Porn and Pixels: The Hidden Link Between Video Games and Porn Addiction
- Jake Kastleman
- May 28
- 24 min read
Updated: Jun 3
How are porn addiction and video games connected? How does one feed the other, and how is your time on video games keeping you from quitting porn. There’s an inconvenient truth that we all need to hear.
In today’s episode, I’m going to challenge beliefs and talk about some things that are difficult to take in. And this is not just me on my soap box, but information backed up by neuroscience and research that could change your life.
At first glance, porn and video games may seem unrelated. One is sexual, the other recreational. But beneath the surface, both stimulate the same circuits in the brain.
Challenging video games is a hard message, especially when they are so dang enjoyable. They’re a thrilling pastime, and I know for many of my clients they’ve acted as one of their sources of social time and fun with friends or family.
I used to play video games everyday. But I quit 14 years ago when I saw a clear correlation between video game use and my porn addiction. At the time, I didn’t understand why playing video games made me more susceptible to desiring porn. But now, I do.
In this article, we’ll explore the neuroscience and psychology of how gaming and porn are connected. We'll uncover how video games can quietly pave the way for porn addiction—and how quitting porn may be only half the battle if gaming remains.
Again, it’s a difficult and controversial message.
I ask you to open your mind and be willing to listen to the inconvenient truth, because it’s one that could make your porn addiction recovery much smoother, not to mention it could transform your relationships and empower you to be the man your family needs.
Let’s dive in.
Dopamine and Digital Overload: The Neuroscience Behind It All
Both porn and video games activate the mesolimbic dopamine system—the part of the brain responsible for motivation, focus, human connection, craving, and reward.
When you watch porn or play a video game, your brain lights up with a surge of dopamine. That dopamine tells your system, “This is important—do more of this.” Over time, the brain adapts to the stimulation by downregulating dopamine receptors. That means:
You feel less joy from everyday pleasures.
You need more intense stimulation to feel good.
You start chasing high-reward, low-effort behaviors.
As Dr. Anna Lembke explains in Dopamine Nation, repeated exposure to high-dopamine stimuli—like porn or video games—leads to a kind of neurological numbing. The result is an ongoing craving for stronger, faster, and more artificial forms of gratification.
Addiction Hopping: When Porn and Gaming Fuel Each Other
There’s a phenomenon known as "addiction hopping" or cross-sensitization—when one compulsive behavior primes your brain for another.
Many men who try to quit porn without addressing their gaming habits unknowingly keep their brains in the same addictive loop:
Gaming late into the night → emotional fatigue → lowered inhibition → porn relapse
Porn binge → dopamine crash → boredom or guilt → escape into video games
In both cases, the emotional function is the same: avoid discomfort, numb difficult feelings, and feel a sense of stimulation or control.
This becomes even more pronounced when porn and gaming are consumed in back-to-back cycles—further training the brain to associate screen-based reward with comfort and relief. This is one of the mental traps that lead to relapse.
High Reward, Low Reality: The Psychology of Illusion
Video games and porn both provide a simulation of mastery and intimacy—but without real-world effort or risk. It’s one of the reasons they can be so enthralling and psychologically problematic.
In psychological terms, these behaviors reinforce:
Immediate gratification: There's no waiting, no uncertainty—just reward. Unlike real relationships, or real life, where rewards don’t come easily.
Avoidance behavior: Games and porn become ways to escape from boredom, anxiety, loneliness, or self-doubt. They’re highly stimulating, so they’re both a great numbing agent for difficult feelings. And when you numb difficult feelings, which are meant to help you grow and mature, you remain stagnant.
Dissociation: Both behaviors often pull men out of their bodies and into an overstimulated, mindless trance. This is very negative for the brain. Human beings are meant to integrate, experience, connect. When we live so consistently in a virtual world—becoming a head attached to a body, rather than a whole human being—we begin to feel empty inside.
According to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), addictive behaviors often stem from experiential avoidance—an unwillingness to feel pain or discomfort. Instead of facing difficult emotions, we choose momentary relief. That's why we need to learn how to surf urges instead of escaping them.
Gaming and porn offer the illusion of power, success, and connection—but none of the nourishing substance of these things. They’re like fast food for the soul—nutritionless.
And again, this isn’t easy to hear, but it’s an important message that we need to hear, as both porn addiction and video game addiction are so pervasive, and so destructive when we come to understand the brain science.
The Philosophical Crisis Beneath the Screen
The ancient Stoics—such as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus—taught that freedom comes not from pleasure, but from self-mastery.
