Watching porn acts as a sexual appetizer that helps calm down the mental and emotional stress. It is healthy till it acts as a stress buster. However, it becomes an addiction when it interferes with your daily life and social and personal relationships. Generally, porn addiction is the emotional dependency on pornography to such an extent that it begins to impact your daily life and societal responsibilities.
A study shows the prevalence of hypersexual disorder due to porn addiction is around 3-6%. However, it is difficult to determine the rate due to the lack of formal classification. Before we jump on how to stop watching porn, it is essential to know the signs of porn addiction and how it impacts our life.
Signs Of A Porn Addiction
If a person has an uncontrollable desire to watch porn, irrespective of the time, place, and surroundings, one might have a porn addiction. Typically, here are the signs of porn addiction:
1. Losing Interest in Real Sex
A person addicted to pornography often finds it difficult to involve in sexual activities or enjoy sex without watching porn. Moreover, one might become less responsive to their partner’s approaches.
2. Difficult to Stop
It almost becomes more and more difficult to stop watching porn no matter how hard you try to resist. One starts spending more time on the internet, failing to notice the attempts of communication from others.
3. Work and Relationship Neglect
One of the common signs porn addiction is neglecting work and procrastinating. The uncontrollable need to watch porn starts interfering with one's relationships and daily functioning.
4. Experience Immense Shame
Porn addicts often experience guilt and shame about the resources and time they invest in watching porn.
How Porn Addiction Can Negatively Impact Your Life
Although the internet has revolutionised our lives, it is a double-edged sword that also impacts it negatively, as in the case of porn addicts. Here are some ways how porn addiction can negatively impact one's life:
1. Can Cause Erectile Dysfunction
Watching porn frequently causes arousal and erections, which isn't healthy. Generally, it becomes a type of psychological conditioning, consequently leading to performance anxiety.
2. Can Destroy Consumers' Value
Video is a powerful tool to create awareness and knowledge with a pinch of entertainment. It also has the power to influence your behaviour and replace the positive attitude without making you aware of it.
A study shows that porn videos could program consumers to alter their standards sexually. It encourages one to seek sex, often resulting in having an intimate and unhealthy relationship with people who want sex without any restrictions.
3. Can Lead to Social Isolation
Generally, watching porn demands complete isolation. Frequent watching porn creates social awkwardness and anxiety, leading to more shame and hiding. This can make it difficult to share true intimacy with your partner.
How to Stop Watching Porn?
There are many answers to the question, 'how to stop watching porn'. But the most important thing to consider is how you address your addiction. Take a look at some points on how to quit porn addiction:
1. Planning Is Crucial
Quitting porn addiction typically involves proper planning. Without the set strategies, getting out of the comfort zone can become even more challenging, causing you to remain static on the goals. Planning provides you with achievable ideas to keep progressing towards your goal and resisting porn despite the urge to watch it.
It is essential to monitor yourself and strategise according to your daily routine.
2. Join an Online or Offline Community to Quit Watching Porn
There are many addiction recovery programs and institutions that help people recover from their addictions. These online communities and support groups can be easily found on the internet and provide the same environment, wherein one can meet people with the same issues. It makes one comfortable and helps get rid of the addiction positively.
3. Replace Porn Watching With Other Healthy Habits
One of the best solutions for 'how to quit porn addiction' is replacing the urge to watch porn with some healthy habits. You can go for a walk or indulge in physical exercise when you feel the urge to watch porn. It is a healthy alternative to pornography which releases happy hormones, giving a similar high.
4. Engage in Physical Activity
Studies show that exercise helps improve one's physical and mental health. Moreover, engaging in physical activities affects the brain's reward centre, which promotes the overall well-being of an individual. Improved control of the reward centre helps make it able to mitigate porn addiction.
5. Consider Changing the Surroundings
Your environment plays a triggering role in quitting porn addiction. Consequently, doing any activity for long makes it a habit, like an autopilot. In other words, it requires little or no thinking while doing such activities.
This also holds true for porn addiction. Watching porn, which people usually practise to cope with stress or relieve boredom, can become a habit. Hence, you should consider changing your existing environment to cope with this addiction.
6. Meditation
Meditation acts as an effective tool for curbing porn addiction at the initial stage. During this stage, one's emotions fluctuate the most, and meditation teaches one to disengage from the existing emotions and thoughts.
It helps redirect the intrusive thoughts and focus on breathing. Switching the urge to watch porn to concentration and focus helps get rid of porn addiction.
7. Install Porn Blocker
Installing a porn blocker on the device acts as a barrier during the intense urgency of watching porn. It helps limit one's craving for watching porn while restricting the device from showing you.
Moreover, it helps direct you towards committed actions of watching less porn and finally quitting it.
8. Give Priorities to Your Values
Values play a vital role in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Moreover, it helps provide a positive outlook towards any actions. It takes more to exist in a porn-free lifestyle than mere planning to quit pornography.
Rather than focusing on what to avoid, one must figure out what one wants to become. Once you set the goal of quitting porn addiction, your values help you remain static towards the goal.
9. Seek Help From Your Friends
Seek the help of an accountability buddy. It can be your close friend or relative who you trust will help you out instead of judging you critically. They help remind you about the recovery journey and help you remain focused while motivating you at every instance.
10. Figure Out Other Alternatives
Although watching porn helps turn you on, it is not a viable solution if it turns you into an addict. Try other alternatives like having sensual and erotic conversations with your partners. These options will help you keep away from the porn addiction and improve your sexual relationships.
Treatment For Porn Addiction
If the above solutions to ‘how to stop watching porn’ do not help you, you can seek therapeutic treatment to recover from porn addiction. Some popular treatment for porn addiction includes:
1. CBT
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is the psychotherapy that aims to recognise the negative thoughts and behaviours and change them. It is one of the common approaches for treating addictions.
2. ACT
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is also psychotherapy that helps identify and accept the urge to watch porn. Further, it involves value-based interventions to manage the symptoms and urges.
3. Relationship Counselling
Couples counselling helps partners talk about their values and the position that porn holds in their relationship. It is a psychological treatment that helps prevent incidences of watching porn through value-based interventions, helping build trust and confidence.
Summing Up
If you or your loved ones have fallen prey to porn addiction, it is crucial to understand their perspectives. People often make fun of and underestimate porn addicts. Follow these tips to overcome the challenges and help them rather than mocking them. Watching and enjoying porn a few times a week is okay. Don't let it have control over your mind and other activities.
FAQs
Is Porn An Addiction?
Although it is a trending topic nowadays, whether porn is an addiction or not is still a controversy. As per APA or American Psychological Association, reviewers failed to determine enough evidence to include for porn addiction definition.
Some associate it with the brain's chemical change. However, it requires more studies to state porn as an addiction. If watching porn becomes the prime focus for youths than their career, they need quick counselling and treatment to deal with it.
Does Porn Kills Sex Drive?
Watching porn continuously than needed releases dopamine, a hormone providing sexual pleasure. Hence, people prefer masturbating to pacify the dopamine release. They find masturbating more satisfying than the actual sex, thereby jeopardizing their sex life, intimacy, and sexual performance.
