Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

Do you feel like your porn use is getting out of control? Have you ever thought that you display clear signs of porn addiction, and feel unable to stop?

You aren’t the only one facing this struggle. According to Semrush, as of 2024, Pornhub is the 7th most popular website on the Internet, gaining 5.5 billion visits per year and having only 20.3% bounce rate (which means that users often browse multple pages looking for ‘videos’).

Pornhub even managed to surpass other major sites like X (Twitter), WhatsApp, ChatGPT, and even Bing – the world’s 4th most popular search engine!

Porn addiction has become so normalized that few people realize how destructive watching artifical sex for hours can get.

In this article, we’ll explore 8 signs you have a porn addiction, how they can manifest in your daily life, and strategies you can use to break free from its chains. Let’s begin.

Alarming Signs You Have a Porn Addiction

Porn addiction isn’t officially recognized in the medical community. Nevertheless, millions of people suffer from it, as porn interferes with their work, relationships, downtime, and responsibilities.

There are various signs you have a porn addiction, and the most obvious one is the frequent urge to consume it.

1: You Feel the Frequent Need to Watch It

Picture this: you’re scrolling through social media, skipping random posts you find uninteresting, and becoming bored with every passing minute.

Suddenly, you feel an intense desire to pleasure yourself, and, whether consciously or not, you want this urge to stop. You don’t get any genuine enjoyment from porn cravings, just strong, persistent internal pressure to stop resisting.

Unlike other negative emotions, like anger, sadness, fear, or greed, porn cravings often appear out of nowhere. While the former emotional states require external triggers to manifest, porn cravings arise at any moment, even when there aren’t any stimuli.

When you reach a point when porn cravings appear randomly, spontaneously, and intensely, that’s when you know you’re developing a porn addiction.

Another sign you have a porn addiction is the inability to control these spontaneous urges.

Related article: How to Deal With Temptation: 8 Ways to Overcome Lust

2: You Feel Unable to Stop Consuming It

It’s relatively easy to stop playing video games and using social media with the right mindset. After all, once you recognize they don’t bring much value into your life and find better alternatives, you stop wanting to use them as much.

Porn is a different story. Just like other drugs, it creates so much pleasure in your nervous system that this system eventually gets numb to more natural stimuli, like drinking water or getting outside.

Additionally, it easily satisfies our most intense, primal desire: reproduction. Instead of working hard on your appearance, character, and mastery, you can just make a few clicks and immediately get artificial sex.

That’s why porn is so hard to resist: it manipulates you through offering an easy replacement for meaningful relationships, something that countless modern men struggle to get.

If you can’t resist porn cravings and lose to them in most cases, that’s a clear sign you have a porn addiction.

It’s one thing to masturbate to porn once in a while; the other is to find sole pleasure and enjoyment in masturbation to pixels on the screen.

3: You Only Feel Happy When Watching Porn

In a study from 2014, it was revealed that nearly 70% of boys and 40% of girls get exposed to pornographic content by the age of 13.

Considering how much the Internet has evolved and expanded over the last 10 years, it’s safe to say that these figures have increased dramatically since then.

Every day, millions of children worldwide get exposed to harmful content they’re not supposed to see, and it greatly affects their brain development. They learn that porn brings enjoyment while not requiring great monetary or energy investment.

Later in life, this leads to extreme consumption of porn, lack of interest in other activities, and even stronger urges with each completed jerking session.

Sounds familiar? If it does, listen: consuming porn doesn’t truly eliminate the cravings. It only intensifies existing unhealthy patterns in the brain and causes even worse urges in the future.

The more you watch porn, the more likely you’ll withdraw from the real world, abandon hobbies, productive pursuits, and be consumed by this terrible addiction. The situation is even more dangerous if you use porn to cope with stress.

Recommended article: How to Be Happy in Any Situation

4: You Use Porn to Cope With Stress

Moderate stress is great for us. It forces us to focus, complete tasks effectively, and go past our normal limits. But that’s only if this stress lasts for a couple of hours.

