1 Year of Porn Addiction Withdrawals | What to Expect During Your First Year After Quitting & How to Stay Sober

Hey, this is Jake Kastleman. Welcome to the show, my friend. It's such a privilege to be here with you today.

I recently had someone reach out to me directly to ask about porn withdrawals and I told him I would love to do a podcast episode on that because I know that there's a lot of people that have questions about porn addiction withdrawals and I think that a lot of people can have the misconception due to culture and society and the lack of education and understanding for something as new as porn addiction because it's only been by the last 30 years that it's really become prevalent in society and across the world. A lot of people believe that porn addiction withdrawals are not real. They're not difficult.

They're not akin to drug withdrawals or substance withdrawals like alcohol and that if you feel you're experiencing withdrawals that it's really just emotional and it shouldn't be that difficult and you're probably just being weak. I want to clarify something. I was addicted to drugs.

I'm blessed enough to have not been addicted to hard drugs. I was addicted to alcohol. I have been addicted to porn and I've been sober for almost a decade now and out of all the substances that I was addicted to and all the behaviors that I've been addicted to in my life, porn was by far the hardest one to overcome and according to brain studies and then anecdotal accounts from people who have quit porn, this would be seconded by many and by the research.

Porn activates parts of the brain that drugs don't because porn is built into you biologically. What I mean by that is sex, the desire for sex, is built into you as a human being. The desire for cocaine, on the other hand, is not.

Withdrawing from cocaine is extremely challenging and there are physical withdrawals that come with cocaine or heroin or meth or other hard drugs. That is so hard and I've had friends and people that I've known who have gone through those withdrawals and I've been in the rooms of recovery with them and I've worked with also those who've struggled with porn addiction and who have quit drugs or alcohol and they've talked to me about how they could quit drugs or alcohol but they could not quit porn until they joined my program and they started to learn mental and emotional processes to do so amongst other mindset and lifestyle practices that you can do on a daily basis to get sober and to quit. And I think it needs to be understood that there is in many ways no difference between taking in drugs through a substance, through your veins, through a pipe, drinking it, eating it, or taking in a drug through your eyes.

A drug, quote unquote. We can become addicted to behaviors just as we can become addicted to substances. It is an old conception that would teach us that substances are the only things you can be addicted to.

We understand very well now, I think through the age of internet, through social media and through porn and through online browsing and everything that's happened with technology, TV, video games, that we can become addicted to behaviors. That addiction is far broader than just being addicted to substances. That's basic now in the addiction recovery field and there are many in the professional sphere and in the general public who have not caught up with that knowledge that we now have.

Addiction is substances, behaviors, and we can get addicted to pretty much anything. It just has to do with our relationship to it and how we engage with it. Is it obsessive? Is it fixated? Is it extreme? That said, it does not have to be something that we are engaging in every day.

It could be something we're engaging with twice a year, but if we're thinking about it frequently and it causes us stress and overwhelm because we can't get our mind off of it, even if we're only engaging with it twice a year, how much of our emotional bandwidth is it taking up? That's an addiction. An addiction is anything that we want to stop but feel we can't despite the negative consequences. Simple enough.

Anything we want to stop but feel we can't despite the negative consequences. That's Dr. Gabor Mate that came up with that definition. Love it.

So simple. That's addiction. Nothing about time frame or number of times you do it or how bad it is or how much it's because we often will define addiction by saying, oh it's an addiction if it's severely inhibiting your daily functioning.

I think that's coming from a very westernized view of symptom, symptomology. It's probably the wrong word, but essentially paying attention to symptoms and saying we want to avoid a destructive life. You just need to get to a base place of like, I can work, I can eat, I can live, and anything beyond that is bonus.

I'm speaking from a deeper, greater perspective here of you as a human being deserve to and want to be happy, genuinely happy. So an addiction can be anything that's getting in the way of that where you want to stop it but feel you can't despite the negative consequences to whatever degrees those negative consequences are coming up. So what I personally experienced in my own recovery, looking back on the time when I was about six months sober from porn, it was one of the most beautiful and one of the most difficult times in my life.

It was extremely challenging to not go back to porn during that time and I had to develop many habits. I had to give up a lot of behaviors, not just the behavior of porn or things to do with sex, but I had to give up a lot of other behaviors and a lot of other habits and replace them with new behaviors and habits in order to get things out of my life that were making me more susceptible to addiction and bring things into my life that would make me more prone towards recovery and more living in a space where I wanted to be sober. Many people described, I remember that when I was going through those withdrawals, because they were mental and emotional and physical to some degree, right, again not like cocaine, meth, heroin, there are horrible physical and chemical withdrawals that people go through with hard drugs.

