Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

In the 21st century, with the development of the Internet, porn spread rapidly across the globe. Every day, 68 million search queries related to porn are generated, which means that, every second, 79 people are searching for porn to masturbate to.

Just as porn became increasingly public in recent years, so has the information about the negative effects of it. If you’re reading this article, you clearly want to stop watching this content, and seek motivation to do it.

In this article, we’ll explore reasons to stop watching porn, how they impact your and other people’s lives, and steps you can take to quit this bad habit. Let’s begin.

Important Reasons to Stop Watching Porn

At a first glance, porn seems like a fun way of coping with your sexual urges and experiencing your sexual fantasies when you have no partner.

In reality, sex in porn and sex in real life differ vastly, and that makes porn a mere representation of various sexual fantasies. There are countless dangers that come with this fact, both to yourself and society in general.

The first and most significant reason to stop watching porn is that it fuels your lust.

1: It Fuels Your Lust

Thoughts in our brains are amplified by the actions we regularly do. If you lift weights regularly and stay committed to fitness, you think more about it, and that again leads to lifting more weights and optimizing your rest for maximum progress.

The same principle applies here, except this time it causes regress instead of progress. The more you watch porn, and the more violent or niche it is, the more you have sexual fantasies, and the more porn you crave.

In scientific terms, viewing porn causes unnaturally high releases of dopamine, a hormone of pleasure and motivation, which desensitizes the brain to it and makes it dependent on porn for pleasure.

Lust is one of the worst states that exists. If you let it into your mind, it will draw countless fantasies inside your brain, cloud your thinking, and force you to engage in actions you’ll later regret, which isn’t only watching porn.

I’m absolutely certain that, if you’re reading this article, you are sick of constantly succumbing to lust. The good news is that abstaining from porn weakens lust over time, and makes it much easier to deal with it.

2: It Causes Extreme Shame

Another reason to stop watching porn is the shame that it causes. Some people don’t like to admit it, but whenever they jerk off to artificial sex, they feel ashamed with themselves and their choices in life.

I’ve seen many people argue that this shame arises from one’s perception of porn as immoral and sinful. As we’ll later find out, this perception of watching porn is completely valid and necessary in quitting this habit.

The animal part of your brain believes that it achieves something by receiving “sex”, but the newest part of it, which is the prefrontal cortex, consciously realizes that this act is shameful and doesn’t contribute to the quality of your life.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to quit watching porn, for it causes shame and self-loathing that can be easily avoided by investing time into other, more useful activities (which we’ll discuss later in the article, so stay around).

If you have long-term goals, you should pay special attention to the next reason to stop watching porn. Porn takes directly affects your ambition and desire to achieve.

Related article: How to Deal With Guilt and Shame

3: It Kills Your Ambition

One of the greatest dangers of porn is that it kills your drive to achieve. As a man, one of the greatest motivators of effort and achievement is increasing one’s attractiveness to women. We are genetically wired to seek to improve ourselves to get the best possible partner.

However, when you watch porn regularly, your sensitivity to sexual stimuli weakens. Your brain thinks that, if you receive a lot of “sex”, you have achieved the ultimate peak of male existence, and can therefore ease up on your efforts.

This explains why you feel so lazy, weak, and lethargic after jerking off: your brain thinks that it accomplished everything it needs, while in reality, you wasted time on playing with yourself instead of actually working.

Moreover, porn overstimulates your brain with ultra-processed information, limiting its ability to function properly and focus on the task at hand, which explains why you can’t focus after beating your meat.

If you have dreams and goals you want to accomplish, you need to stop watching porn. Abstaining from it and focusing on accomplishing tasks and good habits consistently leads to great results over time.

If that isn’t enough to convince you to stop, you should remember that there is evidence that porn causes erectile dysfunction.

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4: It Causes Erectile Dysfunction

Yes, that’s right: masturbating to porn consistently greatly elevates the risk of erectile dysfunction and delayed ejaculation. That’s because you can develop a tolerance to masturbation, just like any other drug.

Your brain becomes more and more numb to sexual stimuli with every time you watch porn, and therefore, you need more time and effort to achieve the same pleasure and orgasm you had before.

Moreover, when you watch porn and jerk off, you limit blood flow to the penis by gripping and holding it in your hand, which can damage blood vessels and affect blow flow to this area.

Dopamine also plays a role in this. As said before, porn causes extremely high dopamine release, damaging the brain’s sensitivity to it. Therefore, porn also damages your ability to experience sexual pleasure with every session.

Not only does this affect your hormones and genitals’ work, but it also causes problems in your relationship (or in acquiring it, if that’s your case).

Recommended article: 9 Bad Habits That Will Ruin Your Life

5: It Ruins Your Relationship

Although some couples benefit from porn by watching it together and discussing their sexual preferences, it causes severe damage in other cases.

As discussed before, porn strengthens your lust, making you more likely to be dissatisfied with your woman and cheat on her. Porn regularly depicts women with unrealistic body features and proportions, ones that 90% of women don’t have.

There have been cases when husbands were so addicted to porn that they preferred jerking off to it than having sex with their wives. Needless to say, such situations cause problems in sexual life, frequent conflicts, and, in many cases, breakups.

It doesn’t stop there. Regularly viewing porn makes you objectify women, making you needy, creepy, and unattractive to them, cutting your chances of getting a partner down to zero.

