Let's talk about Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction.

This is a phenomenon where healthy, sexually active men find themselves unable to perform when it comes to being intimate with a partner. 

When you know that is physically wrong, and you’ve addressed any potential psychological issues, an honest review of personal habits often points a finger at a root of the problem -  the habit of watching too much pornography. This is not a moral judgement. I’m not saying that watching porn is inherently bad, but it does have the potential to contribute to real-life sexual problems, particularly when it's habitual.

Studies show that frequent use of pornography effects a man's brain chemistry and can change his sexual appetite, potentially to the degree that he no longer becomes aroused by real-life sexual interaction. This is the heart of porn-induced erectile dysfunction.

According to data from the Internet Traffic Analytics, porn sites received more traffic in 2020 than Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Zoom, Pinterest, and LinkedIn combined.

And with the ease of accessibility at the tip of your fingers, it’s pretty safe to say that you’ve had some, if not a lot, of exposure to porn. 

Of the 18 million American men who have ED, research indicates that 15 to 20% of erectile dysfunction is due to overconsumption of pornography. So it’s really important that we address this topic head on.

Again no moral judgements or shame here. This is the world we live in and the climate that young men are being raised in. 

Look, when I was a kid, the most graphic porn most of us had access to was a Hustler magazine. If you were really lucky, you may have found your dad’s cheesy VHS porn movie. But even then, finding a place and time to watch it privately was almost impossible. Today, thanks to the internet,  it is almost impossible to not have graphic porn flashed in front of you daily, even if you wanted to avoid it.  

I have a lot of compassion for boys and younger men who have been exposed to porn from a young age when they were just developing as sexual beings. And there are men my age and older who are struggling with this issue as well. They may have turned to porn due to a lack of an available sexual partner, or being in a long-term relationship where their partner was no longer interested in sex. Or maybe you just got into it because you were curious and it’s so easily available. I get it. No shame, no guilt. But the subject cannot be avoided. So let’s take a realistic look at what’s going on. 

Before the advent of the internet, erectile dysfunction was virtually unheard of in men younger than 40. 

A study from 2002 shows erectile dysfunction rates of men aged 18 to 40 at just 2%. By 2015  that rate had jumped to 30%.

But obviously this is not just a younger man’s problem.

One issue with porn is that it can affect your sexual appetites. A survey of twenty-eight thousand  men found that excessive consumption of porn desensitized them to even the most hardcore porn. This can cause sexual dysfunction by lowering libido, affecting the brain's reward center and eventually leading to an inability to get an erection.

Over use of pornography can lead to what many call porn addiction because it follows the same pattern as any other addiction. 

There is growing medical evidence that online pornography is a lot more dangerous than most people suspect.  And now, more and more men, and boys, are coming forward to share their struggle with their porn habit, and its real life consequences.  

Some of the reported symptoms of porn addiction include: Erectile Dysfunction: You may still get an erection and orgasm with porn, but not with a partner. When you go to have sex with a real person, it just doesn’t work. Delayed Ejaculation or even the inability to ejaculate at all is common. This can result in a lot of frustration and can cause friction, in more ways than one, with your intimate partner.

An escalation to porn that you doesn’t match what your original interests were when you started. Let’s be frank, if you are watching a genre that you would be embarrassed to tell you best buddy about, you may have gone to far. We’ll talk about why and how this happens later. Spoiler alert: it’s by design.

Other symptoms of porn include: Brain fog or problems concentrating, Lack of motivation, Social anxiety and lack of confidence, Depression or emotional numbness, and Declining interest in real partners.

So why does all this happen? A lot of it can be understood through neuroplasticity, which is the brain ability to change by forming new neural connections over time.

Watching porn can actually alter structures in the brain through the release of specific neurochemicals.

These neurochemicals impact what’s called the Reward Circuit in your brain.

The Reward Circuit is an evolutionarily ancient part of our brains. Whenever this reward circuit is activated, our brains note that something important is happening that's worth remembering and repeating. 

This is where our moods arise out of, It's where our emotions are, it's the seat of our desires and our motivations, It's where we fall into and out of love, and it's where addiction happens.

Now, erections are powered by chemicals released in the brain’s reward center when a male sees something that turns him on. 

The problem for porn consumers is that they’ve hijacked their reward center by using porn to get it to overload on these chemicals, primarily dopamine.

