The Hidden Brain Damage of Porn: What 10 Years of Use Does to Your Dopamine
Ever wonder why quitting porn feels impossible? Why willpower alone never seems to be enough? Why you can make it a few days or even weeks, only to crash harder than before?
Here's the truth: it's not a lack of discipline. It's your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Because when you understand the neuroscience behind porn addiction, suddenly everything makes sense. The fog lifts. The shame loses some of its power. And most importantly—you realize there's a real path forward.
Let's dive into what's really going on inside your brain.
What Does "Dependency" Actually Mean?
We throw around the word "addiction" a lot. But what are we really talking about when we say someone is dependent on pornography?
It's all in the word: dependency. You're developing an attachment to this thing where you've become dependent upon it. For what? As a way to cope, to numb, to escape feelings, to pull you out of whatever scenario or frustration or complicated thing you're in.
Now, dependency isn't inherently wrong or bad. We're all dependent on things—food, water, relationships, sleep. But when we develop dependency upon chemicals, substances, or pornography, it's actually really detrimental to your overall health, your humanity, and your relationships.
So let's talk about how dependency develops. Because there's a common and predictable pattern that follows how we get into this trap.
The 4-Stage Addiction Cycle That Keeps You Trapped
If you've struggled with porn, you know this cycle intimately. You might not have the words for it, but you've lived it over and over again.
Stage 1: The Trigger
There's some sort of trigger that pulls you in, that grabs your attention, that arouses your attention toward something—or makes you want to distract from it because something's painful, uncomfortable. You don't want to be here. You're bored. You're lonely. There's conflict. Whatever it is, there's a trigger.
Stage 2: The Craving (The Thrill of the Chase)
Then what follows is the craving phase. This is where the neurotransmitter dopamine flares up during the craving phase, which gets you to pursue something. It's the thrill of the chase.
When you've developed some sort of habitual pornography use, your brain says, "This is the shortcut to deal with all of the things we don't want to deal with right now." So craving hits. Your brain says, "Okay, just go use porn."
Stage 3: Temporary Relief
Pornography becomes the next phase—temporary relief. We crave. We go to porn because we're seeking temporary relief from the thing that's uncomfortable. Our boredom, our loneliness, our conflict, our frustration—whatever it may be that we don't want to deal with or feel in the moment, that's our temporary exit.
And I'm saying it's temporary. It doesn't feel temporary. It feels like, "Well, this is just going to fix this in the moment."
Stage 4: The Crash and Relapse
When it doesn't, we end up in the final stage of this pattern—the crash or the relapse. That's when we complete the acting out.
And it's not just a crash in terms of relapse. It's a crash in your neurotransmitters. Dopamine specifically—you crash hard.
The wave of neurotransmitters you were receiving during the chase and during orgasm—which involves not just pleasure but endorphins (a natural opioid to kill pain)—when that subsides, it's like, "Okay, I don't have that anymore, and I feel terrible."
Also, there are certain transmitters that affect mood. So you did feel really calm, elated, optimistic. And then when that wave of neurotransmitters subsides, it's like, "Oh, I crashed."
The Crash: Living Under a Fog
And man, that crash—you can't talk about how hard that is enough. Because most guys think, "Oh, yeah, there's a letdown afterwards."
But really, it can be almost a state that you live in until your next relapse.
Everything from low mood to irritability to restlessness—that can be a state that you wrestle with off and on until you're like, "Man, when can I get my next fix?"
Living in that space is horrible. It sucks. And then it's compounded by the emotional factor of shame, guilt, loneliness—all of it.
It really feels like you're living under a fog. And I say that because I lived in it for a long time.
Oftentimes—and this is unprompted by me—when I ask guys how they feel after they've got several weeks to a couple months of sobriety under their belt, they will describe it like a fog is lifted. They can see clearly. They can hear more clearly. They're more present to the world around them because they're not sort of locked in this box anymore.
How Dependency Actually Develops: The Four Key Factors
But the cycle in itself isn't dependency. There are elements to this that when the cycle is repeated, dependency develops. And there are four things that sort of define how dependency takes root.
1. Tolerance: Your Brain's New Baseline
The first one is tolerance. This is how much your brain can deal with, process, tolerate before it gets pushed over the edge.
