This is What Happens When You Watch Porn: Negative Emotion Dopamine Dump
What is Dopamine?
Dopamine is all about seeking and searching for rewards— the anticipation, the wanting, the gratification.
Dopamine provides the motivation and drive to pursue potential rewards or long-term goals.
Beyond drugs, food, and adventure, sexual excitement releases the HIGHEST levels of dopamine and opioids.
Reproduction is hard-wired as a top job in our genes and therefore has the highest output for such drives.
Negative Dump
The amount of dopamine that surges through the brain during porn activity has been recorded in staggering amounts.
Although often referred to as the “pleasure molecule,” dopamine can also be released in high intensities due to emotions opposite to pleasure.
These bursts of dopamine have detrimental effects on the brain, psyche, and spirit at large.
Huge surges of negative dopamine release from porn are due to:
Negative emotions such as shame, guilt, disgust, embarrassment, anxiety & fear
The drive to seek and search
The excitement of novelty and things that violate expectations which create emotions of shock, awe, and surprise.
“Many of these emotional states (anxiety, shame, shock, surprise) not only elevate dopamine, but each can also boost stress hormones & neurotransmitters (norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisol). These stress neurochemicals increase excitement while amplifying dopamine’s already powerful effects. Over time a porn user’s brain can mistake feelings of anxiety or fear for feelings of sexual arousal. This helps explain why some porn users escalate into ever more shocking or anxiety-invoking porn – as they need that extra neurochemical jolt just to become sexually aroused, or to orgasm.”
This means that over time the brain wires itself to associate pain with pleasure and feelings of anxiety with feelings of love.
These wiring effects will then bleed over from the bedroom into the user's everyday life.
Soon he will begin attracting this in his relationships and in everything he experiences.
It may soon become impossible for him to experience any sense of love, joy, and peace.
He will either attract relationships that are vibrating at the levels of anxiety, shame, and fear, or even if he were to be presented with loving energy he may not be able to feel or receive it because of cross-wiring in his brain due to continual porn consumption.
Oftentimes, those liberated from Novelty Addiction report that their anxiety and depression completely subsides after discontinuation.
They say they previously had no link between porn use and their constant anxiety and depression until discontinuation.
Many are able to release their habits of drug and alcohol use and other coping mechanisms that they had been using to relieve their anxiety and depression.
