An explanation of the neurological repercussions of  porn and how it can affect your love life off of the Internet. 

Editor’s Note: The quotations (all italicized text), unless otherwise cited, were taken from the comments sections of posts and message board conversations where men were talking about sex.

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It’s really hard to get erections when I’m trying to [have intercourse]. Takes about 20 minutes or so to get it up. Really embarrassing. But if I’m sitting and watching my pornz, it’s almost instant.—Porn user in his 20s

Are you a heavy porn user who, during lovemaking, cannot consistently produce/sustain an erection or penetrate a real partner, feel much sensation, or climax (without difficulty)? If your doctor has ruled out organic causes for your woes, he/she is likely to hand you a trial pack of Viagra and refer you to counseling for your “sexual issues.” The medical assumption is that your issue is psychological (performance anxiety) rather than physiological. After all, if you can get it up for porn, your penile health is fine.

Growing evidence suggests that the problem is indeed in your head, not your penis, but that it is primarily physical. Specifically, overstimulation has produced plastic changes in your brain, which make you less responsive to pleasure—and yet hyper-responsive to Internet porn. These addiction-related changes are called desensitization and sensitization, respectively. Together, they explain why porn does the job and your hot babe doesn’t.

Before you panic, know that these brain changes appear to be reversible—most easily in guys who wired to real sex before highspeed Internet arrived. Guys who stop masturbating to porn generally regain their responsiveness during sex within a few months  (often after a nasty withdrawal and a disconcerting, temporary absence of libido):

(Age 30, 4 months) From the reboot standpoint, I’m doing spectacular! Any time my girlfriend and I make out, caress etc., I get rock hard and it lasts. I really just don’t worry about penile function anymore.

If performance problems are plaguing you, take this simple test. Do your problems appear to be porn-related? Keep reading to learn more about the changes going on in your brain. Otherwise, you may erroneously conclude that if you can climax to porn, you don’t have a problem, and that the problem lies in your alcohol use or your partner’s behavior or looks, or solely in your anxious feelings. You may spend thousands of dollars on counseling, or resort to costly, and increasingly ineffective, sexual enhancement drugs—and still be left with your problem:

I never had a problem getting hard for porn, but when it came to the real thing, I started taking Cialis. Over time, I took more, and even then there were times when it would only partly work. WTH? Yet I could still get hard to porn.

Why is Mr. Happy ignoring hotties?

With Internet porn it’s easy to overstimulate your brain. Each search, each novel image, each surprising visual, each new genre, and sexual arousal itself all release dopamine in your reward circuitry. Dopamine is the gas that powers the reward circuitry and it equates with desire, anticipation, cravings, and wanting something in particular.

Unfortunately, too much stimulation causes some brains to protect themselves by decreasing their sensitivity to dopamine, and thus to pleasure, for a while.  Obviously, if your brain does this and you are using porn frequently and heavily, your brain doesn’t ever have a chance to return to normal sensitivity. You may find yourself clicking to more extreme material to arouse your reward circuitry’s numbed pleasure center.

Over time, your brain adapts to this situation with measurable decreases in dopamine signaling. You want more, but experience decreasing satisfaction. This is an addiction process calleddesensitization. (See Intoxicating Behaviors: 300 Vaginas = A Lot of Dopamine.) Recent research confirms it occurs in behavioral addictions such as gambling, food, video gaming, and Internet addiction (which includes cyber erotica addiction). When desensitized, you experience a numbed response to all so called “natural rewards”—including sex with hotties.

Your reward circuitry is the barometer for “How exciting is this?” so if dopamine signaling (desire) is low, erections are sluggish. Erections only arise when dopamine signals flow from the reward circuitry to the hypothalamus.

Why does Mr. Happy prefer porn?

If desensitization were the whole story, erections would be weak whether the stimulus were a girl, your imagination, or porn. But obviously it’s not the whole story, because porn still does the job. In fact, as you try to stop using, porn’s impact temporarily increases. This is where sensitized neural pathways come in.

Note: Addiction terminology is confusing. Desensitization refers to a general dialing down of your responsiveness to all pleasure…a baseline change. Sensitization refers to hyper-reactivity/excitement—but only in response to the specific cues your brain associates with your addiction.

If these two neuroplastic changes could speak, desensitization would be moaning, “I can’t get no satisfaction” (low dopamine signaling), while sensitization would be poking you in the ribs and saying, “Hey buddy, I got just what you need”…which happens to be the very thing that caused the desensitization. Over time, this dual-edged mechanism has your reward circuitry buzzing at the hint of porn use, but less than enthused when presented with the real deal.

