Holly Finn: Online Pornography’s Effects, and a New Way to Fight Them

Looks like there’s some hope for this highly addictive disease. See what you think.

Repetitive viewing of pornography resets neural pathways, creating the need for a type and level of stimulation not satiable in real life. The user is thrilled, then doomed. But the evolutionary plasticity of our mind makes this damage reversible. In “The Brain That Changes Itself,” psychiatrist Norman Doidge writes about patients who overused porn and were able to quit, cold turkey, and change their brains back. They just had to stop watching it. Completely.