How Negative Thinking Fuels Porn Addiction—Shame, the Brain and the Habit Loop
- Jake Kastleman
- Aug 12
- 17 min read
Updated: Aug 25
When I was deep in my porn addiction, I thought the biggest enemy I faced was desire. I thought if I could just get rid of my cravings, I’d be free.
But the truth is, my biggest enemy wasn’t desire—it was the constant, unrelenting negative thinking in my own head.
Social anxiety.
Depression.
These things plagued me almost every waking moment. While there were genetic factors and circumstances I couldn’t control, I didn’t realize something crucial: my thoughts were shaping my brain—and my brain was driving me back to porn again and again, even when I desperately wanted to stop.
I had no idea that the constant weight of inadequacy, fear, and self-blame was fueling my porn use. And even if I had known, I wouldn’t have known how to change it.
In this article, I’m going to show you why negative thinking is not just a symptom of porn addiction—it’s one of its biggest drivers—and how you can start breaking free from that mental trap starting today.
The Psychology of Negative Thinking in Porn Addiction Recovery
Negative thinking isn’t harmless background noise. It's an active fuel source for addiction.
Let’s look at a common pattern I see with the men I coach:
A man relapses
Thinks, “I’m such a failure”
Feels hopeless
Uses porn again to escape that hopelessness.
That’s the shame loop in action. And shame loops often become self-fulfilling prophecies—your brain starts living out the story you repeat to yourself.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) and the Inner War
From an IFS perspective, Manager parts of you try to “motivate” you through criticism. They beat you down in hopes that you’ll shape up. But Firefighter parts—desperate to shut off the pain—use porn to numb you out. This inner war can run on autopilot for years.
Cognitive Distortions That Keep You Stuck
These mental habits distort reality and lock you into the addiction cycle.
All-or-Nothing Thinking “If I can’t quit perfectly, I might as well give up.” This doesn’t just apply to porn addiction—it seeps into all of life. It keeps you tense, stressed, and feeling like progress doesn’t matter unless it’s perfect.
Labeling “I’m disgusting” vs. “I made a mistake.” One defines your identity; the other simply describes an event. If your labels don’t match your true character, they become chains.
Emotional Reasoning “I feel like I’ll always be addicted, so it must be true.” Feelings are not reality. They’re signals—important ones—but they require self-awareness to interpret. Often, surface emotions are protective layers hiding deeper truths.
The Cost of Constant Self-Criticism
Negative self-talk doesn’t just feel bad—it shapes who you become.
It erodes motivation until you don’t even want to try.
It cements an identity of being “broken.”
It polarizes your internal system—parts of you are at war instead of working together.
Your brain listens to the way you talk to yourself. Every thought is a vote for the man you’re becoming. But here’s the key—it’s not just about trying to replace bad thoughts with good ones. It’s about stepping back and becoming a witness to your thoughts.
When you can invite a painful emotion in, sit with it, and understand the good intention or longing underneath it, you can release it—either all at once or in layers over time.
The Neuroscience: Why Negative Thinking Hooks the Brain
Negative thinking isn’t just “in your head.” It rewires your brain in ways that make porn cravings harder to resist.
The Negativity Bias
The human brain evolved to spot danger faster than safety in today's world, “danger” often means emotional threats: criticism, rejection, embarrassment, fear of failure.
That’s why it’s easier to dwell on mistakes than progress. But here’s the twist—painful emotion isn’t the enemy. When used well, it can deepen resilience, self-understanding, and your ability to love and be present.
If you slow down enough to ask what’s underneath the pain, you’ll usually find fear, shame, or grief—and beneath those, a desire to do good and give good.
The Stress Response and Cravings
Negative thoughts activate the amygdala, triggering a cortisol spike. Cortisol primes your brain to seek quick dopamine fixes—porn, junk food, alcohol—anything to escape discomfort.
This is why the answer is not to avoid painful emotions at all costs. The path forward is learning to become deeply aware of them, invite them in, and be with them. Only then should you turn toward more positive thinking.
