualified therapist.

4. Try and eat a well-balanced, healthy diet, and get out there and get plenty of healthy exercises.

Conclusion

For many, viewing a lot of porn seems a pretty harmless way to indulge in your sexual fantasies and urges. When these urges start to interfere with your other responsibilities and duties, whether at work or home, this can turn out to be very damaging to you in more ways than one.

Consuming pornography has become an all too common pastime. While viewing it can benefit you with educating yourself, or for masturbation purposes, when you make cannot do without it any longer is when there are problems. Fortunately, it can be cured but will require some deep-rooted treatments [6] to reverse the damage caused by this addiction. It is not common that a man can cure himself of porn addiction. But with the correct treatment, medication, and other treatments, it is possible to overcome it!

References