Intelligent but uninformed people might believe that the only danger of masturbation is shame or guilt, where a person feels guilty for committing something believed to be a sin.

Based on these thoughts, some people concluded that masturbation wouldn’t affect you if you didn’t believe it’s wrong, but science proved those people wrong.

With disregard to your beliefs about masturbation or internet porn, they will both work on changing the structure of your brain, lowering your self-esteem, and even bringing you depression!

Excited to know how it happens? Then read this post.

The Effect of porn addiction on your brain

Dopamine is a chemical that helps us experience emotions, respond to rewards, and feel better. Low dopamine levels are associated with social anxiety, low self-esteem, binge eating, depression, motor control problems, and many other bad moods.

In other words, you won’t want your dopamine levels to go low at all costs. People who suffer from low dopamine find lifeless joyful, feel dissatisfied with their lives most of the time, and are at a much higher risk of social anxiety and depression than others.

Now what Porn addiction does is that it gives your brain very high doses of dopamine in concise periods of time and, as a result, makes your brain less responsive to the normal levels of dopamine released naturally by the body.

Porn addicts were found to have chronically low dopamine levels all the time between porn sessions. In other words, if you watched porn on a Saturday then did it again on a Wednesday, then most probably you will suffer from low dopamine levels sat through the wedding!

In other words, you will feel more anxious, less confident, more depressed until the next session, which will only elevate your dopamine levels for few hours, then reduce them to a new low after you are done!

Why masturbation lowers your self-esteem and causes depression

Because dopamine is also the chemical responsible for connecting actions with rewards, porn addicts usually start to find social connections less rewarding.

A porn addict is more likely to get bored of social gatherings, find his friends boring, and lose interest in social connections. In such a case, his dopamine levels become low during social interactions, and as a result, he finds himself anxious around people.

The only way that can help that person feel good is to find something that can give him a higher dose of dopamine than the dose he got used to, and that’s why he reverts to porn.

Each time that person reverts to this bad habit, he raises his dopamine resistance even more and makes his life more grayish!

Because fatty foods can raise dopamine levels, many porn addicts become fat due to the binge eating habit they develop to regulate their low dopamine levels.

The Good news about addiction

The good news is that the brain can restore its normal chemical levels after giving up on porn for some time (weeks to months, depending on how your brain chemicals got messed up)

In brief, porn addiction can’t just make you feel guilty, but it can make your whole life tasteless and less joyful. Break that habit today because it’s much more destructive than you thought it to be.