Sex addiction is real, and scientists have discovered what charges it within the mind. If you or a loved one or suffering, read on for answers.
“This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.”
The D.A.R.E. program was a ubiquitous part of any child’s life in the late eighties and early nineties. You had this impressive “DARE Officer” come to your school and talk to you about how it wasn’t cool to do drugs.
But nobody talked about sex until high school. And, for a lot of children, by then it was too late.
Eighties and nineties kids grew up in a time when internet technology was new and largely uncontrolled by parents. Men tend to find pornography around the time when their brains and bodies are discovering sexual hormones.
For some, the warped world of pornographic sexuality is all they have ever known. Their brains have changed completely to accommodate this over stimulus and crave more.
Sexual addiction is a real thing. And we’re going to talk about what your looks like on sex addiction.
1. What They Know
Sex addiction is like drug addiction. At least in how your brain looks when scanned. A study conducted in 2014 on 19 people with compulsive sexual behavior and 19 people without compulsive sexual behavior.They showed sexually explicit videos to both groups.
They found that the people who had compulsive sexual behavior, their brains lit up in the same regions of the brain as that of drug addicts in similar studies. Compared to the people without compulsive sexual behavior, that part of their brains lit up like a Christmas tree on LSD.
Psychology follows neurology. Our brains are not static etchings of stone. They’re plastic, like putty. They literally change in response to outside stimuli. This is why we become addicted to things.
2. Why Does Addiction Happen?
Our brains are made (or evolved) to give pleasure for important behaviors. Things like eating, sleeping, sex, bonding, these things are important for our well-being and survival as a species.
Back when man was scarce upon the earth, we needed these brain rewards to drive us to propagate or survive.
But now, everything is in full supply. The brain can and will latch onto the hyperstimulus offered by contemporary society.
This is why obesity is a problem in the first world. We would grab whatever we could in the lean times. We still have our hunter-gatherer brains. And our brains still seek food, even to the point of overload, if we were to let them.
That’s the thing about addiction. It’s suddenly out of our control. When our brains have changed, and, like the fish in water, all we know is addiction, we won’t know we were made for better.
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