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Why is it bad that PMO produces a lot of dopamine, that's good isn't it?

Discussion in 'Porn Addiction' started by bestme996, Sep 26, 2020.

  1. bestme996

    bestme996 Fapstronaut

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    Why is it bad that PMO produces a lot of dopamine, that's good isn't it?
     
  2. Schnabel

    Schnabel Fapstronaut

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    actually no! that's what makes you addicted. For an easy first approach think of dopamine as the substance that makes you want things and makes you move (literally mice will starve to death if you take away their dopamine despite having their food right in front of them - no dopamine=no desire/no action/intention/movement/etc. no matter how bad the consequences). Your brain is pretty good in realizing what gave you your dopamine kick and it will reinforce everything that led to it. On PMO addiction almost everthing your brain cares about is watching porn and fapping. Most other things will be neglected and soon enough you'll find yourself fapping 4-5h a day, wasting most of your time doing very little other things. You don't want that.
     
  3. SickSicko

    SickSicko Fapstronaut

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    Lots doesn't equal good, source matters.
     
  4. bestme996

    bestme996 Fapstronaut

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    Thank you

    Huh?
     
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  5. SoaringEagle

    SoaringEagle Fapstronaut

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    SickSicko means that if you get a lot of dopamine from just watching P, it's not good.
    But on the other hand if you get dopamine from doing an exercise, spending time with a girl then it's good.

    The difference that dopamine from real world activity is natural and it means that your life will be moving and you will be getting ahead while from dopamine from those pixelated things means that you will become that cartoon character, doomer or whatever it's called that just watches P and does nothing from life because it doesn't feel it needs to. After all it can get all the dopamine it needs from P.
     
  6. ADMG

    ADMG Fapstronaut

    In addition to what's been said above, your brain will also re-wire itself based on the dopamine that comes from PMO. This means that, the more you PMO, the more your brain will adjust so that the dopamine from PMO is your new "normal level" of dopamine. Because PMO releases such a ridiculous amount of dopamine, this means that you will not get much joy or stimulation from other things.

    It also means, that in order to go after that original "high" of PMO, you will either increase frequency of PMO and/or increase the intensity of PMO (by looking for more and more extreme content).

    So, in short, the unnaturally high amount of dopamine release will re-wire your brain in such a way that will make you disinterested in most normal activities, while also creating the conditions for your PMO dependence to worsen. And all of this is why PMO is addictive.
     
  7. Little Prince

    Little Prince Fapstronaut

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    Also, we haven't evolved with porn so we're not used to such massive levels of dopamine. There's no way to adjust to it, maybe in a few centuries or millenniums it will be fine but as a species porn is just damaging for us.
    The intensity is much higher than any "natural" activity which is a problem because your brain will make you seek it to the detriment of actually living your life. You can end up alone, with no family, friends or hobbies.
    And there's the psychological changes... anxiety, social distancing, shyness, insomnia, lack of confidence, low self esteem, lack of motivation, etc. You really don't want those.
     
  8. bestme996

    bestme996 Fapstronaut

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    Special thanks to you guys, and to Sicko, but particularly to ADMG, really helped me understand things.


    I just question, then sex would in a way be not so good either? Sex raises dopamine too, wouldn't that make us not want to achieve and be social as well? Maybe we need to go easy on the sex too? Or maybe its the overstimulation of the visual stimulus, yeah man, men from 60 years ago never seen as many nude women as we seen in just minutes scrolling the page down, unless they had nudie magazines back then but they would have been real tame anyway. You wont see no vagina lips or spread legs or anything, and that would have been Very arousing to them back in those days just to see bare skin, boobs and a bit of butt. Now days people are edging for hours on end, even fapping 6 times a day, sure my addiction is only every 2-3 days but I hear ya, now its making sense. If anyone has any input or wants to put it in there own words that would be good.
     
    Last edited: Oct 6, 2020
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  9. bestme996

    bestme996 Fapstronaut

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    Solid post man, i missed this, cheers!
     
    Little Prince likes this.
  10. IR254

    IR254 Fapstronaut

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    It's not only the visuals in and for themselves, man. It's the unending novel content on the web. Imagine you only had the same porn video to watch for the rest of your life. Chances are, you will get bored very fast and just not watch it as much.

    To give my two cents about your initial question, I have to say this: The problem with porn as a dopamine source is, that it's an "empty" experience. Yea, it feels good while it lasts, but after you are done you have done nothing other than wasted your time. You don't gain anything useful by that, quite the opposite actually. In the best case you simply waste time, but in the worst case - the case many of us are in - porn takes over your life and you develop an addiction to it. If that happens, you keep wasting your time over and over again and you feel like you can do nothing about it. That's the problem. I doubt that you would feel the same way after you are done having meaningful sex with a partner (casual sex might be problematic too, but I don't really know).
     
