How your brain changes when you quit porn

Whatever gives your brain the most dopamine is what it will crave the most

I remember watching porn once as a teenager, and finding that when I had returned to my studies, took much less pleasure in them.

The same book I’d been fascinated by the day before now felt more dull. It was like someone had turned down the brightness in my mind.

It was a complete aha moment — I could have lust, or I could have my mind.

It also taught me something deeper: all pleasure is relative to your baseline. If you ate nothing but broccoli for a week and then bit into an apple, that apple would taste like candy. If I locked you up in solitary confinement for a week, I could hand you a technical manual, and you’d read it with fascination.

Most people keep their pleasure baseline so artificially high that the subtler joys of thinking, reading or doing meaningful work simply can’t compete. They feel flat by comparison. Your body registers them as chemically unrewarding.

The way many people go about their day practically guarantees that their finer motivations remain offline.

Before even getting out of bed, people reach for the smartphone to check emails, social media, the news. From that point on the entire day is terrorized by cheap dopamine.

People skim headlines, half-read messages, switch between apps, scroll videos, and start tasks only to abandon them minutes later. Lunch is consumed while watching videos and the evening is filled with the most intense artificial stimulation.

The pace and rhythm of a single American day would send an 18th-century person to the madhouse. It’s prostitution of the mind at the highest level. It’s deranged behavior.

“Thanks to the internet… it’s finally possible to distract yourself for every waking minute of your life and barely even notice you’re doing it. When you mix all colors of paint together, you get black. Everything quickly becomes nothing.”

— Catherine Shannon

We’ve become professional interrupters of ourselves. The average person is a permanent start-stop machine.

Once you’ve spiked your dopamine with a doomscroll, there’s nothing you can do but wait it out. You can’t fight your chemicals.

Since realizing this, I’ve been on a quiet mission to plain-ify my life. The fewer dopamine sources I engage with, the more alive I feel in the simplest moments. Now, when I sit down to study or take a long walk, I’m in Disneyland. A good conversation or a few hours of writing feels like an exquisite pleasure.

Joy isn’t missing from your life, it’s just buried under a mountain of stimulation.