When we get a spike of Dopamine our reward center tells us “I've got to have that”, whatever that thing is.

But here is the most important part: many people think that dopamine is released when their brain receives a reward or pleasure they are seeking, but dopamine is actually released in anticipation of a reward. 

It's important to know that dopamine isn't even associated with satisfaction, but rather with wanting and craving. It’s what motivates us to seek pleasure.

It's released in anticipation of something that's rewarding. That’s why we go after it. It’s the promise of the reward, whether we get it or not.

Other neurochemicals like endogenous opioids and endo-cannabinoids are released after a pleasurable experience like enjoying a fabulous meal or a mind blowing orgasm. 

These self-producing opioids and other feel good hormones are there to  help us to feel satiated and temporarily stop us from the seeking and craving craving cycle.  The problem is the dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system and so we are inclined to seek more than we are to be satisfied.

And because of our biological imperative to reproduce, sexual stimulation produces higher dopamine levels than any other reward-inducing behavior we engage in.

So we keep seeking. Not because it makes us feel good, but because of the promise that pleasure is just around the corner. If we can just get that fix, maybe we’ll be released from this constant craving. And yet, it is the very state of craving that we are addicted to in this loop.

Internet porn users can keep dopamine levels elevated for hours at a time by clicking from video to video, opening many tabs at once, and exploring new genres. This behavior is called edging and can be indicative of a problematic relationship to porn use. Dopamine is the “gotta get it!” neurochemical behind all motivation. Without it we wouldn’t bother to court, pursue sex, or even eat. When dopamine drops, so does motivation.

 Dopamine is the hook in all addictions. An addict’s brain grows less sensitive to it over time, and paradoxically, more desperate for larger doses of it. As a result, your brain responds by cutting down on the number of pleasure chemicals it produces and stops responding as well to the neurochemicals of satisfaction that are being released. In fact, porn consumption follows a very predictable pattern that’s eerily similar to drug use. Over time, excessive levels of the dopamine hit cause the porn viewer’s brain to develop tolerance, just like the brain of a drug user. In the same way that a junkie eventually requires more and more of a drug to get a buzz or even feel normal, regular porn consumers will end up turning to porn more often or seeking out more extreme versions—or both—to feel excited again.  This leads to a pattern of wanting it more, liking it less and finding less satisfaction. And once the porn habit is established, quitting can even lead to withdrawal symptoms similar to drugs. 

Pornographers are well aware of the science driving the male brain to perpetuate the species and have used it to their advantage to build a hundred Billion dollar industry.

Data is now at the core of the pornography business model. The industry has invested considerably in the creation of algorithms that  allow them to identify users as specific individuals. Every time you visit a porn site data is compiled on the type of videos you’re watching.

Here’s the clever part. Each time you return to the site, a tailored menu of videos likely to appeal to your sexual interests is waiting for you. There’s just one small difference, so subtle you wouldn’t notice. With every visit, the videos presented to you have become slightly more graphic. This is to keep those addictive dopamine levels high and to keep you coming back for more.

The internet pornography industry has used both it’s understanding of the neurochemicals associated with sex as well as their potential addictive qualities and has used this inherent weakness in your biology to mushroom into a multi-billion dollar business.

Now, let's take a look at what’s going on with your body when your brain’s on porn. In addition to rewiring your brain, porn is an experience that causes you to dissociate from your body. Which is such a shame since sex should be one of the most lucious embodied experiences, allowing us to drop out of our minds and fully into our bodies. When having a sexual experience with porn, stimulation is coming from an external, out-there source, which can make it very hard to be in your body. Just the act of closing your eyes during lovemaking enlivens the sexual experience enormously. Porn does not allow for that. It conditions you to have a sexual response to screens, constant novelty, and watching other people have sex. Not only that it perpetuates the myth that men are rockhard and women are ready for sex all the time, which we know is not true.

It also distorts your expectations of normal body image. Both those of your partner and of yourself. Let’s be real, most of the population does not have porn star bodies. 

Porn also encourages social isolation. Watching porn, in most cases, demands seclusion and secrecy. Anything done in secrecy can lead to shame or guilt which can make it difficult to share true intimacy with a partner. 

Another potential issue with pornography is that you become accustomed to having full control of the sexual experience. When you're masturbating to porn by yourself, you're fully in control of the speed, the amount of pressure used, the type of touch, even how long the sexual experience lasts. 

