Pornography can change the habits of the mind, the inner private self. Its use can easily become habitual, which in turn leads to desensitization, boredom, distorted views of reality, and an objectification of women. There are also numerous clinical consequences to pornography use, including increased risk for significant physical and mental health problems and a greater likelihood of committing a sex-based crime.

Even three hours of porn use a week can cause a noticeable reduction in grey matter in key areas of the brain. When brain connections are involved, it means they impact behavior and mood. Regular bingeing on hardcore internet porn can cause some users to develop mental health problems, compulsive use, even addiction. These interfere significantly with everyday life and life goals.

Here are the psychological risks and side effects that pornography can cause.

pornography

Encourage social isolation

Watching porn, in most cases, demands isolation. Anything that consumers do in secrecy usually leads to shame. One of the first effects of frequently watching porn for men and women, especially those who are young, can be social awkwardness in public, which ironically, leads to more shame and hiding. Isolation and shame can make it difficult to share true intimacy with others. And it makes it difficult to truly grow and mature as a person, and reach our full potential as people.

It lowers your motivation

Delayed gratification is a crucial skill to learn if one is to maintain control and direction in their life. Basically, the healthiest of individuals have mastered the art of discipline and delayed gratification.

Repeatedly giving into the urge to watch pornography leads to a lack of ability to delay gratification. Your brain becomes more and more focused on the things you find pleasurable and the discipline of delayed gratification falls to the wayside. It is no coincidence that people who are hooked on porn might be radically underachieving in other areas of their lives, and they can face behaviors such issues as procrastination, and to other clinical diagnoses such as anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression.

Destroy a consumer’s values

Video is powerful. We live in a world where we need to see something to believe it and in our fast-paced, information-driven world, video is the preferred means of communication and information dissemination.

The thing is, video has the power to influence and even replace behaviors in your mind without you being consciously aware of what you are seeing. As you watch videos, your subconscious mind is rapidly dissecting, translating and making sense of what it is being fed.

The research has found that the subconscious mind can translate and subsequently change behavior in one disturbing way. Pornography can program consumers to lower their standards sexually. It can encourage consumers to seek sex and, in some cases, build intimate and unhealthy relationships with people who are willing to have sex without any boundaries. As exciting as that sounds, having sex with anyone who is available can be a sign of someone without much discipline.

A truly mature person at some point in their life must have control over their sexuality. You should not be a slave to your sexual desire—instead, you should master and control it.

In addition to that, hundreds of hours of porn create certain expectations of what sex looks like, especially in the youngest. The average 16-year-old consuming pornography is literally getting his or her sex education from the videos he/she watches. And that’s not good, especially because porn sells a warped fantasy and exaggerated reality of what real sex is like.

Can cause erectile dysfunction

This one is specifically for guys. The rise in porn-induced erectile dysfunction is something to be alarmed about. Frequently watching porn can lead to erections which can increasingly only be induced by hardcore pornography. That’s not healthy. Porn consumption then becomes a sort of psychological conditioning which creates performance anxiety.

Can change sexual preferences

Watching porn can lead to changing sexual preferences which is pretty scary. In the pursuit of your next dopamine hit you may find yourself requiring more extreme scenarios or porn that offers greater shock value to get you aroused.

You will start hating your body

When you watch porn you can unconsciously start comparing yourself to the actors and very quickly develop insecurities about your body and a poor self-image. Now to compare yourself to a porn star would be ridiculous because they are chosen for the way they look. Even after that, there is plenty of makeup, surgery and Photoshop edits to make them look the way they do.

Can promote violence against women

In a lot of porn videos online, women are treated in ways that should never be repeated in real life but if you keep watching women being abused and raped, very slowly it can alter your beliefs about what is acceptable. It is a dangerous one and a very good reason to stop right now.