today we're going to talk about why resisting pornography is a bad [Music] idea so pornography is running rampant through our society right now people are getting more addicted to pornography than they've ever been before and there are a lot of good neuroscientific reasons for this pornography is getting more visual we have VR pornography higher resolution pornography everything is getting brighter bouncier jiggli right and then we also have this whole parasocial angle which has never existed before in the past when you were looking at pornography like when I was growing up there were things like magazines and they don't even move which is one thing but they certainly don't interact with you right and now what we have is things like only fans or other platforms where you can interact with a pornographic content creator and you can form a relationship with them and this can all become very addicting but there's one thing that we're actually screwing up which is quite paradoxical so as people try to conquer por porography improve their relationship with it maybe get rid of the addiction one of the biggest mistakes that they make is trying to resist it now I know that sounds absolutely insane but in order to understand this we have to understand sort of the neuroscience and clinical perspective on Cravings resistance and also how we ultimately in addiction Psychiatry overcome something like an addiction hey y'all if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life check out DrK's guide to Mental Health it combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a Choose Your Own Adventure format so check out the link in the bio and start your journey today so let's take a quick look at what happens when you actually try to resist a craving so anytime your brain wants something right it starts by trying to entice you so it says like hey man like let's get high like let's have a good time it's fun it's the weekend maybe it's not quite the weekend it's a Monday and it's been a hard day and oh the weekend wasn't quite as fun as you thought you know it'll come up with whatever I can to try to get you to use and then if you say no the addiction is like H now I'm feeling jittery come on bro like let's let's take the edge off just take the edge off a little bit right we don't have to party the whole way like let's just take the edge off let's just try to do this it'll help us work it'll help us go meet our friends like the rest of the day we'll be good like come on man like let's let's take away a little bit this negativity let's move towards positivity and then if you say no then the brain starts getting pissed like ah like now I'm I'm Gonna Give You withdrawal right you feel this withdrawal we've got headaches we've got stomach aches we've got whole body pain we're gonna have a little bit of diarrhea and then if you still White Knuckle it if you resist then your brain gets angry at you says what do you think you're doing we need this stuff I told you we need this stuff look at how much we're hurting now now the headache intensifies now you have diarrhea now you're vomiting and then ultimately if you end up giving in what your brain kind of says is like why do you make me do this to you man like why do you have to make me hurt you so much in order to get what we need right it's just like hunger and thirst thirst to your brain where if you deprive your body it starts to punish you it literally sends you negative signals not positive signals it punishes you for not giving it what it wants and so I'm kind of reminded trigger warning of a South Park episode where there's some domestic violence but this is literally what I see that one of my patients mentioned this this episode to me and he said this is what it feels like when I resist a craving I feel like my brain starts punishing me for fighting it in the first place and so this is a weird challenge because what ends up happening is as we resist Cravings our brain begins to learn what kind of signals do I need to send to this dumbass to get what I want and so the real paradoxical thing that we see in addiction is that the more patients resist and fail the more intensive their Cravings become so this is what's really different about addiction right because if we look at most things in life as we fight against things even if we lose we get better over time so if I go to the gym and I lift a bunch of weight and I can't lift let's say this high amount of weight the next time I go to the gym I'll be better at it my muscles will grow my muscles will adapt right if I play chess over time I'll get better at it I'll get better at swimming I'll get better at reading I'll get better at studying I'll understand more mathematics more calculus but addiction is the one interesting thing where the more that you fight it the worse off you become so if you look at the cycle of addiction after years and years and years of people resisting Cravings being sober for a while relapsing and then you're kind of back on this treadmill over and over again despite the fact that people who struggle with addictions have a ton of experience their life seems to be moving in the wrong direction and why is that it's because of this principle of if you resist a craving and end up giving in your brain learns this is the signal that I send to this person in order to get what I need so your brain starts paradoxically amplifying the Cravings because it knows that I need to go straight to a high level so that we can skip all these first steps because this is what gets me what I need and this isn't just your brain doing this in the case of of of addictions we even do this normally for example if you have a family member who's deaf right you start by calling their name you're like hey buddy and they don't hear you and then you raise the volume you say hey buddy they don't hear you and then if they're deaf you start yelling and that's when they hear you if you do that a couple times your brain will stop talking to them in a normal voice it'll realize what signal it needs to create to get the response that it wants and it's not just the case of deafness we also see this in sort of getting our psychological needs met so sometimes we'll see this very commonly as psychiatrist with kids so if a kid is getting bullied at school they'll start complaining about stomach AES and it's not that they're faking it it's that what happens with this child is I'm being bullied at school I go to my parents and I say hey I'm I don't want to go to school today and they don't listen but the one day that I have a stomach ache they let me stay home so our brain is learning and the child isn't even consciously aware they they can be 5 years old 6 years old 7 years old and then the the the body will actually create physiologic stomach AES to get the needs met so our brain is designed to get needs met and paradoxically if you try to resist cravings and fail your brain will intensify the Cravings to get what it needs so this is where you're probably saying well what are you saying DrK should I just like watch porn anytime I feel like it should I just give into it completely cuz I've tried that and that doesn't work no no no so let's take a look at the evidence-based inter the things that really work for things like addictions so we have things like Psychotherapy we have things like peer support like Alcoholics Anonymous we also have certain medications we'll even have things like