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Kevin and Josh both have the same habit.
Explore the Cheesecake Rule, a new approach to quitting porn by understanding addiction layers and overcoming shame and brain effects.
Key Takeaways
- Shame and guilt about porn use worsen addiction rather than help overcome it.
- Porn addiction involves both psychological shame and neurological brain changes.
- A non-moralizing, compassionate approach is crucial for effective recovery.
- Awareness of addiction escalation and brain impacts is necessary for all users.
- The Cheesecake Rule reframes porn use as a health choice, not a moral failing.
Summary
- The video compares two porn users, Kevin and Josh, showing how identical behavior can lead to different outcomes based on moral beliefs and guilt.
- Researchers identify three layers of porn addiction: moral incongruence (shame), brain effects from porn use, and a deeper underlying layer.
- Moral incongruence causes shame and guilt, which paradoxically increase addiction severity and relapse risk.
- Heavy porn use negatively impacts the brain's dopamine system and reduces gray matter in areas responsible for long-term thinking and decision-making.
- Porn use can lead to objectification and difficulties in romantic relationships.
- The video emphasizes separating moral judgment from behavior, comparing porn use to eating cheesecake—unhealthy but not morally wrong.
- Self-love and non-moralizing approaches are more effective for change than guilt and punishment.
- Users must recognize the difference between casual use and addiction, watching for escalation signs.
- The third, less discussed layer drives the addiction cycle and relapse, often masked by shame.
- The video offers new insights and strategies to address porn addiction beyond traditional guilt-based methods.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Every night before bed, they're on the Cornhub.
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They both watch the same kind of content for about the same amount of time.
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But Kevin is racked with guilt about it.
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He struggles with urges all the time, he feels awful about himself, zero confidence, brain fog, all the stuff you've read about in NoFap forums.
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Josh on the other hand, he barely even thinks about it, just strolls through his days without a worry in the world.
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How can the same behavior lead to such wildly different outcomes?
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Researchers have actually studied this and what they found changes everything about how we have to think about the problem of porn addiction and its solution.
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Because as it turns out, if you are a porn user, you don't have one problem, you have three and they're stacked on top of each other like three layers of cheesecake.
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In this video, I'll walk you through exactly what these three layers are and share with you the two insights that help you solve your porn habit in a way you've never heard about before.
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Insight number one comes from what researchers call PPMI or Pornography Problems due to Moral Incongruence.
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Very catchy, right?
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But they found is this Kevin versus Josh phenomenon.
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Now, looking deeper into this, the researchers found that often,
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the Kevins were people who came from a strict conservative or religious background.
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Or also from other backgrounds, but what they all had in common is that they had strong moral ideas about porn use.
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In other words, the Kevins are guys who feel especially bad and guilty about the fact that they watch porn.
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Whereas the Josh's are guys who go, everybody does it, it's fine.
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And so here we have to tease apart the first two layers.
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There's a whole layer of porn addiction and problems with porn use,
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that is actually the shame loop.
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There are a whole bunch of problems such as stress and anxiety and low self-esteem,
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and a lack of confidence, which can get so bad that you literally get nervous and can't look people in the eye because you feel so bad about yourself.
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And even things like brain fog and constant distraction and things like that that porn users sometimes report.
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But it turns out it is not the porn use itself that is causing these problems.
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What's causing these problems is how bad you feel about the fact that you use porn.
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And here's where it gets even crazier.
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Other research shows that if you shame yourself, if you believe that porn use is a moral failing,
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and makes you a bad person,
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you're actually more likely to relapse, you're more likely to keep using it and you're more likely to escalate your porn use,
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and make it into a worse and worse addiction over time.
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And that's super counterintuitive, isn't it?
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I mean, you'd think that if you believe that porn is really bad and you need to stop,
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and maybe there's even some kind of a divine punishment if you don't stop,
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you think that would motivate you to quit.
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But somehow, it seems to do the opposite.
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Now, if you're familiar with my content, you can probably guess why this is.
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And this is why I call it the shame loop.
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See, what happens is all the shame and guilt you feel about using porn becomes this emotional charge.
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It becomes this thing that you feel bad about.
