4 Ways Porn Addiction Changes Your Brain

Lex-

Very good that you kicked that habit. Friends like that... oftentimes they don't really WANT to break out of that, or just don't think it's possible. Even if they've seen you go through a metamorphosis, a lot of people when they're really far gone will just say, "He's so lucky... I'm so UNlucky."

Usually the best you can do is subtly jab them, like, "Dude, when are you going to quit watching porn and go learn how to get real girls instead?" but in my experience with friends like this back in college, while this will sometimes get them asking you, "Oh yeah? How do you do that?" they soon decide it's too much work and go back to their pornography.

Chase

Anon–

On urges to dive back into porn, the best advice I can give is resist them for a while while you ramp up having real life experiences with real women and learn how to have all the kinds of sex you want. Then by the time you go back into porn, you go thinking you’re going to get a hit, and it ends up being a let down because it’s nothing like the real thing. Do that a few times, and you stop getting urges to go back because your brain learns that what was once exciting now no longer is.

If you want kinky sex with a girl, focus on giving her good, hard, satisfying, orgasmic sex first (see “Make Her Orgasm Hard from Sex in 8 Minutes or Less” and “How to Be a Good Lover (and Give a Girl Orgasms)”).

Once she's thrilled with you in the bedroom, it's pretty easy to transition to almost anything else. Many things you can wait until you've got her close to orgasm, then start doing them, even if she had resistance before. When she's close to orgasm, her resistance is way down, and if it's new / exciting / pleasurable, she will enjoy it. Once she's experienced it a few times close to orgasm, you'll have little trouble doing it with her earlier in sex, or even as the first thing you do.

If it's something you can't just suddenly switch to late in sex (say, a threesome), you can start seeding it during late sex around the time of orgasm. e.g., "Wouldn't it feel GREAT if a beautiful girl was licking your pussy as I fucked you right now?" Enough seeding leads pretty quickly to curiosity and fantasizing outside of sex, and puts you on the road to making something happen.

For all the rest, just get her close to cumming, then tell her, "Lie on your back," and tie her up, or whatever it is you want to do to her.

On threesomes - I have it in the post queue. Meanwhile, there's a thread on the discussion boards that might give you some ideas: Threesome advice.....

And on getting asked things you don't know - just say, "I don't know, that's not really my area of expertise," or simply making an expressive "Beats the hell out of me!" face and shrug. If it's an authority (teacher, policeman) you can simply say, "That one I'm not sure on."

Chase

Anon-

Memory is like everything else in the brain - it gets trained up or lost with use or lack thereof.

When I was a new tire salesman in 2001, I'd walk out to somebody's car, look at the size of his tires - e.g., P195/65R15 - walk back in, and my mind would be blank. Sheepishly, in front of the customer, I'd have to walk back out again with a pen and paper and write it down. After a year or two of tire sales, I never needed to write it down anymore, and very often could still remember his tire size if a customer came in to the store, left, and came back to the store again days or a week later.

There's a lot of research on "memory training" programs designed to improve working memory, but the jury's still out on whether these are actually effective or not. If I had one quibble with them, it might be that the kind of things you need to learn to remember in many of these games are different from what you need to remember in real life.

I might suggest taking up chess. A skilled chess player is running mostly off of memory - he's seen a number of different board layouts before, and his brain is accessing these stored patterns and telling him how to move next. When you're first learning chess, it's a MADDENING memory game of trying to remember to look for certain things and defend against other things. I recommend playing against a computer to start - you can start at an easy difficulty level and work your way up once you're winning most of your games. I'd also suggest playing as black sometimes and letting the computer move first so you can observe how it sets up its opening moves, and then try those same opening moves up yourself as white the next game and see how you do. This forces you to remember how the computer opened and what it did. Chess is a much more complex sort of memory game than most of the games sold as "brain training."

Another thing that will help is daily journaling. Start by trying to write down all the most important things that happened to you every day. You'll find at first you don't remember many details, but as you go on you'll find it easier and easier to remember these. When I used to write a lot of field reports while learning how to get girls, I went from very basic (because it was all I could remember about an outing) to more and more complex as the months went on - by the end of it, I was writing out full pieces of dialogue I'd remembered verbatim.

