"By Jove, it's the reward circuitry!"
A dedicated member of the "to each his own taste" club, I'm all for freedom of speech. However, my website happens to discuss the highs and lows of sexual satiety in terms of the highs and lows of the typical addiction cycle. To my surprise (and theirs, I'm sure), men from all over the world showed up in my site's forum complaining of addiction to porn/masturbation.
At first it was painful reading their stories. These guys were constantly overheated -- due to the many virtual mates that their limbic brains perceived as genetic opportunities. Just a click away, another novel "mate" ached to be serviced -- and my visitors' subconscious, primitive mating program was determined to leave not one unfertilized. In fact, when they tried to stop, they faced weeks of intense, fluctuating withdrawal symptoms:
First guy: The whole day I have been shaking with jitters similar to how it felt when I quit smoking.
Second guy: My withdrawal symptoms? Intense bouts of anger leading to interpersonal difficulties, aggressive demeanor, easily stressed out (I'm inexperienced confronting the world without that soup of post-orgasmic sedation), suicidal ideation, severe depression, violent dreams (I actually enjoyed these, but others might consider them nightmares), insomnia, hallucinations (jumped out of bed screaming because I felt a "presence"), "insects" crawling all over me in bed, shakes, mania (energy far in excess of my ability to use it constructively), and inability to concentrate.
Third guy: Bored? Masturbation. Angry? Masturbation. Sad? Masturbation. Stressed? Masturbation. I went from being the first of my class to the very bottom, until I dropped out for good. I found a Web job, making good money with my porn one click away. This was my life, and I didn't recognize I had an addiction until I had surgery and masturbation wasn't an option for fifteen days. On day three, I was literally shaking, and I began to connect the dots. Other symptoms: irritability, inability to focus ("staring at walls syndrome"), mood swings, headaches (sometimes quite strong), sense of pressure in my genitals, flashbacks, paranoia, self-defeating thinking, depression, hopelessness, and fear that I will never have sex because I've learned no social skills since diving into porn eight years ago as a teen.
I also heard: "No matter how many orgasms I have, I never feel satisfied; I just finally collapse in exhaustion, and start again the next day." "To get off, I need extreme material that I never would have viewed before." "I'm more anxious or depressed, and I have a strong desire to avoid other people." "When I try to have sex with a partner, I can't get an erection."
Many had no religious background, and gradually I realized that debates about guilt, morality, sexual repression, exploitation, and freedom of speech are largely beside the point. Purely and simply, these guys had thrown their brain chemistry out of whack. It might have happened to anyone -- and probably would have happened to me had I been male. Besides, women have vulnerable limbic brains, too.
The men's activities were certainly understandable, but changes in their brain's reward circuitry had nevertheless hijacked their free will. They were hooked.
As Burnham and Phelan explain in Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food, Taming Our Primal Instincts, our environment has changed, leaving our primitive, subconscious reward circuitry very vulnerable. It serves our genes before us, so when it perceives "novel mates" around, it can urge us to ignore our well-being...and keep on fertilizing. This is especially true if we aren't engaging in enough of life's more soothing rewards: friendly interaction and affectionate touch.
Extreme stimulation of the reward circuitry is risky. The danger isn't hairy palms or going blind. It's ending up on a high-speed treadmill, trying to stay ahead of withdrawal symptoms. Normal pleasures--the simple things our brains thrive on--gradually lose their capacity to delight. Biologist Robert Sapolsky remarked:
Unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. As the first, soon we hardly notice anymore the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward that will come after a long, difficult, and worthy task. The other consequence is that, after awhile, we even habituate to those artificial deluges of intensity. . . . Our tragedy is that we just become hungrier. More and faster and stronger.
Even though evolution has molded us rare pair-bonding mammals to find relationships rewarding, their subtler, healthier rewards don't generate the supranormal stimulation of hours of vivid erotic imagery--especially not as we dull our senses with too much of it. In order for life's less intense, but remarkably fulfilling pleasures to register as enjoyable, we need inner equilibrium.
These days, that's tough. Like it or not, today's extreme sexual stimulation is like nothing our hunter-gatherer forebears faced in millions of years of brain development. Sure, there was the odd harem, and cave girls were no doubt cute. But their erotically writhing images weren't airbrushed to perfection, projected on every screen, and relentlessly moaning for sperm donations.
As long-time Princeton researcher Bart Hoebel said,
Highly potent sexual stimuli [and highly palatable foods] are the only stimuli capable of activating the [brain's] dopamine system with anywhere near the potency of addictive drugs.
The good news in this tale furnishes further evidence that reward circuitry overload was these guys' challenge. As I listened sympathetically, feeling helpless, some of them eventually worked out how to return their brains to balance. Slowly, they rebounded. Things that formerly turned them on, turned them on anew without sexual enhancement drugs. They lost their taste for extreme material. Their anxiety and depression eased. Random feelings of discouragement and remorse evaporated. Humor and optimism bloomed. They started flirting. In fact, they began to enjoy social interaction generally -- even if they withdrew into porn as shy teens.
