By: Shane James O’Neill
Being informed is a big part of finding freedom and living a truer life. After all, a person can’t pursue truth if they don’t know what is true. Sensible, right? But ignorance can damage a lot of people, including ourselves.
So, here is how porn and addiction are connected:
What is Addiction?
Scientists once thought addiction only involved what we physically put into our bodies. However, addiction is no longer only connected with what we put into our body, rather addiction is connected to how our brains respond to experiences.
We now know that behavioral addiction exists, not just the substance addiction of things such as cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs.
When humans engage behaviors like watching pornography, chemicals are introduced into the brain that would not be there otherwise, similar to using a substance like heroin.
Here’s how it works:
Pleasure Center
There is a part of your brain called the reward center. As you may be able to guess, its job is to reward you doing healthy experiences. The reward center is responsible for those feelings of satisfaction, contentment, stimulation, and empowerment you encounter after exercising, finishing a project, or even cleaning your room.
When we use drugs (like heroin), it supplements and/or replaces the chemicals in the reward center. When we watch porn, since sex is a good experience (as the means of our existence and the greatest source of physical intimacy), our reward center floods the brain with very high doses of feel-good chemicals.
Pathways are created in your brain so that when you feel sad, or bored, frustrated, or even happy, your initial reaction and desire is to watch porn. Over time, your brain begins to think of porn like it does food or water, as a necessity.
Is There Hope?
Yes, pornography changes us, but the brain is a very impressionable organ. Change, and damage, is not entirely permanent.
The brain is designed to enable and support many kinds of interactions, shifting and changing as we move through life. Humans are designed to learn new languages, to inhabit cultures, to know a variety of people who have a diversity of personalities, opinions, feelings, and stories.
The reason brains are able to change is because humans are relational, and relationships require flexibility. People are not static, nor are relationships. Our feelings change and every moment is a new experience. That flexibility is worked into how God designed us, since we are made in His image and He is a relational Triune God.
Related: The Science of Confession
So, yes porn is incredibly addictive. But…
You are not hopeless: You can redesign your own mental pathways, you can shift the way you see people, and you can recreate your impulses. You can be transformed by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:2).
Check in next week for part 2 on how to break the addiction of pornography.
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Shane James O’Neill is the Editorial Director for Proven Men Ministries. He is currently working on a graduate degree in apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawling School of Divinity.