If you are asking “am I addicted to porn?”, the most useful answer comes from a few honest questions about control, consequences and context, not from a score. Can you stop when you mean to? Have repeated attempts to cut down failed? What is it costing you, and do you keep going anyway? No online test can diagnose you, but your answers can show whether the pattern deserves attention and what to do next.
This page is the self-check. For the full list of signs and what research measures, see the signs of porn addiction. For whether “porn addiction” is a real diagnosis, see porn addiction, PPU and CSBD.
Evidence strength: developing for the screening questionnaires these questions draw on; early for online tests as a way to identify a problem. The interview studies below describe lived experience, not how common it is.
8 questions to ask yourself
Think about the last few months, not your worst night. Answer in words, not numbers.
- Control. When you decide to stop, or to watch for only a few minutes, does that usually happen?
- Failed attempts. Have you tried to cut down or quit more than once and ended up back in the same pattern?
- Room in your life. How much of your day does porn take up, including thinking about it, waiting for a chance, or rearranging plans around it?
- Mood. Is porn mostly how you handle stress, boredom, loneliness or a night when you cannot sleep?
- Needing more. Over time, have sessions got longer, or has what you watch shifted to keep the same effect?
- Without it. When you cannot watch, do you feel restless, irritable or unable to stop thinking about it?
- Costs. Can you name something concrete it has cost you, such as sleep, work, money, a relationship or your sex life, and have you carried on anyway?
- Satisfaction and values. Do you still enjoy it, or does it mostly leave you flat or ashamed? And if you feel ashamed, is that because you lose control, or because watching at all clashes with what you believe?
These questions paraphrase the areas covered by published screening tools, not their wording. The Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale was built on a six-component model of addiction. Bőthe and colleagues, 2018. It has a six-item short form for quick screening. Bőthe and colleagues, 2021. The Problematic Pornography Use Scale takes a similar addiction-based approach. Kor and colleagues. The CSBD-19 follows the ICD-11 description of compulsive sexual behaviour disorder and covers control, salience, relapse, dissatisfaction and negative consequences. Bőthe and colleagues, 2020.
How to read your answers
There is no pass mark, and no combination of answers equals a diagnosis. But if several answers point the same way, especially control (1), repeated failed attempts (2) and costs you keep paying (7), and the pattern has lasted months rather than a rough week, it is worth taking seriously.
You may notice that none of the questions asks how often you watch. That is deliberate: frequency on its own says little about whether you have lost control, and the signs of porn addiction explains why.
If most of your answers are no but you still feel bad about watching, question 8 matters. Grubbs and colleagues argue that feeling addicted to porn is often better explained by moral incongruence: watching in a way that conflicts with your own values. Read the review. That distress is real and deserves attention; it calls for a different kind of help from loss of control. Guilt after watching porn looks at it directly.
Why online porn addiction tests can’t diagnose you
Search for a porn addiction test or quiz and many of the top results are published by treatment providers. Some are useful prompts. None can tell you whether you have a disorder.
- The tools are still being validated. A 2026 systematic review of 24 questionnaires for problematic porn use, across 47 studies, found that none could be unequivocally recommended. The four most promising, including the Problematic Pornography Use Scale, the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale and its short form, received only a tentative Class-C recommendation. Jin and colleagues.
- Cut-offs flag risk, not illness. Even the better scales use a threshold to separate likely problematic from non-problematic use, or to pick out people at high risk, in research samples. Screening above a cut-off is not the same as being diagnosed.
- A quiz cannot see context. It does not know whether your distress comes from losing control or from your values, whether depression, anxiety or ADHD is part of the picture, or whether a sexual symptom has a medical cause.
- Check who made it. A result that ends with a booking button for a paid programme is not an independent assessment.
A diagnosis needs a qualified clinician who looks at your sexual life, mental health and circumstances together.
Why it can take years to recognize a porn problem
Many people only call the pattern a problem long after it started. Blinka and colleagues interviewed 23 men seeking treatment for problematic online sexual activity. The pattern often began in young adulthood and persisted for years, and consequences built up slowly into dissatisfaction, regret and a sense of unfulfilled potential. The study covered porn, cybersex and masturbation together, so its findings cannot be assigned to porn alone. Read the study.
In Hanseder and Dantas’s interviews with 13 men who saw themselves as addicted, most described being unable to stop despite adverse effects, and many described porn as an escape from negative emotions or boredom. Read the study.
It helps to separate three dates: when you started watching, when an unwanted pattern began, and when you recognized it. They need not be the same. Noticing a problem now does not prove that porn caused every difficulty before it. If regret has grown into a feeling that you have achieved nothing by 30, that page separates the feeling from the facts.
What to do next
- If your answers worry you, start with how to stop watching porn: one clear goal, a plan for urges and setbacks, and fewer easy routes back.
- If you have already tried several times on your own, porn addiction treatment explains what therapy, groups and medication can and cannot do, and finding a therapist covers who to see and what to ask.
- If the urge itself is the hard part, read what to do when an urge hits.
Before an appointment, write a modest history: a few periods of your life, the pattern of use, what it cost, what else was going on at work, at home and with your health, and what you tried. Leave gaps where your memory is uncertain. The goal is not to prosecute your past self.
Recognition is a starting point, not a sentence. Name what you want to protect now: an evening, a relationship, your attention to a project. You are allowed to begin with the life in front of you.
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