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Dr. Trish Leigh Podcast
#Episode 155: The Truth About Dopamine and Porn Addiction w/ Dr. Trish Leigh
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What if I told you that every single time you watch porn, you are rewiring your brain away from your own real world pleasure and happiness? I'm Dr. Trish Leigh. Welcome back for another episode of Porn Brain Rewired, the podcast. Today we're going to dive into the concept of how your brain is hijacked by porn and what you can do to reset the pleasure pathways back to your real life. So for this discussion, we're going to have to dive deep into the idea of dopamine dependency. So let's start with the idea of what is dopamine anyway? Dopamine is the molecule of motivation more. And pleasure. So just like it sounds like, what it does is it links your brain to go back for more pleasure from the sources that it found it in. So let's just think for a moment. If you never found porn when you were young, most people find porn in childhood or adolescence. We know it's down to the average age of 10. So let's just say your brain never found porn when you were 10 years old. Where would your brain be finding pleasure Instead of in the screen? It would be finding pleasure in your real world experiences. This is how healthy pleasure pathways are built in the brain. So as your brain is developing and you're growing older, your. You have pleasurable experiences in the world and your brain wants more of them because they are the most heightened pleasure that you can get. So let's think of family dinners out where you're laughing and you're having a really good time, going to your favorite amusement park, playing your favorite sport, going to concerts of your favorite musicians, just hanging out with your favorite friends, having a great time, having your favorite foods, cheating, just chilling, watching your favorite shows. All of those become where pleasure is in the real world. As you grow older, you begin to develop an idea of what you want to do for work. And that's where pleasure starts to come in. So for me, you probably know this. I have a varied amount and breadth of degrees because I was in school and I was always fascinated with learning. So I learned about communication between people, and then I learned about neuroscience, and then I learned about neurofeedback, that we can rewire brains. And I was so jazzed up to go to school to learn. And I was so excited to be a university professor, to be the best professor that there was. Then I was even more excited to create my own business and to bring my work to the world. All of that was a lot of hard work that didn't have any. I wasn't getting any real world reward yet for doing the work. It was all intrinsic internal motivation because I found so much pleasure in doing those things. And right now I see my kids developing those pleasures. My one daughter rides horses. She wants nothing more than to be at the barn. My other daughter loves being with her friends. She always calls with the plans that she's making with her friends for the week. My other son, he just went snowboarding for a week, totally psyched, told me all the stories about the snowboarding trip. These are real world pleasures. And you know why they love them? Because that's where the dopamine is. So now let's back up. If you're a person who has a porn habit, compulsion or addiction, when you found porn when you were young, porn hijacked that reward center in your brain and those pleasure pathways, literally true neural pathways in your brain. We know from science that the dopamine levels in your brain recalibrated when you found porn. It's considered a super normal stimulus, which means it produces more dopamine in your brain, which than the other real world experiences that I just talked about. So your brain was hijacked in those first exposures to need more dopamine and to want to go back to porn or sexual media to get it. The link was created. This is how porn hijacks your pleasure pathways and your nervous system, your brain. So then what happens is if you keep going back to porn, you are traversing or walking down those neural pathways in your brain. You're going down the path over and over and over. Basically, you know, hardwiring in those pleasure pathways back to porn at a higher level. It's considered a supercharged level of dopamine. Now what happens is, first of all, you're conditioned to go back to porn to feel pleasure at higher levels. So now those activities that would have been the most pleasurable for you aren't. They can't compare because they're not super normal stimuli. They're healthy stimuli. Hanging out with your peeps, laughing, healthy dopamine, we'll call it a level 6 or 7 on a 1 to 10 scale. Porn, super normal stimuli, we'll call it a level 15 on a 1 to 10 scale. So unfortunately, your brain gets linked to go back to that source for the highest level of pleasure. And two things happen. Number one, your brain needs higher level of pleasure to feel good. Which means you no longer feel good in those activities. You no longer feel