Drivers - Stop It Now

Many people have problems with limiting the amount of time they spend viewing adult pornography or how often they view it.

This might be because of drivers. Drivers are psychological factors in your mind that make it harder to control behaviour.

When viewing pornography online, you could see hundreds of different images and videos within minutes. This has a powerful impact on your brain and can make it very difficult for you to control your online behaviour. They affect the way you view adult pornography and your feelings while you are viewing it.

Here are a few examples of how your brain can be affected.

Needing new and different things

Your brain loves new things. Over time your brain can get bored if you keep viewing the same type of adult pornography.

It doesn’t have the same effect because it isn’t new. To get the same level of sexual arousal, you might need to keep viewing new things.

For people who have viewed a lot of adult pornography, this often means they start pushing boundaries and view things that they might have found too extreme, odd or distasteful before.

Seeing or thinking about new and arousing pornography releases a chemical called dopamine into your body, which makes you feel happy and rewarded.

This is because all species, including humans, evolved to try to reproduce so that they don’t go extinct. So your modern brain is linking pornography with its aim to reproduce – ejaculating as many times as possible to impregnate as many females as possible.

The bikini effect

Research shows that when men feel sexually aroused they make more impulsive decisions, behave recklessly and look for short-term rewards rather than thinking about long-term consequences.

This is sometimes called the bikini effect. It can have a bigger effect on people who are unhappy because they have less to lose or more to escape. There is less research into the effect on women.

This means that when you are online and feeling sexually aroused, you might be more likely to take risks, push boundaries and think more about the immediate rewards than the long-term consequences of your online viewing. You might be less likely to think about the negative impact your viewing habits could be having on your life.

Sexual arousal also reduces your ability to think about other people (you have less empathy) so you might be more able to watch films with violence or abuse without feeling uncomfortable or concerned about the people in them.

Advertisers know this, which is why they sometimes use suggestive or sexual pictures when selling things to men.

The slot machine effect

Slot machines offer random rewards. A gambler will keep gambling even if they rarely or never win because the joy is in the anticipation of winning.

Thinking about pornography, the pleasure might eventually be less from what you see and more from what you hope to see. You might be rewarded from time to time with a particularly arousing image or film, but for the most part, you may be spending hours online in a state of expectation, and keep searching because you think that there must be something better out there.

Flow Theory

When viewing and collecting pornography you might find that time flows more quickly and you don’t focus on your usual worries.

You might lose awareness of what else is going on in life and feel like you’re in a bubble. After you stop viewing pornography, you might not have any clear idea of what you thought or felt while you were online.

This is sometimes called a state of flow. There is something that feels good about doing activities that hold your attention. Dopamine is released when your brain is active and focused on a rewarding task. This can help understand why the behaviour continues and you might be drawn to it in the future to escape from life’s stresses.

How do drivers affect you?

Do you view more extreme material, for longer, without having knowing why you were doing so once you stop being online?
Do you feel as if you were acting out of character or feel ashamed or numb about what you viewed, but still look for it next time you are online?
Do you feel that the ‘online you’ is very different from the ‘offline you’?

Most people don’t know or think about drivers. But the people who make pornography do. This is why pornography sometimes contains violence, coercion and unusual acts because the makers need to find new things to keep their audience.

Exercise 5: Thinking about your own behaviour

Below are some questions to help you think about your pornography use.

What type of pornography do you view now?
Have your opinions changed about it?
Would you have viewed that type of pornography a few years ago?
Which drivers do you relate to?
How does this help you to understand how your pornography use has changed?
What can you do differently now that you are aware of your behaviour and triggers?

How do drivers affect you?

Exercise 5: Thinking about your own behaviour

Connect with us

Search Stop It Now