Chase

Mohammed-

In addition to what Knight's said about how therapy might help, a few things I can suggest:

• Start weaning yourself off - e.g., you can masturbate as much as you want every other day, but the days in between it's not allowed. Spend a few weeks doing that, then when you feel comfortable, take it down to every 3 days. Even if you have a very high sex drive, two days without masturbating is doable until you can start getting women into your life (and then you can mostly quit masturbation because it's not needed)

• Find something artistic or another way of expressing yourself that you enjoy, and start pouring your energy into that instead. You'll find that expression is very frequently a powerful way of transmuting sex energy into productive energy

• If all else fails and you're completely desperate, look into treatment with psilocybin - it's been shown to permanently cure a wide range of addictions (see "‘Magic Mushroom’ Drug Shows Promise in Treating Addictions and Cancer Anxiety" and "Psilocybin-Facilitated Treatment of Addiction - A Beckley Foundation/John Hopkins Collaboration"). They're still not sure how it works, but a properly administered (in a medical clinic, or by Native American tribes who use this) psilocybin trip rewires the brain in a way that clears it of addiction. Reports I've read of former hopeless cocaine and heroin addicts have said that they could still remember the pleasure of the drug as clearly as always, they just had zero urge or desire to go use it, and the urges never returned. In addition, these psilocybin trips usually end up being one of the top five most spiritual moments of most people's lives, comparable with births and weddings

Also, remember this about changing habits: the first 12 weeks are always the hardest.

After that, you don't even think about going back to the old habit anymore.

Chase

Anon-

See the posts on the Law of Least Effort and sprezzatura - these are the keys to being effortlessly cool and commanding / demanding the respect and admiration of others.

On the rugged bad boy image - see this article: How to Be Edgy (and Turn Women On). The one on Byronic personality traits might be worth a look too: How to Be Vulnerable, Enchanting, and Alluring to Women.

Chase

John-

The main thing you want to be concerned with about prostitutes is how they're effecting your opinions about women and how women feel about you.

e.g., I know some men who sleep with prostitutes, and come away more certain than ever that women are nuts about them and that all women love sex (because the prostitutes really enjoy sleeping with them). I've also known other men who slept with a lot of prostitutes who eventually started thinking that women don't want sex at ALL unless they're being paid for it, in one way or another, and that the kind of women they want anyway are out of their leagues unless they buy them.

I think it depends a good deal on your experiences with women outside of prostitution... e.g., are you successful with women even when you aren't indulging? Are the women you sleep with that you don't pay for as beautiful as or MORE beautiful than the prostitutes you sleep with, or are the prostitutes the more beautiful women you sleep with? How do prostitutes respond to you when you sleep with them - is it just business, or are they really iNTO it (and into YOU)?

I don't have much experience with this myself - the prostitutes I've slept with, there was no money involved - and I only know a few guys who are good with girls who enjoy sleeping with prostitutes, which is kind of a small sample size to pull from. But what I would say is be very aware of how your emotions toward women in general begin to shift as you frequent prostitutes, and if you find that they're shifting in a negative way (i.e., "Beautiful women don't want me unless I pay for them," or, "Women don't really want sex... they want MONEY"), then it's probably time to call it quits on the hookers and focus on meeting exclusively real women to start getting some more realistic data points instead.

Chase

Prince-

The only time I use pornography videos if my sex drive needs a jumpstart (e.g., I take a month off from girls to focus on business - my horniness peaks around two weeks, and I get really antsy and jittery, and then it subsides and I stop thinking about girls and sex all that much and I'm concentrating all my energy into business, or whatever else I'm consumed with at the time) or if I have a girlfriend who wants to watch porn. On the jumpstart, you can't overdo it and watch too much porn, or you fall right back into apathy again. Just enough to wet the whistle and get you back out there picking up new girls to sleep with. And on the girlfriends, this can be useful if you want to get them excited about something you want to do with them sexually - e.g., turning on some lesbian porn if you want to start opening a girl's mind up to some of the possibilities there and find out how excited she gets.

I'll sometimes spend 5 to 10 minutes browsing through pictures of beautiful naked girls every now and again, but I glance over most of them (kind of boring) and have my eye out for the especially beautiful ones (which I find only infrequently). I find when you can find a picture of a really beautiful girl, you can sometimes use that to get "familiar" with women who look just like her, and you have a more comfortable interaction when you meet them. It also helps you not overlook girls who look like her in person.

If you have some women you're not getting that you'd like to be getting - I might suggest finding out where those women hang out. Cougars usually have certain spots they go to - I run into cougar bars purely on accident during my explorations sometimes.

On living in the now - ha, sure. I'll put on the list. Might make for a different and interesting sort of article.

Chase

Anon-

Well, fortunately (or unfortunately), men in monogamous relationships see a substantial testosterone drop - which means a much lower sex drive, too. The only men immune to this are the ones who are still actively looking for more women to sleep with. The men who are 100% committed to their partner end up also being 100% committed to a significantly lowered sex drive.

This probably explains the lack of pornography / masturbation addictions among settled down men - after a while of living in monogamy, men shift out of "hunt and mate" into "settle and parent."

