Is Porn causing you Social Anxiety?
Who doesn’t like beating off; choking the chicken; bashing the bishop; rubbing one out, right? All the visual debauchery we could ever need is only a web search away. The wonders of modern like, eh?
But what if I told you there could be a sinister dark-side to porn and masturbation, one that may be ruining your life if left unchecked? Well, you’d probably want a heads-up on the whole thing, and that’s what this article is all about.
Wanking is good for you, and normal…
Masturbation a perfectly normal and natural habit. It should be enjoyed withoutout the stigma and guilt often associated with it by society. Guys relieving the sexual tension because they have no other way to do it is perfectly normal. It’s actually proven to be healthy because it has been shown to help reduce your risk of prostate cancer. However, can it affect our ability to meet women if it becomes an addiction, especially if excessive consumption of porn is involved.
Masturbation is, by definition, an isolated activity that you do alone. You sit there glaring at the computer screen, browsing porn sites for a long period of time looking for new stuff to get your fix from. Part of you knows that this surely can’t be good for your social life, but you do it anyway, right? I know I do.
Well it blew my mind the other day when I read about masturbation to porn potentially directly causing social anxiety in men. What the hell? How can something as normal and porn and masturbation cause you to suffer from increased social anxiety?
Porn & masturbation rewires the brain
Any type of continuously repeated behaviour is going to cause rewiring of the brain, also known as ‘habits’. This is fine if kept in check but if it gets out of control it can completely hijack your thought process. That is how people get into addictions. They start to lose control of what they are doing and allow that particular activity to take over. They become dependent on that particular activity. Anything that we do in life if done in a balanced manner is healthy. However if taken to the extreme it can soon become a detriment to your health.
In the book ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’ Dr Norman Doidge explains how high levels of dopamine, caused from excessive stimuli, can cause the brain to alter. Part of your brain deals with ‘making social ties’ and thus is there to help you make friends and form relationships. However the high dopamine from porn & masturbation can cause these to change, which has a huge effect on our perception of life.
Instead of being in a situation where we want to meet others, we instead get more pleasure from fake people. This is because of the release of dopamine that happens in this situation. Soon the lure of porn & masturbation becomes even more compelling than going out and trying to meet women for sex.
Porn rewards time alone
Although our bodies are engineered biologically to find relationships rewarding – as it spreads and mulitplies our genes, somehow it just does not seem to have the same effect as hours of trawling erotic material on the web. Bottom line, porn in its modern ‘never-ending always on tap’ form essentially short-circuits our reward centre and can turn us into mindless goal-seeking machines.
The instant gratification porn provides means we are more likely to stay in and masturbate, instead of going out into the real world. This therefore isolates us even more from the rest of the world. It becomes a self-reinforcing self-destructive pattern.
Dopamine may play a role in depression…
It seems that dopamine may cause depression. When it is initially released you get a massive high. This however only lasts, while you have exposure to dopamine. The sort of exposure that may be bought about from constant drug use, or in this case frequent, prolonged masturbation.
The problem is, if you have an addiction to porn & masturbation and are therefore subjected to high levels of dopamine, you may find that you suffer from depression. Depression has a big impact on how you feel.
Why? Well, your body essentially builds up a resistance to the effects of dopamine, so your ‘base level’ of happiness and satisfaction, just in general, is subjectively lower. It also mediates social anxiety, so this increases too.
Breaking the addiction and meeting new people is made hard because of depression. Especially the symptoms such as low self-esteem, feeling irritable and intolerant of others, lack of energy or lack of interest in sex, etc. This is what makes it so hard to change your ways, because you feel bad and the only way you feel as though you can feel better is by masturbating. It’s a vicious cycle.
Often, you won’t even notice yourself doing this. You’ll just find yourself on autopilot, self-medicating by watching porn and masturbating. Realising that you are in this situation is the first step in the battle to get control back from your compulsions.
Who is most likely to suffer from addiction?
Certain people are more likely to suffer from social anxiety caused by addiction. Natural introverts are at the greatest risk. They are the sorts of people who isolate themselves away from others. This isolation often further compounds their porn addiction.
What does this mean for you?
Like I said at the beginning, porn & masturbation is totally normal as long as it is part of a healthy lifestyle. However if it becomes an addiction then it can become a problem.
If this happens to you then there is always the possibility that you could suffer from increased social anxiety. Now I am not saying give up masturbation as it’s not to be blamed on it’s own. However if you feel like porn and masturbation maybe taking over your day-to-day life then you need to nip it in the bud fast.
The Challenge
Are you addicted to porn & masturbation? Let’s find out. Me and my main man Preston Blain have made a commitment to stop masturbating to porn for a month. Yeah, we both have girlfriends at the moment but we both still both look at porn and masturbate.
So for a whole month, no more. It’s gonna be tough. We’re going to have to find new things to do with all our new-found time ;-)
If you feel like you’re up for a challenge, see if you can follow along with us and give up beating off to porn too. And if you decide to, let us know how you get on.
Watch this space for updates on how we’re doing in this ‘porn free month’.
Speak soon,
David Black
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