1109 - The Neuroscience of Quitting Porn (Without Biohacks or BS)

When men cure porn rewires your brain, most of them panic.

They assume the damage is permanent, that they've gone too far, that their brain is broken.

But neuroscience actually tells a very different story.

Your brain didn't get stuck because it's weak, it got trained.

And anything that was trained can be retrained.

Especially when you understand how your brain and nervous system work together.

In this episode, I want to show you how real change happens without hacks or extremes or white knuckling.

Welcome to The Man Within Podcast. My name is Cynthia Sam.

I'm an international speaker, men's transformation coach, and a former university researcher.

And I've dedicated the last seven years of my life to helping men like you quit to pornography, rewire their brain, and live a life of integrity and purpose.

Let's jump in. The first thing we have to understand is how the brain really learns.

So here is a really great finding of, I would say probably the last, you know, 15 to 20 years of neuroscience.

Neurons that fire together, wire together.

So repetition builds efficiency. Your brain is this unbelievably efficient organ.

It does not like things that are complex and different every time.

It likes the same things over and over again because that's predictable, it's easier to do, and that makes it efficient.

So your brain prioritizes what works.

And this is why for all of us, if we've had a struggle with pornography, we have this kind of ritual.

We have tendencies. We have a process that we follow.

Maybe we created it when we were younger, and we've adapted it over time.

But there's usually some kind of a ritual that's associated with it, and that's actually neuroscientific.

Neurons that wire together, wire together.

So one more thing I'll just say.

This is how the brain learns skills, habits, emotional responses, and connection.

Like this is a part of our brain or a concept in our brain that is incredibly powerful and necessary.

It's just porn hijacks it, and it creates these circuits in your brain that associate, you know, late nights, open laptops,

unlock screens, you know, Instagram models, scrolling, like whatever it is, we start to couple all of these behaviors together with the big behavior which is watching pornography.

So the truth is, and hopefully this helps you a little bit, brother, your brain learned porn, the same way it learned everything else.

And that's through repetition.

Now, the reason that probably every solution that you've tried in the past has failed is because it only worked when you weren't under stress.

It only worked when you weren't under stress.

So here's what happens in today's world.

In just all this information, you listen to this podcast or you watch this video on YouTube, you read a book, you know, like the last relapse or unwanted by J Stringer or Outgrow porn or whatever it is.

And you say, man, that was some great information. That was really good.

And you say, well, I would like to apply some of these things.

You know, I think I'm really going to apply, you know, that there's that concept in the last relapse, you know, that whole mere therapy idea.

That sounds really good. I think I'm going to give that a shot.

But then, you know, what happens is life gets in the way and you get busy or, you know, there's not really convenient time.

You forget about it. It sounds like a lot of work. It sounded good at the time.

And then when you push the actual key to shove, it was a lot of work.

Okay, all of this works against neuroscience because neuroscience shows us that a circuit in your brain can only change when it's active.

So you don't rewire your brain in calm theory. You rewire it in moments of urge, moments of distress.

These are the moments when your brain actually starts to change when it actually starts to rewire.

And it's very counterintuitive. We kind of envision like, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to try journaling.

That sounds really good. And we, we imagine ourselves waking up in the morning and we're sipping our hot tea.

I don't drink coffee. We're sipping our hot tea and we're journaling, right? And we're doing our thing.

And that's not really how this works. You should journal regularly and with a tea in the morning or a coffee or a hot chocolate.

You know, whatever your beverage of choice might be. But you might need to journal when times are really tough.

And it's the last thing that you feel like doing. So this is important for us to understand.

Now, I also want to introduce a concept here. I mentioned at the beginning and it's important we understand.

We're not just talking about the brain today. We're talking about the nervous system.

Okay, so that includes your brain, but it also includes all of the neural circuitry throughout your body.

When you are super tempted and you have a really strong urge or your under major distress.

This generally puts our nervous system in a place of dysregulation.

Okay, regulation is baseline. Everything's good. Everything's working the way it should be.

You might have learned the term homeostasis in your science class. That's what the regulated nervous system is.

But when it's dysregulated, we go into fight or flight. We go into this distress response that seeks an outlet.

We got to get out of here because we don't feel safe. And so you have this dysregulation that's coupled with this intense urge and the desire to run away.

And what you actually need to do is to start using some of the tools that you've been learning on this podcast to quit pornography.

Today, 1100 plus episodes go back through the archives, tons of tools, tons of devices, tons of things that you can do to quit porn.

But you have to use them in these moments. And so the linking piece, right, when you're super stressed out and you don't feel like doing that thing,

or you don't have even the mental bandwidth to do that thing that you know you probably should do is learning to regulate the nervous system.

When you learn to regulate the nervous system, what it means is you can identify, oh, I'm tempted.

Oh, I'm distressed. That's an urge. I know where this goes.

I'm going to regulate my nervous system. I'm going to settle things down.

And now I'm going to do my journaling. I'm going to go for a walk. I'm going to do mirror therapy, you know, whatever it might be.

