Can Porn Demotivate and Make You Lazy?
In this video, clinical psychologist Luke Vu explores the intricate relationship between porn consumption and motivation. Learn how excessive porn use can lead to demotivation and a lack of productivity.
In this video we’re gonna do a quick recap of how pornography can hook you and how it can affect your motivation in the more general context of porn use. Now psychologists like to nerd out and break down motivation into drive, desire, incentives and behaviour patterns. Most patients use the term unmotivated to refer to as uninterested or lazy so that’s what we’re going to look at in this video.
Quick disclaimer, I’m not your psych, and this isn’t treatment; if you need a psych, you should find a registered qualified psych in your area.
What is the brain’s reward system and how is it affected by dopamine
Our brains - are complex - with many different interacting systems that reward and shape behavior. Neurotransmitters such as serotonin, endorphins and dopamine are involved in the motivation and the reward of simple and complex behaviors.
For example, we know that:
Serotonin is involved in the regulation of mood and prosocial behaviors,
Endorphins are involved in pain relief and euphoria, we experience this during exercise or laughter.
Dopamine is the most discussed neurotransmitter in addiction, because it is heavily involved in anticipation and receipt of predicted rewards.
Dopamine is the “get after it” signal when you think you’re going to get an expected reward. Dopamine does not only reward behavior, it drives goal oriented behavior and dopamine spikes when reward is uncertain.
How does porn interact with dopamine?
First, pornography is a supernormal stimulus. It elicits a greater arousal response than what we have evolutionarily adapted to. Sex is inherently interesting to us as a species, and novel sex is even more interesting. Online pornography is endlessly novel and this constant uncertainty from what new video is out there creates the ideal setup for maximum dopamine output.
As you search, find and satisfy yourself - the drive to repeat this behaviour pattern gets stronger. However, dopamine overstimulation is thought to result in desensitization or down-regulation. Our brains will naturally calibrate and down-regulate the amount of dopamine you can get from a specific source
Arguably this results in two outcomes:
One, you start to build a tolerance to amount of porn you consume and Two, you will have to increase the intensity of use to feel the same level of excitement that you felt at the beginning. Porn will take up more of your time while giving the same amount of reward. Over years, this pattern can become so ingrained that it’s argued that longer term structural and connectivity brain changes can be observed.
Now, this is largely still an active area of research.
It’s not clear if this is happening in everyone or mostly observed in severe chronic cases - and if dopamine is even the best way to think about this problem. So now that you have enough context about dopamine
Lets pause the neuroscience for a second and ask
Source: inspa_makers, Unsplash
How does chronic porn use make you lazy?
I think it's really helpful to see the context in which porn is used, rather than the brain mechanisms.
There are three main points here,
1) Disturbed Sleep Patterns:
Problematic pornography use often impairs healthy sleep patterns. It is often consumed late at night when your partner is sleeping at the cost of adequate sleep, for months and years. Sleep deprivation has huge impacts on a range of areas such as decision making, stress tolerance, emotion regulation and you guessed it dopamine regulation.
Lets face it, you’re not gonna make it to that early gym session, lecture or meeting if you've been binging porn all night.
2) Emotional and Experiential Avoidance
Pornography can also be excessively used as a procrastination tactic when faced with daunting tasks like assessments, life admin, work presentations. In this way, pornography is used as an unhelpful distraction or coping tool to manage mild anxiety or stress. Sometimes, pornography is also used to temporarily manage mood symptoms -
When we experience difficult emotions and we seek to avoid them by using a powerful or addictive stimulus,
When we feel worthless or down, sexual stimuli can engage us away from painful thoughts.
We often make the problem worse and reinforce the pattern of seeking temporary relief rather than investing in a longer term solution
3) Inhibited Brain Function
Pornography also has some unique short term effects on risk taking and executive functioning. When we are in a sexually aroused state and pornography we’re often impaired in thinking about long term goals and take more risks. We’re more impulsive and take less time to make decisions and are more emotional. In a way we enter the mind state that favors short term goals rather than long term outcomes. From the brain science perspective, activity in the Prefrontal cortex, the center for rational logic becomes inhibited by the amygdala - the center for emotion and sexual arousal as well as the nucleus accumbens - the center for reward and motivation.
These are only some of the contextual factors that affect your motivation. We haven’t even covered how relationship stress of pornography beliefs can affect your drive to connect or seek romantic relationships (that’s for another video)
Does desensitization from one source of dopamine affect how much dopamine you can get from other sources?
It is possible that chronic overstimulation of dopamine can lead to dysregulation of the dopamine system, such that you can view other activities as less rewarding and become disinterested. We often see this in addiction treatment, especially with substances that directly affect dopaminergic pathways such as cocaine, - a very common experience for those in recovery is intense boredom and inability to become excited.
However, although it is possible that contextual factors such as the ones above can play a massive role for the majority of problematic pornography users.
We are way more complex and there are many more interacting factors at play for motivation to simply be a function of just dopamine.
If my porn use is regulated is this something to worry about?
Not really, if your porn use is regulated -
you dont exceed more than you intend to,
you are deliberate about the categories you consume,
you regularly take breaks and have other healthy avenues for sexual expression and no negative impact on your quality of life.
You’re golden.
And if you’re struggling, reach out to a mental health professional
I’m Luke Vu, clinical psychologist. Be kind, be you. Catch you next time