When stress becomes chronic, that’s when the real problems arise. Since your mind constantly feels in danger and awaits hostile attacks, it depletes its resources at an alarmingly high rate and becomes easily irritable.

Unresolved internal problems accumulate over time, and to deal with them, people often escape through indulging in substances and entertainment, which porn is a part of.

The more you watch porn when feeling stressed, the more your body associates stress relief with jerking off. This creates a dangerous pattern where you can’t regulate negative emotions or succeed in difficult scenarios without using porn.

Using masturbation as the main method of stress relief is a major sign of porn addiction that shouldn’t be ignored. Another dangerous pattern is when the adult content you consume becomes increasingly more violent as time goes by.

Related article: How to Erase Negative Thoughts For Good

5: You Consume Extreme and Violent Content

Porn addiction develops slowly, but steadily: at first, it’s just a few pictures of women posing in underwear. Then, it turns into consuming videos of sexual intercourse.

After several months, such content no longer satisfies developing addicts, and it further escalates into more niche, violent material, where actors are forced to perform in scenes they find humiliating.

I won’t describe exactly what types of content can be considered extreme, but you can probably guess yourself. More humiliation, more pain, and more suffering for all parties involved.

Once again, your brain constantly learns and evolves based on external stimuli it receives. When you keep jerking off to violent scenes, your brain starts associating making love with humiliation and degeneracy.

Not only is this harmful for your cognitive development, mental health, and self-respect, but it also causes problems in your sexual life and relationships (which we’ll discuss later).

Observe what kind of content you’ve consumed in the last several months. Did you keep the intensity same, lowered it down, or escalated it to dangerous levels?

No matter what the answer is, you should reflect on the impact porn has on your brain, and consider quitting it for good.

This is especially valid if you feel shame after every finished porn session. 

Related article: 8 Red Flags in Yourself (& How to Fix Them)

6: You Feel Shame After Watching Porn

Back when I was addicted to porn myself, I’ve had ‘pre-nut delusions’ of how good jerking off to spicy videos would feel. When I actually did it, however, all I felt was shame and regret.

• Why did I do that?
• I could’ve spent my time on something better.
• I’m a failure.
• I’ll never attract anyone.

If these thoughts run through your head after viewing porn, it’s a direct sign that you should reconsider your life choices. Those who deny the harmful effects of pornography are simply in denial of their own addiction and shame.

The reason why porn triggers guilt is obvious: every time you masturbate to Internet porn, you steal some happiness and enjoyment from your future self.

This cycle of guilt and self-doubt doesn’t only drain your self-esteem; it keeps you trapped in a cycle of temporary pleasure and long-term dissatisfaction.

Is feeling 5 seconds of empty pleasure worth hating yourself for the next several hours, or even days? Definitely not.

Even despite this realization, many men still continue viewing porn, simply because they’re so used to this sexual stimulus. This is an obvious sign of porn addiction, and if you relate to it, there’s a high chance you need to change your lifestyle.

Another sign you have a porn addiction is a chronic feeling of isolation from other people.

Recommended article: How to Deal With Guilt and Shame

7: You Feel Chronically Isolated From Others

To be fair, a lot more people are struggling socially nowadays. There is a lack of third places, social media is making millions of people more narcissistic, and people have less reasons or opportunities to meaningfully interact with each other.

With the decline of social life and fulfilling connections, more and more people suffer from chronic loneliness, which they try to cope with through substances, social media, and dating apps (which, ironically, make dating even more frustrating).

How is porn involved with this problem? Thanks to porn, men and women feel like they don’t need a partner, since they can easily satisfy sexual urges without experiencing heartbreak or stress of real relationships.

As a result of porn and social media addiction, people are becoming lonelier and increasingly disconnected from one another, which causes depression, hopelessness, and even physical symptoms like chronic headaches.