Your Brain as a Rehearsal Space
Your brain treats repeated thoughts like rehearsals. The more you rehearse shame and fear, the more automatic they become—and the more likely your brain will reach for old coping habits.
Personal growth and peace don’t come from avoiding pain, but from giving it your full attention without becoming it. As I like to say: It’s not that we feel too much negativity—it’s that we spend too much energy resisting it, fighting it, and trying to escape it. That’s what prolongs the suffering.
Applied Exercise: The Thought Labeling Practice
This is a practice I use with my clients to break the negative thinking–addiction loop.
Step 1 – Notice When a negative thought pops up—“I’m hopeless”—don’t fight it. Acknowledge it.
Step 2 – Name Say to yourself, “That’s the hopeless story again.” Label it as a story, not as truth.
Step 3 – Remind Tell yourself: “A thought or emotion is not truth—it’s just a thought or emotion.”
Step 4 – Invite & Listen Imagine the thought as a hurting friend knocking on your door. Invite it in. Sit with it. Ask gently: “What’s behind this? What need isn’t being met? ”Don’t try to analyze or solve—just feel and listen.
Step 5 – Express Write down what comes up, speak it aloud, or express it physically (walk, pray, breathe deeply).
Step 6 – Redirect Choose one small action aligned with your recovery values—something that says, “I am the kind of man I want to be.”
Why It Works
Creates space between you and your thoughts so you can respond instead of react.
Interrupts the automatic cue → craving link.
Weakens the neural pathways of the old habit loop.
Builds self-trust by showing every part of you that you’re willing to listen.
Reflection Questions
When you think about your most recent relapse or moment of strong craving, what specific thoughts or “stories” were running through your mind just before it happened?
Which negative thought patterns in your life feel so familiar that you rarely even notice them—and how might these be shaping your behavior without your consent?
If your brain is rehearsing the same negative belief over and over, what do you think that belief is training you to expect from yourself and your future?
How would your daily choices change if you no longer believed every negative thought that entered your mind?
Final Thoughts
Breaking free from porn addiction is not just about managing desire—it’s about mastering your mindset. Negative thinking fuels addiction at the psychological and neurological level, keeping you locked in shame, self-criticism, and unhealthy coping loops.
By learning to witness your thoughts, invite in painful emotions, and respond with actions aligned to your values, you begin rewiring your brain for lasting freedom.
If you’re serious about overcoming porn addiction, start here. Get curious about your thoughts. Give them your attention. And take small steps every day toward becoming the man you were created to be.
👉 Download my Free eBook and take my Free Workshop
👉 Or join my Coaching Waitlist if you're ready for long-term porn recovery
Recommended Articles:
Full Transcription of Episode 107: How Negative Thinking Fuels Porn Addiction—Shame, the Brain & the Habit Loop
Jake Kastleman (00:10.744)
When I was deep in my porn addiction, I thought the biggest enemy I faced was desire. But the truth is, my biggest enemy was the constant unrelenting negative thinking in my own head. Anxiety, social anxiety, depression, these things plagued me pretty much all day, every day. And while there were many genetic factors and things outside of my control that contributed to these things.
I didn't realize that my thoughts were shaping my brain, and my brain was driving me back to porn again and again, even when I desperately wanted to
I had no idea that the weight of my constant feelings of inadequacy, fear, and blame, both for myself and for those around me, were driving my porn use. And even if I had, I didn't know how to change them. In this episode, I want to show you why negative thinking is not just a symptom of porn addiction, but one of its biggest drivers in how you can start breaking free from that mental.
Before we dive in, a reminder, follow this podcast and notification bell. Please take a moment to rate this podcast so that others who are searching for help can find it. Last but not least, you want to dive deeper, check out my free ebook and free workshop on nomoresire.com. I poured my heart and soul into those resources and they are
completely free to you to check them out. All right, let's get moving. With that, we'll dive in.
