Research in online porn addiction signals a different approach
If you think back to the early 1990s, streaming services like Netflix or Spotify would have been a cruel joke as clunky dial-up modems would have made them nearly impossible to enjoy. But times have changed -- quickly.
The amount of data that can travel in and out of a laptop now is staggering. People can work from home and store terabytes of information on hard drives no bigger than a paperback book.
A lot of the data coursing over the Internet is, shall we say, for adult viewing only. Access to pornography is part of the "in-an-instant" landscape of today's Internet.
But the dark side of this access is addiction. Isaac Abel (a pen name) has written about his belief that easy access to Internet porn warped him.
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"I found myself rapidly desensitized to online images. If a threesome was kinky last week, then I'd need something wilder this week," he wrote in Salon. "I worried that Internet porn had forever warped my sexual development. I mean, if it's playing on loop in my head, can I ever really stop 'watching' porn?"
He said he stopped watching, but now, in his early 20s, he still struggles with the effects of his porn habit.
An addiction to porn, though, seems to be unlike other kinds of addiction.
Recent research compared the brain activity of people with substance addictions to those of "porn addicts." Traditionally, an addict's neural activity will increase when exposed to his or her drug of choice. When "porn addicts" were exposed to erotic pictures, however, their neural activity tended to stay the same. Basically, that means that treating someone who claims to be addicted to porn should be different from traditional addiction therapy.
LEARN MORE ABOUT ONLINE PORN ADDICTION RESEARCH:
• Ominous News: Internet Addiction Atrophies Brains
"Here's some headline news for anyone who has been trained that Internet porn use is harmless: Physical evidence of addiction processes is showing up in the brains of avid Internet video-gamers. What's more, use of online erotica has greater potential for becoming compulsive than online gaming according to Dutch researchers." (Psychology Today)
