If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you already know the truth: Quitting a porn habit is very difficult. We’ve worked with thousands of men and women around the world who felt trapped by porn for years. If you feel that way, know this: you’re not alone. Outgrowing a porn habit is a long and challenging process with many steps. (Step one? Be honest with yourself. Step two? Be honest with someone else.) As you continue your journey toward freedom, understanding why quitting is so difficult will help. This short guide is a great place to start
From its prevalence to the way it affects our brain chemistry to the way it keeps us from seeking help, porn uniquely combines factors that make it highly addictive. Think of a porn addiction in the same category as a cocaine addiction–if you had a limitless supply you could access in seconds.
Ease of Access to Porn
It’s never been easier to access porn. With roughly 80 percent of US adults owning a smartphone, we’re nearly all carrying a limitless supply of porn in our pockets. All of us at The Freedom Fight embrace technology, and we recognize the many rewards of increased access to information, art, entertainment, and communication that came with smart phones and high speed internet. But the stats on the internet porn that came with those things, while partial and often unreliable, are always alarming.
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Approximately 10-15 percent of all internet searches are for explicit content (Forbes).
Porn sites boast user numbers that exceed those of popular streaming services many times over.
And self-reported weekly porn use in some segments is as high as 87 percent (Statista).
That’s not news. And for you, the numbers don’t matter nearly as much as your own experience. Having an amazing, powerful, totally portable computer in our pockets has changed things forever–and we weren’t ready for some of those changes.
Let’s compare porn use to alcoholism, another common addiction.
You can’t pour a glass of whiskey out of your iPhone. You’re probably only offered free drinks occasionally. If you’re drinking for the seventh night in a week, you probably have to go back to the liquor store–again–and make eye contact with a cashier you may have seen several times in a few days. If you drink at work, someone will notice the smell or the slurred speech or both.
Porn use, by contrast, is free, anonymous, and difficult to spot–and you can do it anywhere you have an internet connection. It’s a dynamic unique to porn, but porn affects our brains as significantly as some drugs that are much harder to get.
Porn Gets Us Chasing a Dopamine High
When we become sexually aroused, our brains release dopamine, a chemical that creates feelings of pleasure (among other things). This chemical is an integral and vital part of our biology. When you smile at someone because they smiled at you, you both felt the effects of dopamine. Felt great after your run this morning? That was dopamine. Find yourself unconsciously reaching for your phone every time it buzzes in your pocket? You want the dopamine you’re probably about to receive from whatever message is waiting for you.
After we experience the release of dopamine, we want it again and will repeat the behavior that caused the release. Think of it as a wonderful design feature meant to reward men and women for engaging in natural sexual activity (as well as many other things)–one that’s been thrown into overdrive by porn.
Porn causes the brain to release dopamine, just like natural sex. But with porn, there are fewer barriers to repeat releases–no environment to create, no wooing to do, no partner required.
What begins as something pleasurable can quickly spiral downwards, becoming compulsive as we seek that pleasurable feeling over and over. It’s especially true when the quick fix of pleasure becomes an alternative to feelings of stress, tension, or other negative emotions in life. Addiction experts tell us that when someone uses their addictive substances to medicate the pain and negative emotions in their life that is when an addiction is born. Porn use may have started out of curiosity or for sexual pleasure but it can quickly become about how we cope with life.
Porn activates a powerful, God-given biological process in a way that leaves us drained and unfulfilled.
And when we use porn to get a dopamine hit to medicate pain, it takes hold at a deeper level, an emotional level. The men and women who find themselves in this situation often find it extremely difficult to stop watching porn.
Slowly, the law of diminishing returns begins to take effect. We need more stimulation in order to get the same reward, and we want two things: Increased frequency and increased variety; more time with porn, often digging into darker content that’s novel and triggers our arousal and the ensuing dopamine hit like it did when we first started using. The people creating porn know who we are and what our flesh desires, and they’ve made the content to suck us ever downwards.
With Porn, We Often Struggle Alone
The result? Loneliness. Silence so profound it seems loud in our ears. An isolation that we simultaneously create for ourselves and hate.
Countless believers have described to us the shame they feel after they’ve used porn and the fear they felt when they imagined being discovered. For many porn addicts, their porn use is the last thing in the world they’d ever admit to anyone, which makes building authentic relationships and getting real help almost impossible.
God created and designed us for intimacy, to be loved and accepted by Him and others. Even God is part of a small group! Father, Son, and Spirit share an eternal oneness, and we are made in His image.
God told Adam and Eve to become one, and He didn’t just mean physically. Spiritual and emotional oneness are core human needs, and healthy marriages are their breeding ground. A hidden porn habit creates weeds that choke true intimacy on every level, leaving married believers feeling isolated even during sex with their spouses.
Relationships Will Help You Grow
Addictions aren’t established overnight, and, barring a miracle, they aren’t broken overnight either. Many professionals say that porn addictions are some of the most difficult to overcome. Porn is always present and our brains learn to crave it, and we find ourselves betrayed by our own flesh and too embarrassed to seek help.
But what’s impossible for man is possible with God. He has provided a way of escape, just as He promised he would: God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out. (1 Cor. 10:13)
You can experience freedom from porn. For many, it’s a long journey that requires faith in the power of God and His promises. One of the first steps is breaking that isolation and getting help. If you’re a believer, choose a recovery program that helps you grow
in your understanding and grow into your identity in Christ. Don’t just try to gut it out: this is about developing a new lifestyle.
Ted Shimer
Ted Shimer has mentored men through Student Mobilization since 1991 and holds an MABS from Dallas Seminary. As a trained Pastoral Sex Addiction Professional-Supervisor, Ted has spent over 30 years helping people break free from pornography while making disciples. He is the Founder of The Freedom Fight, an online porn addiction recovery program, and the author of The Freedom Fight: The New Drug and the Truths that Set Us Free. Ted and his wife Amber have four adult children and live in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