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It becomes a source of stress.
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And how do we escape stress and bad feelings?
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We use porn.
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Remember, every addiction is a coping mechanism.
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It is something you use to help soothe yourself, to help not feel unpleasant feelings.
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So the more you beat yourself up about having an addiction in the first place, the more bad feelings there are that you then need to escape with even more addictive behavior.
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Now, you might think, okay,
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the solution is, I just need to stop feeling guilty about it.
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I just need to be a Josh and not worry about my porn use.
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And yes, that helps a lot.
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But I don't only have good news about this because we have to unpack the second layer,
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which is the behavior and the brain effects of that behavior.
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Unfortunately, the reality is that heavy porn use does have measurable, clear, detrimental effects
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on things like your brain's dopamine reward system.
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Which means it can lead to states of low motivation or what's called dopamine depletion.
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Researchers also shown that porn use causes hypofrontality, which is basically the degeneration in what could be argued to be one of the most important parts of your brain.
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Your long-term thinking, strategic decision-making part of the brain, you literally have less gray matter in that part of the brain,
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if you are a heavy porn user.
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Researchers also shown that people who use more porn tend to objectify other people.
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It makes relationships and especially romantic relationships with other people more difficult and so on and so forth.
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What I want you to realize here is that there are two separate problems we're talking about.
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There's a whole set of problems that come from feeling bad about using porn.
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And then there's a different set of problems that come from just using porn, regardless of whether you feel bad about it or not.
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Right now, we're in a bit of a pickle.
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Because on the one hand, I'm telling you, hey, if you feel bad about your porn use,
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that makes it worse, but also,
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using porn is kind of bad.
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So how do we resolve this?
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Well, think about it like you would think about cheesecake.
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Cheesecake is not a health food.
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And it's full of sugar, which means that it's also quite addictive.
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You might be someone who really likes cheesecake.
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Maybe you're even a little bit addicted to cheesecake.
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And that is not good for your health.
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But also, it doesn't make you a bad person.
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You could choose to not eat cheesecake because you care about your health, but that doesn't mean that you're morally superior to someone who does eat cheesecake.
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And it doesn't mean that if you ever have cheesecake, you've somehow screwed up monumentally and you can never be forgiven.
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What I'm laying out here is a non-moralizing view of behavior.
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You can have preferences, you can make choices that are good for you, that are good for your physical health, good for your mental health, without invoking morality.
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And you know what's funny?
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Research into weight loss shows the same dynamic.
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People who try to punish themselves and bully themselves and guilt themselves into losing weight tend to be much less successful than people who do it without all this pressure and guilt.
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In practical terms, the way I think about it is that you can make a choice that comes from a place of fear,
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or you can make a choice that comes from a place of love.
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You can be afraid of, oh no, if I eat this cheesecake, it's going to kill me and I'm going to be fat and nobody's going to love me.
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Or you could say, you know what, as an act of self-love, I'm going to make a healthier choice.
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The exact same thing applies to porn use.
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If you're a Josh, you have to be real about the fact that this affects your brain.
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There are consequences to this behavior.
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And you have to make a choice about whether you want to live with those consequences or not.
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And as I've talked about in a separate video, you also have to be aware of the warning signs.
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Because it's one thing to be an occasional porn user and you don't feel bad about it.
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And you go like, yeah, maybe it's not the healthiest thing, but I'm fine with that.
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But you also have to be on the lookout for escalation.
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You have to be on the lookout for,
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when is this turning from a kind of unhealthy habit into a full-blown addiction?
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And will you be able to stop that before it derails your life?
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Now, this brings us to the third layer.
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This is the one that almost nobody ever touches.
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But it's the one that matters the most.
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Layer number three is the one that runs the whole show.
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And you might have never even realized.
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And in fact, the crazy thing is that if you are a Kevin, if you are in a constant guilt and shame spiral,
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that whole thing actually exists to help you not have to experience layer three.
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The endless relapse cycle and making yourself feel bad about it,
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is a convenient distraction from what's really going on underneath.
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Layer three is the shadow.
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Remember how I said all addiction is a coping mechanism?