Don't mistake me, I am talking about mental and emotional withdrawals but also physical and biological because this is sex. This is built into us as human beings. The desire for it is built into us.

When we mess with that mechanism and we are watching porn regularly for years and masturbating to it, we have distorted what I believe to be a naturally very positive thing, can be a very positive thing for human beings. It's caused a lot of destruction, a lot of harm and hurt in people's lives in various ways. But sex can be beautiful and so positive.

It can be so wonderful and I think ultimately it's meant to be that way. But it becomes something very different with porn. And so when we withdraw from it, we've gained this dependency on it mentally and emotionally and then in some ways physically, right? And when I say physically, I don't have any kind of research or studies to back that up.

It's just personal experience and what I've heard other people say that they go through when they're withdrawing. So just if you're going through withdrawals of your own, you experience some things physically, you know, tiredness or things with your sexual hormones or things with the way that you feel sexually in your sexual organs, and you're like, what is going on with me? Why am I so messed up? Just know that it all pretty much fits in the realm of normal things that happen to other people. You never need to feel alone.

So many people, many people described, you know, withdrawing from porn in very mild terms, where they'd be like, yeah, you know, during the first... man, I've seen social media posts like this. Withdrawing from porn, they talk about the first three days. If you can make it three days without porn, man, you're almost to the point of sobriety.

Or if you can make it three weeks, man, now you're good to go. Now you're really launching and taking off I don't know who these people are that have withdrawn from porn, that have gotten sober and have experienced this severe, this miraculous change in three weeks where they no longer want porn. I wasn't that person.

I haven't met a single client that was that person. I've never met friends or done volunteer work with people that were that person. Not a thing.

It's not a thing, okay? I don't... I think if someone's saying that, they're an exception, they're an oddity, or they're lying. And they're trying to sell you something and tell you that you can quit in 30 days and your life's gonna change and be so different. And that you can leave addiction behind you forever and never worry about it again.

That's not true, okay? Recovering from porn addiction takes a lifetime. And that might sound discouraging at first, but essentially it takes a recovery mindset and a recovery lifestyle. It needs to be lived forever for the rest of your life.

It doesn't ever stop. You don't just go 90 days and you're like, okay, cool. I've got this recovery thing in the bag.

I'm good to go. Leave this behind me. Now I can go back to my normal life.

Your normal life was the thing that was driving your addiction. And we'll get more, we'll get deeper into that. So what I'll teach you today is only scratching the surface when it comes to recovery.

If you want to go much deeper, check out my free workshop on nomoredesire.com. I have an hour and a half of material in there that goes deep into the recovery mindset and lifestyle. Eight keys to lose your desire for porn. So please check that out.

It's completely free to you. I've poured my heart and soul into that thing to help people out so that they can see deeper into what recovery actually takes and see that it is actually hopeful. It's powerful.

It doesn't have to be something that's horrible and extremely difficult for the rest of your life. You can actually live a sober life and enjoy your sober life, love your sober life, and no longer desire porn. That is something that you can have.

And I like to say it's like if you reach an extremely stressful something, you know, someone close to you dies, you may have a desire for porn come up out of a coping mechanism. That's still there in your brain. But as far as your ongoing day-to-day life, you can get to a point where you no longer crave it or desire it.

You never think of it. You don't want it. You can truly get there.

And I teach people how to do that in the program. So first off, again, I want to let you know if you're withdrawing from porn or you're looking to quit, you're not crazy if you're experiencing withdrawals from porn. Let's be clear.

Pornography is just as addicting, if not more addicting, than a lot of other substances, a lot of other behaviors. There's many of the same processes and exact identical processes happening in the brain when it comes to cocaine addiction and cocaine withdrawal, as there is with porn addiction and porn withdrawal. There are differences as well, but there are many similarities.

So in addition, here is what I experienced going through withdrawals. Let me share that with you and get open and vulnerable here with you. So during my first few weeks of sobriety from porn, that happened multiple times for me, but I kind of have this, it's funny I'm saying this now that I just said, people will say your whole life changes after three weeks.

I'm actually going to kind of tell you that, but then I'm going to add some serious caveats to it. After three weeks of being sober, my life really did change pretty drastically. I started to see, wow, I'm thinking more clearly, my memory's better, my motivation is better, my focus is better, I am connecting better with people, I feel more confident, I feel more driven, I feel more at peace, I feel closer to God, I feel closer to the people around me, I feel more joy in my life.