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  11. SoaringEagle

    SoaringEagle Fapstronaut

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    Its after all sex addiction, but here is the difference.
    After real sex I personally feel a lot different than P, it's a completely different experience that your body recognizes.
    A lot of dopamine is also released after real sex but it's different for many reason. For one you feel satisfied, but with P you always want more, something is missing, which means with pornography as you said you tend to overdue it.
    Secondly with real sex, you have done something to earn it, by finding a girlfriend or a wife which is a much longer process than opening up a website and you will learn few things to achieve it. Ideally by building your self as a man in the process. So you get dopamine, but that dopamine is a reward for a success and not for opening a website.

    Now just to put things on the other side, Sex, real sex can be as addicting as P if you have the means. And it can also have extremely dangerous escalation!

    For example many of the oil rich princes are known to have strange sexual deviancy, because they simply have a lot of girls on demand, like P, with a press of button they can just spend an almost infinite supply of money to get "high quality" prostitutes, some of those "princes" with pre-existing psychological problems, will tend to experiment with violance, underage and whatever you can think of (I am speaking about a small portion, most of them actually just spend the money on other useless things and deposit the rest in a foreign bank which the American government will later later steal but that's a different story).

    Israelie mossad Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell island is also a good example of how real sex can be a dangerous addiction if you have the means, where a lot of people like Clinton and Prince Andrew were on its guests list for deviant practices and the kidnapping of underage girls.

    Of course more common where real sex addiction can be a problem is when someone cheats on their wife, sleeps with too many prostitutes wasting all of his money etc.. but I feel that risk pales in comparison to the far easier and more accessible pronography.
     
  12. SickSicko

    SickSicko Fapstronaut

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    @bestme996 You are most welcome mate, at the end of the day, we are here to help each other through a common goal

    @SoaringEagle Good insight about sex addiction itself, if we had the means I bet most of us would be sex addicts instead of PMO addicts, still addiction nonetheless.
     
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  13. SoaringEagle

    SoaringEagle Fapstronaut

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    BECAUSE it's so pleasurable that you need to stop as soon as possible and not it's not going to be easy! And not busting a nut is no excuse. Watching porn and getting your dopamine so high is damaging to the brain! Basically it's another form of an addiction similar to drugs.
    If you get so much dopamine from porn, why do anything! why work or look for a girlfriend. What would happen after few years from now. I know this talk just doesn't help when you have the urge but I know have I had broken this habit long ago I would have achieved a lot more and it's not just about time wasting, it's about being able to face your problems and not escape from them. When you PMO or just watch P you choose to escape from your problems instead of facing them.

    Also worth considering that addictions are a way to escape pain, so basically if you you were emotionally neglected as a child or anything similar you might develop addictions more easily. A book on the subject is by Gabor Mate: in the realm of hungry ghosts.

    Didn't know that was even a thing! But wouldn't surprise me, escalation can take many forms.
     
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  14. SoaringEagle

    SoaringEagle Fapstronaut

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    Google doomer memes

    Again, it's not the same!
    A non sex addict will have sex with a wife/girlfriend and be satisfied and get on with his life and not obsess about and work for a better life. A sex addict will never feel satisfied, only very temporarily. He is always looking for a fix to fill the void. And as we talked before it's all sex addiction after all. Only pornography makes it easy.
    And sex addiction is addiction, not being able to stop when you decide to is one of the hall marks of addiction and you can look up how to define an addiction. Addictions vary. Some people can become addicted to the smell of gasoline!

    If for example you can limit your pornography exposure to a minimum and enjoy life, that's perfectly fine but here is the problem:
    The dopamine you get from sex is not as intense as pronography, nothing in the real world is!
    That's why you describe pornography with pleasure and have an aching for it and want to desperately convince yourself that it's ok.
    This high intensity levels of dopamine from pornography means that after a while you will prefer porn over the real thing! Think this is unimaginable? just wait few years! And there is no shortage on this forum from people suffering from ED from it.
    If you keep watching porn it is certain that you will escalate! You will want more and more hardcore stuff until nothing works for you.
    During all the time you are watching pron you are training your mind and brain circuits on pornography and dopamine from there instead of training it to get dopamine from real world achievements or enjoying life's simple pleasures.

    There is a reason "Wanker" is a derogatory word. Someone who depends on this easy access for dopamine to get high is not someone who will try to progress as a human being.
     
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  15. eric9000k

    eric9000k Fapstronaut

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    So I'm not sure if anyone has used the word homeostasis yet in this thread, but that's what is meant by "normal level".

