so we strive for connection that's what loneliness is it's a drive it's like hunger and thirst to connect to another human being now the problem is that the same circuits that make us feel lonely are responsive to sex because what's the purpose of loneliness getting together with someone and having sex so once we have sex then we get a surge of oxytocin the problem with pornography is that you can't give oxytocin to yourself I can't hug myself I can't feel bonded to myself I require another human being my name is Dr Alo Keno I'm a
psychiatrist who's been focusing on technology addiction since 2015 and I'm convinced that pornography addiction is one of the worst addictions in the world today now this may sound a little bit strange because when we think about bad addictions right we think about things like opiates and overdose deaths or we can think about highly addictive substances like methamphetamine and in my experience as a psychiatrist pornography addiction is one of the hardest addictions to kick and this is confusing for a lot of people because they think they understand why we get addicted to pornography people think that
oh I'm lonely I'm horny that's why I'm addicted to pornography and it's really confusing for them when they enter into a healthy sexual relationship even get married and have kids and for some reason they can't kick the pornography addiction having worked with this population for about 10 years now I think I finally understood how pornography addiction works in the brain and how that understanding leads us to a road map to quit pornography and that's what I'd like to share with you today so let's dive into the literature to see how bad this is so this
is a study from 2019 that basically found that roughly 11% of men and 3% of women reported some agreement with the statement I am addicted to pornography not that bad right let's look at how the numbers have changed so this is a study from 2024 that was done on 8,000 800 people that basically found that the rate of addiction has jumped to 63% this is a staggering increase in 5 years there may be some skepticism to these numbers but this is not the only paper that's showing this right so this is a a narrative meta
a narrative review of pornography addiction that was published in um 2023 and they found that today 46 to 74% of men and 16 to 40% of women watch porn and that this is a striking increase and it's not just that they're watching porn the rates of addiction are or higher but that this is starting to have very real consequences in a study conducted in 1999 erectile dysfunction in low sexual desire rate was about 5% by 2011 Ed rates have increased to 14 to 28% in European men between the ages of 18 and 40 so in
order to understand why pornography addiction is so addictive we have to understand the nature of addiction so if we look at something like opioids opioids are addictive because they target something called the mu receptor so if I use something like you know if I inject heroin heroin molecules are going to travel to the MU receptor and they're going to activate wherever I have mu receptors and they create a particular slice of changes in my brain but the way that I want youall to understand substances is kind of like homing missiles so they're a very discrete
molecule that artificially activates a particular receptor in our brain so now the question becomes what part of the brain does pornography actually activate so this is a review article from 2019 that talks about the neuroanatomy and function of human sexual behavior it's basically a paper that's looking at okay where in the brain does sex happen and what we discover is that most regions of the brain get affected by sex so now let's look at a different perspective right uh let's look at neurotransmitters right because everyone's talking about like dopamine and serotonin and stuff nowadays so
summary of the main neurotransmitters this is not a complete set and modulators involved in regulating human sexual behavior Sarah tonin that's what we use to treat depression anxiety dopamine everyone knows about dopamine and addiction norepinephrine acetylcholine histamine opioids and sex hormones the reason pornography addiction is so addictive is because what it artificially activates are the circuits in our brain that involve sex and so if we're talking about substance use as a homing missile that targets a particular receptor pornography addiction is like a nuclear bomb that covers a whole city because if we sort of take
a step back and think about why is every region of our brain actually involved in sex because sex is the purpose of the human organism right so we tend to think that human organisms produce eggs in sperm and the reason that we produce eggs in sperm is to procreate but there's a equally valid flipped view of that we don't produce eggs and sperm eggs and sperm produce human body the purpose of the human body is to procreate right so a sperm is sitting there and thinking to my itself how can I propagate how can I
live forever I'm going to make this human biological organism and when I make the human biological organism the only point of the human biological organism is to propagate sperm because we know from theories of natural selection and evolution that organisms who do not procreate literally die out and are no longer in the world today so our whole bi ological organism is focused on sex and as a result anything that artificially activates those circuits which is what pornography does will activate every dimension of our being so overcoming a pornography addiction is not about solving one thing
it is about solving all of the things so let's start with the thalamus what does this thalamus do the thalamus is responsible for sensory input the thalamus is the sensory gateway to other parts of the brain so anytime I see something I smell something I taste something I hear something it all gets fed through the thalamus so the first thing that we've got to understand about pornography addiction is that our sensory input matters a lot so if we look at the science of craving what is it that triggers Cravings so there can be all kinds
