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Does porn also affect serotonin receptors?

Discussion in 'Rebooting - Porn Addiction Recovery' started by Anonymous86, Oct 13, 2018.

  1. Anonymous86

    Anonymous86 Fapstronaut

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    Or just dopamine?
     
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  2. Anonymous86

    Anonymous86 Fapstronaut

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  3. Yes, as brain is consistently flooded with dopamine it will get used to having reduced serotonin, they can have an inverse relationship

    Try investing in a decent oil diffuser and get some organic lemon oil, it targets the 5ht1a receptor, if you immediately feel amazing and for some time afterwards you will know that you could probably use more serotonin
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Oct 14, 2018
  4. Mister Fire

    Mister Fire Fapstronaut

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    Fuck, porn affects your whole being.
     
  5. Yes. Serotonin can't fry serotonin receptors but dopamine can fry both dopamine and serotonin receptors.

    Dr. Robert Lustig gives an excellent insight on this in his book The Hacking of the American Mind. He also has some really good videos up on Youtube.

    Too little serotonin has been said to have a link with cravings/high libido. In other words porn addiction by definition induces clinical depression.
     
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  6. Anonymous86

    Anonymous86 Fapstronaut

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    So perhaps porn fucking with serotonin is a possible reason why SSRI's/SNRI's don't work on me anymore?
     
  7. Exactly. Reuptake inhibitors do little if there are too little receptors to begin with. In case of porn addiction or withdrawal from it, the problem is often the receptors, the neurons themselves. Antidepressant medications mainly target the compound that feeds them. That way serotonin circulates longer, but there's not enough receptors to process it.
    You may feel worse on SNRIs for this exact reason. Giving someone with a system that is already overstimulated a noradrenalin reuptake inhibitor is just not a good idea. The real problem here is that neurons are either too inflamed, too malfunctioning or too outnumbered to make a real difference.
    Fortunately your brain is very plastic. You can easily increase receptor density by cutting the habit that caused the breakdown out of your life. This is where antidepressants fall short. They can't replace the right conditions, the right lifestyle, the right amount of time, for real recovery to take place. In case of withdrawal, they're often a band-aid approach. You'll feel somewhat better, but not quite. They only mask the symptoms, the root cause (receptor density) is overlooked by these meds. To make matters even worse these meds can cause tolerance themselves.
    I'm betting a lot of people would be much better off taking anti-inflammatory meds to relieve their symptoms of depression. Fortunately science is starting to understand these issues. Needless to say, in case of severe pmo withdrawal, abstinence is the best antidepressant.

    That said it needs to be emphasized that antidepressant medications can mean the difference between life or death in cases of true MDD (major depressive disorder). People who really need these medications should in no case be prevented or discouraged from taking them.
     
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  8. mgz069

    mgz069 Fapstronaut

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    Sorry for bringing this back but I have this very question myself.
    So in the case of dopamine receptors 2 years of absistence is the longest they need to recover.
    What's the deal with serotonin receptors?
     
  9. uiop2

    uiop2 Fapstronaut

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    All i can say is I suffer from ocd and as you may know it is caused by a serotonin dysfunction.
    Well after some days of porn and masturbation all my energies are absorbed and feel like doing nothing all the time, my ocd really get worst and i get really anxious, keep questioning my phisical appearance, i feel a bad person, mind is always foggy so i cannot focus on something productive...
    I'm not new to no pmo practice, the longest i managed to keep was almost 4 months and i felt really better under that perspective, you hit a point when you no longer think to certain things and no longer feel the need go back to them.
     
  10. Some great contributions here. Thanks everyone.
    Prozac is a paid-for product; learning how to live in a better way requires no fee.
     