Your brain gets used to this new baseline from the dopamine. And the tolerance develops because the same content will not continue to hit like it used to.
Here's how it works: Your brain has a baseline of activity. There are normal activities that give us certain neurochemicals, and we're used to that little hill. Then we come back to our baseline. There are also absences where we go a little bit below the baseline. So your brain is used to regulating around those ups and downs.
But when you go to a supernormal experience—something that is giving you an exorbitant amount of neurochemicals at a level that it's just totally not used to—it totally jacks up that normal ratio of ups and downs.
So what your brain says is, "Uh-oh, that's a problem. I need to lower my baseline because I can't sustain those super high highs."
When we talk about tolerance level, you've totally just messed with your window, and your new baseline has dipped.
Let's be specific: You're producing a little bit less dopamine. You're producing a little bit less adrenaline, less serotonin, because your brain is anticipating, "Oh, if we do that super high thing again, I need to prepare for it."
And so what that creates in the body is this need for, "I need another high to feel normal again." You need another big release to get back to your normal baseline. But in reality, your body keeps adjusting and lowering it. That's what we call tolerance. You need more to get the same effect because your body's trying to adjust and regulate.
2. Escalation: Why You Need More Extreme Content
There's always an escalation that occurs. Which is why you might think, "Well, it's just a little bit of pornography. I'm not cheating on my wife. I'm not doing anything crazy."
And the data says, if you stay in habitual pornography use for the long-term, you probably will end up there. Because there's always an escalation that occurs.
The same thing that got you the big dopamine hit doesn't get you the big dopamine hit tomorrow, or the next day, or the next year, or 10 years down the road. There's always an escalation. You always need more extreme or different content to get that same effect.
And if this sounds familiar—because it sounds like we're talking like a drug addiction—it's pretty similar.
When guys continue to lower that baseline and depend on supernormal experiences, more extreme experiences, more exciting experiences, the time in between gets more and more miserable.
So it's almost like the addiction cycle feels more enslaving, and it just feels more crappy to be apart from relapse. And man, is that miserable. You literally feel trapped.
3. Desensitization: When Nothing Feels Wrong Anymore
The next place we go after escalation is desensitization.
This happens throughout all of life. The more we're exposed to things, not just pornography—but it's especially harmful here because real sex, real emotions, real interactions with people don't feel as exciting anymore. They're muted.
Think of a sharp knife that's used to cutting and being effective and efficient. But if you use that on a piece of brick over and over again, that knife's going to get dull, and it's not going to work the way it used to. It's just not.
And this is important because as things escalate and we're exposed to more extreme content and more extreme forms of acting out, we get desensitized to ourselves and how we're showing up.
And we start to believe, "This isn't as bad as other people might think it is. I'm not really that bad. I'm not really doing that extreme stuff. This is normal"—because you've gotten used to it.
And that puts you in a very dangerous place. It's really hard to see a way out. It's really hard to see yourself honestly in that place.
What's Happening in Your Brain: The Science Behind the Struggle
The parts of our brain we're talking about here—some of the main activity is what's in the front of our brain, which is often called our frontal lobe. A piece of that is called our prefrontal cortex.
That part of our brain is the reasoning, reflecting, evaluating part of our brain. It's meant to be like a CEO of all our functioning to say, "Hold on. Before I just live impulsively, let me study the information. Let me make some discerning decisions here."
When you train that part of your brain to basically shut down and just listen to the limbic system—the reactive, emotional, impulsive part of our brain—when we train through repetition to have the front part of our brain shut down, what we're also weakening, what we're also starving, is the ability to discern in those circumstances.
You're talking about the front part of your brain not being used to evaluating. It's not used to reflecting. It's not used to entering in that space. And so it's not that you've caused brain damage. You've just weakened that part of your brain activity.
And that's why we say for guys, overall, it doesn't just connect to sex. Your brain operates in all spaces of life.
So if you're overall weakening the discerning part of your brain, in general, you're going to be more of an impulsive person than a reflective, discerning person. And man, that's a struggle. It's no way to live.
Brain Scans Don't Lie: Visible Proof of Porn's Impact
So how does that show up? There's some interesting data talking about brain scans.
