Your Brain On Porn

Of course, there are losses, and with temptation comes a choice: either choose to continue watching pornography, or make a decision to turn to God. Otherwise, losses will happen – terrible psychological losses, not to mention the scales of bad deeds. To explain the psychological losses, I want to summarize for you the book Your Brain on Porn by Gary Wilson.

It explains that happiness is a quantity of hormones released in the brain, which they call pleasure hormones (dopamine) (oxytocin), a set of hormones, and God created the brain to secrete these hormones, which people call (Natural), the natural reward or reward, according to each event, which releases a certain amount of hormones. Pornographic films, because they have a strangeness and different things, address instincts, the amount of dopamine that is released in the brain remains a very large flow. A change occurs in the brain’s chemistry, releasing a substance called (DeltaFosB).

Specialists, such as Dr. Gary Wilson, call this substance the mechanism of craving, which causes a kind of confusion in the brain leading to two harms: the first harm is that there is nothing in the world that will make you as happy as pornography, because of the amount of dopamine that is released, like someone drinking a jar of honey. If you give him an apple, it is like sugar, he will not feel anything, because he has just drunk a jar of honey, so nothing will make him as happy as pornography. The second thing is the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the part of the brain responsible for will and decisions, and it gets somewhat confused because of the amount of these hormones, and this is what leads me to the area of weakness of will in front of the subject of pornography. Now take this talk and go into our lives and homes, and the first very big loss happens.

Losses from watching pornography:

1. Distorted Sexual Template: The level of satisfaction and happiness in a marital relationship will decrease below normal due to the habituation to a certain level of films, and this is one of Satan’s goals.

   Keep this expression in mind. Anything in the world in the brain has a template – a template means a shape; I draw the shape, I draw that shape. If it’s normal, I know I can achieve it, my expectations I will be able to achieve, so I will be satisfied. But if my sexual template is impossible, there will be failure in satisfaction with my normal marital relationship with a life partner who is not lacking, but I am my template, and these expectations are in another place. Because the pornographies that people watch take 16 hours to film 10 minutes, and the amount of stimulants and things that make the matter impossible, this is not normal. So when the human being watches it constantly, it forms inside his head that this is the process of a natural intimate relationship, so he experiences a drop in satisfaction in his relationship with his wife if he is married, and if he is not married, he has expectations that do not exist in the universe. He wants a respectable woman, a good person, who acts like what we see in the movies, and this is one of Satan’s biggest goals: to crush the feeling of gratitude and the feeling of grace.

   ((Then I will come upon them from before them and from behind them and from their right and from their left, and you will not find most of them grateful))

2. The second, and very big, loss.

   2 – Turning the man’s view of the woman from a human view to a bestial view: Bestial means what? A sexual view, may God protect you, the person who watches pornography. Against his will, he turns from a friendly person to a greedy person, all of this is scientific talk, I am summarizing it for you in our language, his idea of intimacy turns into the idea of lust or craving, which is called (binge).

   And this human being begins to see that pornographic films rarely show a man with his wife; always it comes to an employee, I don’t know what she does, she is available, I don’t know what club. So a transformation happens in the man’s view, that all women, his view of them is lustful, and this is what God mentioned in the Quran: “Then, may he who has a disease in his heart lust, and speak a known word.”

   His view of women is not sound, and he is not happy in his life. If he is not married, when he gets married, there is tremendous pressure on his wife, although she is not failing him and wants the impossible from her, and he has no affection in the marital relationship; he has craving and lust, as the specialists say.

3. Darkness of the Heart: When a person finishes watching these films, he does not know how to return to practicing his normal life and worships because their specter remains in his mind, not to mention the darkness that is in the heart because you remember the Prophet, peace be upon him, “Indeed, the glance is a poisoned arrow from the arrows of Iblis. Whoever leaves it out of fear of Me, I will exchange for him faith, the sweetness of which he finds in his heart.”

   See, the Prophet, peace be upon him, said, “arrows,” he said, “poisoned arrow.” He also said, “Something runs in the body.” So the one who wants to pray and remember the specter of these images in front of his eyes makes darkness in the heart, so choosing to continue on the path of the temptation of pornography and opening this door makes the person live in a state of dissatisfaction. And God is capable, if you choose to open a door and flee from this temptation, to save you, because He is over all things able.