Episode #214: Porn, Dating Apps, and the Brain: What Changed

Let me start with a question that might sound simple at first, but the answer turns out to reveal

something much more important about the modern brain in a digitally overstimulated world. Why

are more and more people noticing that attraction today can feel fragile, not gone, but much less

easy to access the days of your? If you meet someone new, they can feel exciting one week, but not

so exciting the next week, or something that used to feel automatic with curiosity, excitement,

or even natural sexual arousal. Now suddenly seems like it requires a whole lot more stimulation

than it used to. When people notice this shift, the first place they usually look for an explanation

is inside themselves. They assume that something must be wrong with them, and sometimes that's the

case. Maybe they're tired. Maybe their motivation is gone. Perhaps it is their relationship in and

of itself that is the problem. Well, I'm Dr. Trishley. Welcome back to the podcast. We are going to

dive into why attraction is so tricky in today's day and age. This episode is brought to you by my

Harper Collins published book Mind Over Explicit Matter. Learn how artificial stimulation

miswires your brain and what you can do to rewire it back to purpose, intimacy, and connection.

Go to Dr. Trishley.com, backslashbook. The reason this is so important is because clinician started to

notice a pattern that suggested that maybe the question of what's wrong with me isn't actually

the right question. And this is how it happened. More and more men went to therapists, to their

urologists, to their doctors, and increasingly reported that their bodies worked normally when

they were alone with self stimulation sometimes facilitated by the screen, but that they struggled

with a rousal when they were with a real partner. So here's the idea for the day. Is if you stop

and think about this pattern, then it can't be something internal inherently, right? Of course,

there's a twist. I wish every question had an easy answer, but in my line of work, it usually

doesn't. There's a pattern to this thing when a rousal happens, okay, or it does happen by yourself,

but it doesn't happen with a partner. It is telling us something very important. So if your body

is physically able to become aroused in one situation, but not another, then it can't be the

body in and of itself. It must be the situation, right? The physical system is fine-ish, but the

situation in which it becomes aroused, now that is a different story. The observation shifts away

from what's going on with the body, and instead in my world, it now shifts to what is going on with

that person's brain. What is it conditioned to do? In neuroscience, this is known as

signal activation. So today, we're going to dive into signal activation in the brain and how it

impacts baseline arousal, but also sexual arousal function. So let's open the conversation to a larger

conversation about the environment that modern brains are being conditioned in for the first time

in human history. We are surrounded by unlimited stimulation digitally, right? We are being

overstimulated by our phones, and that's especially the case if explicit matter is in play.

Now, my work focuses on how modern stimulation affects the brain's reward system, attention,

motivation, and importantly, their relationships, and of course, how you can retrain your brain to

reclaim vitality and connection, and to me, one of the most important things purpose and true

authentic identity. So today, I want to talk about attraction, dating, and intimacy, and why it can

feel so challenging in the modern world. And of course, we're going to focus on the neuroscience

behind it, and what is happening in the brain. Okay, so for most of human history, attraction

developed slowly. People saw the same people day in and day out. The environments were the places

in the world where you would see other people. You would go to work, you'd go to school, you would

go into the community and connect with another person shared gatherings. There was an ordinary

rhythm, and it's interesting because the word ordinary might suggest boring, but it had a

rhythm to it. It had a familiarity and bonding could happen in the unfolding of seeing people

out in the real world over time. Shared experiences happened, and they created connection,

and that connection with other people is what slowly, deepened attraction. Now, let me tell you

about how the hubs and I met. The hubs and I had this group of friends, and we would hang out with

them, and we would go to breakfast at this place. I wish I could think of the name, but I can't.

So we would go to breakfast every Thursday morning, me, him, this group of friends, and then he

asked me out, and I'm like, no, because if we go out, then I won't be able to go out to breakfast

with everybody, and that will stink. Because if we go out and we break up, then breakfast ends,

and I love this ritual of going to breakfast. Well, of course, we ended up going out, and we

continue. We still continue to go to breakfast with friends 24 years later. It's going to be my

anniversary 24 years. So the going out and seeing him, he, his office, was in a gym at the time.