We can measure this biologically or medically. There are actually scans that show different aspects of our brain when they're active. And really, what it's measuring is blood flow, electricity.
But what's so fascinating is they'll do brain scans of somebody who has had a compulsive porn habit. And the combination of supernormal experiences engaging only certain parts of their brain while other parts of their brain are kind of just uninvolved or overridden—what happens is less blood flow, less activity is happening in those parts of the brain.
And it's so fascinating. You can just Google this, actually. You could do a "porn addiction brain scan." And you can see—I think they did a scan of someone who was involved in porn for like 10-plus years.
And the result is a lot less parts of their brain began to light up on the scan because it just was underused and therefore weakened.
So man, that's crazy to me that you can actually measure that and see that. But I guess I'm also speaking to the guy who feels the actual practical effects of that.
Why Normal Life Feels Boring: The Loss of Everyday Pleasure
One thing we talked about with your baseline being lowered, with your front part of your brain being weakened, is actually both your dopamine and the front part of your brain—there's another part that if you want to Google it, it's the nucleus accumbens, which is actually in your limbic system.
When the front part of your brain and that part work together, it knows how to associate healthy reward with normal activity. To say, "Oh, wow, a beautiful sunset. I really appreciate that. I enjoy that."
But when you become wired by high stimulation, low effort—I can click on something and have a supernormal experience—what your brain eventually does is say, "I need that to get any type of reward, to feel any type of pleasure."
So man, what you actually experience in your day-to-day life over a period of time is just almost a loss of enjoyment. A medical term would be anhedonia. You lose pleasure. You lose enjoyment in some of the normal rhythms of life.
And man, that's horrible.
You're almost walking around needing a fix to feel normal. But you're also walking around with an inability to enjoy the beauty of natural things, like relational presence, beauty in nature, accomplishing a task at work. And man, that's also really hard.
It's like once you go down that pathway and you develop those neural pathways, the outworking of that is that it reinforces that behavior.
So if you are feeling down and normal life is just not as enjoyable, well, you're probably more likely to stay inside and not have good relationships and be glued to a screen and just keep seeking that fix, which is terrible.
That's why we refer to it as a pattern and a cycle, because you literally do get stuck. And your brain is reinforcing you, trying to keep you there and keep you stuck.
The Boredom Problem: Why It Feels Unbearable
I don't know if our listeners can relate with this too, but one of the most common effects that's reported for guys is what I would call normal boredom. I'm not being stimulated currently. I don't have something to engage me.
Or I'm just going through a normal level of discomfort with a certain thing that's happening in my day.
Those normal things—which, if we're at a healthy baseline, we know how to adapt and have flexibility there—but when your baseline is deeply lowered, boredom and discomfort feels like hell.
It's like, "I cannot sit in this state." It's almost like an inability to function in that state.
And by the way, a lot of young people, adolescents, kids, have that same effect with a dependency on a screen, because it engages some of those same neurotransmitters and their baseline drops. So boredom to them, they just can't handle it.
And I think a lot of even clinicians are saying, "Is this actual ADD or ADHD? Do they have attention deficit disorder? Or is it normally just that their brain has been so adjusted to high stimulation, low effort, that they need a healthy withdrawing period, like a detox period, and it'll naturally heal on its own?"
Man, it's fascinating.
And the good news with kids is that it will. It will heal naturally, because the neuroplasticity is off the charts, especially when compared with adults.
The Beauty of Boredom: A Different Perspective
I'm thinking about the times that my kids will come to me occasionally and say that they're bored. And I don't know if this is right, but I'll respond kind of enthusiastically. And I say things like, "Good. Now you have an opportunity for some creative parts of your brain to develop."
And they're like, "Well, what can I do?"
I'm like, "I'm not going to give you what you can do. I'm going to be present with you while you sit in that discomfort. And think of something creative that you can do, not to just occupy your time, but something that's engaging and fun and that you want to move toward."
I had some very wise people in the field of not only psychotherapy but neuroscience speak to the fact that boredom is beautiful because of two things:
One: It's an affirmation of stability. If I don't feel like I'm on edge or something's being demanded of me, then I can't be bored without that. So it's almost a reassurance of stability.
Two: It's also an invitation to creativity. I have the space to be like, "Hmm, what could I do?" Instead of what's just being demanded of me.
