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. Update: Dr. Oz Show addresses porn-induced erectile dysfunction January 31, 2013.
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 called desensitization. (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.
Sensitization - key brain mechanisms
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 on glutamate. 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:
With sensitization, explicit memories (such as facts and events) transform into habits, which are known as implicit memories. 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.
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.
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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.
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.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/201201/why-do-i-find-porn-more-exciting-partner
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