Speaker A
I love this one, particularly for porn addiction. Use porn anytime you want. Be aware of the porn, but your job is to make sure that the porn that you use is always more enjoyable than the last time you used porn. You have to figure out a
Explore how porn affects the brain, the dopamine-serotonin balance, and practical ways to overcome addiction through awareness and presence.
Key Takeaways
- Awareness and savoring pleasure can disrupt addictive porn habits.
- Dopamine and serotonin balance is crucial for contentment and addiction management.
- Emotional avoidance drives porn addiction cycles; confronting emotions is key to healing.
- Practical exercises like meditation help break automatic addictive responses.
- Building confidence and connection reduces reliance on dopamine-driven behaviors.
What the video covers
- Porn addiction often stems from using it to escape negative emotions like anxiety or pain.
- Increasing the enjoyment and presence during porn use can paradoxically reduce addictive patterns.
- Pleasure and contentment are inversely related, linked to dopamine and serotonin levels in the brain.
- A dopamine-driven lifestyle lowers serotonin, leading to discontent and a cycle of chasing pleasure.
- Contentment, as seen in yogis, involves serotonin and endocannabinoid systems, reducing the need for dopamine-driven rewards.
- Awareness and presence activate brain regions that reduce automatic addictive behaviors.
- Facing and feeling emotions directly weakens their control over behavior, creating a pattern interrupt.
- Porn addiction cycles involve emotional triggers, habitual responses, and post-use regret.
- Techniques like the 'fire meditation' encourage sitting with emotions rather than escaping them.
- Building relational connection and self-confidence can reduce dopamine cravings and support recovery.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Porn Addiction and Enjoyment
- 00:55Emotional Escape and Porn Use
- 01:47Pleasure vs Contentment: Neuroscience Overview
- 02:28Dopamine Lifestyle and Serotonin Deficiency
- 03:22Contentment in Yogis and Functional Neuroscience
- 04:56Challenges in Overcoming Addiction
- 05:58Awareness, Emotion, and Brain Function
- 07:25Porn Addiction Cycles and Emotional Triggers
- 08:12Facing Emotions and Pattern Interrupts
- 09:41Supporting Internal Awareness and Recovery
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
way to make porn super enjoyable. Like, whatever you have to do, like candles, whatever you got to do to make porn more and more enjoyable. I didn't mean like quick pleasure. I mean, like, you're really savoring, feeling
Speaker A
the pleasure. You can do the same thing with potato chips. If someone actually does that, it disrupts bad habits unbelievably quickly. On the surface, what that sounds like is you, uh, speedrunning the hedonic treadmill and, uh, that, oh, well, this is going to make
Speaker A
the habit even more alluring, even more addictive, even, even more, uh, self-reinforcing. Why is that not the case? Why does it do something else?
Speaker A
Yeah. So most of the time, the person who's doing it is trying to escape an emotional experience. So I'm going to use porn so I don't have to think about something, not have to be in pain, not have to, so I can cure my anxiety in that
Speaker A
moment, in that second. This is bringing such a deep amount of presence to it. To actually enjoy it, you actually have to have presence. And then you start to find out that the enjoyment is far better than what porn was giving you.
Speaker A
There's a neuroscience version. Please. So I think, so when he says enjoy porn, notice what he also says. Don't tug one out, bro.
Speaker A
Yeah. Right. So this is, this is what I think is really interesting. A lot of people don't realize pleasure and contentment are inversely related.
Speaker A
Okay? Okay. So, the more pleasure you have in your life, the less content you'll be. And this is down to the neuroscience level. So, dopamine and serotonin are like, this is rough, but if you guys want to get complicated, we
Speaker A
can. Dopamine and serotonin are like inversely related. So, if you look at someone who has a highly dopamineergic life, like the person I wanted to be, right? So, lot of sex, lot of affairs.
Speaker A
Pointing at you, not me. I'm just saying. Lot of, lot of, or as much anal as you can handle.
Speaker A
Just have anal sex, bro. Is that easy? Just say yes to anal. That's going to be, I have, I have practical teachings, too.