Their path was not easy, and some are still struggling. (Read about their experiences in The Road to Excess.) Those who escaped seemed to need about a sixty-day moratorium on orgasm and all sexual stimulation to reboot their reward circuitry. Social support really helped, because the brain finds it soothing and rewarding. Said one (who now has a sweetheart):
The withdrawal, as it turns out, was harder than cocaine, opiates, booze, or nicotine. I spent a solid week weeping every night after teaching at the university. I couldn't sleep, and I had almost zero appetite. The thought of ever dating made me want to curl up into a ball.But here I am. I feel free.
Want to understand today's Internet porn phenomenon in biological terms? Visit Your Brain On Porn.
Follow Marnia Robinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Reuniting
Reminds me of something similar I read in Psychology Today recently:
http://www.covenanteyes.com/blog/2009/09/29/alfred-kinsey-christian-culture-and-sexual-repression-reexamining-old-beliefs/
I can't read an article of any length on the screen without getting eyestrain.... yet the web is seductive:
I click just to see "what's going on", but 45 minutes later realize I have just been flipping from tidbit to tidbit, caught in the avalanche of information overload, drowning, separated from my own life.
Anyone else recognize the symptoms?
Was it masturbation or porn that the men claimed to have problems stopping? While it's common knowledge that women have different levels of arousal and orgasm, men rarely get to admit that we also have different levels of arousal and orgasm sensation. Maybe an 18 year old boy can orgasm at the same intensity each time, but as we age, men become comfortable with their body, their sexuality, and with the comfort comes the recognition that some orgasms are better than others. Masturbating to pornography RARELY produces the same pleasure as masturbating alone, making love, or in sex games with your partner. Relying on pornography to release endorphins is silly -- that's why most men and women drop off viewership by large percentages around mid-twenties.
Why wasn't the issue of individual sex drive brought up. If you take a person with a high sex drive, put them in a situation where they can't express it (e.g. no porn AND no girlfriend/ ability to masturbate alone) then they'll get much more angry and frustrated than somebody with a low sex drive. It's important to make the difference between people with high sex drives and low sex drives.
The solution to these men's (why no women subjects?) problems seems pretty clear. More social interaction, and a couple books on sex to increase their knowledge of the human body to satisfy them better. Claiming addiction is self-inflated and too self-pitying for my tastes.
Over and over, as they came back into balance, they spontaneously remarked how easy it is to kid around with others, how much more fun flirting is, how much more confident they feel, how they can smile at strangers, and so on.
As social anxiety is associated with low dopamine, and dopamine drops after orgasm...there could be a major cause of social anxiety right on our computer screens. Just sayin'....
In other words, coitus starts; people are feeling good; the moment comes; the moment goes; cake is consumed; and a slow sensational drop to the floor ensues. So yes, a dopamine drop does occur, but it's a drop from an elevated level.
I don't think men develop SAD right after we empty the tankers.
The pressure is put on the husband and wife to perform in the work place(s) so that by the time they get home, another "performace" is the last thing on their minds. My middle son who is a manager and his wife who is also a manager take three day vacations just to catch up on sleep every few weeks.
If you own your own business forget it the hours and stress and anexity are even stronger and longer. Making the time for kissing and a hugging even less. I know I had my own printing business plus a full time job and my wife had her own gift basket business plus a full time job. We passed each other in the hall or driveway, for years.
It's a sport taken up by women far more than men. Come on ladies, the men shared their stories.
What we've wound up with are plenty of sexual images and sexual activity going on, and plenty of emotionally unsatisfied people of both sexes and all orientations. We've erased from our racial memory the seeking out of suitable partners and substituted quantity for quality. Just another aspect of an advanced consumer society still operating from an infantile state of need.
It may be that if we don't want to be manipulated by this situation, we need to learn more about the subconscious bonding cues that keep bonds deeply satisfying. "Sure Ways to Stay in Love": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marnia-robinson/sure-ways-to-stay-in-love_b_282615.html And even learn to make love in a way that promotes balance: "Another Way to Make Love" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marnia-robinson/another-way-to-make-love_b_272759.html
Some of us prefer to embrace our biological drives in lieu of some imagined need for social fulfillment.
Pleasure is and has always been the primary motivator for sexual stimulation. Pretending that we're "victims" of some societal plot to disintegrate a quixotic philosophy does nothing to avert the concept's inevitable residency in the desert of unfulfillment.
So women have the triple wammy of having to navigate menopause and maintain desire, a tougher self-image when it comes to their body aging and possibly a hard-coded loss of sexual interest in their partner sexually over time.
Overall, I think its a factor in men's wandering attention as they reach middle age. Not saying its right but...
Allowing yourself the constant selfish needs builds up an contempt in you mind for the act it's self which you have to deal with for a long time.
I was an addict and when you act like a wild animal out of control seeking that rush you need a reality check bad !!!!
I'm addicted to air! Someone help!
"In medical terminology, an addiction is a chronic neurobiologic disorder that has genetic, psychosocial, and environmental dimensions and is characterized by one of the following: the continued use of a substance despite its detrimental effects, impaired control over the use of a drug (compulsive behavior), and preoccupation with a drug's use for non-therapeutic purposes (i.e. craving the drug).[1] Addiction is often accompanied by the presence of deviant behaviors (for instance stealing money and forging prescriptions) that are used to obtain a drug."
It shouldn't take much creativity to substitute "behavior" for "substance"; I don't believe there's much dispute that some can become addicted to gambling.
I'm addicted to water! Someone help!