And there were times where I was like, I don't even want porn anymore. It's not even something that I desire at all. It's really just gone away.

Now I was then shown very quickly after that, something hard came up in life, something hard happened, and then my desires for porn came back. And then I'd relapse and I'd be like, how did this happen? I thought I was over it. I thought that I was clean now and I was good forever.

It's not how it works, my friend. It's one day at a time, okay? And recovery is ongoing. So once I did get sober though, and I made it to about three months of sobriety, you know, I started to feel significantly better in many ways.

Again, that confidence, that focus, that drive and motivation. I also started to feel things more, right? Just in general, that's one of the things that a lot of people don't often talk about with sobriety. It's not all lollipops and rainbows.

It's not like my life is so much better and it's great. Yes, your life is so much better. You feel life more.

You experience life to a deeper level. And that comes with pain. You experience pain to a deeper level.

You experience hard emotions at a deeper level, and that enables you to grow. Whereas when you're struggling with porn addiction, you stay locked in the past in many ways. Your maturity, your growth and potential stop when your porn addiction starts.

Now don't mistake me though, that's not a black and white thing. It's not an all or nothing thing. That doesn't mean you can't do a lot of good things with your life and grow in many ways.

But emotionally and in some other specific ways for you as an individual and what you've been running from using porn addiction, you stay stagnant in those things to a pretty large degree. You may continue to progress to some extent, and when you get sober or you still do progress in some ways, but you stay locked up in many ways in your maturity, your potential, your growth, and the amount of peace and joy you can have, and how well you can connect with people. And it's a hard thing to accept.

It doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't mean that you are, again, doesn't mean that you are bad. What it actually is, if you flip it around, is it's a beautiful truth in that so many of the challenges you experience now in your porn addiction, by getting sober, those things will improve significantly.

It will be amazing for you. So many of the hard things, what you deal with with attention and focus, the motivation issues that you have, the troubles that you have in dating or in your marriage, the struggles that you have in getting motivated to do things, or dreams that you either want to pursue, or the dreams that you feel you should have, the interests you feel you should have, but you don't have, you're just not interested in things, or the anxiety or the depression or the social anxiety, or the confidence issues, or the being able to understand other people, or intelligence you wish you had, all sorts of things of that nature will improve when you get sober. It's a vast inner network inside of you, mentally and emotionally, spiritually, physically, and in your relationships.

And I want it to be clear, this happens in part because you get sober and you stop watching porn, but it also happens at the same time because of changes you're making in your life that you must make in order to even be able to get sober in the first place. So all that understood, okay, for me when I got sober, and let's take it a bit further, I said three months where things were getting significantly better. I was feeling things a lot more.

Six months go by, I've had more life experiences. Some harder things have come up. I've had experiences where I felt vulnerable, right? Where something difficult happened, and I was on the edge, and I almost relapsed, but then I didn't, right? I had many experiences like that for years in my sobriety.

And the thing is, you have to have the tools, right? You have to develop the tools, and you have to have some tools that really work. Not ones that you just come up with on the spot, but that are based in psychological modalities, and wisdom, spiritual wisdom as well, and things that are actually working for people, and that work really, really well. You don't have to just fight it on your own, or just use some gratitude, or think positively, or distract yourself.

There are better ways. So one of the strange things that I'll mention, just kind of going back to the withdrawal. At six months, to some degree, I would experience things where I was like, why is my life harder? Or why do I feel some of the suffering that I used to experience when I was addicted? And I wrote an article a while back, did an episode on the 15 symptoms.

It's funny, I did a 17 symptoms podcast episode, where somehow when I counted them out and created all of them, in writing the episode, it's a lot of symptoms. It's a lot of content. There were actually 15 of them, not 17.

But I just kept the episode the same, because literally in the episode, I count them out, and I skip two numbers. Pretty funny thing, just left it as it was. But the article online is accurate, it's 15 symptoms.

Many of those symptoms that I have in the article are identical to what you experience in withdrawals. And I won't say identical in the way of, in some ways not, but they are identical in other ways. So I shouldn't say identical, they're similar.

And that's because, to a deep degree, porn drains you of dopamine, right? And so with porn addiction, engaging with porn depletes your brain of dopamine, because it flushes you out. Because activities that feed you dopamine, you're not actively producing it yourself. Such as, you know, if you're reading or writing or creating or building things or forming relationships, doing things that bring you fulfillment, where you're creating dopamine, that's going to enhance the amount of dopamine that you have available.