As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Real strength lies in ruling yourself.”
Both porn and video games offer temporary dominion over an imaginary world—but can leave men feeling powerless in real life. The deeper crisis is not just one of behavior—but of meaning, identity, and spiritual grounding.
Our brain cannot help but compare the low-effort, quick hits of dopamine from video games and porn to the high-effort, slow-release dopamine of real rewards in real life. When men experience this dissonance, we can begin to feel hopeless, impatient, and angry.
Do Porn and Gaming Feed Each Other? A Two-Way Street
While gaming often primes the brain for porn use, the inverse can also be true.
After watching porn, many men experience a dopamine crash—a drop in motivation, energy, and emotional resilience. In this depleted state, we may reach for video games to maintain stimulation without effort.
In this way, the two behaviors can create a feedback loop:
Porn use creates emotional exhaustion → seek relief through gaming
Gaming delays sleep, reduces inhibition, and increases screen exposure → triggers porn urges
Moreover, gaming platforms like Discord, Reddit, or Twitch often expose users to softcore or triggering content. Combine this with sleep deprivation and isolation, and you’ve got a perfect storm for relapse.
While not every gamer watches porn, and not every porn user plays video games, the overlap is significant—especially among men using both as emotional coping mechanisms.
How to Break the Loop: Recovery-Oriented Strategies
Now that we’ve uncovered the core issues behind gaming and porn, let’s talk about solutions.
Healing requires more than willpower. It requires rewiring your life around real connection, real embodiment, and real meaning.
Here’s are some simple recovery practices that rewire your brain:
1. Get radically honest
Ask: What emotional purpose does gaming serve for you? Is it connection, escape, distraction, control?
For me, it was all of the above. Video games were a place to relieve my loneliness and feel some power and predictability in my life. They were also a place I could feel accomplished.
2. Track the overlap
Keep a journal. Are you more vulnerable to porn cravings after a gaming session? Do both behaviors follow similar emotional triggers?
I was completely unaware of this pattern in my own life until I stepped back and started asking myself the hard questions.
3. Practice strategic replacement
Swap compulsive gaming and porn time with:
Cold exposure or nature walks (dopamine reset)
Real-world challenges (exercise, creative work, passion projects, sports)
Authentic connection (accountability partners, family, friends, community)
4. Reclaim your nervous system
Use breathwork, somatic practices, and body awareness to come into the body—where real pleasure and presence live.
If you spend hours on screens everyday, you’ve likely come out of touch with your body. That’s an incredibly numb and distressing place to be. And the worst part is, you have no idea what you’re missing. You’re just used to feeling that way.
The full range of emotions you can experience when you reconnect with your body—when you actually feel emotion in your body, rather than just experience a residue of it in your brain—is one of the things that makes life worth living.
I myself was incredibly disconnected from my body for my entire life, and practices of emotional awareness and embodiment have been assisting me in getting reconnected. I’m still learning more about the depth of these practices.
5. Meet your inner protectors with compassion
When viewed through an IFS or Parts Work lens, we understand that protective parts of the mind can use porn and video games as methods of escape.
It may sound strange if you’ve never heard of Parts Work, but you can actually begin dialoguing with the part of you that wants to game or watch porn. You can ask it:
What is it protecting?
What does it fear?
What are its needs, and can you lead it, instead of being led by it?
Again, this can be an out-of-the-box way to view the mind, but the unconscious mind is extremely powerful and speaking to it in these ways—while being still and writing out the impressions you receive—can be life-changing for people. It has been for me.
6. Choose noble pleasures over base pleasures
You don’t need to eliminate all enjoyment. But start asking:
Does this connect me to truth and goodness?
Or does it disconnect me from my body, purpose, and relationships?
What “noble pleasures” might I start doing instead of these “base pleasures”? What would serve me better?
Who Are You Becoming?
Here’s a challenge: What would happen if you took 30 days off from both porn and gaming—not as punishment, but as a spiritual and neurological experiment?
What new talents might emerge?
What discomfort might finally be felt—and healed?
What renewed meaning, intimacy, or motivation might you experience?
You are not your urges. You are not your screens. You are strong and capable, and you can become the man that your loved ones need.
📩 I'd love to hear from you
Have you noticed a link between gaming and your porn use? Have you tried stepping away from both—and what happened?
Send me a message at jake@nomoredesire.com or join my newsletter to get support. You’re not alone in this battle—and you don’t have to fight it without brothers beside you.