Relapsed to porn once, and even though I didn’t get fully erect, I could not believe the intensity of the rush I got when I clicked to the site! Very powerful excitation – tingling, dry mouth, and even trembling. I hadn’t felt that kind of rush since I was at the height of puberty and got an unexpected view up a girl’s skirt!

Your higher brain forms a feedback loop

So exactly how does sensitization arise? In simple terms, sensitization involves two very normal brain mechanisms taken too far: long term potentiation (LTP), which is the strengthening of synapses, and long term depression (LTD), which is the weakening of synapses.

Long term potentiation (LTP) is the basis of learning and memory. It can be summarized as “nerve cells that fire together, wire together.” Memories arise in two steps. First, your reward circuitry signals that an experience is important by sending dopamine to your prefrontal cortex(PFC). The more dopamine the more importance your brain attaches to an experience.

Second, the PFC responds to your “This is important!” signal by (1) knitting together everything associated with the reward, and (2) forming a neural feedback loop heading back to the reward circuitry. Thereafter, any thought, memory, or cue associated with a particular reward activates the pathway, and sets your reward circuitry a buzzin’. It could be smells associated with your favorite burger joint. For a tomcat it could be the hole in the fence that led to a female in heat. For a bird it might be seeing the guy who fills the birdfeeder. Its evolutionary purpose is to help you remember the who, what, where, when and how of sex, food and rock ‘n’ roll.

Importantly, the feedback loop doesn’t run on dopamine. It runs onglutamate. Both neurochemicals have the power to activate “Go get it!” signals in your reward circuitry. Glutamate stimulation is why porn can still ring your chimes even when your reward circuitry has stopped responding to dopamine and real partners. Reward circuit (dopamine) → PFC (associations formed) → feedback loop (glutamate) to reward circuit.

Sensitization: creation of a super-memory

So far, the process is business as usual. Sensitization, however, transforms this normal PFC → glutamate feedback pathway to the reward circuitry into a super-memory in three steps:

1. With sensitization, explicit memories (such as facts and events) transform into habits, which are known as implicitmemories. Example: knowing how to ride a bike without thinking. Addiction-related implicit memories are like Pavlovian conditioning on steroids—very hard to ignore. When a recently sober alcoholic walks by a bar, all the sounds of laughter and smell of stale beer can whip this sensitized circuit into a frenzy, setting off strong cravings…and possibly eliminating all resolve.
2. LTP strengthens the feedback pathway such that a little squirt of glutamate is all you need to fire up the nerve cells that signal, “Gotta have this now!” Sensitized pathways are anon-dopamine mechanism for activating reward-circuitry neurons—come hell or high water. This sneaky feature seems to be at the core of all additions. Traffic jam on the main dopamine highway keeping you from feeling pleasure from real sex? No problem. You have another way to get home, but it’s only allowing one type of vehicle (stimulation): PORN.
3. Continued use of your addiction activates a third mechanism in the sensitization process: long term depression (LTD). The reward circuitry’s innate braking system (GABA) weakens, further amplifying the “Go for it!” glutamate signals. Instead of normal brain operation, which is more like city driving where you check for oncoming traffic at every intersection, your sensitized porn pathway is the autobahn. There are no traffic lights and porn is the only BMW M-5 on the road.

The autopilot thing is definitely familiar to me. It’s like being possessed by a porn-crazed demon, and then once you’re finished, your real self returns and wonders what the hell just happened and why you just wasted all this time looking at disgusting videos.

Same master switch for sex/food as for drug addiction

The master switch that triggers these addiction-related changes is the protein DeltaFosB. High levels of consumption of natural rewards (sex,sugar, high-fat) or chronic administration of virtually any drug of abuse cause DeltaFosB to accumulate in the reward center.

Note that addictive drugs only cause addiction because they magnify or inhibit mechanisms already in place for natural rewards. This is why the American Society of Addiction Medicine unambiguously states that food and sex addictions are true addictions.

DeltaFosB’s evolutionary purpose is to motivate us to “get it while the getting is good!”  It’s a binge mechanism for food and reproduction, which worked well in other times and environments. These days it makes addictions to junk food and Internet porn as easy as 1-2-3.

It not only initiates addiction, but also helps to sustain it for a prolonged period. In fact, it hangs around for a month or two after you stop using, making relapse more likely. Moreover, the sensitized memories it triggers linger for an unknown amount of time. In short, porn cues may electrify you for a long time.

