How Quitting P*rn Can Be Dangerous

Today we're going to talk about why resisting pornography is a bad 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, jigglier, 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 OnlyFans 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 pornography, 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 Dr. K'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 all the weekend wasn't quite as fun as you thought, you know, come up with whatever I can to try to get you to use.

And then if you say no, the addiction is like, ah, now I'm feeling jittery.

Come on, bro.

Let's take the edge off.

Just take the edge off a little bit, right?

We don't have to party the whole way.

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.

The rest of the day will be good.

Come on, man.

Let's take away a little bit of this negativity.

Let's move towards positivity.

And then if you say no, then the brain starts getting pissed.

Like, oh, like now I'm going to 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 going to have a little bit of diarrhea.

And then if you still white knuckle it, if you resist, then your brain gets angry at you.

It says, bitch, 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 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 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 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 of 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 psychiatrists with kids.

So if a kid is getting bullied at school, they'll start complaining about stomach aches.

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 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 can be five years old, six years old, seven years old.

And then the body will actually create physiologic stomach aches 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, Dr. K?

Should I just like watch porn anytime I feel like it?

Should I just give into it completely?

Because I've tried that and that doesn't work.

No, no, no.

So let's take a look at the evidence-based interventions, 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 Anonymous 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, 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 are members of fraternities or sororities.

And as long as you are hanging out with your fraternity buddies, your sorority sisters, whatever, and 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 the principle that I talked about, which is that the more you resist, the more your brain learns, hey, I 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 naltrexone or buprenorphine in the case of opioid addiction.

And literally, what is the result of these medications?

Naltrexone literally reduces cravings.

And buprenorphine is actually like a partial opioid agonist, which means that it 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 white-knuckling our cravings over and over and over again, that doesn't usually lead to success based on our research.

A lot of 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 substances 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 a.m. and 6 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 a.m.

So you're actually strengthening and training your frontal lobe.

And then when 11 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 genetic modifications usually to things like our GABA receptors, our mu receptors, which mean that if I have a little bit of alcohol at 11 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.

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 Sun Tzu.

And if you look at sort of 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 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 pornography.

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.

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've tried to stop right most people who are addicted to things have tried to stop and their experience is 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 a.m. to 11 a.m. You're winning from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. And what I tend to see in a lot of my patients is once they 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 a.m. rolls around, they say, okay, do I really need to use this right now or can I wait until 6 p.m.?

So it's really bizarre, but

Addictions to pornography are a little bit different, and we can treat them a little bit differently.

The next thing that we really want to target if we're struggling with pornography are the underlying driving forces, and there are two really big ones.

The first is that we use pornography as a source of emotional regulation.

So as long as you are developing proactive emotional regulation techniques, and what I strongly recommend to all of my patients who are dealing with pornography in healthy or unhealthy ways is that you develop alternate emotional regulation techniques.

So we know from the neuroscience of pornography that in this way, it's very similar to many substance use disorders in that it sort of gives us dopamine and it takes away negative emotions.

Because while you are watching pornography, you don't really feel a whole lot of negative emotions.

You feel a ton of shame and feel like a loser and all that stuff afterward, right?

Because you've lost.

And then comes the flooding of negative emotion.

So that can absolutely happen.

So what we want to do is really focus on emotional regulation techniques.

We have videos on things like alexithymia.

We teach meditation techniques, journaling, talking about your emotions, working with a therapist, engaging in clinical treatment.

All of those things are really good.

And there's one other thing that we want to do, which is actually wait out the craving.

So there's one big difference between pornography, behavioral addictions, and substance use disorders.

From a physiologic perspective, the longer that you wait to use a substance, the more that the physiological withdrawal will increase.

The one advantage that we have going for us in pornography is that if we wait in relation to pornography, there isn't a gross physiologic withdrawal that starts to happen.

So in the case of something like alcohol, which acts on our GABA receptors, if we go cold turkey on alcohol,

we can actually do things like induce seizures, induce cardiac arrhythmias, and alcohol withdrawal can be fatal.

So remember that when we're talking about a substance use disorder, there's all kinds of physiologic things going on.