Not only that, when you add in a real person with real human needs, desires and insecurities, it's no longer a One Man Show. And if the majority of your experiences of sexual arousal are alone, with porn, then when the opportunity to have sex with a real person is presented you may not have developed the skills and tools needed to navigate a healthy sexual relationship. 

But one of the greatest benefits of having sex with another human being is the release of the neurochemicals oxytocin and vasopressin, the love drugs. 

These hormones are utilised to help you form a memory and connection between sexual satisfaction and the person or experience that delivered it.

In the case of porn use, this means that instead of bonding with real human your brain begins to bond with porn.

And why is that a problem? Because eventually, what started off as thrilling can leave you limp and frustrated.

And look, you may be thinking to yourself, “easy for you to say Kelley!  If I had getting laid enough by a real woman I wouldn’t have turned to porn in the first place”. And that may be true and valid. 

But here’s where things have got to change. Because porn hijacks your dopamine pathways. And dopamine is what motivates you in life. It’s what causes a man to get out there and conquer life so he can  conquer a mate. But you lose that drive when your stuck in a dopamine loop, watching other people get laid, leaving you unmotivated, drained and alone. Porn tricks the brain and steals a man’s healthy desire to for the real fuck.

But that’s not the end of the story. The good news is that even those with serious porn habits can break away and reclaim the power over their minds and cocks and have satisfying sex lives. 

When men can kick their porn habit, they start to recover their ability to become aroused by real-life intimacy and resolve their associated erectile difficulties. 

There is a lot of support online including group forums and porn detox programs. From my research, the best way to overcome a porn-induced erectile issue is to do what is referred to as a hard reboot. Which basically means quitting cold turkey. 

The amount of time it will take to recover full sexual function with an intimate partner depends on many factors, such as, how old you were when you started watching porn, how many years you have watched, what your watching habits are, and so on.  But I’ve heard many testimonials from self-proclaimed, long-term, hard-core addicts that were able to overcome their porn habit and are now enjoying hard erections and satifying sex lives.

As you learned at the beginning of this module, there is often more than one factor at play when it comes to ED. If you use porn habitually, this is something you need to consider. 

I’m not here to tell you you have to quit porn. I’m here to educate you and empower you to make healthy choices for yourself and to offer you tools to do that.

If you are ready for a hard reboot and to quit watching porn while we go through this course together, Fuckin’ right on!  I applaud you!

If you are not ready yet, no problem. 

But maybe you are ready to reduce the amount of time you watch or to cut out the more extreme genres. I suggest that anything that you can’t imagine actually doing in real life with a loving partner, you probably shouldn’t be watching.

Either way, what I will ask of you is that you simply notice your porn watching habits, with no shame, just as a neutral observer. Just notice yourself. What’s going on in your mind or body just before you flip on the screen. Is there an event that leads you to turn to porn, an emotion, a thought, a time of the day? How do you feel before, and how do you feel after? Get curious. And please report back. I really want to hear about your experience.

And regardless of whether this is a problem for you or not, I encourage you to check out the links in the resources section of this module that I have shared with you. On the resource page you will find links to my recommended websites on the subject with more research, stories and Porn Reboot support groups. 

This is a subject that every boy and man on the planet with access to the internet has to confront within himself. I don’t think it’s fair and it’s not his fault. It’s just part of our internet-driven consumerism society that puts profits above all else.

  So please have compassion with yourself and for the world you find yourself in.  But also be informed, and develop a strong determination to be the master of your mind and body and not merely a pawn to a money making machine that exploits your natural human urge for love, connection and sexual satisfaction.

This is a sensitive subject and not an easy issue to address without support. If you are in a partnership, I suggest that you share with your partner your struggle with porn and your desire to quit. Educate her a little and ask for her encouragement and patience as you go through the process of fully reclaiming your sexual function. If that doesn’t feel safe for you or you do not have a partner, then join a support group. And please share with the other men in our online forum, many of whom have the same struggles and can relate to your experience. 

It is absolutely possible to overcome porn-induced ED. If you believe this may be a source of your erectile issue, let me know. I will be here to encourage you, give you helpful tips and remind you how worthy you are to be enjoying healthy sexual pleasure with a loving real life partner.