God bless and much love.
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Full Transcription of Episode 98: Porn and Pixels | The Hidden Link Between Video Games and Porn Addiction
Jake Kastleman (00:26.156)
Why would porn addiction and video games be connected? How does one feed the other and how is your time on video games keeping you from quitting porn? There's an inconvenient truth that we all need to hear. In today's episode, I'm going to challenge beliefs and talk about some things that are difficult to take in. And this is not just me on my soapbox, but information backed up by neuroscience and research that could change your life.
At first glance, porn and video games may seem unrelated. And research, and this is not just me getting on my soapbox, but information backed up by neuroscience and research that could change your life. At first glance, porn and video games may seem unrelated. One is sexual, the other recreational. But beneath the surface, both stimulate the same circuits in the brain. Challenging video games,
Challenging video games is a hard message. I get it. Especially when they are so dang enjoyable. They're a thrilling pastime and I know for many of my clients they've acted as one of their sources of social time and fun with family and friends. I used to play video games every day, but I quit 14 years ago when I saw a clear correlation between video game use and my porn addiction. At the time, I didn't understand why playing video games made me more susceptible to desiring porn and now
I do. In this episode, we'll explore the neuroscience and psychology of how gaming and porn are connected. We'll uncover how video games can quietly pave the way for porn addiction and how quitting porn may be only half the battle if gaming remains. Again, it's a difficult and controversial message. I ask you to open your mind and be willing to listen to the inconvenient truth because it's one...
that could make your porn addiction recovery.
Jake Kastleman (02:38.978)
I ask you to open your mind and be willing to listen to the inconvenient truth because it's one that could make your porn addiction recovery much smoother, not to mention it could transform your relationships and empower you to be the man your family needs. If you'd like more episodes on porn addiction recovery and ways to improve your relationships, your psychology, your happiness, your peace, subscribe and hit that notification button and be sure to shoot me a rating so others can find this show. With that,
Let's dive in.
Jake Kastleman (03:35.64)
Both porn and video games activate the mesolimbic dopamine system, the part of the brain responsible for motivation, focus, human connection, craving, and reward. And when you watch porn or you play a video game, your brain lights up with a surge of dopamine, and that dopamine tells your system, this is important, do more of this. Over time, the brain adapts to this stimulation by down-regulating dopamine.
receptors and that means you feel less joy from everyday pleasures in comparison. You need more intense stimulation to feel good. You start chasing high reward low effort behaviors and as Dr. Anna Lemke explains in Dopamine Nation, fantastic book, incredible expert, repeated exposure to high dopamine stimuli like porn or video games leads to a kind of neurological numbing.
The result is an ongoing craving for stronger, faster, and more artificial forms of gratification. And I remember exactly how this felt for me when I was going through my years that I played video games. I loved them. I enjoyed them. They were fun. They were something that I did to de-stress and to get some recreational time. But eventually, I started to understand as I began to quit them and wean off of them.
much they were impacting my psychology and my ability to show up in life the way I wanted to and to be able to pursue the ambitions that I that I had. So there's a phenomenon that's known as addiction hopping or cross-sensitization when one compulsive behavior primes your brain for another. Many men who try to quit porn without addressing their gaming habits unknowingly keep their brains
in the same addictive loop.
Jake Kastleman (05:35.778)
So that looks like gaming late into the night, which leads to emotional fatigue, which leads to lower inhibition, which leads to porn relapse. So then there's a porn relapse and that leads to a dopamine crash, that leads to boredom or guilt, and that leads to escaping into video games. In both cases of these kinds of cycles that we go through with both porn and video games, their emotional function is the same. We're trying to avoid discomfort. We're trying to numb difficult feelings and feel a sense of stimulation or
control. And if you caught my last episode on emotional mindfulness and embodiment, I talk a lot about how crucial and important it is for us to gain an emotional awareness and a presence with our emotions and be willing to to experience discomfort and to lean into and immerse ourselves in difficult feelings. As strange as it sounds, so many of us are taught the opposite of this. We're taught to run from difficult feelings.