Jake Kastleman (02:18.798)
So I want to start by talking about the psychology of negative thinking in addiction. Negative thinking is an active fuel source for addiction, not just background noise. We get into these shame loops and this self-condemnation. So an example would be a man relapses, he thinks, I'm such a failure, he feels hopeless, and then he uses porn again to escape these feelings, right? Many of us are familiar with this. This gets into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your brain starts living out the narrative that you keep.
Repeating and in IFS terms you have a you have some critical manager parts of you that are beating you down Trying to motivate you to improve While firefighters are responding to this inner criticism by using porn to numb now. That's a very general kind of Outlook on that there are varying different ways that manager and firefighter roles can go But that's one of them so
Some cognitive distortions that can keep you stuck is this all or nothing thinking, really this battle as far as I've seen it between a manager to a firefighter part, a part of you that has high, high standards. If I can't quit perfectly, I might as well give it up. If I can't quit perfectly, I shouldn't do it at all. And another part of you that's like, my gosh, well, we're not gonna quit perfectly, so we might as well give up and be done. And let's just go back to...
to our porn, right? Or whatever our addiction might be. And I want you to actually expand this to all of life, not just addiction. So this is a consistent, unconscious way of thinking, a belief system that keeps you in a state of tension and high stress. It's perfectionism, it's all or nothing thinking, black and white thinking, it's an obsessive-compulsive way of thinking. All of these are really the same thing, or they go hand in hand.
They are so interlocked, and I see them consistently. And that is how I lived my life. I had this high pressure, high tension, and so I kept escaping to addiction because that was the only way my mind could really find to feel okay. It was trying to balance things out, so I had a part of me trying to out the high expectations that I could not meet. And there's a totally different approach to this. I teach my clients emotional mindfulness, how to relate to these parts.
Jake Kastleman (04:47.746)
But this labeling of, you know, I'm disgusting or I'm a bad person, you I shouldn't be doing this and really identifying with that emotion rather than being able to step back and witness it and seek for deep self understanding, acceptance and compassion. You can pull back and be able to see I made a mistake. It doesn't match up with who I am as a person. You can actually feel that, but you need to be able to move through that. So this emotional...
reasoning we can get into. I feel like I'll always be an addict, so it must be true, right? We can actually trust our emotions as reality, as truth. And our emotions are not reality, they are emotions. There are reasons behind them and they are important to pay attention to so that we can grow deeper self-understanding. But often the surface emotion I experience
is not reflective of truth. What I start with on the surface, like something like anger or cravings or perfectionism or if I'm in some kind of a victim mentality, this is on the surface and this does not reflect reality. These are just protective parts of us that are showing up to try to soothe us or comfort us or to try to manage a situation or control it and
we really need to break down underneath the surface so that we can, if we can do this, if we can pay attention and just be present, we can grow deeper self understanding. Often the surface emotion is not reflective of truth. So I practice self awareness to get to the core reasons behind my emotions. And this empowers a more joyful mindset because joy is innate.
within us. I simply remove the barriers to joy by paying attention to the painful emotions and diving into them and understanding the fear or the shame or the grief at their roots and then being able to let that rise inside of me peak and then descend. And I need to move through it so that then I can feel the joy that is innate within me. But as long as I stay in this all or nothing thinking,
Jake Kastleman (07:08.652)
or I stay in this labeling I'm disgusting, or I believe my emotions to be reality, rather than simply emotion, I cannot move forward. And this is, if you actually go back to episode 100, my rock bottom, I talk about how I was in this delusional state of believing my emotions and my thoughts equated reality, and they did not.