of things that trigger Cravings but one of the most important things that trigger Cravings is what we see hear taste smell Etc so if you look at like only or fly like creators right what do they do they also have very robust Instagram profiles they troll around on dating apps and they they'll swipe right on you and the first thing that they say is they say hey don't talk to me on this dating app talk to me on Instagram why do they do that because they know that if you talk to them on Instagram and
you follow them on Instagram you will get sensory input about people who are usually scantily clad and oh there's some kind of Link or something to an only fans page so we understand this principle really well in the field of advertising in the field of marketing this is why people have Billboards they understand that sensory input induces craving now why is this important to us this is important because a lot of people think that pornography addiction is about willpower they they White Knuckle it they'll do things like take cold showers they try to boost their
willpower thinking it will allow them to overcome pornography because sometimes it works right sometimes you have enough willpower and you resist but what I want youall to understand is that if we have let's say this is our this is the level of craving right and so if we have like more cravings and let's say this is the rate of our willpower so this is how many points of willpower we have any amount of craving underneath this line we can manage but any amount of craving over this line we lack the appropriate willpower to resist so
what we try to do is we try to boost our willpower and we try to think okay this will work but there are two things that we can do here we can boost our willpower which sort of works but the other problem is that willpower is a diminishing resource so the more you use it the less you have to resist but what I found works really really well is if this is the rate of your willpower fine you still want to increase it this much go for it but what we can also do is reduce
Cravings right so if we can alter the slope of this curve and we can reduce Cravings we will need less willpower and we'll still need some but it doesn't become whole F dependent on Willpower so Thalamus becomes really important so next up we're going to talk about the nucleus succumbent which is where we have dopamine and everyone knows that porn is very very dope and energic but we still have to have a more sophisticated understanding of this if we want to really quit porn so there are two things we have to understand when you watch
porn there are two levels of dopamine released the first thing is when you watch a small quantity of porn you get a small dopamine release right and this is also like evolutionary so like once we're getting close to procreating when we're on the path of procreation our brain wants to reward that behavior and encourage us to do it so even just watching porn is enough to get dopamine now the second thing that happens is when we orgasm we get a huge amount right and this makes sense too from an evolutionary standpoint Because unless we orgasm
chances are we're not procreating especially if you're a dude but there are a couple of other huge problems with this so the first thing that people don't realize is that dopamine does three things one is that it gives us pleasure but then it also gives us cravings and gives us behavioral reinforcement so why is this important see anytime your brain experiences pleasure it craves that pleasure in the future so almost from like a karmic perspective when I work with people who struggle with this I want them to understand that every time you watch porn and
every time you orgasm with porn the signals in your brain that cause you to Crave porn again and reinforce the behavior right so if I do something fun if I eat like one french fry I get a spurt of dopamine and what do I feel like doing I feel like eating a second french fry and there was a brand of potato chips that you know had this marketing campaign where they're like I bet you can't just eat one and so like that makes sense because once you eat one like resisting the first potato chip is
way harder than resisting the second and that's because of the way that our brain works so when we watch pornography when we or orgasm we get more craving and more behavioral reinforcement and this is the problem is that the more we watch The More We crave it the more we behaviorally reinforce it every time we watch and every time we orgasm we are increasing the slope of that curve and requiring more willpower from ourselves there is another aspect of dopamine that is even more problematic which is that once your brain gets dopamine from One Source
it makes it harder to extract it from a different Source right so we actually have a limit quantity of dopamine every morning when we wake up our dopamine stores are full and there's studies that show that if you do a highly dopam energic activity first thing in the morning like if you play a video game watch pornography or on your phone literally your capacity for Behavioral reinforcement in other activities goes down I want yall to really understand what that means so if I study and I feel good about studying then what will happen is I
will want to study again tomorrow so if we think about what is going on in our brain when we have those thoughts when we have those feelings we are behaviorally reinforcing whatever we just did we want to do it again super cool right here's the reason that pornography addiction really screws with that because you can only have so much dopamine to reinforce behaviors throughout the day so if you spend it all if you empty your tank no pun intended on pornography you will have very little dopamine left to reinforce other behaviors now now let's talk
