The main factor driving addictive behavior is pleasure. If it wasn’t so, the substance people are addicted to would not have been as enticing as they are.
Here’s how the two parts of the brain register pleasure.
The Limbic System
First, porn addiction works vastly on the emotional and sensational system, the embodiment of feelings.
The limbic system being unconscious and instinctive part of the brain registers the pleasures derived from the many experiences you have had with watching porn through bodily sensations.
It registers the actual feelings going through the brain that have made you feel so good about that activity.
In other words, it registers how you felt all throughout these given experiences on a physiological level.
Therefore, you will be able to imagine what future experiences will be like based on these previous experiences.
It builds strong memories of the pleasures derived from these experiences, which in turn will keep on creating desires to further indulge in that activity again and again because it felt so pleasurable.
The more you keeps on indulging in an addictive behavior, the stronger the memories of these experiences will become, the more vivid they will be, and the more intense the desire to return in that behavior in order to re-enjoy the pleasures being embedded in that part of the brain is going to be.
The signals the limbic part of the brain sends through the body that builds up a deep longing about future experiences will become strengthened as well.
When you are so excited or curious about a particular porn scene you are so eager to view, there’s something that goes through your body that makes you want to have that experience just by thinking about it.
Oftentimes, it creates a strong impatience in you due to the reality that you would like to have it right now.
The massive excitement and curiosity to just rush back comes from that part of the brain.
The Prefrontal Cortex
The prefrontal cortex being the higher functioning and rational part of the brain registers the actual experience in the form of thoughts, such as what was done to get into the act, where, what was done to stimulate more pleasures, what was learned through that particular experience, what that moment was and felt like, how to keep that secret, and how to go back.
It’s the part that does all the planning.
In short, it registers the very logic and reasoning behind these experiences in details.
This is the part of the brain where people’s imagination is located.
This is the part that fabricates excuses in order to justify behaviors.
Therefore, one part of the brain provides the feelings, and the other provides the thought processes, which will be central when it concerns going back.
Thoughts and Feelings Are Your Worst Nightmare
Thoughts and feelings are two main elements upon which addictions thrive on.
Thinking a certain way triggers your feeling. The same thing happens when feeling a certain way, it triggers your thought.
Porn addiction rewires the brain in such a degrading fashion by creating neural pathway which allows perverted thoughts to flow freely.
The larger and denser a neural pathway has become; the easier signals are transmitted. The stronger the signals are.
This will result in more thoughts, urges, cravings.
Therefore, that’s the main reason you often have a hard time controlling your thoughts.
The mind is a like computer system that can be programmed a certain way.
When having neural pathway built around something, the information entering the mind through your 5 senses can have such a huge impact on your thinking.
They can even arouse troubling memories of previous experiences that will unleash an inordinate flow of dopamine.
This is the main reason that anything that you see, or hear that is related to what you are addicted to can trigger a cascade of thoughts, thus affecting how you feel in return.
It is as though your brain has some type of antenna that can easily pick up these signals.