environmental changes and let's go through these right so let's say I'm an opioid addict when I go to psychotherapy let's say I'm seeing my therapist am I resisting Cravings no not when I'm actually seeing my therapist let's say I go to a Narcotics annonymous meeting am I actually resisting Cravings there no right so when I go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting there's a lot of community people aren't like actively usually resisting Cravings the whole point is that they're sort of doing things that are not grappling directly with their illness and even if we look at things of people like sponsors so what's the whole point of a sponsor here I am resisting a craving and what does my sponsor do with me I call them up and they say hey let's go for a walk let's grab a cup of coffee they kind of distract me and pull me out of that battle the other thing that we know in addiction Psychiatry is that you know I've had patients for example who are alcoholics and members of fraternities or sororities and as long as you are hanging out with your fraternity buddies your sorority sisters whatever and you people are drinking around you all the time it is very difficult to resist those Cravings so what do we recommend we recommend social transplant you need a new set of friends who are sober because if you are with your set of friends who continue to use it is very difficult to resist the cravings and this is where we also see this the principle that I talked about which is that the more you resist the more your brain learns hey I need need to induce very strong Cravings I need to punish this person for depriving this of me so what we tend to see literally what I see in my patients is that the more that they resist Cravings the more intense the Cravings become and then we can also look at the medications for addictions things like n trone or buprenorphine in the case of opioid addiction and literally what is the result of these medications nxone literally reduces cravings and buprenorphine is actually like a partial opioid Agonist which means that it's so supplies the receptor that wants the opioids and creates a partial opioid signal and so since we're partially satisfying the signal it actually eliminates Cravings because the body and brain are getting what they want so our whole strategy in addiction Psychiatry tends to be to avoid fighting Cravings now there are good reasons to fight cravings and we'll kind of get to that in a second but I just want to point out that we sort of see these two very different things the first is that if we are grappling and B knuckling our Cravings over and over and over again that doesn't usually lead to success based on our research a lot of be people become sober without ever seeing a psychiatrist so we're not entirely sure exactly what they do and on the other hand we see that all of our interventions are not directly fighting Cravings in fact they're used to kind of Dodge Cravings so what should you do this is where there are a couple of things about pornography that are different the first is that when we're talking about resisting Cravings this is where there are a couple of things about pornography that are a little bit different from sub es that we can take advantage of so I know this sounds really bizarre but the strategy that I tend to use with my patients is to pick your battles so instead of just randomly resisting the craving and then ultimately giving into it which will intensify the craving the next time you step into the ring what we really want to do is almost schedule our pornography use so one of the things that I'll do with my patients is sort of pick two times throughout the day where they are allowed to watch pornography this has a very interesting effect the first is that during outside of those windows it becomes easier to resist but even then they're resisting a little bit it becomes easier to win the Battle of pushing the pornography until 11:00 a. m. and 6:00 p.
m. let's say at 8: or 9: in the morning you get this little impulse and you kind of push it till 11:00 a. m.
so you're actually strengthening and training your frontal lobe and then when 11:00 a. m. rolls around you can sort of engage in it so this is really interesting because we can't do this with a substance use disorder and why is that because in a substance use disorder we have certain gen genetic modifications usually to things like our Gaba receptors our mu receptors which mean that if I have a little bit of alcohol 11:00 a.
m. the rest of my day is shot thankfully the pattern that I tend to see in behavioral addictions is that moderation is more accessible it's more doable like so with someone like an alcohol addict you can't really do that if they have one drink they can't stop with pornography addicts I'm able to see more success in this way so I know it sounds really bizarre but just setting aside a particular time where you're allowed to watch pornography the second thing is to generally remember that we don't want to fight battles that we can't win so we're going to draw a little bit on sunzo and if you look at sort of the the goal of addiction Psychiatry it is about setting up the field of battle to beat the addiction so it is about reducing our Cravings shaping our environment because the last thing that we want to do is fight a battle and lose because then our brain will sort of bludgeon us with stronger Cravings so what we really want to do is try to pick battles that we are going to win and and really build up those successes and confidence because there's one other really Insidious thing that happens when we fight a craving and we fail over time what do we learn from doing this not only does our brain learn to intensify the Cravings but we learn that we are powerless I fought it I fought it I fought it and who wins in the end the addiction wins the pornography wins the alcohol wins and then tomorrow I wake up I'm sure I'm going to do a prod let's go let's go and then who wins in the end the alcohol wins I'm sober for a little while the alcohol wins I'm sober for a little while the alcohol wins the sober I'm sober for a little while the alcohol wins I'm sober for a year the alcohol wins and when this is your experience of addiction you begin to give up hope subconsciously you don't think you're ever going to beat this problem why because the more you fight the more you fail and the more you fail the more your brain is learning we're not going to win this might as well give up and this is what we see in the cycle of addiction people will be addicted for years lifetimes because they tried to stop right most people who are addicted to things have tried to stop and their experiences that it doesn't work I end up losing because paradoxically they are feeding the craving they are intensifying the craving they don't understand these principles so they're actually making the problem worse instead what we want to do is pick battles that we can win right this is why we want to sort of restrict things to a particular time of the day and at least you're winning from 8:00 a. m.
to 11:00 a. m. you're winning from 12:00 p.
m. to 600 p. m.
and what I tend to see in a lot of my patients is once start to do this there are times where they'll even skip it because they are training their brain between 8 and 11 to resist and when 11:00 a. m. rolls around they say okay do I really need to use this right now or can I wait until 6 p.
m.