There's one thing that's different about pornography addiction, which is that as we wait, the craving will intensify and then it will sort of decrease.

And I know this sounds kind of paradoxical because I said don't resist cravings in the first place, but this is a really important principle to understand.

See, when it comes to physical substances, the clock is kind of ticking against you, that the intensity of what you feel will get worse and worse and worse.

can bypass this critical point in pornography addiction where your brain is trying to tell you like, hey, I need this, I need this, I need this, if you can really just wait it out, it's not about beating it, it's not about conquering it, it's just about resisting for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour, then things will start to work in your favor because another mechanism will kick in in the brain, which is sort of this homeostatic tolerance.

So if we think about sort of feeling hungry, right?

At the very beginning, when my body feels hungry, it feels hungry.

And then if you don't give it food for a little while, our body will say, okay, fine, like it's okay, like the hunger goes away.

It'll return again more intensely later.

But our body has this really interesting principle where if it wants something, and unless there is an acute physiologic withdrawal, like if your glucose is crashing or something like that, hunger pangs won't go away.

But when it comes to transient neuroscience wants,

When your brain wants something, if you can ride out that urge, and this is what we call urge surfing in psychiatry, then things will actually be in your favor.

So I know it sounds kind of weird because I said don't try to overcome the craving.

And at the same time, eventually, once we do all of this other stuff, one thing to keep in mind is that you do actually want to try to ride it out instead of conquering it.

And the last thing that we really want to focus on, especially with pornography addiction, which makes it a little bit different, is that we know that one of the largest risk factors to become addicted to pornography is a sense of meaninglessness in life.

So this is where things are kind of paradoxical, but usually what I'll do with my patients is I won't work directly to conquer the addiction, and that's the bulk of the work that we'll do.

We'll really try to develop a sense of purpose or meaning in life.

And we're not quite sure what the neuroscientific mechanism behind this is.

My theory is that when you have a purpose in life, when you have a sense of meaning, it makes the negativity worth it, right?

So if I want to become a doctor, let's say, and I'm in medical school studying every day

Spending my 20s while my friends are going on vacation and stuff, and I'm racking up debt here in the United States.

All this stuff sucks for me, but I'm able to tolerate the negativity because there is a greater purpose.

I'm sacrificing for the sake of something.

This is what a lot of parents will do when it comes to their kids.

It sucks to be a parent.

It's not very pleasant, especially the first couple of years.

And we're okay with that because there is this greater purpose.

So if you look at what purpose adds to your life, it's not just purpose.

It is the ability to tolerate negativity.

And this is where pornography addiction really comes in because if we can't tolerate negativity, we will turn to pornography.

So at the end of the day, what we really want to do is a little bit unusual because we don't want to fight a battle and lose because this will intensify our cravings and it'll lead to hopelessness.

Instead, what we want to do is set the field of battle, really try to focus on things that make it easy to resist pornography.

We want to shape the environment around us.

And this is literally what we do in clinical addiction treatment.

whether it is shaping your neuroscience, neurochemistry, through medications like naltrexone, or it is shaping your environment by quitting your fraternity, joining Narcotics Anonymous, whatever.

We really shape the environment, and this is where we use Sun Tzu's Art of War to set the battlefield so that you're set up to win.

And then ultimately, what I tend to see when things go well is that as people start to rack up some wins, they feel hope.

They feel power.

They're able to resist.

And thankfully, pornography is one of these things where it's not quite as intense of a slippery slope as some of these substance use disorders.

So even in this process, people will oftentimes use while they are building up a life that is worth living.

So I know it sounds bizarre, but I strongly encourage you all to pay attention to your life.

And look at what happens when you try to resist a craving.

Because if you resist and lose, chances are the next battle will be harder to win.

Hey, Dr. K, how do I get my kid to put down the game without it being a fight every single time?

The problem with gaming is that it tricks our brain into being a substitute for life.

Once we start to get our psychological needs met through the game, that's when we become addicted.

How to Raise a Healthy Gamer combines the latest in neuroscience research along with a decade of clinical practice.

Check it out anywhere books are sold.