And we're taught that they're actually bad, that things are like fear, shame, grief, anger are bad emotions and we shouldn't experience them. That couldn't be further from the truth. Fear, shame, grief, anger. These are all messengers for us. They all carry a message with them that's important for us to hear. And when we start understanding that, we can start moving out of escape mechanisms, whatever it might be, food, porn, video games,
gosh, shopping, we can be addicted to love, right? Relationships that are thrilling, we're hopping from one relation to the next. Whatever it might be, we can start to move out of these escape mechanisms and move into a full-fledged healthy, happy life. This becomes, for people, this becomes even more pronounced when porn and gaming are consumed in back-to-back cycles, okay? This numbing effect and this...
continuous cycle of emotional fatigue and lower inhibition, dopamine crashes. So if we're both doing porn and gaming back to back, there's further training of the brain to associate screen-based reward with our comfort and relief. So instead of regulating emotion within, we are reaching out to outside sources to regulate our emotions. And that's, again, often it's carried from childhood. It's what we learned to do from a young, young age.
Jake Kastleman (08:00.866)
because we weren't taught how to regulate emotions properly. So now at an older age, we need to teach ourselves how to do that. So video games and porn both provide us a simulation of mastery and intimacy. That's the other thing. We feel in video games that we're becoming a master of something, we're gaining skills and abilities in something.
And also intimacy, right? If we're online gaming, connecting with friends, which some of that can be legitimate for sure. But with porn, there's this sense of mastery in that, wow, I'm meeting all these hot women and I'm spending all this time with them and I'm so close with them and in the way sexually, right? So we feel like we're actually going somewhere in life. It tricks our brain into thinking that.
And it tricks our brain into thinking that we're feeling connection and intimacy, but there's no real world effort or risk. And there's no real world gratification and meaning and purpose. And it's one of the reasons that these things can be so enthralling and psychologically problematic at the same time. Because it convinces our brain we're experiencing something real in the real world. Because our brain, unconsciously, can't tell the difference between the virtual world versus the real one. Our brain, at a base level,
is interpreting those things very much the same, if not identically. And in psychological terms, these behaviors, of believing that we're experiencing mastery and intimacy through these things that are not in the real world, these behaviors reinforce immediate gratification. So this habit of there's no waiting, there's no uncertainty, there's just reward, unlike real relationships or real life.
where rewards just don't come easily. So we get caught up in this immediate gratification that becomes our norm. That's very problematic. It's terrifying. It can lead to massive problems with being able to grow and expand and become resilient and become the man that you want to be. All the men that I work with want to be these great men, these great leaders, these good fathers and dedicated husbands. But when we're trained into immediate gratification through things like video games or TV or
Jake Kastleman (10:15.95)
social media scrolling, it makes it impossible to become that man that we want to be. There's also avoidance behavior. So games and porn become ways, as I was saying before, to escape from boredom, from anxiety, from loneliness or self-doubt. They're highly stimulating and so they're both a great numbing agent for difficult feelings. And when you numb difficult feelings, which are meant to help you grow and to mature,
you remain stagnant. It's a very, very difficult, it's an incredibly difficult cycle to be caught in and it's devastating for people. I remember being caught in that for many years, many years of which I had no idea that was happening and then other years where I knew that was happening but I couldn't come out. So dissociation is the other things. We have immediate gratification, have avoidance behavior and then dissociation. So both behaviors of gaming and porn.
They often pull us out of our bodies and into an overstimulating mindless kind of trance. That's how screens work, right? That's how the virtual world works. It's one of the reasons it's so intoxicating. And I use the word intoxicating purposely because it is like a drug. It functions the same in the brain neurologically. So this is very negative for the brain. Human beings are meant to integrate, experience, connect.
And when we live so consistently in a virtual world, becoming a head attached to a body, right? Our body's just carrying our head, that's it. We're not even experiencing anything in our body. Rather than being a whole human being, we begin to feel empty inside. And our culture and our society are training us into this without us knowing. So according to acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, addictive behaviors often stem from experiential avoidance, avoidance of experiences and unwillingness
to feel pain or discomfort. So instead of facing difficult emotions, we choose momentary relief and we get in this habit, right? And that this neurons that fire together, wire together, right? So the more we do that, the more habit we build of it, the more ingrained it gets in our brain. And then we need to start building new habits to replace those old habits. But that's challenging, especially in the beginning. And then eventually it becomes our new way of life. So gaming and porn offer the illusion of
Jake Kastleman (12:39.086)
the illusion of success and connection, but none of the nourishing substance of these things, they're like fast food for the soul, they're nutritionless. And so, when that's our norm, we get used to feeling empty inside. And again, this isn't easy to hear, but it's an important message we need to hear, as both porn and video games use are so pervasive and so destructive when we come to understand the brain science of them.
