Harmful Effects of Porn and Daily Masturbation to Young Men

Outline

• First of all, we're going to talk about can it be addictive and how it's related to porn consumption.
• Secondly, we're going to talk about the neuroscience behind masturbation. 
• Thirdly, we're going to talk about how masturbation impacts your memory, your thinking, your anxiety, your mental health. 
• Then we're going to transition into your physical health and talk about erectile dysfunction. 
• We're going to talk about the relationship to testosterone. 
• We're going to talk about how masturbation impacts your sex life. 
• And then finally, we are going to talk about how you can stop masturbating if I have inspired you to contemplate it by the end of this post. 

Overview 

So let's dig in masturbation, can it be addictive and how is it related to pornography? And you know what? We're going to transition right into neuroscience when we talk about this. So absolutely, compulsive masturbation is a thing.

I know that many young men and girls want to hear that masturbation is harmless, it doesn't impact anybody. It's just a harmless way to de-stress and to fill the boredom of the holes in your schedule, and it's a way for you to have a sex life without a partner. 

I've heard it all, but the reality is, in fact, it's coupled and associated with pornography consumption or the fantasy that results from thereof, it is not good for your brain. Thus, it will impact your mental and emotional health. It will impact your physical health and it's going to show up in your world.

So, in fact, masturbation can be addictive, and we know that there is compulsive masturbation. When other professionals are talking about masturbation being fine for you or even good for you, they are not talking about people who struggle with compulsive masturbation, which is the majority of people who masturbate. 

It has nothing to do with sex for most people. And you might not be aware of that. But if you peel the layers back, you might find out that, in fact, is true. 

The neuroscience behind masturbation, especially if you have been consuming pornography, the neuroscience behind it is this, when you were young, you found pornography and masturbation and you likely found it in a world that's difficult to exist in, right? The human existence. 

It is a challenging one, in fact. So you found porn and masturbation and it made your brain feel good. You felt that rush in your brain. 

It took you away from the worries of the day or your life. It made you feel good for a time. You were watching pornography, which was highly exhilarating. 

You were masturbating and it gave you physical stimulation that you had never felt before because most people experience this when they're 10, 11, even younger. So this is this new mental and physical stimulation that is awesome and it is literally rescuing you from your life, this is the way that your brain works. 

Your brain will keep going in the direction of the reward. And we know when dopamine floods into your system, it's a dopamine deluge and it's a highly rewarding neurotransmitter. It's the pleasure seeking neurotransmitter. 

So it gives you pleasure. And when it's coupled to porn and masturbation, basically what you're training your brain to realize is that the way that I can deal with difficulties in my life is by masturbating to porn or to fantasy to take me away from that and give me this amazing feeling, not only in my brain, but also in my body. And it is a neurochemical cascade that makes you feel that way. 

And it's primarily dopamine. When you get the dopamine deluge, what it teaches your brain is that, there's a dopamine deficit in your world. So ultimately you keep going back to porn and masturbation to feel good, but you don't even realize it's making your life worse. 

Your brain thinks there's no dopamine in the world, that there's only stress because of cortisol and your work doesn't do it for you. Your friendships don't do it for you. Your hobbies don't do it for you. 

And you find yourself back into the screen and masturbation. So over time, what happens is you develop a masturbation habit and you convince yourself it's harmless. It's no big deal. 

It's your way to de-stress. But in fact, it is keeping you coming back for more because of the dopamine deluge. You've linked your brain neurologically to yourself physically. 

So if you're linked to your brain, and we know when you have sex with a partner, you link your brain to that partner neurologically. That's the beauty of it. So if you have a partner and you have healthy sexuality, there's dopamine for pleasure, serotonin for happiness, and oxytocin for connection or linking. 

When you find a partner and you get those brain juices flowing, when you're with that partner, you've linked yourself to that partner, which makes you want to go back to that partner for more and more, not only physical intimacy, but intimacy so that you have love and happiness, connection and pleasure. 

But if you keep masturbating, you're literally neurologically linking your brain sexually to yourself. And that is a self-defeating loop because it keeps you caught in it. 