about the third region which is really really important which is our amydala and lyic system so these are the emotional circuits of our brain technically the Primitive emotions so things like anxiety fear to a certain degree things like sadness so the amigdala and the ymic system are the parts of our brain that feel this kind of stuff now this is where things get interesting because when you're anxious and your body has the chance to procreate what do you think happens to the anxiety so sometimes like sex can induce anxiety sometimes we get super in our
head but sex orgasm and procreation and watching pornography are really really good at suppressing negative emotions right so if you're dealing with some stress throughout the day and let's say you're in a loving healthy relationship you know having sexual relations is a really great way to feel better about yourself some people that I've worked with who have things like a history of trauma or borderline personality disorder or bipolar disorder will even use like sex basically as a coping mechanism this is what I see in sex addiction and the reason for that is because it's kind
of funny like I was working with a patient once who had cancer and was getting chemotherapy in the hospital and this is a guy with stage three cancer who's getting chemo and you know like we one day you know we walk in and it turns out that he's engaging in a sexual act with with his long-term partner and it's kind of like wow bro like you're in the hospital getting chemotherapy and you like have the energy and drive for this that if you really think about it kind of makes sense right so if we can
look at people like especially older men like older men are capable of procreating at the age of 90 and so if we really look at the especially the biological system of the male sex overrides everything men just want one thing right and there's some kernel of Truth to that common wisdom and one of the key things men or women is that the amydala in the lyic system get suppressed by sexual activity in pornography so what we tend to see in people with pornography addiction is a lack of emotional regulation skills so generally speaking when we're
talking about emotions there are two classes of emotions there's emotional regul which we talked about so these are emotions in the present moment so when I'm feeling anxious when I'm feeling tired when I'm feeling afraid when I'm feeling angry pornography will make those feelings go away in the moment but there's a second area of emotions which I wish it was only so simple as number one and when I worked with people we tried to focus on this and I found that that was not enough and we discovered that there are dormant emotions because when you
shut off the amydala in our negative emotional circuitry where do those go they don't disappear they actually get stored so every time I I watch pornography what I'm actually doing is building up emotions building up emotions building up emotions and this is something I struggled a lot with with video game addiction or any kind of addiction basically every Pati I've worked with has this problem where when you use alcohol or marijuana or pornography to run away from your problems now you have a bunch of negative emotion which has to be continuously suppressed right because now
I have all this crap in here and if my mind goes quiet for a little while then all of this stuff comes out so what I'll find kind of clinically in my experience with people who struggle with pornography is that The Quiet Moments lead to usage of pornography and what we basically have to do it's not just about regulating in the moment it's about actually cleaning all this crap out so we got to empty it out one step at a time so let's talk next about the oxytocin loneliness system so oxytocin is the neurotransmitter that
involves bonding with other human beings so one of the things that we're seeing is a loneliness epidemic and no surprise that the loneliness epidemic is accompanied by a surge in increase in pornography addiction okay so let's like understand this like porn porn addiction used to be 11% and now porn addiction is somewhere around like 65% so what happened we also have a loneliness epidemic going on at the same time so let's go back to the neuros circuitry remember that sexual activity requires bonding with other people and the other way to kind of think about it
is why do human beings Bond anyway what's the purpose of bonding bonding is a vehicle to sexual activity right so you have some animals like cats let's say like the great cats the great cats don't hang out they're solo creatures a female cat isn't heat and a male cat from like 40 miles away shows up once they do the deed and then they part ways we are not like that emotional bonding is critical to the formation of a sexual relationship ship and the propagation of our sperm and our eggs so any kind of loneliness that
we have what does loneliness drive us towards loneliness drives us towards connection if people didn't feel lonely imagine two camps of people one set of human beings who didn't feel lonely at all and if they never felt lonely they never hang out with other people if they never hung out with other people they never procreate and if they never procreated they would die out so loneliness is a signal from your body and your brain it is an oxytocin almost like a deficiency our we strive for touch there's touch starvation now the problem is that the
same circuits that make us feel lonely are responsive to sex so we know that cuddling and bonding with your sexual partner catching feelings for your friends with benefits happens if you cuddle we also know for example that you know cuddling with your children uh releases oxytocin in them and oxytocin in you having your cat kind of come and like lick your face or whatever or your dog like come and like sit in your lap or whatever animals do right that actually releases oxytocin as well and even when you see like videos of this kind of
