Your Brain on Porn (17 page)

sex but respect their sexuality, and gradually steer themselves into a new groove. They don't bludgeon themselves, or threaten themselves with doom.

Sex is a fundamental drive, and giving up the intense stimulation of regular porn use is a big

shift for your brain. It's best to ease your way through the transition, forgive yourself if you slip, and keep going until you get where you want to be. Think of snowboarding or surfboarding. Stay

flexible.

Learn more about what’s going on in your brain

Whether rebooters know a lot or a little about science, they generally value learning how the

brain interacts with a supernormal stimulus such as today's internet porn. It explains how they got where they are and how to change course:

Just knowing what is going on in the brain and what is causing it gives me a feeling of
relief. It's crazy how slyly the mind can trick you. With this new knowledge I feel that I can
recognize what is happening and act on it before it's too late. I highly recommend watching

some of the videos on http://yourbrainonporn.com.

www.yourbrainonporn.com, the site I created, is a clearing house for relevant science about

the brain. Resources range from easy-to-understand articles and videos by lay people to vast collections of medical abstracts and studies about behavioural addiction.

Keep yourself inspired

Rebooting can be a mighty challenge, and it helps to find a well of inspiration to draw from

on a regular, even daily, basis. Maybe you frequent an online forum where there is lots of encouragement. Maybe you have a favourite philosopher or spiritual book you find soothing and

uplifting:

The second thing that really helped me was reading. My favourite was a book that said to

take a goal you want to accomplish; decide what steps you have to take in order to
accomplish that goal; and do it no matter how you feel. I decided to have a better social life,
so I joined university clubs when I didn't feel like it. I joined some academic clubs for my
major when I didn't feel like it. I started conversations with people in my classes when I
didn't feel like it. I went to parties that I knew about when I didn't feel like it. I went to bars
and clubs with people when they invited me when I didn't feel like it. I asked girls on dates

when I was really nervous about it. It was really hard, but eventually I got a really great
group of friends.

There are hundreds of inspiring recovery self-reports, culled from various forums, on

www.yourbrainonporn.com. Click on ‘Rebooting Accounts’ under ‘Rebooting Basics’.

Rebooting Challenges

Withdrawal

Perhaps because our culture does not yet appreciate the honest-to-goodness physical

addictiveness of today's pornography, the severity of withdrawal symptoms can catch those who

quit by surprise. The discomfort can easily derail a reboot, as this guy warns:

Withdrawals suck. We don't talk enough about them. They are why we fail. They are our

brain's reward centre begging us, threatening us, punishing us, pleading with us,

rationalizing with us why we need to use porn. Withdrawals are painful, they are physical,
mental, and emotional pain. They are the jitters, the shakes, the sweats, odd pains in odd
places, the brain fog we feel when quitting, and our brain's way of telling us all that
unpleasantness can go away with just a little harmless fix. When going through withdrawal I

felt I had a sinus infection and my teeth actually hurt. I did not have a sinus infection and my
teeth were fine, but my brain, at some level, had to make me feel bad to try and make me feel

good through a porn release.

In all addictions, terminating chronic overstimulation of the brain prompts very real

neurochemical events
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Typically, these include an exaggerated stress response and a powerful sense that the world is hopelessly grey and meaningless in the absence of the missing stimulus. The first two weeks are often the toughest:

Let me tell you the truth right when you decide to take the challenge: You won't be able to

do it. Or, at least, that's what you're going to think every single day, and it'll feel so true that
you just can't take it anymore. You will be going through the emotional ups and downs and
downs of withdrawal. You are like a man setting out to climb a tall mountain who has never

walked before. At first it will seem impossible, but as you walk a little bit more each day, your
muscles, i.e., your willpower, will grow and it will become possible. So take it one day at a
time, always. Don't look at what you're doing as fighting a war to quit for X days, or it seems
too big to take on. Realize that what you're doing is just saying ‘no’ once. When that urge
comes up, you say ‘no’, you scream into a pillow, you scream internally, you throw those
thoughts away, you distract yourself, you realise how much better you've done without porn,

and how much you have to lose going back and starting over and maybe not even getting this

far. You don't let that urge go anywhere. You say ‘no’, that one time, and you do that every one
time that it comes up. That's it. Not X days of constant willpower, just a subtle lifestyle
change, a quiet ‘no’ whenever the random desire flickers up and tries to take hold.

As explained, our brains evolved to strive for neurochemical balance. If we chronically bombard them with intense stimulation, they mute neural signals by reducing sensitivity to neurochemicals like dopamine. Chronic overstimulation can thus lead to a zombie-like numbness

to pleasure and emotion. Daily life can seem dull and pointless.

Yet when we remove the exaggerated stimulation, numbness gradually reverses itself. Mood

swings are often the first sign that something is shifting:

My brain is like a see-saw right now. My day can turn from a great one to a near suicidal

one in the space of a few hours. It's difficult to endure but it reassures me that something is
trying to correct itself.

Gradually, colours return, enthusiasm increases and stability reigns. In his TEDx talk: "The Pleasure Trap", psychologist Doug Lisle gives examples of how overeaters can reverse food cravings with periods of fasting or juice-only. The same principle of increasing sensitivity by removing overstimulation applies to all natural rewards, including masturbation to internet porn.