Speaker A
I have practical teachings, too. Well, so, so, so literally, like if you, if you live a dopamineergic lifestyle, you will be, your serotonin levels will drop and so you will become discontent and then you chase dopamine. So dopamine is
Speaker A
a substitute for serotonin. And then what we find is that as people become more content, their draw for dopamine decreases. On average, would you say that more people have a dopamine problem than a serotonin problem? They're using that. They're
Speaker A
chasing after that. Whereas if they were more in, I always think about dopamine Chris, serotonin Chris, and cortisol Chris. Like dopamine Chris is achieving things and making new 24-hour play records on the channel. Serotonin Chris is, uh, relaxing in a hammock and cortisol
Speaker A
Chris is arguing about something over email. What's the word you're using? Chris. Chris himself.
Speaker A
Chris. Oh. Oh. Oh. Okay. I was like, "Oh, I, I was going to say oxytocin." Chris, oxytocin Chris. Yeah.
Speaker A
I'm scared that it's going to go anal sex. That's all three. No. No. I'm sorry for opening that door.
Speaker A
More people in serotonin problem, more people in dopamine problem. So, so I, I'd say that you can't have one problem without the other, right? So, the whole point is that they're related. So, if you have a dopamineergic, that's a
Speaker A
problem. If you live a dopamineergic lifestyle, your serotonin by definition is going to be low. And if you look at these yogis in the Himalayas, they're, I mean, we, no one's doing intra, not even intracellular, intercellular measurements of dopamine
Speaker A
and serotonin between neurons. Like, no one's, like, doing brain biopsies to measure that stuff. So this is basically functional neuroscience. But if you look at like a, a yogi, a yogi is content. And so they can still engage in pleasure,
Speaker A
but that contentment also enters the endocannabinoid circuitry. But if you think about your peace, right? If I am fundamentally content, and I think this is what I'd love to get to the methodology of that bifurcation that you
Speaker A
were talking about because I think this is what Connor's talking about is like if you are confident in yourself, if you are relationally connected, the fuel that dopamine, the problems that dopamine solves actually disappear. And I think that's
Speaker A
what he's talking about as well, which is like if you don't tug one out, which by the way is the hard part if you're addicted, right, is to especially if you're watching porn with candles on, right?
Speaker A
There comes a time where I just get outgunned in these conversations. I don't even know, like, how you know. So, so, and so I, I, I think we'll get, we get one, one day I'll be strong enough one day. One day. So, so
Speaker A
we'll, we get, uh, you know, we get to this point where, like, what I, what I really like about that exercise, it's a shift to serotonin. It's a shift. This is exactly the, the, the potato chip exercise. When you start to settle in
Speaker A
awareness, when you become aware of something, the bite of it literally decreases. And there's some fascinating neuroscience about this where, like, I, I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but you know, if I, you know, the
Speaker A
difference between people who dance and people who don't know how to dance confidence once that is traumatized.
Speaker A
So, so I think one, one group tries to do it and one group doesn't try to do it.
Speaker A
Does that make sense? Yeah, I get what you're saying, right? So something really interesting happens. So if I, if I were to, like, give you guys, like, something to eat and I tell you consciously control every movement, you would not be able to chew.
Speaker A
If I tell you consciously, okay, contract the calf, now lift, now extend the foot, now put it down. So anytime you become aware of something, something really interesting happens. It's the anterior cingulate cortex. Once that turns on and you become aware of
Speaker A
something, the automaticity of the brain turns off, right? So I, I think this serotonergic circuit is really, I mean, it's, it's, it's fascinating. But like the more aware you become, things just lose their power. Like the power that
Speaker A
emotions have over you if you really lean into the emotion and you feel that emotion, that reckoning of pain, right? Like when, when you actually face that reckoning, when you face the music, the strength that it has to control you
Speaker A
actually goes away. That's cool. You create a pattern interrupt, right? Like when you think about the porn example, somebody's feeling something, they're anxious, they're angry, they're bored, they're lonely, they don't want to feel that way. Their brain has created a
Speaker A
because our brains are largely pattern recognition machines and they're looking for patterns to largely keep us safe.
Speaker A
And so for a lot of guys, they're watching porn. They're re-watching porn because they feel a certain way that they don't want to feel. And their brain has learned, oh, and I feel this when this emotion pops up in my body, I go
Speaker A
jerk off. And that cycle plays out. And they have a very specific cycle. There's a cycle of how they do it and when they do it and how they're feeling before. There's like a, there's a whole, there's a whole cycle that plays out.
Speaker A
And then they always feel a specific way after, which is usually shame, regret, you know? It's like what's the post-nut regret, right? It's like, what the [ __ ] was I just watching? Um, and so what Joe's talking about is creating a, a
Speaker A
different type of confrontation or a type of confrontation that creates a different pattern that starts to slow things down and accentuate from a, a place of like, okay, what am I actually feeling? What I've given to guys is set a timer, go sit
Speaker A
down, go breathe, and feel into what you're feeling. And I call it the fire meditation. And it's like, okay, you're feeling something in that moment that you're run
Speaker A
Yeah. and you don't want to feel it. You're feeling anger, you're feeling loneliness, you're feeling whatever it is and you are avoiding it and so let's move towards it. Right? Jung talked about uh Carl Young talked about like
Speaker A
when you are facing a monster in a dream, the worst thing you can do is run from it. And but this is what we do when we have habits or behaviors or choices that we largely don't want to deal with
Speaker A
or emotions that we don't want to deal with. We run from them. And so what what I'll often do with men is let's turn towards it. So he says when there's a monster in a dream, the first thing that
Speaker A
you need to do is you need to turn towards it. And you need to turn towards the thing that you're afraid of or you don't want to feel or you don't want to experience because not always, but sometimes it'll start to dissipate. You
Speaker A
can start to build a relationship with it. And instead of oh, I feel this way.
Speaker A
I don't want to feel this way. It's oh, I feel this way. And I'm starting to build tolerance for it. I'm actually still okay even though I'm feeling this way.
Speaker A
And that that often times is a byproduct of a family system, a nervous system within a family system where somebody just didn't learn how to deal with hard emotions, right? They didn't learn how to deal with anger or anxiousness or
Speaker A
whatever it is. And so they're they've adopted all of these methods to deal with internal states that they don't like. Like a lot of dysfunction that people are experiencing is I'm experiencing an internal state that I don't like and I have all of these ways
Speaker A
of avoiding what's happening inside of me. And so I think part of what we're talking about is how do we support people in turning towards the internal state that they're ultimately trying to avoid? And one of the things that I say
Speaker A
to guys all the time is like there's no change without some form of confrontation. There's no change without some form of confrontation.
Speaker A
And and it's like but that's and I think from a masculine perspective that is something that we're really missing.
Speaker A
Like a lot of young men are they have been neutered when it comes to confrontation. They've been told that confrontation is toxic. They've been told that confrontation is bad. They're wrong for it. And so they're really these fragile
Speaker A
not just men. And I was the same way, right? Like I, you know, I was okay with getting into bar fights. That was totally okay. That type of confrontation was fine. But I wasn't okay with the confrontation of
Speaker A
like, "Wow, I feel really [ __ ] sad or I feel really weak or I'm really scared about this thing." That type of confrontation was never taught to me.
Speaker A
And I think that that's the case for so many people where they're not taught how to confront the hard negative perceived negative experiences that are going on inside of them.
Speaker A
A quick note, lots of people tell us that YouTube unsubscribes them from the channel even though they already pressed it. So, just check down there and see if the subscribe button is pressed. You get access to episodes before anybody else.
Speaker A
If you do, supports me and the show helps me to bring you bigger and better guests. Uh, and it makes me very happy.
Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Topics:porn addictiondopamineserotoninneuroscienceaddiction recoveryemotional awarenesspattern interruptmindfulnesspleasure contentmentbehavior change