I would go to the gym to work out. He would come out to my treadmill and talk to me, of course,

then I owned a restaurant at the time. He would come into the restaurant for dinner. So we would see

each other in our natural environment, and we would go visit each other. And then, of course,

made this group of friends when we were going to new environments together, shared connection

and bonding over time. But of course, the environment surrounding the brain and attraction and

connection looks very different in today's day and age. Instead of a limited number of social

interactions, now your brain encounters millions of them dating app, social media feed streaming

entertainment and unlimited explicit content online, porn in your pocket. All of these experiences

share one feature that the brain responds to very strongly. Constant novelty, each swipe,

each video, each new image delivers something new, something slightly different,

something the brain is not seen before. And of course, with the algorithm being the way that it

is in today's day and age, it's curated for what will keep your interest. So when we take a step

back and we look at the shift and important insight appears, the modern brain is not struggling because

people are weak or because something about human nature has suddenly changed. What is happening

is due to the environment that brains are being conditioned within. The environment has become

incredibly unnaturally stimulating. And in many ways, we are living inside what could be

described as a super stimulating environment. Now in my own life, I notice this in small ways,

but that can be surprisingly revealing. You know, I consider myself to be someone who is very

present with my family, the vast majority of the time. Thankfully, right? I've worked hard to get

there. I listen closely to each one of them and what they're saying. I care deeply about what's

happening in their lives. And I make a conscious effort to stay engaged. Yet every once in a while,

last Friday included, I was multitasking. And I realized, you know, I wasn't present. I said

the wrong answer to a question. I missed details in search of story. And that really weighed on my

mind. I thought to myself, it's milkshake multitasking in my brain. I'm not focused on

her in the way that I typically am. When we're in the car together, we just crank up the tunes.

And we sit next to each other and we share funny stories. She's not on her phone. I'm not on mine.

But in this particular case, I was doing meetings in my AirPods. She's got, she's in noise

cancelling mode. So she doesn't have to listen to me. Then she talks and I give her an uh-huh,

even though I didn't even hear her. This is what we're talking about. Many people are moving

through the world like this at all times. So attention today is constantly being pulled in multiple

directions. I'm not even a person who has notifications on. And that was a derailing experience for me.

Now, this is partly because we now live inside what researchers are calling the attention

economy. In this environment, many technologies are designed specifically to capture and then

hold your attention. Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman often explains that dopamine is widely

misunderstood in conversations about behavior. Many people think that dopamine simply represents

pleasure. But dopamine is more accurately described as a signal for, check this out, motivation

and pursuit. Dopamine teaches the brain what to seek again in the future. So you know what happens.

When the brain repeatedly experiences novelty, it begins to expect novelty. Lots of it. Over time,

the brain organizes behavior around the search for the next super stimulating experience that has

a high level of novelty. That stimulation might appear in the form of short videos,

social media posts dating apps with their swipe right or explicit matter. Although the content

itself varies, the reward system being activated in the brain is the same. The brain does not

differentiate very much between the sources of stimulation. It primarily learns the pattern

of stimulation that any given person has taught it. In neuroscience, there is a concept known

as super-normal stimuli. A super-normal stimulus is an exaggerated signal or an exaggerated

version that activates the brain much more strongly than the natural version or the natural

cues the brain actually evolved to respond to. Pornography can function. It does function

as a super-normal stimulus for sexual reward circuits because it delivers an extremely

concentrated combination of novelty, rapid switching, and intense visual and auditory signals.

These signals arrive faster and more powerfully than the natural cues that occur in real relationships,

especially if your partner isn't happy with you because of the explicit matter. This is where an

interesting paradox of modern attraction begins to appear. Real intimacy tends to unfold

slowly and it involves emotional complexity, vulnerability, and relational depth. Digital

stimulation by contrast is immediate, predictable, and endlessly novel. These two experiences

operate at very different speeds, and the brain can begin to adapt to the faster system.

Neuroscientists call it fast dopamine versus slow dopamine, and it is what can change the way

that a rousal works within your brain and your nervous system. Author Mel Robbins often points out

that many modern struggles are not caused by lack of motivation, but instead by a brain that has

been trained to avoid discomfort. Real intimacy requires willingness to tolerate being vulnerable

and emotional exposure in front of another person, and patience. Each of these experiences can

feel uncomfortable in the short term. I was in the car with Declan in search of the other day,

actually the same day, Friday, which involved a lot of multitasking. I had to pick Declan up,

take him to the automotive shop, and then meet him there, then go back, pick search up from a

horseshoe. Anyways, it was a long day, and then we are stuck in Friday evening traffic out of the

city back to our house. It was very slow, and I said to Declan, answer search was chill, not so much.

But I said to him, patience is like a muscle. You only get to exercise it in these moments of

impatience, and we got to exercise that muscle together for a little while, and it worked out great.

I've already built that muscle, so I'm just big chill and put some music on, and gradually make

our way home, but the kids got the opportunity. Yep, overextending the word opportunity yet again.