Chase

Wolf-

This is not something I've studied, so I'm not sure how useful it is... I can only tell you that I'm a pretty rapid learning, and from observing my thoughts during the learning process, here are what seem to be the tools I use.

• Comparison. Everything new I learn I "query the database" and see what it relates back to and come up with an example, or someone gives me an example that does this (good teachers do this; you'll note I try to use easily relatable examples for everything I explain on here, too). e.g., my martial arts instructor tells me to throw the weight of my body into my kicks, and to imagine that I'm kicking down a door when I do this - I learn the right technique much more easily. Or, someone tells me that light that passes a black hole's event horizon can no longer be seen by outside observers - I imagine it as light being sucked into a closed box. You can't see it from the outside, only the inside.

• Repetition. I try to immediately repeat things I hear several times when I hear them. When I was in school, I would repeat what the teacher had said in my head, and I'd write it down in my notes. When I had a chance during class, I'd glance back through my notes and refresh my memory on what we'd covered that day. When I meet someone new, I say her name 2 or 3 or 4 times immediately after meeting her. "Paula? That's a nice name. Paula, I'm Chase. It's good to meet you, Paula. You know I don't meet a lot of Paulas."

• Breaking things down into bite-sized chunks. Every chance I get I break things down into smaller, more easily understood pieces. e.g., learning marketing seems impossible, it's such a broad topic. But learning one piece of marketing a time you can handle. So you focus primarily on just, say, press releases, until you get great at writing really compelling press releases that get picked up by media, and you get good at getting those releases in front of the media. And in that, there are different skills to get down - writing good copy, locating and contacting reporters in ways that aren't intrusive and that they respond well too, etc. You break off one piece at a time, and suck up information about it.

• Do things right away. As soon as you learn it, do it. Go use it, any way that you can. One of my pet peeves is being around someone who starts talking about how to do something, when the thing is right there in front of me. I start almost freaking out - "Okay, enough talking! I can't remember all this! Let me just try out the thing you just said, and you can tell me the rest later!" Learn one thing, try it. You remember it infinitely better. Then learn something else, then try IT. Then learn ANOTHER thing... then try THAT. And so on and so forth. Don't try to learn a ton of stuff and then go try it later. Learn a little bit, then go try that little bit.

On staying up late - the best natural reset I've found have been transpacific flights (not transatlantic ones, oddly). For some reason, whenever I go from North America to Asia or Asia to North America, I get dead tired by 10 PM every night, and I'm waking up at 5 AM or 6 AM the next morning. By religiously listening to my body (and not pushing myself to stay up later, which means I then wake up later), I can extend this for months... very useful. Doesn't occur when I go to Europe though.

For something a bit more practical, that doesn't require crisscrossing the globe - pick a night when you're going to start going to bed earlier. Try to make sure you're tired that day - get up earlier or avoid getting too much sleep. Then pick a set time you're going to bed (say, 12 AM) and tell yourself you need to be finished everything you need to do (work, socializing, etc.) by 10:30 PM, computer goes off at 11 PM, and you shower or do whatever you need to do to get ready for bed after that and then go hit the hay. You'll still wake up a bit later in the day the next day - your body's used to staying asleep until then - but set an alarm, even if you have to hit snooze a few times. Then just keep repeating this a few days in a row. Your body catches up quickly.

A really hard work out the day you want to go to bed early can help, too. Nothing quite like a ragged tired body to get you in bed a lot earlier than you're used to.

Chase

Nick-

More than I can count. Here's a few:

• Anything high novelty-seeking translates to other high novelty-seeking traits. e.g., if she loves to travel, she also likes trying new foods, having new experiences, and she has a high sex drive and loves sex. Same thing goes in reverse - if she thinks the very idea of travel is horrifying, she probably orders the same thing every time she goes to McDonald's, enjoys the same hobby she's enjoyed since college, and has sex in the same 2 or 3 positions every time she does it (which isn't all that often, compared to some other women)

• Women who are highly empathetic to other people dislike judgment and may laugh at your jokes at others expense but feel guilty about it, so don't make too many of these (just enough to show her you're edgier than she is). They like charity and orphans and donating to starving children in Somalia and think you're a saint if you like these things to. Women who are low on empathy consider liking these things signs of weakness and stupidity, and they'll crack up if you bust on other people without feeling a shred of remorse. They'll get a kick out of any stories of yours of pulling something off over someone else (he's like me!), whereas highly empathetic women will despise you for even a silly story like this. Empathy towards people also doesn't necessarily translate to empathy towards animals, or vice versa - that girl who thinks animals are the cutest things on the planet may love people too, or she may think people are vile, evil, polluting creatures that the animal kingdom would be better off without

