What came first...the porn or the anxiety?

They are related. My OCD anxiety increased after I used porn. I was afraid to talk to other and being in social situations. I used to feel bad to talk to women knowing that I used. So in my experience they are related and your anxiety feeds of your porn use.

 

I dont know. My first contact to porn was very early. Too early. I think that porn is not the root of every problem but as an addict you really dont know.
Overall i think porn is causing real damages for the brain. But it also is a way of escaping. So you have not to deal with your problems.

Some succes storys are describing porn as the root of all evel and problems some do not.

 

Obviously, anxiety came first. One of the helpful things, when battling porn addiction, is to ask the question: how and why does porn affect us. Notice, not how it affects me, but, how it affects us, as in the human species.

It is easier, I think, to conceive of the brain science behind the problem, when we are examining the human brain, generally, rather than just "my brain." Your brain, my brain, aarondf's brain, are not unique and different from the brains of every other human on the planet. In fact, if you were to take them out of our skulls and look at them, they would be essentially identical. Well, Thor, yours and mine maybe, aarondf's is probably a bit freeeeky (say freeeky in high pitch voice). Ok, just joking, a bit of levity to see if you have fallen asleep.

Today, you hate anxiety, and, probably, we always have, meaning even way back in our evolutionary past. It is not a good feeling. But, understand what anxiety is. Psychologically speaking, anxiety is the appendix of the brain. It serves no, obvious, purpose, and every now and then it bursts, so to speak, crippling, or at least hampering, our happiness.

But, in our evolutionary past, before we had, mostly, tamed our environment, anxiety was a positive trait to have. Probably, the most successful members of our species shared the trait "high anxiety", because they were the most aware of the environment and their relation to it. Anxiety was the feeling that made us aware of the dangers around us, not least of which were other humans. It served a purpose, much more so then, for most of us at least, than it does now. That is not to say it serves no purpose at all now. Although we have reduced threats in our environment considerably, we have not eliminated them, so there is still a place for legitimate anxiety in our existence.

Porn, including High Speed Internet Porn, as you can see, was invented much, much later. In evolutionary terms, porn addiction was invented 3 seconds ago. There are people alive on the planet who have never experienced the internet, or High Speed Internet Porn, and won't in their lifetimes. 100 years from now, I doubt that statement could be, honestly, made.

So, the intersection between porn and anxiety? Like a lot of brain reactions, one reaction to High Speed Internet Porn, especially when trying to quit it, is withdrawals. Anxiety is a withdrawal symptom. Not to attribute thought to the addiction, but it might be helpful to say that, like the addiction figured out how to make us get high via HSIP, it also figured out how to make us stay addicted, by creating tons of anxiety when we attempt to quit. The addiction punishes us with anxiety when we refuse to feed the porn monster. Going through that, and other negative feelings, is the price we have to pay to quit the addiction, and to get back to normal. Those horrible feelings do go away, but it takes time, thus the hard 90. It is not called the easy 90, the somewhat difficult 90, the annoying 90, and calling it the hard 90 is probably an understatement. It should be called" the hellish 90 in which you will feel like you are dying, and have to feel that, and accept that, until you probably would like to die, before you get clean, 90," but that is a mouthful, and since most porn addicts have an attention span of only .5 seconds, is way too long a phrase to ever catch on here.

What I want for you, Thor, and anyone else reading this, is to get free, to break your chains, and walk through life without having to drag the chains of the addiction behind you. The addiction makes us crawl, but lose it, and you can fly. Do the hard 90. I have absolute confidence you will succeed.

Much love.

W.O.A.D.