Digital stimulation offers something easier by comparison, because it provides immediate,

easy button reward without requiring vulnerability or emotional risk, right? There's no risk

because you're by yourself with a screen. When the brain becomes accustomed to instant

stimulation, experiences that should unfold more slowly begin to feel less engaging. Even

very meaningful experiences may feel less stimulating simply because they operate on a different

timescale. Think fast dopamine from the screen, slow dopamine from a real world experience with

your honey. So if we go back to that clinical observation that therapists were making earlier,

the pattern of erectile dysfunction that occurs with a man with his partner, but not in solo

situations becomes a lot easier to understand when it's viewed through this lens, the lens of

fast and slow dopamine. If the brain is continuously learning, and it's continuously going back to

repeated high level stimulation and it adjusts its sensitivity accordingly, one way that the

brain protects itself is by down regulating sensitivity. It's called dopamine down regulation.

It's a protective mechanism when the brain has been exposed to excessive stimulation with frequency

and consistency. Intensity, frequency and consistency leads to dopamine down regulation in the

brain for protection, but that also leads to sexual arousal dysfunction, what I call sad,

which is why I've developed, laugh, the lead arousal function protocols to help retrain the brain

back to healthy baseline arousal, which allows your brain to feel that sexual arousal and to

respond in the moments that it's supposed to in those slower dopamine moments. So when the

reward system is activated, intensely over and over again, the brain gradually reduces its

sensitivity to protect from overload. When that sensitivity decreases more and more, the natural

signals may no longer activate at the same level as they once did. They may not activate at all

if there's very high levels of desensitization. It doesn't mean that anything is broken

from a brain perspective. It's an adaptation. It's actually a mal adaptation to the level of

stimulation that the brain has been experiencing over and over. Another way I think about it,

and I explained it to my clients this way, is by using a metaphor of a sound mixing board,

which this reminds me of my eldest daughter, AFA, who is a musician. So imagine that different

experiences in life control different volume sliders. You know, that volume slider on the board.

Some sliders represent connection. Some represent touch or emotional bonding, while others

represent novelty and excitement. If one of those sliders is all the way up, it will repeatedly

signal with amplification over time. So if that sliders all the way up, the other aspects

can't shine through because the stimulation and the novelty are too high. The connection,

the touch, the emotional intimacy, that doesn't even register. It's reminding me of the movie,

which AFA and I saw together about Queen, which of course I'm forgetting the name of that movie too,

but it was, oh, it's Bohemian Rhapsody. And if you remember at the end when they're playing in

Wembley Stadium, the producer takes the red line that the sound isn't supposed to go over and

he puts it under it. So he pushes the volume up. If the volume is so high for stimulation,

intensity, novelty, all of that, the rest of it doesn't even register. It's not that it disappeared,

it's just no longer the signal that's being picked up. It's not loud enough. And the loudest

signals are the ones that are going to shine through. So in a super stimulating environment,

novelty becomes the loudest signal that the brain receives. As novelty increases in volume,

other signals such as emotional connection can appear quieter and they no longer register.

So researchers have begun exploring these patterns more systematically. One international study

that was published in 2021 and it involved over 3,000 men. This is a big number when it comes to

studies. I love a big end study, right? It showed that over 21% of these young men experienced

erectile dysfunction and that these same men had higher levels of problematic pornography consumption.

And a lot of the literature it's called PPU, problematic pornography use. So those people were

correlated or associated with the higher probability of ED. While correlation isn't totally causation,

we know that they are very strongly linked. That the stimulation from the environment is likely

influencing the sexual responses and the way that men responded to that high intensity

stimulation versus lower intensity. Fast dopamine versus slow dopamine. But you know how I feel

about this. Through the wonders of neuroplasticity, the brain can adapt again. So no longer taking that

mal adaptation pathway towards the high intensity signal. Instead, your brain can be retrained and can

adapt to the signals that it's receiving and those that shine through the brightest.

So it's the same idea that a brain that learned through frequency, consistency and intensity

can also learn through bonding, connection in the real world, vulnerability, emotional closeness.

When the stimulation pattern shifts, the brain begins to experience different signals in different

ways and it will recalibrate. This is how your brain can be retrained for healthy sexual function.

Again, you reduce the overstimulation. Notice when your brain is looking for high levels of

stimulation. Those cravings, they will decrease. Your mood will stabilize, your attention will improve

and attraction will begin to feel healthy and natural and like it's coming online again.

Here's the reality. Healthy sexual arousal is not built primarily on intensity.

