If you’re here, it’s because you have some damn good reasons NOT to quit your porn habit.
And maybe also because quitting is scary.
I know what it’s like…
Maybe you’re asking yourself some of the following:
“What will happen to me?
Who will I become?”
“How will I survive?”
“I know myself only being with porn for as long as I can remember..”
“Can I really give this up? I will lose my freedom!”
The idea of quitting is daunting and overwhelming.
Of course it is. Here are a few more reasons not to quit –
- You may start craving so much that it will drive you mad.
- Perhaps your negative emotions will all begin to surface and you will suffer.
- You might feel bored out of your mind.
These are all real concerns and it makes sense that they are blocking you from quitting.
However, many studies and clinical experiences suggest that saying goodbye to a porn addiction offers a wide range of benefits that can impact and improve your overall quality of life.
Let’s explore seven key benefits you may experience when you quit porn, and how it can positively affect your daily life:
1. Improved Sexual Function
One of the first things you might notice after quitting porn is an improvement in sexual function.
Pornography can overstimulate the brain, leading to issues like erectile dysfunction and loss of drive to be sexual with a real partner.
By cutting out porn, you allow your brain’s dopamine levels to stabilize (dopamine is a hormone that induces pleasure), which can reverse these negative consequences.
Even during the first week of quitting, some people report better sexual satisfaction and a renewed sex drive.
This is especially true for those who struggle with sexual dysfunction, as their brain begins to “reboot” and respond more naturally to real-life sexual experiences.
Many people find a renewed sexual attraction and interest in their real-life partners, which leads me to the next point…
2. Enhanced Relationships
Another significant benefit of quitting porn is the enhancement of your relationships.
Like I said in the previous point, that can manifest on the sexual level, but not only.
Pornographic material often creates unrealistic expectations from the addict’s partner. The partner is compared to young, picture-perfect porn stars who may also be heavily covered in makeup.
How can anyone compete?
This may create disappointment and a disconnect in the addict. Some addicts may even grow to feel repelled by their partners, as they begin to focus on every wart and blemish.
The partner in turn feels rejected, unwanted, unloved and unappreciated.
No surprises there…
Moreover, having an addiction to porn also means that the addict is constantly preoccupied with fantasizing about and obtaining explicit material.
As the craving and obsessions grow, addicts become less and less present with their family and friends.
Porn becomes their ultimate partner, substituting for a real, intimate, human connection.
Therefore, on the flip side, abstaining from porn helps you focus on building a healthy and realistic relationship with your partner, which is crucial for the emotional bond no less than sexual satisfaction.
Over time, many people experience positive changes in their relationships, feeling more present, connected, and satisfied with their partners.
This renewed ability to be intimate with self and others can naturally strengthen your bonds also with other family members and friends, as you become more present and engaged in your social life.
3. Increased Motivation and Productivity
Quitting porn can significantly boost your motivation and productivity.
Pornography can dull the brain’s reward system, leading to low energy levels and a lack of focus.
This is probably what many porn addicts report as the heavy “fog” that lifts when they stop porn.
When you quit, the dopamine receptors in your brain start to normalize, leading to increased motivation and mental clarity.
Besides, there is the more simple reason – when you quit porn, suddenly you have a lot more time to accomplish stuff!
Thus, recovering from porn addiction allows you to reclaim control over your daily life.
Whether it’s in your career, personal goals, or social settings, you’ll likely find yourself more driven and capable of achieving what you set out to do.
4. Reduced Addiction Symptoms
OK, I know this is an obvious one, but it must be said –
- withdrawal,
- cravings,
- and tolerance.
As you abstain from porn, you may experience severe withdrawal symptoms, especially in the first weeks of withdrawing from your drug of choice.
Besides emotional pain which I will cover in the next point, you may become very irritable, you may experience angry outbursts, and generally, it may feel like your lifeline has been cut off.
Because that is exactly what it became, right? A lifeline.
And with withdrawal, come renewed and even more powerful cravings. Addicts tend to feel then an increased compulsion to satiate the cravings so that they can calm down (and not feel the awful withdrawal symptoms).