Addiction neuroplasticity can be summarized as: continued consumption → DeltaFosB → activation of genes → changes in synapses → sensitization and desensitization. (See The Addicted Brain for more detail.) It appears that desensitization eventually leadsto loss of executive control (hypofrontality), another major feature of addictions.

Sensitized pathways and withdrawal…ugh

Let’s say you decide to make the ultimate sacrifice and stop using porn. You’ll probably feel rotten for a while. Remember, your brain initially perceived your heavy porn use as a genetic bonanza. It thought you were making babies with each ejaculation. It laid down the super-memories so you wouldn’t abandon your “valuable” bevy of beauties (or whatever you were climaxing to).

Now, as you defy your brain by abstaining, your already low dopamine drops further. Also, libido-squelching brain stress hormones CRF and norepinephrine shoot up. Your desensitization is in overdrive, so a real partner doesn’t stand a chance. No wonder most guys experience such intense withdrawal symptoms. They’re feeling less pleasure than ever in response to normal stimuli, feeling more anxious, and trying to quit the one thing that can still goose their reward circuitry. There are solid reasons why addictions are so tough to beat.

Worse yet, during abstinence the sensitized “goosing” pathways grow even stronger. It’s as if your pleasure center is screaming for stimulation…but only the addiction can hear the call. The branches (dendrites) on nerve cells processing reward signals become “super spiny.” This overgrowth of little nubs allows for more synaptic connections and greater excitation.  It’s like growing four extra pairs of ears while being stuck at a “Spinal Tap” concert. When cues or thoughts (glutamate) hammer your reward circuit, the craving scale hits eleven.

I’m finding that just random pictures in ads and stuff are setting off cravings. Even when the models are fully clothed, I really want to give in.

During recovery, it’s easy to mistake an activated sensitized pathway for true libido. This is particularly true if you experience the typical radical drop in libido at some point in your recovery. During this “flatline” phase, a porn cue may still fire you up, and even trigger an impressive erection. This can fool you into thinking that porn is thecure for your sluggish libido. The real cure is to patiently wait for structures in your brain to catch up with your new direction. Meanwhile, all other stimuli, including your partner, are less arousing.

Two months into my recovery I saw a simple frame of bare ass on an adult movie channel. Honest to god, it felt like I got injected with some kind of drug. I had the biggest urge in my penis and my mind, to put it back on. I literally ran upstairs and brushed my teeth. Had I stayed downstairs, I would have relapsed 100%. I could feel a part of me going, “WHAT THE HELL MAN? GO BACK DOWNSTAIRS!!!!!!!!!”. I was shaking and panting. After 8 min of brushing my teeth non-stop, I was back to normal.

Recovery turns sensitized pathways into paper tigers

Despite their enormous power, sensitized pathways eventually lose their grip as your brain returns to normal and everyday pleasures become more satisfying. Staring at pixels begins to register as an empty exercise, and eventually the brain allows the sensitized pathways to weaken at the same time it strengthens the pathways related to other promising rewards (such as real partners).

Here, guys describe what this shift feels like. Keep in mind that most of them have been through a tough withdrawal phase and a month (or several months) of avoiding porn/masturbation.

• In the past I would get intense sexual cravings to view really extreme, hardcore explicit scenes. But now those types of cravings are diminishing. I’m no longer battling myself to visit a porn site – but rather to wanting to see a really stunning, toned, hot woman…even if she is wearing clothes. It’s like I am regressing to a state before hardcore – when more subtle sexual cues could get me excited. This is awesome and exciting! I remember when I got off of sugary drinks years ago – I used to drink 5 or more cola drinks per day. I never thought I was addicted but when I gave them up I wanted a coke badly at every meal. Just having water felt strange. But after sticking with it for about 2 months I was completely past it. Not even any cravings. I did once have a coke since then, and I didn’t really like it – I found I actually prefer water.

• During the heights of my porn addiction, I never looked forward to much of anything: dreaded going to work, and never saw socializing with friends and family as all that great, especially in comparison to my porn rituals, which gave me more pleasure and stimulation than anything else. With the addiction gone, little things make me really happy. I find myself laughing often, smiling for no real reason, and just being in good spirits all around. I thought I was a pessimist, but really I was just an addict. Today, a spontaneous erection lasted over 25 minutes. I did not really feel the urge to masturbate. I just lay there and enjoyed the sensation, and thought about how far I’d come.