Pornography and explicit matter has taught your brain that it's actually built on regulation.

It involves two nervous systems interacting together. That's what healthy arousal

is supposed to look like. It involves presence, eye contact, emotional attunement and a sense of

safety. Now of course it involves pleasure but it also involves joy and connection.

In my work many people can benefit from having a brain map or neurofeedback to accelerate their

process in healing healthy arousal function. What I do is I offer something called QEG

brain mapping. It measures the electrical activity across the brain and it identifies the networks

that are overactive or underactive. That's how the map works. Then in my regular first neuroregulation

program we use a high level type of neurofeedback that helps guide the brain toward a more

regulated pattern. Thankfully I'm able to provide top tier services to people around the world.

We map your brain, we see where the arousal dysfunction is coming from, the root cause,

then we make a plan with the laugh protocols. We identify the sad, we identify the laugh,

the lead arousal function protocols. This way the brain can be trained again

back towards that slow dopamine and no longer needing the fast dopamine.

Neurofeedback can help guide the brain back toward regulated patterns of activity

and help to rebalance the reward system on its own. That's neuroplasticity at its finest.

Rather than forcing the brain to change through willpower alone which doesn't work,

this type of training helps the brain to learn those healthier patterns of regulation through

feedback. Over time this can support improvements. Now feedback is just like the feedback that the

brain learned that maladapted pattern except for this is the feedback that teaches it back towards

healthy adaptation. So when people begin to notice the shift in arousal function it's because the

brain is more regulated. Then of course if you have a honey spending time with that person in real

human connection reinforces the regulation pattern that's facilitated through technology.

So it means more eye contact, more feeling engaged, conversations that are more interesting and

deeper, emotional closeness you might not have felt in a long time. And you will feel alive again

instead of numb or dull. It won't feel muted anymore because your brain will be trained

back towards a slow dopamine. This is the brain sensitivity being recalibrated. This is what allows

healthy baseline arousal to come back online which allows sexual arousal function to be felt again.

So it brings us back to the larger idea. Attraction itself has not disappeared from the human

experience. The capacity for connection has not been lost. It's muted. What has changed is the

environment that the brain has adapted to. This is an environment filled with constant high level

stimulation and novelty. And the brain has learned to respond to those signals the ones that it

encounters most frequently. So hopefully that realization shifts the conversation away from

personal blame or failure toward awareness. That's what I'm on a mission. Helping people to

understand that your brain is responding to the signals around it so that you can make a different

choice which signals you allow your brain to be trained by and from which environment. And you

can create the environment around you that supports regulation attention meaningful connection

instead of a brain that's looking for fast dopamine for constant high level stimulation.

So I want you to remember we are in the first time in human history where the brain is living

in a digital world or simulation honestly that stimulates your brain essentially into infinity

infant stimulation. But that puts a new responsibility on every single one of us including you.

It makes it so we have to choose and we have to curate our feeds. We have to balance our screen times.

Awareness is one thing, right? When you become aware that's great. But now your awareness

has to lead to new action steps. This understanding on how your brain works and how it's being

conditioned by the algorithm. It becomes imperative in today's day and age to exercise discernment,

deciding what you want for yourself and deciding what screen use is leading you towards your best

life or leading you away. Think slow dopamine and the happiness trifecta lead you to the life that

you want and deserve fast dopamine seeking scrolling and clicking that's leading you away. So in many

ways, this is the most important skill that you can develop in the digital modern world. And then

of course, the question is no longer simply whether we have access to stimulation or information.

The deeper question is whether we understand how to direct our own attention and reward systems

in a way that supports the life we actually want. Okay, I want you to remember that ultimately

your brain is going to learn or be trained by the experiences and the stimulation that you give

it consistently. And this powerful idea can help you step away from a digital simulation filled

with constant stimulation back into the real world to foster the attraction with your honey or

with the honey that you want with the moments and the real life experiences that help you to not

only get the dopamine that your brain needs. Dopamine is not a bad thing. It's the role that it

plays in your life. Fast dopamine will keep you stuck. Slow dopamine and the happiness trifecta

will help you become free. Alright, if you are looking for more help on the journey, please go over

to drtrishlee.com. You can read about my masterclass. The do-it-yourself program that you can

join at any moment. And with the click of a button, you can be on that road to recovery if you're

struggling with explicit matter or with sexual arousal dysfunction. You can also look at regulate

first, which is the program that I offer that uses top tier technology. And as always, remember,

control your brain or it'll control you. I'll see you next time.