What is “Excessive” Porn Watching?
When watching porn every day is considered “normal,” it’s not so easy to tell when you’ve crossed the line into overconsumption. It also doesn’t help that much like drinking, social media, and other common vices, countless people will openly admit to themselves they watch too much porn.
But how many of these people are actually watching porn at an unhealthy level? Regular use doesn’t automatically constitute excessive consumption. After all, someone can enjoy a glass of wine a couple of nights per week, and that doesn’t make them an alcoholic.
It’s more about the effect that porn is having on different aspects of your life, like work and relationships. Here’s how to tell if your regular porn habit is on the verge of becoming a full-fledged addiction:
How to Know You’re Watching Too Much Porn
The easiest way to tell if you’re watching too much porn is if your porn habit is negatively affecting your personal or professional life. Let’s start with work, since remote work allows many people to watch porn during working hours without facing immediate consequences. If you feel the need to watch porn so that you can focus on your professional responsibilities, you are likely watching too much.
This suggests that your urge to watch porn is so strong that you’re not even thinking about the potential impact it could have on your career, even though your career is more important to your overall well-being.
How Porn Can Affect Relationships
Another tell-tale sign of excessive porn consumption is a detrimental affect on your ability to maintain romantic relationships. Men who overuse porn tend to have a lack of satisfaction with real sexual partners. This is often because their partners can’t live up to the professionals they see online. Compared to these performers, real partners can seem boring and disappointing, causing you to lose interest.
According to scientific research, this happens because pornographic content delivers a quick and powerful surge of pleasure to the brain’s reward system. Watching more and more porn makes your brain more and more accustomed to this feeling. Eventually, your brain’s response to porn becomes so strong that it dwarfs your response to real sexual partners.
If watching porn is the only way you can achieve or maintain an erection, you’re likely watching too much.
What To Do If Porn is Required in Your Day
Just like the other vices mentioned above, the first step towards minimizing porn consumption is admitting you have a problem. This is a hard thing to talk about with friends or family members, which is why counseling can be very helpful. A board-certified sex and intimacy therapist is specifically trained to help people overcome unhealthy relationships with porn, and they can provide a safe space for you to talk about this sensitive issue without judgment or shame.
A sex and intimacy therapist can also help you change your perception of porn, so you see it as something you do recreationally from time to time, as opposed to a recurring distraction from work, or a substitute for real sexual partners.
So, if you’re concerned about you or your partner’s porn habit, please contact me at Blue Pearl Therapeutic to schedule a free 15-minute consultation.