The Pleasure Trap

I thought I'd share this as I found it helpful in understanding and working to resolve the issues that I have. It really helped me sort things out with my weight problem, and it ties in really well to porn addiction as well. I'm not a doctor though, and this isn't medical advice or anything like that, but I do encourage people to look into this, because it might give a whole new perspective on what you're dealing with and some ideas of how to get out of the pleasure trap. It really helped me.

In short:

It's not your fault, there's nothing wrong with your brain. You're working exactly as you're designed to do, it's just that the environment you're designed for no longer exists. Your internal compass naturally points north, but porn like a magnet has caused the compass to drift and point you in a different direction. If you fix your environment, your compass will realign and you'll once again be pointing a true north.


The Pleasure Trap is a book written by Dr. Douglas Lisle and Dr. Alan Goldhamer. As its basis it looks at the biological drives that all animals (humans included) share. There are three basic laws:

1. Seek pleasure (sex and food)
2. Conserve energy
3. Avoid pain

This is why we enjoy eating and having sex. It's why all else being equal we go to the closer store to buy things (energy conservation), and why we go to great lengths to avoid pain. Our bodies tell us we're doing something right and good by giving us a powerful rush of pleasure. We are designed to seek it. Historically, having sex was key to passing on our genes and every chance we got to do that was a good thing - and our bodies rewarded us for it. There was nothing artificially stimulating at the time, and all was well.

Porn changed that. Now we can get the same pleasure rush with little effort. We don't need to convince a partner, we don't need to dress nicely or go to pricey restaurants. We can sit on our backsides (or lie on our backs), press a small screen and have highly stimulating content delivered directly. Masturbation provides a lot of control, in many cases better feeling, and it takes much less energy than having sex. We also don't have the pain of rejection or the fear of not being able to perform. To our primitive brain, this is a win win scenario:

1. Seek pleasure - we get to orgasm
2. Conserve energy - requires little resources and much less energy than sex
3. Avoid pain - no need to risk rejection or failure

The problem though is that like everything else in our brain, we adapt. The pleasure circuitry isn't meant to fire constantly or this strongly, it was only supposed to fire when great things happened. So what happens is the receptors become less sensitive. We aren't getting the same rush we used to, we're not responding the same way. So we up the ante, we increase the dose. This again works well until we adapt again. Each time takes us a little deeper into the pleasure trap.

We can end up in the situation where we are doing and looking at things we would never have imagined before. We followed our pleasure (as we are designed to do) but we were lead astray by the magnet next to our compass.

This is natural human behavior, this is us following our programming, what we naturally and instinctively do. Naturally this would work well for us, but we got so good at engineering our environment for the pleasures we seek, that we are well off course.

The good news is, there's a really simple answer to the problem. Note I said simple and not easy. Following the advice on nofap, is a great way to reset your neuro-chemistry. It can reset and it will, as it has biologically been designed to do. If you keep trying, eventually you will get back to true north.

So, my takeaways would be:

1. It's not your fault you're here - you're following your genetic blueprint
2. We changed the environment - that's why our programming like a magnet is leading us of course
3. Like a compass, if we remove the magnet, it will drift back to true north
4. There is a way out of this trap, it will happen, you just need to stay the course.



There's a great Ted talk about the pleasure trap (although it is focused on the dietary pleasure trap), and it can be found here:




I hope this helps someone!