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Well, this is what you're coping with.
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There are things you don't want to feel, there are things that feel dangerous to your system, like parts of your psyche or certain feelings, certain memories, where your subconscious has put a big sign up in front and said, never go here.
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And whenever you get anywhere close to that, part of you goes, ah, we need porn, or maybe we need sugar, or whatever your addiction thing is.
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We need to pull out the phone and start scrolling.
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Anything but feel this feeling.
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This is what healing is all about.
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And if you want to truly resolve your porn addiction, this is where the work lies.
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Now, I know this can sound pretty abstract and vague.
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You're thinking, well, what exactly is in the shadow?
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What are these feelings that I'm not trying to feel?
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And I have good news for you.
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It's very easy to find out.
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Well, easy is maybe not the right word, but it's simple to find out.
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Because all it takes is abstinence and awareness.
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And here's how you can do that.
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You basically go on a detox, you don't scroll social media, you don't watch porn, you don't eat junk food.
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You cut all of that stuff out and then you simply see what happens.
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What comes up?
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See, when you take away the coping strategy, when you take away the thing that you've used to not feel those feelings in the shadow,
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well, then eventually those feelings will start bubbling to the surface.
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And it will feel really bad.
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Part of you will panic.
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You'll have thoughts like, I can't do this, or I really have to check TikTok right now,
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or something like that.
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Look, this is why quitting porn or doing a detox, quitting social media.
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This is why it's hard.
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This is why people always say, yeah, I'm going to try this and then they don't do it.
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Because you have that unconscious system that makes sure you're not confronted with your shadow.
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So you have to sit through that.
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You have to feel that panic, you have to feel that fear, you have to feel that, it could also be different feelings, it could be shame or sadness, loneliness, existential dread, all kinds of stuff.
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You have to feel that come up and just let it.
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There are two specific strategies you can use to make it through that.
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And also bring awareness to what's happening.
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One is what I call sitting in the fire, and I'll link to a separate video on that.
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And the other is writing, you grab a pen and paper and you start writing about what are the thoughts that are racing through my mind.
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What is happening in my body, what are the feelings that are coming up that feel so unpleasant and so difficult?
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Writing is bringing the spotlight of your attention to these very things that you've been successfully avoiding for so long.
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Now, this is unpleasant.
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It's difficult.
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Most people successfully avoid feeling these feelings for years or even decades.
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But I've got great news for you.
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Because not only have I just given you two tools that make it much easier to actually feel through these feelings,
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but also that's all that's needed for healing.
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If you're just there, if you just allow yourself to feel these unresolved feelings, to for once not escape into distraction, but just sit with it.
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Experience what has been suppressed for so long.
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That is the majority of the healing work right there.
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In many cases, once you feel all the way through those feelings, they're resolved and they won't come back.
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And that's the kind of thing where you look back and you realize, oh, I haven't had the addictive impulse.
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I haven't had the urge anymore.
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I haven't relapsed anymore.
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It was easier than I ever thought possible.
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And that is the final and most important insight.
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When you bring acceptance and self-love and awareness to what's happening in layer three.
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When you allow yourself to sit with these things instead of constantly escaping.
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And when you allow yourself to forgive yourself instead of constantly shaming yourself,
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you are so much closer to total healing than you could ever be with all the willpower and stress and guilt and shame that you've tried up until now.
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In my work with clients, I've consistently found that this kind of work really moves the needle.
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More than anything else they've ever tried.
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And now you even know the research to back up exactly why that is.
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If you're willing to do this kind of work and you want practical guidance on how to do it, I've put together a completely free shadow work course for you.
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That you can sign up for on my website.
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That's the first link in the description, click on that, sign up and you can go through this entire course right now.
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And also, if you want to understand more about this sitting in the fire thing I mentioned, watch this video next.
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That's all for today.
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Thank you so much for watching.
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If you appreciate my content, please give it a boost in the algorithm by leaving a comment, leaving a like.
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It really makes a difference.
Topics:porn addictionpornography problemsmoral incongruenceshame loopdopamine depletionhypofrontalityself-loveaddiction recoverymental healthbehavioral change