And once I started to step out of that, once I actually had a very profound and very earth-shaking, a disturbing experience where I realized what I have believed to be truth is not at all truth, it's psychological. That helped me step back and start to see that emotions and thoughts are just simply, they're just simply that, they're emotions and thoughts. And I used to believe that they were the spirit speaking to me. I used to believe that they...
equated some kind of deeper meaning in my life and a vast majority are they're just psychological and the actual inclinations of like deep strong inclinations of warning or of yes a push a confirmation move forward on this we can have I believe some spiritual kinds of inclinations of that nature but it's very easy to
to conflate those two things, emotions and thoughts versus these true spiritual inclinations. And the only way we can get there is by becoming deeply self-aware and using emotional mindfulness to work through these types of emotions and all these games that parts of our minds can play. So this constant self-criticism we can get into, so kind of back to that. This can erode our motivation.
It can reinforce identity as broken and it creates this internal polarization. So we get into this, my last episode that I did is about the inner war that's behind addiction. So this really reinforces kind of this broken identity when we get in that state. And instead of doing that, being able to really
Jake Kastleman (09:23.532)
be deeply aware of and relate to these emotions and pull back and step back and see them. Your brain listens to the way that you talk to yourself. And every thought is a vote for the person you're becoming. So more importantly though is your ability to step back and be a witness to these thoughts. It is not about suppressing them or replacing them with happy thoughts, but instead,
practicing self-awareness. Invite the painful emotion in, be with it, find understanding for it, see the core good intention or desire behind it, and this empowers you to release it, either immediately or in layers over time.
Jake Kastleman (10:06.072)
So again, it's not so much about negativity being present as it is about how we are present with negativity. So the neuroscience behind why negativity hooks the brain, negative thinking isn't just, it's not just in your head, it changes brain activity in ways that make cravings harder to actually resist.
Again, if you've listened to my other episodes, you should understand at this point that our cliche way of looking at recovery, this very modern, westernized kind of view of willpower and resisting cravings, is actually just the other side of the coin from addiction. It drives addiction. So that can't be the approach.
our brains when it comes to.
of negative thinking and this painful way of thinking our brains evolved to spot danger faster than safety and in modern life danger has become emotional threats criticism embarrassment fear failure and this bias makes it easier to dwell on mistakes rather than progress and now i'll i'll say that that there is power in painful emotion if we use it
it can deepen our resilience, our self understanding and our compassion and ability to be present and loving. We need to pay attention to painful emotions and see what parts of us are trying to communicate with us. And that requires us to really get present and ask what's underneath. And at the core, we will always find again, fear, shame or grief. You hear me say it a million times. What am I afraid of? How do I feel inadequate? Or what am I sad about?
Jake Kastleman (12:02.648)
There's something of that nature. And underneath those, by the way, we were always going to find the desire to do good, to be good, and to give good. That's at the core of who we are as human beings. And I believe in that fundamentally. I've seen it again and again and again. But it requires us to take this mindfulness aspect. When negativity comes up, where we actually go wrong is not by getting...
It's not so much that we get caught up in it. Well, we identify with it and we resist it. We want it to make it go away. We don't want it to be there. And it's so interesting that healing is just on the other end of really fully paying attention to the painful emotion. We get negative because we fight and resist and judge ourselves and try to escape the pain rather than.
going deep into it and really seeing it and understanding, okay, what's behind this for me? And being with that, feeling with ourselves. So when it comes to our stress response and our cravings and negative thoughts, right? When we identify with them rather than stepping back and witnessing them, these lead to an amygdala activation, right? Our amygdala, that's where our emotional center of our brain and a cortisol spike. And the cortisol increases cravings for quick dopamine.
porn, sugar, TV, social media, video games. You're literally priming your brain to seek escape. So the answer is not to try to avoid all painful emotion. That is not going to get you there. And I'll cover this in the next episode, positive, just thinking positively, it's just, it's not the way. It is to learn to become deeply aware, invited in, be with it, and only after you have done that.
should you then turn your attention towards more positive thinking, okay, which we'll cover in episode 109. That's kind of part of this series about positive versus negative thinking. So your brain treats repeated thoughts like rehearsals. The more you rehearse shame and fear, and this is a bit more of the neuroscience, you know, habit looping end. The more you rehearse shame and fear, the more automatic they become and the more your brain will reach for old
Jake Kastleman (14:25.614)
coping habits. So what's amazing is how personal growth and peace is not again, not in avoiding the painful motion, but in giving it your full attention, not to identify with it, but to witness it. It's not that we feel too much negativity. It's that we spend so much time fighting it and trying to hide from it and escape from it. This prolongs our suffering. So to really to really give a an analogy to this, this is something that I heard recently that I love.