    Your hormone regulatory system tries to maintain 'homeostasis' (stasis being static or unchanging and homeo being 'in alignment' more or less) anyway it's how your internal states persist despite the environment (stimuli). So psychology of behavior is fundamentally thought of as a process STIMULUS > RESPONSE > OUTCOME.

    Dopamine is a complex chemical that has to be synthesized in certain brain regions and then when it is released in "response" to a "stimulus", the pleasurable feeling is the "outcome". It is released at the synapse, the junction between cells where electrical current passes. After this process, there is a system called the reuptake system that kind of soaks up the dopamine and gets ready to use it again. With respect to homeostasis, this process occurs again, and again, and again, as part of the complicated interplay between the environment (stimulus) and the response (this is basically what described learning in the 1950s). So the strengthening of the RESPONSE (i.e. overt behavior) is the general process of learning (responding to stimulus to produce favorable outcome). Again, the favorable outcome would be a release of dopamine.

    Ok, so that's just really a surface description. Your question is why is it bad. The answer is basically that your reuptake ability gets depleted and your brain can not synthesize enough new dopamine all the time, and it is constantly pressured toward homeostasis, so this leads to a state of fatigue and distress since the environmental stimuli (i.e. pornography) is overwhelming (since our neurotransmitter systems evolved by natural selection). If you would like to know more then just look up dopamine synthesis, homeostasis. Here is one basic scientific report on the subject you can view. It is called Homeostatic Mechanisms in Dopamine Synthesis and Release. Just read the abstract, even. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755466/
     
  16. The problem comes from to much dopamine, the more and more porn abuses dopamine, the higher intake you need to get that high because the dopamine receptors will start shutting down because they are being overused and abused. That is why porn addicts have no motivation or love of life because everday activities fail to give them the dopamine needed to have any effect this is like I said because of the receptors shutting down and your brain needed higher and higher doses each time, same thing that happens for drug addicts.
     
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  17. eric9000k

    eric9000k Fapstronaut

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    Bruh.
     
  18. eric9000k

    eric9000k Fapstronaut

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    Read one paragraph from the scientific article I gave you, or read a wikipedia page, or read any thing, or use your brain.
     
  19. eric9000k

    eric9000k Fapstronaut

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    Good idea, to get off the internet.

    Anyway, sorry, I said you aren't using your brain. Surely you are, or is it using you...

    Lots of people love to talk about dopamine, but don't really know anything like what's going on or how it relates to behavior.
    I thought you asked a good question for a couple reasons. Not really cause it's a good question per se, but it sort of is, but more like it will bring to light some of the complete ignorance that most people have about dopamine and I think it's kind of dumb to make things up...

    It's one thing to not have a degree in biochemistry but it's another to have little pet theories about crap that you have no clue about (not picking at you just explaining why I thought you asked a good question).

    The cells in your brain have a lifespan and some poor fuckers get brain disease in old age that completely wrecks your golden years.
     
  20. ADMG

    ADMG Fapstronaut

    @bestme996: In addition to what Eric has talked about related to normal and homeostasis, I would just add the following: As it has been described to me, the flood of dopamine from PMO makes your brain react to protect itself from that flood of dopamine in the future. It does this by releasing... neurotransmitters(?) or some sort of hormone/chemical that blocks dopamine receptors in the future. This means, that you will need more dopamine to get the original high that you got from your first orgasm (the blocking of dopamine receptors is the neurochemistry behind tolerance).

    The brain is highly adaptive, however, so that if you stop PMO, those dopamine receptors will be opened up again. In the meantime, however, you're going to feel more depressed/apathetic because normal levels of dopamine that you might receive from conversations, sports, games, exercise, nature, life, etc. will no longer register because a bunch of the dopamine receptors have been blocked, and therefore the lower levels of dopamine don't stimulate you.


    You also asked a good question about the difference between sex and PMO. Again, I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that sex doesn't produce quite the same amount of dopamine as PMO (though it is still quite high), BUT sex also produces other chemicals (I've forgotten their names) which allows for things like bonding. Also, whereas PMO produces a spike in dopamine that drops off quickly (which is why we often feel crappy after climax), sex does not have as sharp of a drop off... I guess the dopamine tapers off less quickly, which leads to a far greater feeling of satisfaction rather than emptiness. And presumably all of this means that it will effect the brain differently than just the dopamine rush from PMO.

    (Disclaimer: This is just what I'm recalling off the top of my head from research and talks that I have heard, so sorry that it is not as precise as might be desirable... also, I'm a virgin, so the experience after sex is just theoretical to me... though it seems to be supported by most anecdotal evidence that I've heard).
     
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