• I’ve found as I progress, my dreams become more sex-oriented and more surreal, instead of just seeing myself spanking the monkey in front of my computer. Also, I feel more like masturbating when I see an attractive girl when I’m out—instead of feeling like looking at porn. Previously, I never felt like “just masturbating.” I always wanted porn.

• I am still getting some porn flashbacks: porn stars or parts of scenes. At the beginning of my reboot, the first couple weeks, these flashbacks would make me strongly consider masturbating or looking at porn. Now, when I get them, I don’t really feel the desire to do those things. I get a small rush from seeing those images in my head, but that’s about it. I’m able to shake them away fairly quickly and without consequence. Their power is receding.

• In the past I noticed beauty, of course, but never FELT a DESIRE to be with a girl. I directed all my sex drive toward porn. Everything sexual for me WAS porn. I could never think about me, this guy with this d*ck, having real sex with a real girl. Now, I feel like sex is the most natural thing to do. “Hell yeah it’s possible for me to have sex. Hell yeah there’s a lot of girls out there wanting to have it with me!” Suddenly, self-defeating thoughts seem so stupid and time-wasting. I finally feel what most males feel. And it’s awesome.

• Eventually I decided to masturbate to some porn. One thing was strange: I didn’t seem to get the same enjoyment from the porn as I recalled. Even finding favorite scenes didn’t seem to deliver. Porn was a bit boring in some way. Even though it wasn’t as “good” as I remembered it, I was still drawn back to it. Since the porn was not nearly as great as I remembered it, not going back will be easier.

• The first time I started masturbating again, I felt my brain looking for the porn. This is going to be hard to describe…there was a spot in my brain where the porn junk went (memories, cravings, etc). When I denied the porn, I literally felt a collapse or an empty feeling in that part of my brain. Like it just did not exist anymore and my brain realized it. It was like when you clap your hands. My brain was expecting something in between the hands, but then it realized there was nothing in between except air.

In short, cues may still evoke a powerful feeling of anticipation. Yet as you become more responsive to real pleasures, masturbation to pixels seems increasingly pointless and unfulfilling. Of course, if you return to exclusive porn use, you fire up the sensitization process again. In other words, recovery of sexual function doesn’t protect you against future excess.

Which event have you been training for?

Sadly, the young guys who arrive at our site with porn-induced sexual dysfunction often have the toughest time rewiring their brains. Here’s a typical scenario:

When I lost my virginity it really did not feel that good. I was bored actually. I lost the erection after maybe ten minutes. She wanted more sex, but I was done. The next time I tried to have sex with a woman was a disaster. I had an erection at first, but I lost it before I ever penetrated. Condom use was out of the question—not a hard enough erection.

Usually guys like him started with heavy Internet porn use at age 11 or so, and didn’t try to have sex with a partner for another decade. They’ve wired to super-high octane fuel in the form of ever-novel Internet porn, and it’s possible that their brains pruned back some of their under-used “mating” circuitry as they reached adulthood.

For a while after they switch to real mates (regular fuel), they ping along and occasionally stall out. Some have to make a concerted effort to spend time around real potential mates, and be patient as their brains catch up with their new direction. They sometimes need 4 months or more to respond normally to potential partners. A cuddle buddy helps.

In contrast, guys who wired to real mates before highspeed Internet still have those well developed “real-partner pathways” in place. Most didn’t notice performance problems until they overwhelmed their brains with synthetic stimulation via broadband. When they lay off the porn, their reward circuitry bounces back. Potential mates automatically start to look hot again. Most need about two months, but one 50-year old recently reported that, after three years of porn-related erectile dysfunction, he needed only 8 days porn-free to get back in the saddle.

If porn is the only way you can climax, it means you’ve wired your brain to the wrong target. It’s not that real giggles and wiggles aren’t appealing. They are. But while your reward circuitry is desensitized to normal pleasures, your gut-level (actually, brain-level) response to real potential mates is…meh. The only reason the porn signals still do the job is because you’ve created a neural sledgehammer powerful enough to get a rise out of your numbed reward circuitry—at least while you’re actually viewing porn.

Real sex is flirting, touching, being touched, smells, pheromones, connecting and interacting with a person. Internet porn is 2D voyeurism, clicking a mouse, searching, multiple tabs, isolation, constant novelty, a harem, and interacting only with your hand.

To use a sports analogy, which event has your brain been training for? If you want to shoot hoops like a pro, you don’t spend your time swinging a golf club. Have years of Internet porn use created a mismatch between what your brain expects and what actually happens during real mating? Time to rewire.

—Photo _sarchi/Flickr