stuff on the internet like you feel really good like think about that for a second some guy is cuddling moodang some tiny little hippopotamus and we're like oh like oh so warm and cuddly I feel so like what's going on in the brain that's the oxytocin system our brain thinks that okay if we satisfy sex we will get oxytocin with it the problem with pornography is that you can't give oxytocin to yourself myself I can't hug myself I can't feel bonded to myself I require another human being but these circuits are aligned now the last
system that we're going to talk about is the social status or social emotional system so if you look at sex on the internet today it has a lot to do with status right you have all these like alphas and I'm an alpha and that means my body count is real high and I'm not going to work I'm not going to date a girl whose body count is high right so we can also look at a lot of communities where people are like I am a loser because I am a virgin so this is really important
to understand but sex and Status are very tightly linked in our brain so when we're feeling ashamed of ourselves when we're feeling low self-esteem when we feel like we're a loser because we're a virgin at the age of it doesn't matter what your ages and there are also people like the Dalai Lama who I think are virgins and they're totally fine with it so being feeling low self-esteem isn't about being a virgin but the key thing to understand is all of our programming moves in that direction and so as long as you feel like you
have a low self-esteem a low social status that will drive the pornography addiction as well so this is where I got to say like so this is like basically what I figured out as a clinician I would strongly recommend that yall work with clinicians too but addictions are also a little bit different because addictions are the one aspect of Psychiatry where we know that statistically most people DIY it so if you look at alcohol addiction the majority of people who become sober do so without the help of a mental health professional that could be changing
but historically that's been true so so what I'd love to do today is to share with youall the plan that I put together but keep in mind this is not me saying that this will overcome an addiction this is just what I've learned and if you guys really want to overcome an addiction can't emphasize enough how important it is to work with a professional remember that thalamic input right our sensory input is what will trigger all of this kind of stuff and companies are actually getting really really good at reducing our barriers to entry we
Auto log into websites websites will give you can get notific from Pornhub Pornhub will email you only fans will email you everyone is trying to pull your attention in and the problem right now is that if you have an Impulse to watch something the space between that impulse and you actually watching it is very important and everyone who's trying to addict you is trying to reduce the barrier between the impulse and you engaging in the behavior so what do we want to do first thing we want to do is log out of everything right if
you want to delete your accounts and stuff like that you can do that I find that that does doesn't work quite the same way because then people just end up signing up again remove as many apps programs as you can block websites right so use like if you have like a work browser or something like that block as much stuff as you can so you want to increase the barrier of entry and what I found with my patients is that they don't have to resist pornography forever they just need to resist for a few minutes
and then usually the impulse will subside it'll come back stronger which is why we got to do a bunch of other stuff but we want to increase our barriers to entry to really work on the level of the thalamus now what I would also say now this is going to sound crazy is restrict access to one device make it hard for yourself to watch porn so now we're going to do step two and step two is going to blow people's minds so what we want to do for step two I know it sounds crazy is
going to be we want to restrict our pornography use to a particular window of the day so when I'm working with severely addicted people to pornography we usually end up doing like we they it's not like I'm doing with them 30 to 60 Minutes like sometime around noon and then 30 to 60 Minutes in the evening ideally you can restrict it to one window a day at the end of the day if we watch pornography first thing in the morning or early in the day we empty our dopamine stores and we won't be able to
behaviorally reinforce or crave other things no second screening and when you're watching pornography do not do anything else just sit there and watch the pornography until you were SED until you were done no opening it up again later so the next thing that we want to do is make a plan at the beginning of the day so remember that anytime we have an open window the desire for pornography will increase so remember we have all those dormant emotions right so if we have a quiet moment in the day what actually causes people to relapse the
most is like boredom like that's been my clinical experience when they get bored when they have an empty hour of the day when there's nothing really going on this is also why you can look at studies that show that meaninglessness correlates very highly with pornography addiction so if people have relatively empty lives pornography will fill it up so what we want to do is plan the day so when you wake up in the morning or ideally the night before map out as many hours as you can and push the pornography as late as you can