So you might know that this is true if you prefer masturbation over having sex. And you might want to have sex, but it feels better to masturbate or it feels better to masturbate to porn. You're stuck in that loop. 

That's the neuroscience behind it is you're getting this flood of dopamine and your brain is feeling good and you continue to want to come back for more and more and more. 

Now, let's talk about how that impacts your memory. So let's move on to porn, masturbation and memory loss. When you masturbate, you are flooding your brain with dopamine. What that does is it floods your frontal lobe, which is in charge of working memory, concentration, focus, socialization, judgment, impulse control. 

It's in charge of all of that and you're flooding the reward center. So what happens is when you're flooded out with dopamine, your brain can't think and it can't remember as well. So the more consistently and frequently you masturbate, you're knocking out the frontal lobe and it becomes this vicious cycle that is impacted by neurochemical release. 

Depending upon where you are in the cycle, you'll have the worst brain fog and then when you move through the cycle, it might get a little better and then it'll get worse again. And so it becomes this vicious cycle, but I want you to know every time you flood your brain out, you're making it so that your memory will actually be negatively impacted from that dopamine flood. Now, obviously it's more involved than that. 

One other aspect is that we know this again from the science is that the more you consume porn and masturbate, you're increasing slowing in the frontal lobe. You're slowing your brain down. It's like you're putting the brakes on your frontal lobe. 

That's another reason why memory and thinking becomes impaired and you might experience brain fog and thinking is not going to be as good or work out as well for you. Okay, let's move on because we're trying to move through lots of things here in this episode. 

Let's move to erectile dysfunction, hopefully you kind of get the gist of, you've got all this going on. You think it's about physical stimulation, but where do you think the physical stimulation comes from? Your brain, you're feeling it in your brain and it's delivering the signals to your body. So now when the signals are delivered, it's delivering the signals to your mind and your body. 

So that's why this slowing can impact your thinking in your mind, your cognitive behaviors, but then it also can impact erectile dysfunction and delayed ejaculation. So it works like this. If you're desensitizing the reward center in the middle of your brain, you're knocking out the receptors, the reward sectors that basically can perceive arousal and perceive levels of arousal. 

So porn is a supernormal stimulus. When you're watching sexual acts and behaviors that don't actually exist in the real world, especially in the way that it's portrayed with partners that don't exist in the real world, it is a supernormal stimulus. It gives your brain tons of mental arousal, which means you get large amounts of dopamine. 

At the same time, masturbation is extreme amounts of physical stimulation. I work with some people who their grip is so tight, they have handprints on their penis. The amount of physical stimulation that some people apply is extreme. 

And so it's anywhere from extreme to still more than what would happen if you were having sex with a partner. That physical stimulation makes it so that your brain needs that level of mental and physical stimulation to be aroused. 

Now it's time to have sex with your honey and when you're with a partner, you don't have that physical stimulation. You don't have that tight grip. And at the same time, you don't have the mental stimulation. 

So now you can't get where you need to get being with your partner. And we also know from the science that if you're consuming porn, that your attraction level to your partner literally goes down. So you're just less aroused by your partner, even if she was amazing because she's not doing the funky things that you're watching on the screen. 

She can never live up to the super normal stimulus. Thus, even if you have the best partner in the world, it's still not to the same level as the screen. And if you're not masturbating and you're having your healthy levels of sex, you're not getting the physical stimulation leads to erectile dysfunction. 

You can't get an erection, which means that you can't have a sexual experience, which means now you have performance anxiety. We know performance anxiety is going through the roof for young people and they are not associating it with porn and masturbation. 

But the performance anxiety is coming from the fact that they may not be able to get an erection. Plus, they're worried about sex as a performance because they watch it as a performance, not experience it as an experience. At the same time, they might not be as aroused by their partner and they don't have the same mental and physical stimulation. 

Now let's jump to how it impacts your sex life and then we'll go back to testosterone. So we know that the way that it impacts your sex life is now you might have delayed ejaculation because it takes you forever to get anywhere near the arousal. And this is how you know you might have a problem. 