Whereas if you engage in things like social media, porn, TV, movies, junk food, all these things that just feed you dopamine, you don't really have to do anything for it. It depletes your dopamine, and it decreases the ability your brain has to produce dopamine more efficiently on its own, right? Internally, you actually produce it rather than it being fed to you kind of from the outside, right? Whether that be through a substance or it's producing it through a behavior. So because I no longer had that dopamine, that source of dopamine from porn, it takes a while for your brain to heal.

And I don't know what the numbers are. Some people will say a year, people will say two years. I've heard these numbers before of for the dopamine centers and the damage centers in your brain to heal from addiction.

I don't think it's quite that way. My personal opinion, whether it's backed by science or not, I think it depends on how long you've been addicted and how severe your addiction was. I know also from an emotional standpoint and relationships and how my brain works and my maturity, it's taken years to heal from many things that my porn addiction was a good part of because we use addictions to mask and to cover up, to extinguish our suffering and pain.

And so we don't deal with that suffering and pain. We don't mature and evolve and progress as we would if we weren't relying on addictions. And by the way, many, many people have addictions that they rely on to varying degrees.

People who, I will say if we're able to get to a point where we're not using addictions either at all or very little in our lives, and none of us are going, I think none of us are perfect at that. But if we're able to get to that place more or less, the amount of growth we can experience is just exponential. It's just, it's incredible.

And you feel so alive and you're able to advance so immensely when you don't have these addictions you're relying on, whether that's porn or shopping or food or codependence or anger. Anger can be an addiction or depression, isolation. These can be addictions, right? Whatever your addiction is that helps you numb out, escape, isolate, check out, right? Or try to control situations, right? Not utilizing those, you can grow, you can grow so much.

So anyway, I'm off on a lot of tangents here, but hopefully they're helpful to you. At that six month mark and around there from about six to nine months, I was, I was experiencing life being harder in a lot of ways. And I wanted to go back to my addiction.

And especially when you reach, when you reach that year mark, it's like you have a substantial amount of time between you and the addiction. For a lot of people, we can experience kind of this inclination like, well, my life's not really as great as I thought it would be. So why am I like, why am I sober? Maybe I should just go back to being addicted.

Now, that depends on the person. It depends on how good your life is and what you've done in that year. That is so central to this, but that inclination, it's first off, we forget how bad it was in addiction.

Addiction, a sober life to any degree is so much better than a life addicted because it just is for various reasons. But you feel things more, things hurt more, like I said. And so reaching between that six months to 12 months mark, just bear in mind that you're not getting the thing I didn't quite, that I kind of skirted around.

I didn't quite dive, dive directly into is you are not getting that dopamine fix anymore that you got from porn. That was kind of what boosted you on occasion. It also drained you, it depleted you, but it did boost you sometimes with your dopamine.

Again, dopamine helps you get motivated, helps you get focused, helps give you purpose and drive, and it helps you connect with other people. That's everything that dopamine does. And porn drains you of that.

So you don't have that anymore. So you're not being drained, which is awesome. It's the best, but you're also not getting that spike.

So you're missing that fix that you had in your brain. You're neurologically learning how to live without that. And you're emotionally learning how to live without that.

And when times get hard and they hurt and things suck, you're learning how to lean into that and choose other ways of coping with life that are actually healthy and good for you. At least hopefully you're choosing that.

And so what I want to kind of conclude with here is recovery is not just about stopping the addictive behavior. Okay, ultimately that, yes, that is sobriety. You do need to stop the addictive behavior.

But in the long run, recovery is about so much more. And you might think, wait, what? I mean, yeah, getting sober from porn, that's going to fix all my problems. It's not going to fix all your problems.

I'm sorry to tell you, it won't. It's going to substantially improve your life. But it is going to substantially improve your life in large part because out of necessity, you are going to need to start living a different life.

You're not being drained of dopamine. You're not, you don't have a behavior in your life that's sapping your confidence from you. And as well as something that is causing your brain to be much more objectifying of people and of life in general, right? Porn has so many impacts on the brain.

So you're free of that, and that's wonderful. But you also need to build this recovery mindset and lifestyle, and you need to live it forever. Again, if you want to learn what that mindset and lifestyle is, check out my free workshop on nomoredesire.com. So I hope that this has answered some questions for you when it comes to addiction recovery and withdrawal from porn addiction.

I hope that you have an amazing, an amazing week. And I also, and if this has been helpful to you, go ahead and rate this podcast. That helps it reach more people.

Follow this podcast so you can get updates every time I release a new episode. God bless and much love my friend.