10 Reasons You Should Quit Watching Porn For Good

Statistics prove what most Americans don’t want to admit: The vast majority of Americans watch porn on a regular basis. Pornography has become so synonymous with the internet that an estimated 30% of all online traffic is related to pornography. Although it is widely viewed as harmless fun, and not everyone will experience any one of these symptoms, watching pornography is associated with a range of mental, emotional, sexual, and physical harms, from lack of concentration to impotence.

Here are a few of the harms scientifically proven to be associated with porn use:

1. Loss of sexual pleasure: Multiple studies have shown that people began to lose sexual pleasure in their current relationship if they watched porn a few times a year, provided they were male, in a relationship, or religious. For everyone else, sexual enjoyment plunged after they began watching porn once a month, and “additional increases in the frequency of viewing lead to disproportionately larger decrements in satisfaction,” one study notes. “Notably, under no circumstances was pornography use associated with greater sexual satisfaction,” wrote Grant H. Brenner, summarizing its findings for Psychology Today.

2. Erectile dysfunction: Ironically, while people seek out pornography because they find it sexually arousing, studies have found that greater exposure to pornography can create psychogenic erectile dysfunction (ED). That is, watching too much porn can make it more difficult for a man to get an erection with a real human being. “Depending on the research, anywhere from 17% to 58% of men who self-identify as heavy/compulsive/addicted users of porn struggle with some form of sexual dysfunction. “Essentially, research tells us that the more porn one uses, the more likely sexual dysfunction is,” explained Robert Weiss.

3. Memory problems and inability to think:Watching pornography can make it difficult for people to concentrate, much less produce independent thinking. “Porn use has been correlated with erosion of the prefrontal cortex — the region of the brain that houses executive functions like morality, willpower and impulse control,” wrote Rachel Anne Barr, then a PhD student at Canada’s Université Laval.

Another study found that men gave the wrong answer to simple yes-or-no questions 72% of the time after seeing a pornographic image — but the lack of cognitive function goes beyond rudimentary tests. Porn viewers “report problems” that are “associated with negative life consequences,” so the researchers tested whether watching porn resulted “in a neglect of relevant environmental information and therefore disadvantageous decision making.” The 2013 study, which

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