What Are The Effects On Brain Due To Addiction

Human brain is basically the biological anchor of the human’s psychological experiences and it is therefore helpful to understand how it actually works. Knowing exactly how the brain is wired would help in understanding how a porn addiction physically changes your brain. Porn actually changes individuals in myriad subtle ways. However, it is not fully understood how it affects people. Right from sabotaging relationships to shrinking of the brain, listed below are a few ways in which porn addiction has an effect on the brain.

Seem to Need More

When people watch porn, dopamine floods certain region of the brain which causes an intense feeling of delight. If this pleasure response gets triggered again and again, a person would require a bigger hit in order to feel a response. This means that you would seem to need more to feel something.

Short-term Mentality

Being addicted to porn might also make people start valuing immediate payoffs rather than delayed gratification. A research was organised wherein one group of people were asked to abstain from their favourite food while the other group was asked not to watch porn for three weeks. The people who were abstained from porn exhibited a rather lower rate of delay discounting. This means that they were willing to wait for a longer period for their reward. Delay discounting refers to the phenomenon wherein the reward has a lesser value if the person has to wait for a longer period in order to get it. So researchers have found that avoiding porn can put people into a more long-term mindset.

Triggers Neurons in the Brain

Sexually explicit material is known to trigger the mirror neuron in the brain of a male. These neurons that are involved in the process of mimicking behaviour have a motor system which correlates to the planning of how a person is to behave. In the case of porn, the mirror neuron triggers the arousal which leads to the building up of a sexual tension and therefore for the need of an outlet. People often fail to understand as to how a porn addiction physically changes your brain. The reality is basically when a person acts; it leads to neurological and hormonal consequences that are designed so as to bind the individual to the object that he has his focus on. Pornography thus subjugates the viewer and hijacks the biological response that has been intended to bond a man and his wife.

Shrinks the Brain

Porn is also known to shrink the brain. Men who are addicted to porn have a smaller brain volume as well as fewer connections in the striatum as compared to those who do not watch porn. However, it is not that porn particularly shrinks the brain. The same regions of the brain shrink as in the people who suffer from alcoholism or depression. It might be possible that people who are depressed watch porn. So, porn might not work alone to shrink the size of the brain.

Porn changes the brain and the way in which men view women. People start expecting more out of their sexual relationships and end up being disappointed often.