An Experiment to Understand the Urges of Porn: ' The Super Stimulus'

TheBadger

Member
This post is about porn and other super stimuli and how by understanding how one works, we can understand how many stimuli effect us. There is an experiment at the bottom for people to do. I would be interested in how people find it.

Porn is obviously something all of us have been chronically exposed to other the years. In my own case I suffered from porn induced ED for a long time and i'm still fighting it now. Porn really is as much like sex, as Call of Duty is too real war. It took me a long time to realise what is going on with porn and how it effects me. I have come to realise that porn really has hijacked our brains not only to not react to real girls but to not really be interested in them. For me, the latter is why it is so important to keep away from all superficial stimuli such as Facebook and online images ect. Obviously this isn't always possible but its a good thing to avoid, not just porn. The problem being that our neural pathways for superficial stimulation are wired together with porn, images and anything superficial.
On the talk of super stimuli I found that recently I spent a lot of time playing video games (such as fifa) with friends. I found this really powerful in drawing me in to wasting loads of time playing FIFA even though I knew I wanted to get other stuff done like studying ect. This also occurred over christmas with another stimulus: FOOD. I'm typically a very healthy guy, I work out a lot, eat really well and play a lot of sport. However, I noticed when I went back home for Christmas from university, unhealthy food was very available and I started pigging out. This became the norm for me for a few weeks and after I went back to university I found it hard to go back to healthy living. With these super stimuli we really are pushing ourselves into a fake world or a way of living that avoids us experiencing life.
A great way to understand this and how all this works for me, was the combination of a talk by Doug McDougal called 'The Pleasure Trap' (watch it if you haven't seen it) and mindfulness meditation. Both of which can give people an understanding of how the brain works and then when you expose yourselves to the stimuli again you can see what is really going on with the brain.

The Experiment:
1. Watch the TED talk 'The Pleasure Trap'
2. Spend about 1-2 weeks doing mindfulness meditation (I use the app headspace which is really good) and withhold from fast food or unhealthy food and also video games ect
3. After practicing the meditation re-introduce these stimuli and it will help you understand how they work and how you react to them. Apply this to how you interact with abstaining from porn and urges and it will hopefully shed some insight on what is going on in your head...

This is just a practice for people to understand what is going on in their heads when you get urges and how to react to them.

I would be really interested in what people think about doing this and if it helps you!

JohnDoe
 
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