A doctor has revealed exactly what happens to you when you stop watching porn.
According to a 2022 YouGov survey, 36 percent of men watch porn at least once a week and 13 percent of men watch it most days or every day.
Studies have found a link between a low level of mental health and regular porn watchers, highlighting the problem for several young men.
US neuroscientist Dr Andrew Huberman has explained exactly how porn affects our brains on Chris Williamson's Modern Wisdom podcast - and, more importantly, how taking a break can undo the damage.
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How can porn damage our brain?
Dr Huberman says porn can change the way we look at sex as a whole.
He said: "The brain is a learning prediction machine and I'm not trying to say that all pornography is bad, but there is good data to support the idea that if your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily going to carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're one-on-one with somebody else."
He said this can create 'challenges with sexual interactions with a real partner'.
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Dr Huberman then went on to explain how getting too much of a good thing can actually be really harmful.
Watching too much porn can leave us desensitised, searching for more extreme content to try and replicate the original high.
"Extremely palatable food, extreme pornography, extreme experiences like bungee cord jumping - those set a threshold for dopamine release," he explained.
"The higher the dopamine peak, the bigger the drop afterwards. It's not that you drop to baseline, you drop below baseline.
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“The amount of dopamine released over time goes down and down and down and pretty much traversing into the level of pain.
"People are back to this thing where they’re scrolling internet porn eight, nine, then hours a day and they’re wondering why this isn’t effective for them anymore.”
How taking a break from porn affects your brain
This all sounds pretty scary, but there's a pretty easy fix: going cold turkey on porn.
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The fancy scientific name for this is a dopamine detox.
Dr Huberman said: "When people are pursuing dopamine peaks over and over and over and they aren't getting them, typically it's because they've been pursuing that activity far too often.
“Staying out of high intensity, highly rewarding activities could be useful in terms of reestablishing the dopamine balance.”
So the damage watching too much porn does to the brain is far from irreversible.
If you take a step back from internet pornography, your dopamine levels should return to normal, which means you can engaged in real-life sex in a more healthy way.
Joshua Nair