it won't help today but each time you make a plan and you stick to it even for 1 hour 2 hours 3 hours 4 hours what your brain is actually doing is behaviorally reinforcing the actions that you take next thing that we absolutely need to do is develop an emotional regulation practice so remember that based on our understanding of the igdal and the lyic system that pornography is a very powerful emotional regulation technique as are basically all addictions so I would recommend starting with something called Nishi pram or alternate nostril breathing meditation works great exercise
works great but I want yall to understand that as long as your brain and your body do not have ways of regulating emotions outside of pornography you will always go back to pornography right if I have way of paying my own bills I will continuously hit up my friends for short-term loans you have to satisfy what the brain needs in order to pull it away from something else The Next Step that we really need to take is find your triggers the craving for pornography is going to be triggered by all kinds of stuff so it
could be thalamic input I've worked with some people who it's like even like a a stressful conversation with your parents right uh working with a young dude 30-year-old and like every time his parents call they're like when are you going to get married how is dating going what is going on when are we going to get grandkids and so this person recognize that anytime like he feels the worst he ever feels throughout the day at the end or beginning of a conversation with his parents when the phone rings that's when he starts to feel awful
because he knows that they're going to ask a bunch of questions which he has no satisfactory answers to and they really show him how much he has stalled in life by asking their questions because they're concerned and so you really have to pay attention to what are your triggers what are the things that cause you to Crave pornography and then at some point sometimes you have to tank through triggers but ideally we want to understand what those are mentally prepare for them and anticipate what you will feel emotionally before you step out of them so
the next step that we're going to talk about is somewhat related to that which is to analyze your weak point so this is a little bit related to triggers we want to sort of think about things like the day but what I really want youall to do is anticipate which parts of the day will be the hardest and what kinds of other things can you do to sort of prevent yourself from cracking in those moments so one example is I had you know I worked with someone who was uh would have lunch and then they
would go back into their car they would leave the office building they'd go into their car and they'd watch pornography so instead of what we sort of focus on is just taking a walk for 15 30 minutes and then once that window is passed they finished digesting and they're kind of like back in the office they tend to do really well next thing that we're going to talk about is working on dormant emotions so this is where doing something like working with a psychotherapist is ideal you can also work on dormant emotions through things like
journaling or stuff like that but recognize that resisting pornography or overcoming pornography is not just about emotional regulation in the moment it's about working through all of that crap inside you that is driving the pornography addiction next thing that we want to do is find a community so remember there's that oxytocin and loneliness aspect that really drives addiction this is why we've seen from all kinds of studies on addiction that peer support Community connecting with other human beings is actually an antidote to addiction generally speaking you don't have to have the addiction for the meeting
you can go to an AA meeting and say hey my name is all Oak I'm addicted to pornography and people will generally speaking be pretty welcoming for you there the next thing that we're going to talk about is do something that you can be proud of so remember that the fifth Circuit of the brain that we really need to address is this social status circuit so this circuit that really thinks about our status in the community why status is important and if we have low social status we won't be able to procreate and so what
we really want to do is recognize that as long as your sense of self is very low the pornography addiction has fertilizer and so I'd strongly recommend that you'll work on your confidence work on your self-esteem work on things that you can be proud of so you have to feel good about yourself and as you start to feel better about yourself the internal drivers the parts of your brain that are telling you to watch pornography will calm down the last two things things that I would recommend very strongly is exercise and diet I know those
are a part of all kinds of answers or all you know everyone says you should exercise more you should eat a healthy diet but let's understand this from a pornography perspective remember that every part of the brain and basically every part of the body is associated with the sex drive so we know that erection for example is triggered by the parasympathetic nervous system which is our rest and digest system which is why when men are relaxed they will get erections this is why we have morning wood because when we're asleep we're super relaxed as we're
relaxed we get erections and then our sympathetic nervous system gets us really excited when it's kind of time to go so that a process of of sexual activity and ejaculation is governed by our sympathetic nervous system so what I would recommend is exercising for one hour at least three times a week you can do 20 minutes three times a week at a minimum but that will actually literally physiologically do something to reduce the drive and balance some of the drives of of pornography the last thing that we want to talk about is actually an anti-inflammatory