Some porn users report little withdrawal distress. Others report severe withdrawal

symptoms. Here's a 26-year old, long-time porn user's report:

The first week I had the worst type of insomnia imaginable. I don’t remember falling
asleep at all the first 6 days. In my mind, it made Hell Week of Navy SEAL training look easy.

During the weeks that followed, things started turning around a bit but really became
noticeable after about 3 months. I actually started getting energy to do things.

Some people had no reason to suspect withdrawal would be so agonizing:

Not having had a major porn problem, I assumed the benefits would be marginal. But if

you think you don't have an addiction, try stopping and see what happens. In my case, a
period of quite punishing withdrawal symptoms. They lasted for at least a month. Something

was clearly profoundly affecting me neurochemically, as within a 24hr period I might
experience the extremes of a kind of shimmering, exultant euphoria followed by a moribund

depressive blackness. Around the month mark I started feeling significantly better about
myself and things began falling into place effortlessly; people seemed better disposed
towards me, my body language improved, I started joking around at work more and generally

seeing the lighter side of life.

Common withdrawal symptoms include: irritability, anxiety or even panic, unaccustomed

tears, restlessness, lethargy, headaches, brain fog, depression, mood swings, desire to isolate, muscle tightness, insomnia, and severe cravings to use porn.

Emotional things come up heavily: depression, strange anxieties, worthlessness. It was
everything that I had been struggling with – all at once. It was like having a really bad day x
10! And, of course, the horniness. You really start to learn to control your fantasies because if
you don't, you'll feel the discomfort.

Less common, but not unusual, symptoms include: frequent urination, shakes, nausea, tension

in the chest creating difficulty breathing, despair, hot flashes or feeling cold even in front of a fire, overeating or loss of appetite, unaccustomed wet dreams, semen leakage when using the toilet, and fullness, pressure or aching in the testicles (cold water helps).

Mood swings like a pregnant 13-year old girl. I'll see a neat-looking tree and then cry
about it. Intense, insatiable desire for human contact...yet a terrible fear of actually getting
it. Insatiable food cravings...Almost ate an entire cake in 24 hours. I have a VERY SHORT

FUSE, you idiot! LOL I treat people like crap when I feel like this. This is the worst symptom.

Another frustrating thing about withdrawal symptoms is that recovery isn't linear; it's up and

down. Some people only experience acute withdrawal symptoms during the first two or three weeks. Others still have sporadic withdrawal symptoms for months, which sometimes go by the

term Post-Acute Withdrawal (PAWS). Good days gradually become more frequent, but bad days

continue for a long while before the brain is really back to normal.

It's unwise to measure your progress against any particular individual's recovery time. Some

people simply need longer than others to restore brain balance.

Flatline

One young man described the flatline as ‘the gruelling, mysterious initiation one endures but

never speaks of.’ It's a standard withdrawal symptom in guys with porn-induced erectile dysfunction, but it also happens to some who don't have ED at the time they quit. I touched on this temporary effect earlier, but there's more to say. Here's a typical description of the flatline:

After a few days of brain tantrums (cravings), I went into a flatline for weeks. Basically I

felt totally indifferent about girls, sex, everything. A little voice from the porn beast nagged at
me in the back of my mind, but mostly, I just didn’t care. And my penis was very lifeless and

small. It was like somebody just pulled the plug on whatever machine provides my sex drive.

No libido at all.

Needless to say, some guys bail out of recovery at this point and rush back to porn, afraid

that they will permanently lose it if they don't use it. About five years ago, however, a courageous 26-year old Australian kept going – and discovered that somewhere around week seven, his flatline ended and his libido (and erections) came roaring back.
[175]
Since then, many guys have braved the flatline and documented their recoveries.

No one yet knows what causes the flatline, but here's one guy's theory:

We started masturbating to internet porn very young, kept doing it like crazy until we
exhausted our minds and bodies. When you become exhausted, your brain and body enters
sleep mode (that we call flatline) in order to recover so it can react to stimulation again. If we
had let it rest back then it would probably been a flatline of only a few days before things
returned to normal. But we didn't let it rest. Despite being in a flatline, we used porn to
continue until we reached rock bottom. So now it doesn't take a few days for things to recover.

It takes a few months or even longer in some cases. But it passes.

Perhaps the flatline arises from a constellation of normal withdrawal events, combined with

stubborn changes in the sexual centres of the brain. I suspect the sexual centres (in the hypothalamus) are implicated because other kinds of addicts don't lose sexual function when they stop using.

Certainly everyone's flatline is somewhat unique in terms of severity and duration. Some guys' libido and erections come back together, either gradually or all at once. For other guys, libido returns before erections. And some report that erections return before libido. Whatever

its origins, the flatline is definitely weird. Prior to highspeed porn, cutting out porn use was
not
associated with a severe, temporary drop in libido.

If you're having porn-related sexual performance problems, should you tell your partner?

Many guys report that it really helps to educate a partner about the flatline and its causes. Here's a 23-year old woman whose boyfriend of the same age needed 130 days to return to normal: