Online Pornography - How to beat the addiction

Online Pornography's Effects, and a New Way to Fight Them - WSJ.com: " . . . . Fully 94% of therapists in another survey reported seeing an increase in people addicted to porn. . . . Countless studies connect porn with a new and negative attitude to intimate relationships, and neurological imaging confirms it. Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, used MRI scans in 2010 to analyze men watching porn. Afterward, brain activity revealed, they looked at women more as objects than as people. The new DSM-5 will add the diagnosis "Hypersexual Disorder," which includes compulsive pornography use. 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. None of the men were addictive types, or kooks, Dr. Doidge points out. But "because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images increased at the expense of what had previously attracted them"—including girlfriends and wives. When the doctor explained what was happening to them, they "stopped using their computers for a period to weaken their problematic neuronal networks, and their appetite for porn withered away. . . ." (read more at the link above)

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