However, these powerful cravings are a normal part of the recovery process, and the longer you stay away from explicit content, the more control you gain over your urges.
The good news is that with time, the intensity of these symptoms decreases, leading to a stronger sense of self-control and empowerment.
Naturally, as you stop feeding the urges, you also stop increasing your tolerance to explicit material.
As an addict finds the strength to abstain from porn and gain a longer period of sobriety, something surprising may happen.
The same explicit material that may have been less arousing when they were in the claws of the addiction, now becomes arousing again.
It seems to be a parallel phenomenon to finding renewed interest in real-life sexual partners.
It seems you can reverse the process that took over your brain so that now it becomes again more normally sensitive to less sexually explicit cues.
5. Better Emotional Health
Quitting porn is also linked to better emotional health, particularly in reducing and soothing negative emotions.
It is particularly an important step toward soothing pervasive shame and guilt.
This may seem odd, because initially by quitting, many addicts start to experience withdrawal symptoms and mood swings, including an increase in shame and guilt.
Indeed, it is for this reason that it’s so difficult to break the cycle of behavioral addiction. When those negative emotions hit, all you want is to dull them by going back to porn ASAP!
But engaging with these painful emotions is the only path forward and a crucial part of your recovery process.
Because the shame and guilt are not going anywhere. And instead of soothing them with porn, you will need to put other, healthier mechanisms in place.
So stopping the addictive behavior is the first step toward recovery because it allows the pain to surface, and then we can do something about it.
This is the emotional pain that causes us to turn to addiction in the first place, and therefore it must be dealt with.
(i.e. negative emotions as a result of trauma, social anxiety, or other mental health issues).
But porn is not only our “solution” for negative feelings. It can also become the source of shame and guilt, in and of itself, for several possible reasons:
- You tend to use porn excessively and you realize you are dependent on it in a way that others are not;
- If you tend to view “stranger” or “darker” pornographic material that goes against your values or even against the law;
- If you are religious and feel “impure” as a result of your porn habit;
- You find yourself preoccupied with hiding your habit from your partner or others.
For these reasons and others, quitting a porn addiction can have an immediate impact in reducing some shame and guilt, even without tending yet to deeper mental health issues.
Living without porn allows you to come out of the dark dungeon of secrecy and look the world in the eye once again.
More importantly, it allows YOU to look yourself in the eye, and know that you’re in a better place.
Over time, your mental clarity can improve, and you may gain a greater sense of personal growth and well-being.
Seeking professional help or joining support groups can further enhance this aspect of your recovery journey.
6. More Emotionally Stable
This point is really an extension of the previous one (well, actually all of these points are interconnected and overlap in different ways).
Mood swings, or emotional instability, are a common ingredient of withdrawal when you stop watching porn.
Because, if porn is functioning as a sedative to negative emotions (like I explained in the previous point), it follows that removing the sedative will lead to feeling more negative emotions.
And when we’re not emotionally aware and have limited emotional language to describe what we’re feeling and why, it feels as though the emotion is “taking over”.
A sense of unworthiness or deep inadequacy or defectiveness can creep up and take us by surprise, having this choking effect.
Thus, our mood “swings” from something OKish to something completely different and agonizing, seemingly from nowhere.
I say “seemingly” because when you begin to explore yourself and get a lot more in tune with your emotions, you begin to realize that they are coming from somewhere and for really good reasons.
But as long as those painful emotions are shut out of your conscious experience, these mood swings will send you running back for more porn to calm them down.
Therefore, when you finally decide to quit porn, over time you can break free from this cycle.
Naturally, you would need to tend to the negative emotions leading to these mood swings and instability.
As you approach your emotions, rather than run away from them, you can calm them down, thereby stabilizing your mood.
Initially, of course, you will probably experience a lot of instability, especially if you’ve relied on porn for a long time.
However, as you progress through your recovery journey, your mood will likely stabilize, contributing to overall emotional resilience.
