Consuming porn may start out as an exciting form of entertainment or a way to facilitate and enhance masturbation, but over time it can shift from being something extra you do on the side, to an activity that significantly interferes with other pursuits in your life. Many porn users tell us that they have become so involved with porn that it is compromising their career goals, family responsibilities, health, and spiritual life.
Anything that provides a lot of pleasure can create a level of ob — session—whether it’s fixing up a vintage car, playing online poker, or watching sports on television. Because so much of today’s porn is delivered via high-tech devices that are always right at hand, it’s easy to shift over from other interests to engaging with porn. And even when you’re not actually doing porn, you can lose a lot of time thinking about images you recently saw, imagining what you might see next, setting up circumstances in which you can be alone with porn, and covering your tracks so you don’t get caught. Numerous studies show that as the number of hours spent doing porn increase, the more likely porn users report that they are having a serious problem with it.
When it comes to your health, a time — and energy-consuming porn habit can really interfere with important self-care activities such as exercising, eating well, getting enough sleep, and even bathing and grooming. Sleep problems, such as exhaustion, inability to fall asleep, and sleep deprivation are a particular problem for porn users, given that many people access porn before going to bed or in the middle of the night. Porn users can literally stay up night after night jeopardizing their health, family relationships, and work. Having a busy schedule to begin with can only make matters worse for people who are preoccupied with getting their daily dose of porn. Rob explains, “I was working full-time to support my family, going to college in the evenings, maintaining the house, trying to be a good husband and father, and getting by on four to five hours of sleep at night. I’d work on my homework from nine until eleven or twelve, then I would search the Web for porn until one or two a. m. It got out of hand with the time I was spending. I’d often have a hard time functioning the next day.”
Besides taking up time that could have been spent sleeping, porn can also make it difficult to fall asleep. The visual centers in the brain can have a hard time calming down after all that stimulation. Long hours on the computer doing Internet porn can also result in eye problems, back, neck, wrist, and shoulder pain, which make it difficult to sleep and make life more difficult during the day as well.
Spending significant amounts of time doing porn also wreaks havoc on work and school pursuits. When your mind is frequently focused on porn, even when you’re not actually using it, you have difficulty paying attention to your own educational or career goals. One man told us that when he was into porn he became 75 percent less productive at work and it cost him his job.
Corey describes how his porn use stifled his developing career in the computer field. He said, “As my porn addiction got stronger, I started to ignore other parts of my life, particularly my job. I’d procrastinate and fall behind in my work. I was spending three to four hours a day on something that had no benefit to me whatsoever as far as becoming a better person, gaining skills, understanding the world better, or enhancing my relationships with other people. It was pretty sad. I wasted huge tracks of time, and time is most precious.”
For Bill, it wasn’t so much the time he lost that bothers him about his past porn habit, it was the lost chances. He said, “I’m an ambitious person in a lot of ways, and the pornography provided a very easy diversion from that ambition. Instead of pushing myself, I would just look at pictures for several hours a day. There were milestones that I should have been hitting as a stockbroker and I wasn’t hitting them. I kept diverting myself. That’s what bothers me—the lost ambition, the squandered opportunities.”
Regular porn use can compromise a person’s ability to fulfill family and relationship responsibilities as well. As we noted before, porn users often pull back from their partners and children in order to have more time for themselves and to keep their porn activities secret. Doing porn can become more important than spending time with your children, relaxing with your partner, or attending to useful household chores. One man said, “I’ve become invested in my own pleasure at the expense of everyone else in the family.” Another man described how his fascination with porn changed the way he related with his family. “I got into a habit of sneaking porn videos into the house and masturbating to them whenever my wife and daughter went shopping. Sometimes they’d ask me to go with them and I’d refuse. There were days when I couldn’t wait for them to pull out of the driveway.”
It’s not only time that is drained away from the family when porn is the center of attention. Some porn users spend a lot of money on porn, obtaining access to specialty Web sites, magazines, books, videos, DVDs, electronic equipment, and subscription services. These choices can drain money important to the family welfare. There are also drastic financial consequences that can occur if a porn user loses a job because of logging on to porn sites at work, or gets arrested for illegal porn behavior, such as child pornography.
Simply having porn stashes in the home, including those on computer files, can jeopardize the welfare of children by increasing their risk of exposure to porn and the likelihood that they will be upset or emotionally harmed by what they uncover. As we’ve seen, serious problems with porn often have their roots in early exposure to porn in childhood. And a child’s view of their parent can be negatively impacted if that parent’s porn use is discovered or revealed.
The spiritual part of a person’s life can also suffer when porn is a priority. When asked what area of their lives was most likely to improve if they went cold turkey from using porn, respondents in a Men’s Health magazine survey listed their spirituality. Not only does porn use take time away that might otherwise be spent in church or reaching out to others in need in the community, it can also compromise a person’s core values and create feelings of shame and hypocrisy. In fact, if you think about it, the things we ordinarily associate with worshiping in one’s faith, such as commitment, contemplation, and fascination, become directed at “worshiping” porn. Some porn users tell us they feel too ashamed to go to church or express their spirituality in the ways that were once meaningful to them.