You shouldn’t rely on a relationship to be happy, but if you seriously consider getting a girlfriend or being a good partner, you should cut out porn as soon as possible.

Porn isn’t only detrimental to your health and relationships. It is also damaging to society, in particular, the actors that participate in its production.

Related article: How to Be a Better Man for Her

6: It Ruins People’s Lives

Let’s move on to discussing some dark, but important topics. In many cases, production of porn is an unethical and cruel process that has long-term consequences for actors and actresses.

Porn studios, especially smaller ones, often mistreat their workers, forcing them to perform in scenes they’d rather not be in, denying them pay, and even forcefully giving them drugs to enhance their performance on camera.

A good example of this is the infamous GirlsDoPorn, an American adult studio and website that operated from 2009 to 2020 with ties to MindGeek (now rebranded as Aylo), the  company owning Pornhub and Brazzers.

They’ve committed many crimes, but in short, they primarily hired college students, promising them quick and easy cash in return for modeling services. In reality, however, they were forced to act in violent porn for hours straight, often while being abused and drugged.

The studio is now defunct, and there are some studios that produce adult films ethically. Nevertheless, this is just one example, and there are hundreds of studios committing the same crimes against their workers.

Moreover, the actors were traumatized for life, and most of them received only a fraction of the money they were promised in the contract.

I didn’t even mention how most porn actresses struggle with acquiring normal jobs after finishing their careers, or how many of them die of drug overdose in an attempt to forget their existential dread.

You can argue that these women are adults, and that they consciously made their choices. This claim is completely valid, but do you still want to contribute to their misery and increase the demand for their services, trapping them in this terrible industry?

Speaking about being trapped. Millions of people, including children, are sexually enslaved and exploited, largely thanks to porn.

7: It Contributes to International Slavery

Now, how does porn contribute to sex slavery? After all, governments work on taking down illegal studios, especially in the western world.

You see, unlimited availability of porn increases the number of people that can watch it, pleasure themselves, and desire more intense services. Therefore, porn increases the demand for sexual labor and prostitution, which is often illegal.

Thousands of innocent women and children get kidnapped by trafficking groups through false promises of high financial reward or other methods every year, and sold to brothels or individual clients to do sex work they did not consent to.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), around 4,8 million people are victims of sex trafficking, while most of them are women and minors.

They are extensively used to film illegal porn, forced to engage in sexual acts with highly specific and often violent kinks with zero regard for their safety of wellbeing.

It is rare to see pornography users attempt to buy sex, especially if prostitution is illegal in the places they live in. However, some desperate users purchase sex, including sex from trafficked women and children, contributing to the suffering of millions.

If you don’t want to indirectly contribute to increasing the demand for illegal sexual exploitation, you should quit consuming porn. You shouldn’t beat yourself up for relapsing, but you should be mindful of the effects of your actions on you and other people.

Finally, the last reason to stop watching porn is that it takes away your life.

8: It Takes Away Your Life

Happiness is the ultimate goal of our existence. We desire to feel calm, relaxed, enthusiastic about what we do, and have healthy relationships with like-minded people.

Guess what? Porn takes all of that away, especially when its consumption gets out of control. The most obvious reason for this is that it takes away the time you could’ve spent on healthier activities.

Aside from that, it literally takes away your joy and energy after you finish another session of jerking off. After beating your meat, all you feel afterwards is weakness, lazyness, shame, and self-loathing.

Can you work on yourself, build healthy habits, and find your tribe when you experience these states on a near-constant basis? Of course not. Porn takes away your self-respect, happiness, and contentment with life, only giving 5 seconds of pleasure in return.

After all the individual and societal damage of porn we’ve discussed, do you still want to associate yourself with this activity and do it, even for 5 minutes a day?

I’m 100% certain the answer is no. So, now that you have the reasons to quit, how do you actually do it?

The Bottom Line

Porn is immoral, harmful, and damaging, and you should stay away from it as much as possible. It isn’t enough to just install a NSFW blocker on your devices, though: if you don’t have proper hobbies or things to do, you’ll find a way to bypass it.

I’ve found by experience that the most effective ways of quitting porn are occupying yourself as much as possible and eliminating internal triggers, which is basically not letting even a single sexual fantasy inside your brain.

You may argue that sexual thoughts are normal should not be supressed. You’re partially correct, but in most cases, sexual fantasies only distract you from what’s important and cloud your mind when you don’t want them to.

How to Quit Watching Porn

Here are some ways to manage triggers and occupy yourself to stop watching porn:

• Meditate 10-20 minutes every morning
• When urges appear, breathe deeply and imagine them fading away
• Occupy yourself with useful hobbies instead of scrolling
• Go outside and visit a park, library, or cafe
• Lift weights 3-4 times a week (if you already lift, do it more intensely)
• Replace lustful thoughts with thoughts about a pure traditional woman
• Do not shame or beat yourself for failing, but move on to a productive activity
• Remind yourself of the 8 reasons above

There are many reasons to stop watching porn. If you implement all these tips, you’ll break free from this habit, and learn to genuinely enjoy life again. They also work when quitting other addictions, so you should definitely start doing them after reading this article.

I applaud you for reading this far, for it shows your dedication to change and self-improvement. Remember: energy and persistence conquer all things.

Work, go to the gym, stay loyal to God, and be a good person. Good luck, and see you soon, brother.

If you liked this article and found it useful, make sure to share it on social media and leave a comment below. See you next time.