And a lot of times I think I'm guilty of that, saying like, "Boredom is bad." And actually, there's a lot of beauty behind it that we often overlook.
How Porn Destroys Your Ability to Connect: Empathy, Objectification, and Narcissism
Let me jump to one more thing before we wrap up. In this whole conversation of dependency, tolerance, and how it's working in our brain, there is one more aspect that I often love to share with guys ahead of time.
There's a part of your brain, parts of your brain, that are specifically attuned to relational connection. These are the means by which we can have empathy.
I can begin to feel what another person is going through. It can anticipate another's emotion. It can also help us regulate, like, "How can I best respond to this person?" It's the normal parts of our brain that are engaged in any sort of relationship, right?
And it has to do with the connection between the front part of our brain, and there's actually two lobes on the sides of our brain. If you want to specifically look it up, it'd be the prefrontal cortex again, and what's called the anterior insula.
Here's what's so sad, so heavy about this: Those are parts of our brain that are bypassed. They become weakened. We can prove this through brain scans.
Objectification: When People Become Objects
So what's the practical result of that? Well, one thing is when those relational parts of us shut down and we stop seeing people as people, we begin to operate with a level of objectification across the board.
So depending on what gender we're attracted to, we begin to see that gender as an object. "Will this stimulate me or not?" And I use the word "it" intentionally. We stop seeing it as a person created in God's image, and we say—let me be blunt—"Are they hot? Are they sexually attractive?"
And if not, I'm going to move my attention somewhere else. And then even if someone is attractive to us, it's "What can I get from that person, that relationship?" instead of "How do I show up and also acknowledge their needs and personhood?"
The Porn-to-Narcissism Pipeline
And one more thing with that, just because I think it's worth mentioning: They've also been doing some studies and trends, specifically with sexual addiction. And they've noticed that those who have struggled with it for a prolonged period of time, one of the results is they naturally develop—the addict develops—a very egocentric or a narcissistic persona.
Those big words mean I have a super elevated view of myself, which is actually rooted in insecurity and pain. But I have this mode of living that says, "The best way I can deal with that insecurity and pain is to make it all about me."
Which, again, the pattern of high stimulation, low effort, "you please me," and objectification just feeds into that. And so our brain is trained to naturally be egocentric, arrogant.
And goodness, yeah, that's just some of the ways that porn can impact us—again, in our brain, but also in the way that we live.
Why We Say "Porn Not Even Once"
That's why we say porn not even once. There's no safe amount of porn you can engage in. It's always affecting you in ways that we don't always understand and we don't always see.
There's Hope: Your Next Steps Forward
I know we've covered a lot of heavy material here. We're going a little bit more into the details of the science of the struggle.
But honestly, the reason we talk about this is because this informs our model of how we care for individuals.
So if this is something that—maybe you're just looking for guidance on what's the best step, or if you're interested in recovery coaching—please reach out to Nick and me. We just call it a discovery call. It's a free opportunity to connect with us, not a robot. And you can talk through where you're at.
And our goal is actually not, "How do we sign you up for something?" Our goal is, "What would be the next best step for you? And how can we do that?"
We're in this whole space because our biggest goal is: How do we let people experience God's grace and healing in the same way it was given to us?
FREE Resource: The Quit Porn Quick Start Guide
Before I go, I want to tell you about something. I wrote a book called The Quit Porn Quick Start Guide. It's everything that I wish I had access to when I first started trying to quit porn. It's not everything, but it will get you started. It's a pretty low barrier for entry—just like, "Hey, I want to quit porn. I don't know where to start." This is it. This is literally where you start.
Don't wait. Grab one of these. I want to give it to you. I think it's really helpful.
Final Thought: You Don't Have to Face This Alone
Listen, I get it. Understanding the neuroscience doesn't make the struggle easier overnight. But it does give you something powerful: clarity.
When you realize your brain isn't broken, it's just been trained, suddenly there's hope. Because what's been trained can be retrained. What's been weakened can be strengthened. The fog can lift.
You don't have to face this alone. There's a real path forward.
Keep showing up. We'll catch you next time.
For more tools, resources, and information about our coaching, check out rscky.com/getstarted.