How Your Brain Changes When You Quit Porn - Dr. Andrew Huberman

There's additional issue with pornography which is not often discussed, which is that, remember, guys in particular, the brain is a learning prediction machine. And if I'm not trying to say that all pornography is bad, but there are good data to support the idea that if your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily going to carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're one on one with somebody else. So you're going to program yourself into being a voyeur. Yeah. Or just create challenges in sexual interactions with, you know, with peer, with a. With a real partner. Mary Harrington has the three laws of porno dynamics. And the second law of porno dynamics is the law of FAP entropy. And it says that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more intense over time. And I think that this is sort of speaking to that ever, ever sort of escalating amount of the wildness that you need to watch in order to get an ever decreasing stimulus that comes back. Yeah. And you know, here I'm approaching this only through the lens of biology. Right. Right. I'm I'm not a, you know, I'm not a psychologist and I'm certainly not political in it in any way, at least not. I have ideas about politics, but I just don't discuss them publicly. But the, but the idea here is that I'm not saying pornography as a stimulus is bad or good. What I'm saying is in its availability and its extreme forms, it's a very potent stimulus and very potent stimuli of any kind. Extremely palatable food, extreme pornography, extreme experiences like bungee cord jumping, those set a threshold for dopamine release. And Ana will tell you that, and I'm sure she did, that the higher the dopamine peak, the bigger the drop afterwards. And it's not that you drop to baseline, you drop below baseline. So again, it's not. These things aren't good or bad. They just have to be controlled in a way, because when people are pursuing dopamine peaks over and over and over and they aren't getting them, typically it's because they've been pursuing that activity far too often. And you're saying perhaps take a break from that and there may be an ability for yourself, your system, to reset, right? Yeah, yeah. I I mean, in theory, all the things that we're talking about with pornography could be superimposed onto food or could be superimposed onto real sex. Right. That one also has to be cautious there. Right. But the cycling back and forth between dopamine and low dopamine states dopamine fasting, as it were. But maybe just low dopamine states. These are natural rhythms that existed in the nervous system. We had to remember what the dopaminergic system is there for. I'll say it again, I wasn't consulted at the design phase, but we know as a generic form of motivation and pursuit, you can imagine the human or the animal that's hungry or thirsty, it needs energy to go pursue the thing. So the idea that you have to eat in order to get energy, that's true, but you need energy in order to get the thing to eat. So our nervous system has energy also. That's dopamine and epinephrine. Yes. We use glucose and glycogen, et cetera, when we're pursuing things. But the idea here is you're pursuing something and then either by smell or by sight, you think you're on the right track. So you go down that track and then, ah, there it is. You know, you get some berries or you get, you know, let's get prehistoric about this. Or you get to kill the prey and eat it, and then it gives you energy to continue this pursuit or to reproduce. I mean, there's a reason why humans and other animals seek out reproduction is that every, every species, but certainly humans, have two innate desires built into them. Whether or not they decide to actualize this or not, is the desire to protect young and make more of its own species. Every successful species does that, even if people don't have children. In general, people care about children because of what they represent. Very few people dislike children. I mean, there are a few mutants out there that dislike children, but you always worry about those kinds of people. What's happening people. If you enjoyed that, then press here for the full unedited episode. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.