7. Improved Emotional Self-Regulation
Finally, quitting porn often leads to improved emotional self-control or self-regulation. There are two types of self-regulation you may achieve:
I. Explicit Emotional Regulation:
The recovery process requires you to develop greater self-discipline. You become used to the habit of stopping yourself and making a personal boundary.
As you strengthen your ability to resist urges, you’ll find it easier to manage other impulses as well and be more able to tolerate discomfort in general.
Avoiding pornography and tolerating or accepting the emotional discomfort that comes with it is an emotional “tool” that then extends to other areas such as work and relationships.
II. Implicit Emotional Regulation
This is a deeper kind of change which usually entails getting help from a therapist.
As you get a lot more comfortable with your negative emotions, their source, their meaning, and the unmet needs signaled by them, you begin to gain a sense of emotional mastery.
It’s no longer a fight to shove them down or to distract yourself from them. Rather, you are able to feel them and naturally use their rich information for your benefit. In other words, you can finally notice your unmet needs and fulfill them.
I know this sounds a bit like Chinese so let me give an example.
Let’s say you decided to quit porn. Kudos to you. But now those sh*tty feelings are rising up inside. And it feels like an emotional mess, a confusing uncomfortable blob of pain.
Let us further say that alongside quitting porn, you decide to tend to these negative emotions which have been neglected for so long. Whether with the help of a professional or otherwise.
That’s great. And now, maybe you’re beginning to make sense of this knot of pain, and you realize that one of the dominant emotions there is a strong feeling of inadequacy or low self-esteem.
You explore the feeling, flesh it out, and try to make sense of why it’s there (some trauma or “just” emotional neglect from childhood perhaps?)
Then we can begin to notice some deep, basic human unmet needs. Because every negative emotion is in fact a signal that can tell us what we’re missing.
Inadequacy, low self-esteem, or shame (they all belong to the same “family”), usually signal a need to be accepted, acceptable, good, good enough, important, valuable, and the like.
When we realize that, and connect with this long unmet need, we can finally begin to fulfill it, by giving it to ourselves. We can learn to be more self-compassionate, more tender, and kind to ourselves.
And being able to do all of that in real-time, means we have gained emotional mastery.
Final Thoughts
Quitting porn isn’t easy, but the benefits are well worth the effort.
You may have also realized by now, that quitting porn is not enough to reap all of these benefits. We also need to tend to our painful emotions.
From improved sexual function and relationships to better emotional health and self-regulation, the positive changes can transform your life.
Whether you’re just starting your journey or are well on your way to recovery, remember that each step forward is a step toward a healthier, happier you.
References
- Bridges, A. J., Morokoff, P. J., & Kuhlman, C. (2016). Sexual media use and relational satisfaction in heterosexual couples. Personal Relationships, 13(3), 451-469.
- Fernandez, D. P., Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2021). The pornography “rebooting” experience: A qualitative analysis of abstinence journals on an online pornography abstinence forum. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 50(3), 711-728.
- Fernandez, D. P., Kuss, D. J., Justice, L. V., Fernandez, E. F., & Griffiths, M. D. (2023). Effects of a 7-day pornography abstinence period on withdrawal-related symptoms in regular pornography users: A randomized controlled study. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 52(3), 1819-1840.
- Grubbs, J. B., Stauner, N., Exline, J. J., Pargament, K. I., & Lindberg, M. J. (2019). Perceived addiction to internet pornography and psychological distress: Examining relationships concurrently and over time. Journal of Sex Research, 56(2), 247-261.
- Kraus, S. W., Meshberg-Cohen, S., Martino, S., Quinones, L. J., & Potenza, M. N. (2016). Treatment of compulsive pornography use with naltrexone: A case report. American Journal of Psychiatry, 173(10), 1056-1057.
- Laier, C., & Brand, M. (2017). Empirical evidence and theoretical considerations on factors contributing to cybersex addiction from a cognitive-behavioral view. Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, 24(3), 215-249.
- Park, B. Y., Wilson, G., Berger, J., Christman, M., Reina, B., Bishop, F., … & Doan, A. P. (2016). Is Internet pornography causing sexual dysfunctions? A review with clinical reports. Behavioral Sciences, 6(3), 17.