In case you relate to this, I want you to remember: porn isn’t a substitute for relationships. It’s merely a fantasy created by corporations to profit off of you through countless advertisements.

Other than feelings of chronic isolation, the last and most serious sign you have a porn addiction is the appearance of physical symptoms.

Recommended article: How to Enjoy Life as an Introvert

8: You’ve Developed Physical Symptoms

In extreme cases, porn addiction can get so bad that an addict may develop physical symptoms, like erectile dysfunction, low testosterone, and irritation.

While the link between excessive porn consumption and symptoms like low T or sexual dysfunction is yet to be proven, it’s indisputable that there is a strong correlation between them.

The more you masturbate to porn, the more you sexually numb yourself, and the more difficult it becomes to get and maintain an erection.

Additionally, you lose motivation to do anything productive. Why try exercising, eating clean, learning new skills, and working on appearance when you can get more rewards just by doing a couple clicks?

Conscious or not, this mindset is common among porn addicts, and that’s the reason they often suffer from low testosterone, excess weight, depression, and even suicidal thoughts.

When porn consumes all your time and attention, you lose opportunities to develop yourself and grow as a person. If you don’t want the rest of your life to be filled with regret, it’s necessary to get rid of this addiction, once and for all.

How to Quit the Modern Drug for Good

One of the main signs of porn addiction we’ve discussed is the inability to resist urges. How is it possible to quit porn if it’s impossible to resist?

Turns out, it isn’t a matter of willpower, but a matter of perspective. What I mean by this is that if you realize that porn is harmful and ultimately brings no benefit, you’ll be much more likely to quit the addiction for good.

There are many reasons to stop watching porn: it messes up your hormones, brain, relationships, self-esteem, self-image, makes you weak, docile, and even leads to sexual exploitation of millions of innocent people.

What do you get in return? Just 5 seconds of artificial pleasure with days of guilt and shame afterwards. Porn isn’t real sex: it’s an artificial stimulation meant to exploit you for greedy corporations’ profit.

There’s no reason to continue watching porn or trying to “balance it out.” The only way to get rid of porn addiction and heal is by quitting porn entirely. All you need is abstain from all pornography (including Instagram pics) for 21 days while building better habits, such as:

• Reading for 30 minutes every evening
• Playing a game of pool or chess every weekend
• Working out at least 3 times a week
• Writing what you’re grateful for every morning
• Learning a new language or skill to monetize

In short, forget about porn, decide you’ll never watch it again, and spend time on more fulfilling pursuits. Remember: you don’t lose anything by quitting porn. You only gain confidence, mental clarity, happiness, focus, relationships, and a healthy mind.

The Bottom Line

Porn addiction has become so normalized in our society that it can be difficult to spot. The line between regular consumption and full-on addiction is very blurred, and isn’t obvious at first.

There are, however, 8 primary signs you have a porn addiction:

• You feel the frequent need to watch it
• You feel unable to stop consuming porn
• You only feel ‘happy’ when watching porn
• You use porn to cope with stress
• You consume extreme and violent content
• You feel ashamed after every session
• You feel chronically lonely and isolated
• You’ve developed physical symptoms (low energy, low testosterone, sexual dysfunction)

If you relate to 3 or more of these signs, you’ve likely developed a porn addiction that you should address immediately. Admit that you have this problem, have your last ever session, and decide that you’ll never go back to porn.

Replace the addiction with healthier pursuits, as suggested above. Lift weights, repair cars and furniture, learn a useful skill, build your own brotherhood. Just get up, close the incognito tabs, and do something meaningful every day.

If nothing else helps and you feel desperate in your attempts to quit porn, by all means, seek out a therapist. But this addiction doesn’t cause any serious physical withdrawal symptoms. Therefore, you can quit porn if you firmly decide to do so.

Stay strong, better yourself, and be a good man. Good luck on your newfound journey, brother.

If you liked this article and found it useful, make sure to share it with those who need it and leave a comment below. See you next time.