  11. I have absolutely no doubt that a severe pmo addiction can lead to a significant loss in serotonin receptors. I'm absolutely convinced porn addiction alone can deplete so much of a person's serotonin receptors that it will induce psychiatric disorders. OCD and eating disorders at first, depression and anxiety in the later stage of the addiction. It will probably take about the same amount of time to grow back these receptors where you can and repair the damage.
    In all honesty, severe withdrawal may require therapy with antidepressants just to provide enough circulating serotonin. These medications have their use and I feel that I may have been too blunt in my last post. That doesn't mean antidepressants are in everyone's best interest, but when the quality of your life starts suffering, please, by all means, listen to your doctor. People can have serious abnormalities in their serotonin pathways which may require these drugs. I'm in this boat myself, always considering going back on them as I'm practically nowhere off them, withdrawal being as severe as it is. Clinical depression is no joke even when it's withdrawal induced. You can't just 'tough out' certain levels of stress. It is however true that the right lifestyle, meaning a clean diet and regular exercise, should be the first line of defense against diseases like depression. No one can deny that.

    You still have several options to consider before introducing these SSRI medications though, one of the most promising being L-tryptophan. L-tryptophan is an essential amino acid that was banned by the American Food and Drug Administration around the time when Prozac was first prescribed. All sorts of conspiracy theories about this coincidence are out there. In any case, L-tryptophan is highly involved in serotonin synthesis. In fact it's the most important building block. Certain foods like poultry, eggs and fatty fish are rich in tryptophan but diet alone provides very little since tryptophan needs to compete with other essential amino acids in the digestive tract. To make matters worse it can bind to simple sugars, especially trytophan, and never make its way to where it's supposed to be. This is where a supplement can help. Certain herbs can help. Cannabis is said to significantly upregulate serotonin function, CBD oil in that regard could be promising. You don't want the addictive psycho-active substances if you are already addicted and anxious or depressed.

    You definitely want to avoid fructose when you are feeling tired, depressed and or miserable. Glucose is probably acceptable when it's consumed in moderation. All sugars are poison though. They are oil on the inflammation fire. They can easily trigger symptoms of depression or make them much worse. Sugars are also responsible for feeding the bad bacteria in the gut, which is responsible for producing roughly 90% of human serotonin levels (!!!) in the first place. Get this, the brain only produces around 10% of serotonin. But it's the way in which the brain processes available serotonin that is so important. You can have as much serotonin as possible, if there are no receptors to accomodate these neurotransmitters, it's practically useless. A dopamine addiction can and will lead to the eradication or malfunctioning of serotonin receptor cells. We must not ever mistake pleasure for happiness again. Neurochemically speaking, happiness and pleasure are far from the same thing. Pleasure involves harmful stress hormones, happiness does not. You can't damage your serotonin receptors from being too happy too often, but you can damage them by giving in to pleasurable temptations more than what's healthy. The body can probably tolerate a certain masturbation treshold, but we are talking intervals of weeks or months here (in case you are not yet addicted). Porn is never acceptable. Addiction driving delta fos B levels kick into high gear almost instantaneously when exposed to this toxin.

    Exposure to sunlight on the other hand is another biggie. Vitamin D is extremely important, most people are deficient. The best source is natural sunlight. Sunlight is just a different type of food. Plants can't grow without it and that's saying a lot about how important getting enough sunlight really is. And sitting outside in the sun for 15 minutes a day or so is all it really takes to get the levels going back up.
     
  12. Anonymous86

    Anonymous86 Fapstronaut

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    Can a person regrow their serotonin receptors if they abstain?
     