pleasure in healthy sexuality with a partner. You need all the bells and whistles of what you are exposed to in porn, you no longer feel the pleasure of your work. You actually feel more stress because you're in a dopamine deficit state. When you go back into the world, your relationship is less satisfying, your sex life's less satisfying, your kids are more irritating, your co workers are more irritating, unless they're a triggering avatar that represents sexuality to you. So number one, you need higher levels of pleasure. Number two, you need it from sex. That's the link. And specifically high levels of sex that you find in porn. So what this does to people is it gives you sexual arousal dysfunction, what I call sad. So that shows up as ED and D E most times because your threshold for arousal is, it's been raised back when your brain was developing in a healthy way. You would feel pleasure hanging out with your friends at a 6, you'd feel sexual pleasure at an 8 with your partner. Now you need a 15. None of those things will do it for you. So what we know from the science is that this dependency on higher levels of dopamine from unhealthy sexual sources, what it does is it creates more depression, anxiety, it creates more self esteem issues, body image issues, less satisfaction with a human partner, less satisfaction in your real life sexual relationship, less satisfaction in your life overall. Depression, anxiety, low motivation, brain fog, ADHD symptoms, porn induced erectile dysfunction, the list goes on. Science supports it. If you're interested in reading about it, my book is coming out soon. Mind over explicit matter. Tons of science there. If you don't believe me, you can check all the references in the back. But the idea is this dopamine dependency, it's hijacked your brain, it's actually stealing your happiness from you and you may not even know it. So how do you reset it? It's as simple, but not necessarily easy. It's as simple as getting back on track and resetting the pleasure pathways, kind of flipping them from over here, going towards unhealthy hypersexuality, flipping it so that now these pleasure pathways are leading back into your life. I work with thousands of people all over the world and what they tell me is they get stuck in the loop of constantly chasing the high of high levels of dopamine from porn and they actually have foregone the pleasure pathways into their life because there's no pleasure there anymore. So that's why I say this is simple but not necessarily easy. It's simple in theory to flip needing high levels of dopamine from unhealthy sources to getting healthy levels of dopamine from healthy sources. But the reality is, at the outset, it's not going to do it for you. So this takes time, training, and perseverance. But I also know, and this is in my book that's coming out, that you can use advanced technology called neurofeedback. And what neurofeedback does is it will rewire your brain much more quickly than you trying to use your mind and body alone. It can rewire you from needing high levels of dopamine back to needing lower levels of dopamine, which makes it easier for you to flip that switch. So we know this impact on mental and physical health is huge. So if you want to rewire this pleasure pathway, reset is essential. It's crucial that you rewire your brain from the neurobiological dysfunction that is happening at the core that is creating the need to go back to the high levels of dopamine. So I've already told you that your brain recalibrated when you were young and you found porn. Let's revisit that for a second. The idea is that when you were growing up, before you found porn, your brain was developing in a neurological capacity until the age of 28 when you found porn. This developed, changed. We know this from science. So it no longer developed in the way that it would if you hadn't been exposed to porn and if you hadn't continued to consume porn. So if you continue to consume it, you're reinforcing these dopamine pathways for pleasure back to the screen. So what happened is your brain never fully developed. We know from science that it's an underdeveloped brain pattern. In functioning, your brain functions differently at a neurological level than it would if you never consume porn. What this looks like on a QEEG brain map, the assessment that I provide is that it's very high levels of one of two patterns, one I call strained brain. It's a brain that's running very fast and very slow simultaneously. What this will feel like to you is you'll feel wired and tired, either at the same time, or you will swing back and forth like a pendulum. You'll swing back and forth between wired, feeling anxious, vigilant. You can't sleep, your mind is racing, you're overthinking, you're a busy body. You will swing back and forth between the wired aspect, as I just described, all the way over to the slowest energy, the tired aspect. Brain fog, exhaustion, low motivation, can't concentrate, can't focus, attention issues, your work productivity decreases. Wired Very fast energy. It's got you buzzing, tired, very low energy. You can't do what