And that has a great deal to do with dopamine, right? So, which is an extremely important neurochemical in the brain for motivation, for purpose, for focus, for relationships and actually feeling connected to people. So if we, from a philosophical perspective, we go back to the ancient Stoics. Many of us are fond of them, I think. I think there's a very positive connotation. And those who know Marcus Aurelius or Seneca or Epictetus,
Amazing men, powerful men, very loving, good, kind men that lived with great purpose. They taught that freedom comes from not pleasure, like is so continuously just drilled into us by modern Western culture today. It comes not from pleasure, but from self mastery. As Marcus Rilius wrote, you have power over your mind, not outside events. Real strength lies in ruling yourself.
So both porn and video games offer temporary dominion over an imaginary world. Temporary dominion over an imaginary world. But they can leave men feeling powerless in real life. That's a scary position to be in. The deeper crisis is not just one of behavior, but of meaning, of identity, of spiritual grounding. Our brain cannot help but compare the low effort, quick hits of dopamine
from video games and porn to the high effort, slow release dopamine of real rewards in real life. It's much harder to get dopamine in real life and you can't get the high heavy spikes of dopamine you do with things like video games or porn in real life. You just can't. Those would be very rare circumstances that you'd get hit with that much dopamine and it would have required a great deal of effort and sacrifice on your part to actually feel
Jake Kastleman (15:03.99)
something that good. But with real world types of experience, there's context, there's meaning, there's purpose. There's actually a fulfillment we gain. And it's not so much the dopamine spike, that massive pleasure we're getting, but it's a more fulfilling feeling that is more well-rounded. So we don't need all the dopamine because we feel fulfilled as a whole person. So when men experience this dissonance,
we can begin to feel hopeless and patient, angry. like, what's wrong with me? Why can I not gain satisfaction from a normal life? It just doesn't feel good to me. I don't feel motivated. So while gaming often primes the brain for porn use, the inverse can also be true. So after watching porn, many men experience a dopamine crash, right? It kind of as we were talking about before, a drop in motivation, a drop in energy, a drop in emotional resilience, dopamine plays a role in all of these, not just pleasure, but it...
role in motivation, energy, and emotional resilience. And in this depleted state, we may reach for video games to maintain stimulation without effort, right? Our brain is starving. It's at this depleted state and it's like, give me more dopamine. That's a hard position to be in, man. I remember feeling that all the time. It was my normal state of life and I hated that. In fact, it was so normal, I didn't even know to hate it because it's just the way I felt all the time.
It was chronic. And that's what's happening to so many people now with the number of virtual addictions we have and other addictions we have that all play into each other and that feed pornography addiction and the craving for porn. So in this way, the two behaviors can create a feedback loop. Porn use creates emotional exhaustion. So then we seek relief through gaming. Gaming delays sleep. It reduces inhibition. It increases screen exposure. It's...
It's spiking our dopamine and our dopamine is dropping, right? And so then that triggers porn use. Moreover, gaming platforms like Discord, Reddit or Twitch often expose users to soft core triggering content. So combine this with the sleep deprivation, the isolation, you've got a perfect storm for relapse, right? So while not every gamer watches porn and not every porn user plays video games, the overlap is significant, especially among men using both.
Jake Kastleman (17:29.006)
than using both of these as emotional coping mechanisms. So I want to talk a bit about, now that I've kind of like just dropped all this on top of you like a massive weight, I want to talk about how to break the loop to talk about some recovery oriented strategies. Now that we've covered the core issues behind gaming and porn,
Some of these solutions, healing requires more than willpower here guys. Okay, so don't just think you can just stop playing video games or stop watching porn and that's gonna fix your issue. It's never gonna work. You can't approach it that way. And I've talked about that on many episodes and many places in the blog. It's a constant message of mine. It requires rewiring your life around real connection, real embodiment, emotional awareness, real meaning, real activities that actually fulfill you, real.
relationships. And here's how you can begin. First, you got to start by getting radically honest. What emotional purpose does gaming serve for you? You may be listening to this episode with some degree of resistance, like I don't want to hear these things. They're not true. Jake's wrong because of this or that. There may be all sorts of excuses that come up in your mind. We could talk about the psychological kind of processes behind that, right? It's very human. It's very normal.
But if you look at this and you feel that sense of resistance, it may be a really good sign for you that you have a video game challenge, challenges with video game addiction or craving, and that those are actually harming you in your life. And that resistance is a clear sign of something to pay attention to. When you resist something, pay attention to it. Turn your focus directly toward the source of that resistance and what's behind it. Because there's always going to be fear or shame or grief.