• If she's educated and she's high novelty-seeking, she's dreamed about running her own country someday. And her eyes will light up like Christmas and she'll ask you how you know this when you tell her that. Don't answer; just ask her if she'll let you come and live there once she's got it established and what you'll have to do for her in order to earn your passport
  

• If she's a stripper, astrology, palm-reading, tarot cards, and anything and everything else mystical is like a religion to her. She will be awestruck even more than most women if you start talking astrology to her

• If she's living in a country other than her home country, she was always ahead of her peers and never really fit in. She was always "different," but in a good way, and she knows it. All those other people left behind are living ordinary, normal lives, that maybe occasionally she wishes she could have, but only until she realizes how boring their lives are

• If she plays sports (hard, competitive sports; like lacrosse, or soccer - tennis doesn't count unless she's in Wimbledon), she LOVES sex. And her testosterone levels are through the roof - she's basically a man in a skirt

• If she's a goth / punk / hipster and she gives you hard, sexual stares, she's at least a little bit into bondage

• Astrology is surprisingly accurate. If you want to blow a girl's mind, get a copy of Suzanne White's The New Astrology and find their combined Chinese-Western Zodiac sign and read that to them, or even put it on your smart phone and pull it out mid-conversation. I have no idea why that stuff works (especially this, which is a lot more specific than general cold reading), but it does
  

That's just a few off the top of my head. But there are tons more out there - lots of common things you'll pick up when you've met enough different women.

Chase

Anon-

The problem with this is you're still training your brain to respond sexually to horny, naked women.

But when you go out side to meet girls, they're neither horny nor naked.

And even when you do get a girl naked, she's rarely behaving like the girl in the porn video, unless she's extremely sexually experienced / an ex-porn actress herself. Even most strippers or prostitutes don't behave like women do in porn, and they work IN the sex industry pleasing men and have LOTS of sex with LOTS of men.

It's an easy recipe for being bored with real world women.

Chase

Roberto-

Depends what part of the world you're in, but in most countries they dress a LOT flashier than most normal girls... they'll be dressed up in really revealing, bright, sparkly-type dresses, hair and make up done very well, etc. Most normal girls get dressed up, but usually not as flashy or as "Barbie doll"-like.

They'll also tend to congregate in certain spots to wait for prospective johns... if you're in a bar, say, they'll quite often be either hovering around the bar all lined up, or they'll be circling around the main area watching inwards waiting for drunk guys to stagger off the dance floor, realize they're not going to get laid that night unless they pay for it, and grab a hooker.

Pretty standard for most of these girls to be neither especially intelligent nor especially charismatic... they usually have a rather dull look in their eyes, and unlike the other girls in a place they're not having fun (because they're working). Instead, they scan the venue with the same kind of predatory glance that men on the prowl employ.

Commonness varies a lot depending on where you go. There are often several nightspots in each city where the prostitutes congregate, because those are the best hunting grounds for clients. In most countries they learn to largely ignore / stay away from young men, who neither a) have money or b) want to pay for sex, and usually target the older men who'd very much enjoy a romp with a younger girl, and have the dough to foot the bill.

Chase

Renee-

Best way of changing your preferences is gradually building up new positive experiences around the kinds of women you want to change them to.

I've done this at several times in my life: with black girls in high school, Asian girls in university, and bleached blondes while living in SoCal. I didn't have much interest in any of these girls beforehand, but said to myself, "I should learn to appreciate these girls' features, because why not?" so I started looking at lots of pictures of them, keeping an eye out for them whenever I went out, and thinking about them and imagining talking to them, kissing them, and taking them to bed. After a time, I started finding them attractive, too.

Check out the article on how to visualize - this helps a great deal for speeding this process up and making it go deeper.

Chase

Joe-

My pleasure. And I could easily tell sales copy was your trade! Pretty clear you know your way around a pitch.

I'd agree with you on addictions... anything that lets you escape or sucks you into doing it usually gets in the way of doing other things. Exceptions are addictions with certain benefits - e.g., being addicted to lifting weights, then building a great body and using that to more easily attract and meet women wherever you are, or being addicted to something like dance, that puts you in constant contact with attractive women.

Getting addicted to things is useful and necessary to develop any skill to a high degree - you've got to be doggedly relentless in doing something over and over and over and never getting bored of it or giving up to get good at it. But it's pretty easy to get hooked on something that isn't productive at all and doesn't make you better at anything, simply because it's easy and the reward structure makes it feel like it's good for you (porn is like this, or various video games, Internet addictions, etc.).

Chase