  13. Most definitely yeah. Neurons are constantly being recycled and replaced. You grow a new liver each year. It's one of the only organs that completely replaces itself but it gives a good idea of what your body is capable of under the right circumstances (alcoholism for instance will take a toll on the liver's resilience and thus prevent much of this regeneration). In that regard you can't expect serotonin receptors to function correctly when they are constantly bombarded with inflammatory neurochemicals like dopamine. Neurons are primarily made up out of proteins so it's important to have a lot of that in your diet. Most of the problem has to do with how these neurons operate. The rewiring that takes place is where it really goes wrong. It's a bit like having made your car run on diesel when it should be running on petrol and then you need to make it run on petrol again. Do that to a car and the engine will stutter or malfuction. Same goes for the nervous system. These neurotransmitters all have their individual receptor cells. Obviously you can't wipe out all of them as you literally have billions of these cells, but excite them too often and they can begin to dysregulate and stutter so to speak. You can lose a lot of them though. There is scientific evidence of grey matter loss in the brain in sex and porn addicts. Particularly in the brain's neocortex which is almost completely shut off when porn is being watched. The part of your brain that processes porn however, the brain's core, is also in charge of your emotions and how you feel. Knowing that, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand how porn addiction can lead to utter discomfort. Watching porn is basically training these stress regulating parts in the brain. Once these are no longer fed their addictive substance of choice, ultimately dopamine and other excitatory neurochemicals (all substance addictions ultimately affect neurotransmitter behavior which is why saying that only substance/drug addictions are real addictions is utter BS), taking away these excitatory neurochemicals will needless to say induce abnormal stress levels.
    Nerves seem to be super plastic. They easily adapt and will begin to thrive on dopamine and its relatives in the case of pmo addiction. Giving in to temptation too often will lead to an inflammatory condition. That's all it really is. The things we like the most in life are ultimately all inflammatory since they cause the release of harmful stress hormones and derivatives of these hormones. Dopamine is literally the precursor to adrenalin. These stress hormones are why you feel bad after masturbation. The higher the high, the lower the low. It's almost natural, Newton's third law if you will. It's probably not the best idea to oversimplify and trace everything back to mere dopaminergic and sertonergic expression as there are hundreds of neurotransmitters all equally important, most even not yet discovered by science, but in any case, you can regulate a lot of it by simply adhering to a healthy lifestyle. That said, in the case of severe addiction, the brain needs at least a year of abstinence to fully bounce back. Once you've hit withdrawal interrupting recovery by relapsing is the stupidest move anyone could ever make. The entire system is so extremely sensitive at that point that it will violently react to the excitement it has been used to.
     
  14. Fantastic posts as usual Bken. The last part of your previous post is so important more people need to understand that reality or face even worse consequences like we have. Catch it while it’s early sort of thing.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 20, 2019
  15. mgz069

    mgz069 Fapstronaut

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    Wow those replies are very insightful.
    In fact I went to a therapist myself and she DID recommend antidepressants.
    She also acknowledges the fact that internet porn IS an addiction.
    She said that If I was crazy I would be much happier ironically..
    The thing is that I want to make sure that the chemistry in my brain is restored somewhat to normal levels before trying anything else. Im currently into nofap since the days you can see below, but i did masturbate without porn some times the last 200 days. I had a 200+ days streak. Should I stop MO aswell?
    To sum up, how much time should I give myself in nofap before trying antidepressants?
    Dopamine receptors are said to take up to two years to repair. What the longest that serotonin receptors need to repair?
     
  16. If i were you i would read this first:
    https://rxisk.org/ema-acknowledges-persistent-sexual-dysfunction-after-ssris-snris/

    Spoiler alert, soon these ADs will be banned, that my feeling.
     
  17. Craig edward

    Craig edward Fapstronaut

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    Need help here , had a porn addiction for years and in the last two weeks I’ve been constantly thinking about worryingly sick thoughts and need some reassurance that if I stop eventually my brain will heal and they thoughts will leave , it’s almost 24/7 I think about these thoughts
     
  18. Yes your brain will heal, but not in 3 months. Do not expect miracles before 6-8 months, and even after you will still have bad days. If you relapse you will cause brain damage, Learn about what p.a.w.s and kindling mean.
     
  19. uiop2

    uiop2 Fapstronaut

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    But what happen if after my serotonin receptors are completely healed i relapse? Will i have the strenght to go back on track straight away or i am slowly gonna lose my head again to this stupid addiction?
    Because it can always happen and i'm scared of it. After 4 months relapsing and starting over again killed me inside...
     
  20. uiop2

    uiop2 Fapstronaut

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    I also managed to keep me away from it for 3 and a half months or 2 and a half and everytime i relapsed it was so bad...
     

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