diet so this is pretty standard stuff lots of leafy green vegetables lots of whole grains lots of healthy proteins so reasons for this are really interesting so the first is that if we look at things like depression and anxiety which Drive pornography addiction what we find is that those relate to our serotonin levels our serotonin levels are in some way determined by our gut bacteria because our gut bacteria produce things like tryptophan and tryptophan is one of the serotonin precursors so the more tryptophan we have the more serotonin we produce so when we we adopt
a healthy diet we are sort of correcting an internal serotonin deficiency all on its own and there's studies that show that there are certain kinds of bacteria that will produce neurotransmitter precursors which will be protective against things like depression and anxiety and then there are some kinds of bacteria that if you have a lot of them will induce anxiety so remember that pornography addiction is a way to regulate negative emotions and if our negative emotions are high then we will crave pornography more and one of ways that we can reduce our negative emotions is through
actually our diet but we absolutely know that the more inflammation we have in the brain the more negative emotion we experience and so we want to Target that through an anti-inflammatory diet so there are two final things to consider when it comes to quitting porn so the first is the concept of dual diagnosis so as with a lot of addictions sometimes pornography addiction is fueled by another mental illness so we're talking about something like depression a mood disorder an anxiety disorder maybe some amount of trauma so trauma has a very very very high correlation with
being vulnerable to addiction so one of the things that I would strongly recommend is that youall see a mental health professional they can hopefully help you with the porn addiction itself but also they can evaluate you for other emotional things that are driving some of these dormant emotions some of these emotional regulations a lot of that can actually have to do with mental illness even if you have an a problem like something like ADHD that degree of impulsivity if yall work with a therapist who can can help you kind of train your mind help you
become less impulsive it's very very very helpful one of the things that I've learned doing a lot of addictions work in Psychiatry is that an illness like a mood disorder like major depressive disorder and an addiction feed each other right so since I feel bad about myself I turn to the addiction and since the addiction messes with my neurotransmitters gives me a lot of Shame makes me feel worse about myself I beat myself up because I should be able to resist it and I can't resist it that just feeds the depression so often times if
we don't address both of those at the same time the outcomes aren't ideal the last thing that we're going to leave you with is a very simple technique so one thing to keep in mind about addictions is that a lot of addictions and recovering from addictions is actually about patience so we have this impulse we have this drive and it's not about overcoming the drive it's actually about waiting it out so if you look at the science of how human beings relate to their desires cravings and impulses essentially we will return to a state of
homeostasis if you're feeling very very hungry what happens to the hunger over time it kind of goes away and then it comes back stronger and then it goes away and then it comes back stronger the same is true of something like thirst the same is true of when we're talking about things like going through withdrawal from substance dependence so there's a big difference though between behavioral addictions and even some form of substance use and things like hunger or thirst hunger or thirst are Primal signals for fundamental survival and even people who are starving will eventually
stop feeling hungry so our our brain will kind of acclimatize so the last thing that I want to teach yall is actually a technique that will help you ride out the urges to use and we're going to teach you this technique in a very very simple way the technique is called urge surfing and basically what we want to do is when we have a an urge to use a substance or look at pornography what we basically want to do is acknowledge it and kind of ride that wave until it runs out and the way that
we're going to teach you urge surfing is by shutting the hell up for about 60 seconds and doing nothing on this video maybe we'll even do longer than 60 seconds maybe we'll do 2 minutes and what I want youall to do is try your hardest to not give in to whatever impulses arise the moment that I stop talking there's going to be all kinds of tempting things on your sidebar on YouTube there's going to be comments there's going to be your phone all kinds of urges arise and if you all really want to be successful
at this at the end of the day what you have to do is learn to master yourself so Ready Set Go is it easier if I talk is it getting hard are yall still even here have you clicked off yet oh my God so hard oh my God I have to sit here for two minutes oh my God I have to stop being entertaining then it becomes easy I'm G to shut up notice what is arising within you see even what's arising with me I can't be quiet let's do it again e all righty good
job if yall made it good job if you clicked off well you can always try another day so we hope this has been helpful to y'all you know I know porn addiction is hard to quit we also have some additional resources and yall can always revisit this and stare at my face for 60 seconds when you feel like watching something else good luck hey y'all hope you enjoyed today's video we talk about a bunch of topics like this on the channel so be sure to subscribe for more if you're already subscribed he [Music]