You're with your partner, but you have to go to fantasy to get the mental stimulation going. You have to recall some porn scenes that you've seen. You have to run a highlight reel. 

You have to think about your favorite porn performer. Many people have said to me before, so I should be thinking about my wife when we have sex? Yes, obviously. If you're not, that's a problem.

At the same time, if you're having sexual intercourse with your partner and you're feeling a really strong urge to masturbate or do some other activity that gives you more physical stimulation, it's because your brain needs it. It's no longer getting the level of stimulation from your partner that it would. 

So let's just say if masturbation and porn were out of the equation and now you're with your partner, it would feel amazing and that's why when you give up porn and masturbation, your sex life goes from zero to hero. 

It goes through the roof. Once your brain has unwired the porn and masturbation pattern, rewired into healthy sexuality and mood regulation, sex becomes better than ever, as it should be, because that's what's healthy. So it impacts your sex life in that way. 

Now, let me tell you something else. Your partner knows things are getting funky in the bedroom,  even if she doesn't know that you watch pornography, if she doesn't know that you masturbate daily, she knows something's up. She knows that you're not enjoying it that much. It's getting weird and she's not enjoying it that much. Things are going wrong. So I encourage you to know that. Don't blame your partner. 

I have so many people that I work with and they're like, yeah, if my wife wanted to have more sex with me, I wouldn't have to watch porn. That's not true because you started watching porn and masturbating long before you met your partner and then you've continued it and then your relationship's gotten funky. So it's dynamical.

The dynamics need to shift and porn needs to come out of the equation because when porn's in the equation, we know that divorce and breakups are more than doubled and the desire to cheat or infidelity is 300% increase, which is a terrifying statistic. 

Okay, so let us move on to testosterone because I've read a few studies in terms of testosterone. What we know is that abstinence from masturbation in from orgasm, but some of these studies looked at masturbation from abstinence from orgasm can increase testosterone. 

One of the studies shows that it increased 146%, which is awesome, obviously on day seven. And so on the seventh day, there was a spike in serum testosterone. We also know that there's another study that was a three week abstinence period and testosterone levels increased over that amount of time. 

Another thing we know is that orgasm creates more testosterone. So there's enough science supporting abstinence as a way to improve the way that your body makes and utilizes testosterone. And I know many men are worried about their testosterone levels. 

I know a lot of the dudes that I interact with are on testosterone supplements. And I'm like, dudes, if you just stop watching porn and masturbating, your testosterone levels would even out. You wouldn't need those supplements. You're doing it to yourself. You're draining yourself.

You're making your brain's electrical energy go back and forth, pendulum effect. You're making those neurotransmitter cascades go wonky. When the system stabilizes, your sleep improves, your workouts improve, your muscle growth improves. Things get better when the system is stable. 

When you keep watching porn and masturbating, you're destabilizing the system. And then the nervous system, then the body, the mind, and the brain are not able to handle things well.

We also know that when you are stuck in this loop of masturbation, especially when it's associated with porn, that it can be so difficult to get out. How do you stop masturbating? Let me tell you how. Number one, you have to stop watching porn. 

I know it's challenging, but you are frying your brain. You're damaging your brain. And it is the thing that's keeping the masturbation alive.

Because I challenge people to masturbate without fantasy on a schedule. So you're not using it to de-stress or to fill the boredom and then stay with the sensations in your body. And so many guys will like burst out laughing and be like, what's the point? And I'll be like, exactly.

That's exactly it. There is no point if you're just doing it on a schedule, no fantasy, especially no porn. And if you're just staying in your body, but that is, you know, a quote unquote healthy masturbation habit. 

If you are in a culture or a religion where you're not able to have healthy sexuality with a partner at this point in your life. So how to quit it is to stay out of the screen and make a pivot plan. What you're going to do instead of masturbating to decrease your stress levels and to not be bored, especially if you're using masturbation as a sleep tool, find a way to wind down at the night. 

If you find that you're masturbating in the morning, you're likely trying to get a dopamine hit to help you get through the day. So building more breaks in the day, building more mood regulation activities, favorite hobbies that you love to do, and you won't need to masturbate anymore. Okay.