I Quit Porn For 1 Year, Here’s What Happened.

Is porn affecting your daily life? There’s only one answer and it’s yes.

People may not realize this but porn has an enormous influence over us. In this article I’ll talk about my story, why I decided to quit and what happened after I stopped watching porn.

One day, while I was scrolling through Tik Tok, I came across a video discussing the Neurochemistry and Neuroplasticity of your brain on porn-meaning which chemicals are being produced and how your brain reacts to porn. The 2 main takeaways from this video and the research I performed afterwards are, that dopamine levels while watching porn are extremely high and that the grey matter, specifically the ventral striatum, of your brain physically changes.

I asked myself, why do I even watch porn? How does it affect my life? These were my conclusions.

1. Porn was relieving my stress. What I didn’t realize at the time was the fact that’s momentary. In fact, it caused even more stress to me unless I kept watching.
2. It made me socially anxious. Going up to new people, socializing, making new friends, and talking to women was inversely proportional to watching porn-meaning the more porn I watched the harder it was to socialize.
3. It took a toll on my sex life. I started having problems enjoying sex. The only time I enjoyed it was when it replicated what I was watching. My libido was also affected. Who even needs sex when you can have 24/7 access to audio-visual stimulation on your phone with an endless amount of content, that to be honest can last you 5 lifetimes?
4. My perception of reality changed. A lifetime of watching porn pushed me towards the mindset that women are only needed for sex, depriving me of deep, emotional connections and healthy relationships with women.

It became clear to me, I clearly had a porn problem and I needed to stop. What was the best course of action? Stopping gradually clearly doesn’t help, putting a website restriction was pointless for me, so what is there to do? Undeniably, the best and quickest thing you can do is have the discipline to stop watching it. That’s understandably quite hard since after a couple days withdrawal symptoms will start but the only way to get over them is to keep going.

So what happened after I quit porn?

1. The first two weeks without it, induced my anxiety due to the lack of stimulation and the dopamine of porn. After those two weeks, my mood and mental health started to gradually get better.
2. After a month I started having normal social interactions.
3. I gained confidence and had less brain fog. My social anxiety started to gradually go away making my thoughts and my ideas clearer and more accessible.
4. I found interest in new activities and hobbies. Watching porn was extremely energy-draining, so when it was taken out of the equation, I realized that my energy levels increased and I found interest in pursuing new ideas and activities.
5. My family, friend, and sexual relationships improved and became more meaningful. I started to listen and empathize more with other people, helping me form deeper connections with them.
6. I learned how to delay gratification. In a world where everything is accessible so fast, mastering delayed gratification helped me with every aspect of my daily life from conversations with other people to my studies.
7. Sex became fun again. The whole process became exciting again and much more intriguing.

Quitting porn is probably one of the hardest tasks for young adults in today’s society, this can be seen by recent studies that show an extremely low 4.4% of men acknowledging that they have a problem with porn. It’s a well-known fact that identifying the problem is half the solution. There’s clearly a problem with young men and women and it’s time to spread awareness for the negative effects of porn.

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