you need to do. Pendulum effect, swinging back and forth between the two. That's strained brain. Secondarily, there's another pattern that I call drained brain. Drain brain is when the pendulum has swung for so long that your brain becomes completely taxed and exhausted from the swinging of the pendulum. And it stops, it stops in the middle and it gets stuck there. I call it drained brain. It is a brain that's using very high amounts of medium speed that typically in a healthy brain or an optimal brain would be used for you to relax on the couch for a minute or for a beat for an hour. So it would be used when you take a chill and you take a break on the couch. That is what happen happens when drain brain happens. You get stuck there permanently or semi permanently. So you're either stuck in strain brain or you've dipped and tipped over a worsening of strained brain into drain brain. Drain brain is what causes erectile dysfunction and sexual arousal dysfunction. It's what causes depression, it's what causes low motivation. You really get stuck there and you are no longer happy. You, your baseline arousal has changed, it's lowered, which means it's even more difficult to become sexually aroused. So this functional brain pattern, neurological dysregulation or dysfunction, is the crack under the surface. It's what I refer to as the silent tsunami of porn addiction. This crack has happened without you knowing. It's a crack in functioning, not in the structure of your brain, but in the way that it functions. A QEG measures functioning. Your brain performance pattern has changed from optimal functioning functioning to dysfunctional. And that dysfunctional can be at all different levels. So you can be a little dysfunctional or a lot dysfunctional. That's what I can see on a QEG brain map. So from there, you know how the functioning has changed in your brain. It started changing back when you found porn when you were young. And it continues to become more and more dysfunctional with continued porn use. This is the underlying cause of having to go back to porn, chasing that high of the necessary dopamine. And it's also the cause of sexual arousal dysfunction. Now how do you reset that? I can see it on the QEG brain map. You can use the neuromodulation technique of neurofeedback. That's the easiest and fastest way I know of. You can measure the amount of dysfunction in your brain on the map, then you can change it and visualize those changes in Neurofeedback over time, and you can see your brain changing as you feel and perform better. That's what I do in my work. If you're not able to get into the neurofeedback program, a lower level neuromodulation technique is meditation. So you can use guided meditations or you can create your own meditation habit. So there's a caveat there because meditation is designed to get you into that kind of middle speed of, you know, couch mode relaxation. But if you're stuck there in drained brain, you don't really want to reinforce that with meditation. I see it happen with clients all the time. You want to jimmy your brain out of that mode and get back into the optimal mode. But neuromodulation can be a key for many people. Okay. So if you want to see success stories from people that have used neurofeedback to help their cause quickly, you can look at the testimonials on the Google Reviews. Neurofeedback is an advanced technology. It's a top tier way for you to reset the pleasure pathways in your brain. It's imperative for you to leave porn behind and to heal sexual arousal dysfunction. The pleasure pathways have to be reset and the dopamine receptors in the reward center in your brain resensitized for you to get started by yourself. Limit, reduce and eliminate your porn use so that your brain doesn't need high levels of dopamine anymore. And get back to your real world experiences. Get back to the hobbies you love, the relationships you love, and the work that you love. Every time you engage in those activities, you are resensitizing your brain back to real world pleasure. All right, for anybody who's still here on the podcast, I'm thinking about renaming the podcast because the P word has become more and more difficult to get out in the world. So when I started this podcast, Porn Brain Rewire, which I still love the name, it was easier for people to find it. It's becoming much more difficult these days. So I am thinking about changing the name of the podcast to Desire Rewire. And this way, talking about changing, not only stepping away from porn, but like I just talked about being able to rewire pleasure pathways and desire back to real world desire. So let me know what you think about. Drop some comments if you think that Desire Rewire is a good idea. So instead of Porn Brain Rewire, it's Desire Rewire and it will, you know, hopefully it capitalizes on being able to reach more people and to help people leave porn behind. Get on purpose in their life and get back to enjoying the life that you want and you deserve. So let me know what you think about that. And until next time, control your brain. Or it'll control you. Thanks for listening.