This is how you actually rewire the circuit in your brain. You have to interrupt it in those moments where you might be the most prone to doing something

that you didn't really want to do.

And when your nervous system is overwhelmed, your brain is going to default to familiar relief.

When your nervous system is regulated, your brain makes better choices.

So the interesting thing here is that all of this neuroscience and nervous system language is also why quitting feels so uncomfortable.

You have these old circuits in your brain. They expect stimulation.

Your nervous system is always looking to be regulated and calm. And porn kind of acts as this temporary regulator.

In the moment, it gives us the relief. It gives us the comfort or the connection or whatever it is that we're looking for.

And then obviously as we all know, it's slowly fades or quickly fades away. And we're right back where we started.

So what happens then is you remove this pseudo regulator that has had a place in your life for a really long time and you start to get dysregulated.

You feel restless, irritable, agitated. Now this is not damage. This is the system recalibrating.

So it's the thing that nobody ever warns people about is, hey, when you quit porn, you're actually going to feel terrible for a little bit.

It might feel good initially. But at some point your brain and body are going to go, well, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

What happened to my regulator? You know, my friend Drew Brog calls it a pacifier. What happened there? That was really helping me and now it's gone.

So the discomfort comes and you can't avoid it. And that's okay because we're going to regulate.

This is where learning how to regulate your nervous system through breathing, moving your body in a certain way, really concentrating on your thoughts, altering your thoughts, getting things aligned with the truth of scripture.

These kinds of things go a long way and they settle the nervous system down. And it's our not our ability to push through the discomfort.

It's our ability to regulate through the discomfort that allows us to properly retrain our brain and our nervous system.

And here's the best news in all of this is that the brain and the nervous system are fast learners.

It really doesn't matter how old you are. It doesn't matter how much trauma you had when you were young.

The reality is God wired your neuro system to be able to change. And it's not just changeable when you're a child and it's not just changeable when you're a young adult.

We have had clients, you know, I still remember Michael, Michael having affairs for 50 plus years, hopelessly addicted to porn, two years clean, two years clean.

Right? Like his life changes and boom, before you know, he had two years clean. It's much more years than that now, but it was two years when he finished working with us.

70 plus years old, rewired his brain, rewired his nervous system. Now actually, that's interesting because Michael didn't, didn't rewire his brain and nervous system for the first year.

For the first year, he white knuckled his way through and he hated himself and he hated his life.

And at one year and he came to us and he said, you got to help me because you keep talking about this freedom thing, this joy thing.

And I said, well, let me show you. Let me show you how you actually rewire your system properly.

So I want you to get this brother. You're not late. Okay. You're not damaged goods, but you've been regulating in a really narrow, ineffective way.

And you can rewire your nervous system if you apply some of the stuff we're talking about today.

So here's how we do this. Okay. Number one, you have to interrupt the circuit like we discussed. Okay. I already explained that.

Number two, you got to practice regulation. Okay. This is, this is so important.

And like, I mean, I do this at the end of every coaching call with my clients. You know, I say, put your, put your feet on the ground, release your hands, roll your shoulders back.

And we do a few deep breaths together. You know, about four counts in six to eight counts out.

We really focus on that exhale. And that alone teaches the body. I can calm down without porn, without an app, without some kind of pseudo comfort. I can do this.

Okay. Another really important thing here is use concentrated moments of motivation to launch yourself forward.

This is something I wish I would have I was so focused on like the long slow boring parts of recovery that I missed out on these little windows or these little opportunities to sort of accelerate things.

And whether that was, you know, getting a coach for a season, whether it was doing a program or sometimes even just like a, I don't know, even a challenge.

And I don't like the challenge model necessarily because a lot of the challenges sort of, you know, let's just go seven days and raw, raw, let's have a rally.

But you know, seven days of like, I'm going to journal every single day for seven days. Right. I'm going to fast social media for seven days straight. Right.

That's enough repetition where you start to retrain the nervous system, you weaken old pathways. And if you're doing it properly, you can actually strengthen new ones. Right.

That the nervous system doesn't learn through explanation. It learns through experience.

And that's the real power here. So look, my friend, if you believe that your brain was broken, I hope that this episode has changed your mind.

Your brain isn't damaged and your nervous system isn't defective. They've just been trained in a narrow way to deal with stress and pressure and training can change. Right.

That's actually why I built the deep detox. There's something I've been telling you guys about a little bit more because this is essentially a seven day reset. Right.

It's designed to help you interrupt old circuits, regulate your nervous system, practice new responses while they're active.

There's not hacks or extremes. It's just structure repetition and momentum. And if that's something you want to learn more about, you can go to deep clean coaching.com slash detox.

I love to see you in their excellent place to start. But here's the deal and here's the thing you really need to understand when you stop fighting your brain and you start training your system.

Freedom stops feeling mysterious. It starts to become predictable. So brother, do something. Don't just take this information and take a step.

Do something with this. And if you think the detox might be a good step, deep clean coaching.com slash detox. Thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next one.