Why Quitting Porn will be the best New Year’s resolution of your entire Life?
December 31st, 2029. 11:44 PM. You are in front of the mirror, staring into your eyes. A new year’s resolution that you made 10 years ago, made such a big difference. Outside of the bathroom, friends and family are celebrating, waiting for the countdown to enter into 2030. A decade passed by. What was that resolution? You decided to quit porn.
You’re glad that you had the courage to make that decision. You wouldn’t even imagined that porn was so dangerous, otherwise you wouldn’t have wasted so long masturbating in front of a screen watching people copulating.
Fortunately, today, 2029, porn is part of the past. But it wasn’t easy: some things had to be in place, so you could quit porn for good: things like getting the right information, having the right strategy, allow yourself to create a great life, so you didn’t want to escape from it, and of course, finding a great community.
You were especially glad when Congress passed a law in 2027, decreeing that porn sites had to advertise that their products go against public health, like the graphic health warnings they put on cigarettes.
Who would have guessed? Nobody would ever think that an activity that you used to do in the privacy of your room, as something to release stress, could affect every area of your life.
After a few minutes, you glance at yourself at that mirror, with a certain look of pride, take a deep breath, and go back to the party to receive the new year.
Imagine that this person is you. Imagine that is the last day of 2029 and suddenly you remember that same day 10 years ago, when you decided to quit porn for good.
Well, let me tell you that it wouldn’t be a bad idea. When it comes to porn, what people need is information.
When people think about porn, they think about something that has been so normalized, that is part of every conversations: friends, family, coworkers. Everyone talks about it, everyone consumes it. The topic is usually touched lightly and then people move on into another subject.
We live in a pornified world, and this is not new for anyone.[1] I remember how eye opening was for me to find out the psychological, emotional and physical impact that porn has in humans while I was researching for the book “Conquering Porn Addiction”,[2] that I published earlier this year. But what I remember the most were the tools that I found along the way to heal my own addiction to porn.
Today it’s easier to watch porn than not to watch it: The market has turned sex into the main byproduct to sell us things. This is so common that we don’t even blink when someone try to sell us burgers or clothes with a hypersexualized model suggesting that if we buy it, we’ll have the greatest sex in the world. When we do the reality check, we realize the we have never received a proper sex education, not because the previous generation kept it as a secret, but they also didn’t receive one themselves. If you got nothing, you can’t give nothing.
And what do we have today? … Porn: but, not just any kind of porn, we have the unlimited hyperstimulation that comes from the hardcore categories of high-speed internet porn. Something completely different than the porn our parents used to watch in the 90’s.
Why is this so different?
Simple. It is harmful for your health. The human brain is not prepared for the extreme intensity that the unlimited hardcore porn provides. In Biology there is a phenomenon called “The Coolidge effect”[3], which says that your brain will show renewed sexual interest every time you come across with a new young and fertile female that can potentially receive your genetic information. When that happens, your brain gives you a rush of dopamine (the hormone of reward and motivation), so you take action into courting her, until you copulate and pass your genes, so the human species continues expanding. The problem here is that your brain doesn’t know that the female ready to have sex with you, doesn’t exist, and is just a fiction on a screen. Still, your fooled brain, trusting that you are intending good for its preservation, continues giving you the rush of dopamine with every new female (every porn actress on every tab opened at the same time). If we add the fact that the majority of men masturbate with porn practicing “edging”(extending the time of masturbation by stopping or slowing down when they approach to the point of no return), then is almost unavoidable that most of men consuming porn will create in one way or another, an addiction to dopamine. The problem doesn’t end there. In fact, this is just the beginning: The pleasurable behavior repeated many times (masturbation with porn for the sake of that rush of dopamine), will override the reward system, and literally desensitize the brain, so that person will need more and more stimuli to be aroused sexually (more intense porn, more hardcore categories and more frequency of use). So, here is when one of the most common consequences of porn arises: erectile dysfunction. And the problem gets worse because this will not be solved with the blue pill: the problem is not in your penis, but in the brain. In other words, a man can be naked with the most attractive woman in the world, and she is completely open to have sex, and no matter what they try, he won’t get an erection.