This analogy is be the bison. And if you listen to a much earlier episode of mine with Janine Gardner, with Circles of Grace, they have a bison as their logo of their clinic. And it's based on this analogy of be the bison. what does that mean? So when we look at how cows versus bison respond to a storm.
So a storm is coming in, there's lightning, there's rain. Cows run from the storm. And what ends up happening when cows run from the storm is it's coming in towards them. It's obviously moving faster than they can run. And then once it gets to them and they continue to run from it, they stay in it much longer because they are running from it. Now, what does it mean to be the bison?
Bison have a very different approach instead of running from the storm They run towards the storm so that they spend less time in the storm They actually run through it and past it. It's the exact same way that we need to work with painful emotion It carries a gift for us. It's it's actually something quite incredible when we learn how to do that so Practical steps to break the cycle of negative thinking that you get caught up in and identify with
I want to talk about the thought labeling practice. So you want to notice when a negative thought arises, such as I'm hopeless, all right, name it. That's the hopeless story again, or this is a part of me that is experiencing hopelessness. Remind yourself a thought or emotion is not truth or reality. It's just a thought or emotion. And then pay close attention to it. Invite it in for a while like a hurting friend that just needs you to listen. That's what that part of you needs.
Jake Kastleman (16:52.812)
and ask what's behind this? What needs aren't being met? Don't try to figure it out by the way, just feel it, be with it, listen internally, then write out what comes up for you, speak it out loud, express it. This can be done through prayer, meditation, journaling, whatever medium you prefer. And then you're going to want to redirect, choose one small action aligned with recovery values.
And the reason that this step-by-step process works, and you can actually find this in the blog article that's attached in the show notes if you need that step-by-step practice, the reason why it works is because it creates space between you and your thoughts. It interrupts the automatic cue to craving link. You have a cue and you go to craving. So it weakens the neural pathways of the habit loop over time. And as strange as it sounds,
It shows the parts of you that you are here to listen, that they can trust you. You really need self-trust. It is in my mind an eternal principle and it's a recurring theme that I see consistently. is people not, we don't trust ourselves. And so parts of us need to actually build trust for what I would call our higher self. This is the awareness, this is your ability to step back.
and witness your thoughts and emotions and to build trust internally with these parts of you. So I want to leave you with some reflection questions. You can also find these in the blog article. Number one is when you think about your most recent relapse or moment of strong craving, what specific thoughts or mental stories were running through your mind just before that happened? Number two is which negative thought patterns in your life feel so familiar that you rarely even notice them?
And how might these be shaping your behavior without your consent? Number three is if your brain is rehearsing the same negative belief over and over, what do you think that belief is training you to expect from yourself and your future? And then number four is how would your daily choices change if you no longer believed every negative thought that entered your mind?
Jake Kastleman (19:13.686)
So negative thinking is like the fuel that keeps the engine of porn addiction running, but just pouring in positive thinking isn't the answer. And in our next episode, we're going to talk about why forcing yourself to just be positive often makes recovery harder, not easier. We'll explore why beliefs like the law of attraction can actually keep you stuck and what to do instead. And that's coming up in next week's episode. So.
Follow this podcast and hit the notification bell. And if you want a breakdown of everything I've talked about today, head to the blog. I will leave that in the show notes. And be sure to follow, hit the notification bell, do all that good stuff, rate this episode so that others can find it. And I just invite you to share this with someone who needs it. And I encourage you to journal your top three recurring native thought loops before the next.
Episode that you so you can really get in touch with what's going on in my life. What are these negative thought thought loops that I have going on? God bless and much love my