Hi. This is addressed to everyone who struggles with porn addiction, but also to those who aren’t addicted, so that they don’t get dragged into it. I want to raise a few things worth paying attention to when we talk about addiction.
As for me, I’ve been in this for twelve years, so half my life. I’ve been struggling with it for a long time. I have quite a lot of experience, and I want to share what I know and what I’ve noticed. I’ll try to keep it as short and readable as I can.
Looking back, I’d say I had a wonderful childhood. A good family. I had lots of mates and people liked me. Everything came fairly easily to me: I wasn’t a nerd, but I was very good at school, level with the best. Thanks to that, I didn’t have any stress. I loved sport and moving. My friends and I trained together for as long as I can remember. Everything looked promising.
I started like everyone else. I still remember my first contact with porn. It’s strange, but I remember that picture. I was maybe in fifth grade. A friend showed me a photo that hit me so hard I didn’t quite know what was happening to me. Then of course came middle school, masturbation, softcore pictures. Then a film on TV, or one a friend passed on to me. I didn’t see it then, but I was slowly losing control over it. I still had lots of friends, but now I can see I was already isolating myself a bit.
High school. New people, new surroundings; I felt uncomfortable, a little afraid. I believe porn and masturbation cause social phobia and fear of the people around you. As I understand it, people with social phobia have low dopamine and trouble with it binding to their receptors, while those of us watching porn flood our dopamine receptors with so much of it that they become insensitive to smaller amounts. I think that’s why we isolate ourselves and don’t want contact with others.
I remember how, back in the day, a girl asked me during a conversation whether it made me uncomfortable to look the person I was talking to in the eye. I said no, because that was true. She was surprised and said that hardly anyone looked her in the eye when they talked. Later, once I got tangled up in porn, I could only dream of that. Of course fear and stress appear, and they do their own damage too. I remember that in my second year of high school I wanted to quit, probably for the first time. Of course the vicious circle and weak will kicked in. Every time, I gave up again, and so I went from bad to worse.
To me, porn and masturbation addiction is very similar to cocaine addiction. Trying to quit, I avoided it as much as I could. Sometimes I lasted a month, other times two weeks, or a few days. I didn’t lose hope. But my porn and masturbation became irregular, and that got me into other trouble. For me, the irregular watching brought huge mood swings, anxiety and depressive states. I was afraid of everything, and two hours later I was euphoric. It’s very strange. You can’t trust yourself anymore. You don’t know where reality is. You lose your sense of space and time.
I went to university to study a very difficult, demanding subject, but I’d always liked technical things. I couldn’t concentrate; learning things by heart was completely out of the question. My mates sat up at night doing their assignments, and I couldn’t force myself to spend even a moment on mine. As if there were some kind of mental block. On top of that came family problems. It was very hard for me to focus on my work. I put it down to my hormones being out of balance (dopamine, prolactin) and to depression. When I did manage to force myself, the work somehow got done. I don’t know how, but I got very good grades and ended up among the most gifted students. I really don’t know how that’s possible: me, addicted, with huge problems concentrating on anything, and with social phobia. Because of all that, I spent much less time on my work. A friend once told me that my projects were motivation and a model for him. I thought to myself: man… if only you knew what I go through just to force myself to do anything. I’m really surprised it turned out this way. I guess I have a talent for it, because I’m not exactly hard-working.
As for quitting, many of the symptoms I’ve described ease off within the first few weeks. These days I slip relatively rarely. I’m about two weeks in, so it’s still early for bigger changes, but I already feel much better.
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