The number of symptoms associated with porn is staggering. I have a support group on Facebook for men that are healing from porn addiction and what they report on regular basis, is sometimes shocking: wasting time, losing energy, spending money, social anxiety, depressive episodes, losing the capacity to connect with another human, losing the ability to create a compelling life for the misuse of their sexual energy, lack of capability to magnetize a life partner, low libido or losing interest in sex, objectifying women, false expectations from sex, delayed ejaculation for lack of sensitivity, premature ejaculation, being constantly distracted or literally becoming a human battery to feed an industry that has hijacked the sexual energy of an entire generation, among many others.
Of course, I’m not counting what lays on the field of potential, which is all the great things you can do by repeating a productive activity regularly, using the time and energy that before you used to dedicate to porn.
It gets worse: today porn has turned into a global sex school, teaching our kids the wrong way sex supposed to be done. We are talking about an industry that reduces women as sex objects, and industry that teaches really bad sex (anyone trying to emulate in real life what they see on porn will have the worst experience), an industry that recycles women and cut down their salary after 3 or 4 months because they are not the fresh face anymore, so they end up quitting the industry because financially doesn’t make sense doing porn anymore.
But the real problem with teenagers watching porn, is related to a function of the brain called neuroplasticity: which is the brain’s ability to adapt and create neuronal connections based on the environment and the experience. Young people’s brains are still being formed and they will be programmed to be aroused by porn in detriment of a real human being. A teenager that gets this kind of programming, will take way longer than an adult to reverse his brain to default settings.
Another piece of information about porn in the U.S. that people should know is the fact that as December 2019, there are more than 15 states of the U.S. that have declared porn as a public health issue: This is not a moral concern: public health is on the line.[4]
Think about the time people invest on porn, think about how humanity deviates its energy into this industry. For example, on the 2019 annual report of the most visited porn site in the world, they received 42 billion unique visits on 2019 (more than five times the population of this planet), that is 115 million visits per day searching for categories like Amateur Porn, Porn with aliens, and POV (point of View Porn, with the growing space for virtual reality. By the way, these categories are the most searched in 2019.
The average porn user in the United States, uses 10 minutes and 36 seconds per day. If you multiply that times 365, you’ll get 65 hours watching porn in a year (almost 3 days). On that that time you can easily start the basics of the ukulele that you’ve always wanted to play or that language that you’ve been saying for years that you wanted to learn.
Finally: look into the future: Porn as it is, is creating so many addicts around the world, now imagine when virtual reality or augmented reality advance so much that the porn experience becomes more appealing that real life itself. We are not far away from that, soon we’ll see computer programs that will allow you to build your own avatar/porn actress, that will be available 24/7, will get to know you as a real person based on your interactions and will be able to send you text messages from the computer. We haven’t seen anything. The future regarding this is scary.
Still, I choose to be optimistic, and when I help men on a coaching session, to walk along the route of healing, I choose to see every man as healed, even though they’re just starting their healing process: One man making the effort to heal, represents for me all my fellow brothers healing from porn addiction and bringing awareness to their sexual lives.
So, on that fantasized New Year’s Eve of 2029, I hope that by that time you are already enjoying a fun, juicy, satisfying and a healthy sexual life: A life where you and your partner take responsibility for their sexuality. A life where you have an open communication about fears, boundaries and desires in your sexual space. A life where you heal each other physically and psychologically by using sexuality as a tool. A life where you enjoy each other from knowing what exactly arouse one another to the point of dissolving your personal identities becoming one consciousness. A sexual life where you enjoy true abundance because you both have practiced the transmutation of your sexual energy and now you both set intentions together before lovemaking, in order to manifest the life of your dreams. A sexual life where you don’t allow any institution to cover your sexuality in guilt or shame, and where you both take charge of your pleasure, connection and intimacy. In other words: A life where you refer to sex as a sacred practice.
That dreamed sexual life, started with the conscious decision of quitting porn for good on the last days of a cold winter of 2019. It was totally worth the effort!
Read the full article at https://medium.com/@gonzalosalinas80/why-quitting-porn-will-be-the-best-new-years-resolution-of-your-entire-life-fca19780086
At 423 Communities International, our doors are open for business. We are still offering recovery options for those struggling with temptations and trauma around pornography, sexual fantasies, and addictive behaviors. Want more information? Click here: https://www.423communities.org/join