Why it’s so hard to quit porn

Many modern conveniences come with some serious downsides on the backend.

If you watch internet porn, you’d be considered the epitome of normal by most people’s standards. Porn is widely available and easy to access. Porn is also increasingly socially acceptable.

But the downside is that it’s incredibly hard to quit.

About 40 million people in the United States watch porn regularly. Another 200,000 are considered addicts.¹

However, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone that readily calls themselves a porn addict.

Porn Masturbation Orgasm (PMO) creates nearly identical addictive patterns that we see in people that use alcohol and hard drugs. To kick my alcohol habit, I first had to get honest about why it is so hard to quit.

That honesty has allowed me to build a lifestyle around staying sober, which I’ve done for the last 8 years. In this article, I’ll provide you with the insight you need to know on why porn is so hard to quit so you can do the work and make changes in your life.

Porn today is inherently addictive

The first reason porn is hard to quit is that it’s designed to be that way. It’s an instant gratification piece of digital candy that touches on our brain’s pleasure centers and lights up the reward system.

Your brain starts producing dopamine every time you search for your favorite scenes and enjoy them in 4K. Technology today allows people to watch porn on 50-inch TV screens, in 3D, and with ASMR effects that make it all the more immersive.

With online porn, you can pretty much find footage of humans (and other species’) performing any sexual act your mind can imagine. It’s way more sexual stimuli than anyone could reasonably experience in a lifetime.

When you wash, rinse, and repeat this cycle, habitual porn watching eventually deactivates your brain’s frontal lobe,² which is responsible for:

• Social interactions
• Problem-solving
• Impulse control
• Emotions and memory
• Higher thought
• Motivation
• Personality

This all creates the perfect storm for addiction over a long period of time. And this addiction becomes more of an uphill battle every single time you watch porn.

Read here to learn science-backed reasons porn is harmful.

It’s free and widely available

If I asked you where you get your porn, you could probably rattle off two or three go-to porn sites without much thought. If I asked you how much you paid for these sites, you’d probably laugh in my face.

Porn is a $97 billion industry, but the average user watches porn on free sites that have massive archives of scenes and categories.³

When you’re hooked on booze, cigarettes, or hard drugs, there’s a motivation to quit once it starts hurting your pockets. That’s non-existent for internet porn, so you have to find your own reasons.

Check out my article on reasons to quit porn.

Men today use more coping mechanisms

Porn is the ultimate coping mechanism for men…

Today, 9% of men live with daily feelings of depression.⁴

About 21 million adults experienced a depressive episode in a recent year.⁵

Any mental health issue you’re going through requires significant effort to overcome. It starts with making a decision to work through it. Coping with these problems with porn-induced dopamine hits keeps you from ever making that decision, let alone doing the work to fix your life.

That’s when you get stuck.

Instead of booking an appointment with a therapist, you research new porn fetishes to masturbate to. Instead of getting out of your comfort zone, making new friends, and working out, you sit alone in a dark room masturbating. Sometimes twice. Sometimes three times.

The more you repeat this cycle, the more difficult it is for you to advance from a coping frame to a thriving frame. You might even start blaming everything outside of yourself for your chronic misfortune. At that point, you’ll have zero motivation to sacrifice immediate gratification for a bigger and better life.

The journey toward a better life always requires you to bet on yourself. 

It hijacks your natural sex drive

Accessing your sex drive through a digital screen is a lot like needing “liquid courage” to be social. In a vacuum, it’s a nice little external perk to help you feel things.

In practical reality, it becomes a crutch that robs you of feelings you naturally have access to.

Check out this post to learn how many men are taking the NoFap challenge and joining the online support group to regain their natural sexual feelings that pornography addiction hijacked.

Men who commit to a 30-day NoFap reboot often experience a flatline period, during which they have no sex drive. This happens because your brain is rewiring the damage porn did to your brain by hijacking your natural cycle of desire, arousal, orgasm, and resolution ⁶.

But masturbating to porn three times a day is proof that you just have a really high sex drive, right? Not quite.

Science shows that this level of hypersexuality is closer linked to avoidant behavior, and will likely lead to erection issues or delayed ejaculation.⁷ You become desensitized to sexual situations, so you need more intense sexual situations to feel those feelings.

Read up on the withdrawal symptoms of porn and how these cravings make quitting a struggle.

The downsides aren’t immediately apparent

If you ever touched the stove when you were a kid, you know that the intense pain created immediate feedback.

You probably yanked your hand away involuntarily before even realizing what happened. Even a mild burn likely left you with a memory that has stuck with you to this day.

You get none of that immediate feedback with porn.

You get the exact opposite.

You get rewarded with pleasure and feel-good chemicals.

The negatives of pornography don’t become obvious until much later:

• Brain fog that makes it difficult to focus
• Erectile dysfunction (ED)
• Premature ejaculation
• Delayed ejaculation
• Neglecting life responsibilities
• Bad romantic relationships
• Low sex drive

By the time you experience these side effects, you’re likely already addicted.

These problems also don’t show up right away because men are increasingly isolated and less likely to interact with real women they find attractive. A study showed that 33% of young men reported not having sex in a recent calendar year.⁸

When you’re not approaching women, there’s no real-life social feedback to correct your course. This means you have no motivating factors to quit porn use.

Why is it so hard to quit porn?

Hard doesn’t mean impossible. But I’d be lying to you if I said you can just flip a switch and break such an addictive porn habit.

Start doing the work of learning who you are now, versus who you want to be. From there, it’s a matter of cutting out the behavioral patterns that get in the way.

You’ll get a headstart with my Vicebreakers course, which helps you gain self-respect, self-control, and self-esteem as you kick your bad habits and addictions.

The rest is up to you.

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