There's going to be some anger, there's going to be resentment, there's going to be some reason, some belief you have inside, a knowledge of, man, I need to be better in this way, right? So often that's going on. So what emotional purpose does gaming serve for you? Is it connection? Is it helping you feel connected? Is it helping you escape? Is it giving you a distraction? Is it giving you a sense of control? For me, it was doing all of those things. Video games were a place to relieve my loneliness.
Jake Kastleman (19:47.214)
They were a place to feel some power and some predictability in my life. And they were also a place that I could feel accomplished. It gave me all those things. And as long as I was getting them from something like video games that were so highly rewarding, I wouldn't go out and pursue those things in real life because it came much harder for me in real life. So the second thing is to track the overlap. So you want to keep a journal. Are you more vulnerable to porn cravings after you game?
And you want to really track that over about a three day period. That's not always an instant thing. So think of this more holistically and how this is impacting your dopamine levels and other things neurologically for you over the next few days. And the effects last far, far longer term than that, but those first few days are especially telling. So do both behaviors follow similar emotional triggers? Both porn cravings and gaming, right?
both behaviors follow similar emotional triggers. I was completely unaware of this pattern in my own life until I stepped back and I started asking myself these hard questions that everybody needs to. So number three is to practice strategic replacement. Swap compulsive gaming and porn time with things like cold exposure or nature walks. Cold exposure would be like a cold shower or like an ice bath if you have that available. So that's going to be a dopamine reset.
Right, so it's going to give you more focus, more motivation, you feel more connected with people, you feel more pleasure in your life, you feel more purpose. It's a dopamine reset, so get out in nature, get cold exposure. Real world challenges, this is so important, you can get dopamine from real world things and reasonable amounts of dopamine and this actually helps rebuild, they call these noble pleasures, things like exercise, creative work, passion projects, sports.
Etc. Right service to other people having a kind loving conversation with someone these things are noble pleasures that actually rebuild Your dopamine-ergic system they help it heal and repair So we need to start replacing the base pleasures these things that are low effort instant gratification high intensity kinds of activities like TV or junk food or video games or porn Okay, we want to replace those with these noble pleasures and then authentic connection and I kind of already said this but
Jake Kastleman (22:12.45)
Things like accountability partners, family, friends, community, getting those connections in your life is one of the biggest things that we're starving for in today's society. And when we struggle with things like pornography addiction, it's one of the things that we need the most. Number four is to reclaim your nervous system. You can use breath work. I love the Wim Hof technique. I highly recommend it. It's very powerful. You can use somatic practices. You can use body awareness to come into the body.
where real pleasure and presence live, right, inside of the body. Okay, so bringing your awareness into the body when you experience emotion, bringing your awareness into the body, go do yoga, go exercise, right, and feel inside of your body. And this takes a lot of practice, this does not come quickly. If you spend hours on screens every day, you've likely come out of touch with your body, and that's an incredibly numb and distressing place to be. And the worst part is you have no idea what you're missing.
You're just used to feeling that way. And the full range of emotions you can experience when you reconnect with your body. And I know some of this sounds like a little, I don't know what to call it exactly, but it can sound like a little feminine maybe. This is so important. And the feminine is obviously important too. Both men and women carry masculine and feminine traits and powers, energy, right? Just men, obviously, tend to have far more masculine energy.
So when you actually feel emotion in your body rather than just experience a residue of it in your brain, it's one of the things that makes life worth living. I myself was incredibly disconnected from my body for my entire life. And practices of emotional awareness and embodiment have been assisting me in getting reconnected. And I'm still learning more about that, the depth of these practices in my daily life. I'm consistently practicing this myself and getting better at it.
The fifth thing is you want to meet your inner protectors with compassion. So when viewed through an IFS or a parts work lens, that's what I'm talking about from that lens here. So we understand that protective parts of the mind can use porn and video games as methods of escape. These would be firefighter parts, parts that are trying to spray out our emotions, essentially hose them out with an escape, whether that be a substance or a behavior.
Jake Kastleman (24:36.694)
So it may sound strange if you've never heard of parts work, but you can actually begin dialoguing with the part of you. Again, I know it sounds odd, but you can begin dialoguing with the part of you that wants to game or watch porn and you can ask it, what is it protecting? What are you protecting? You can ask that part. What do you fear? What are your needs and can I lead you instead of being led by you?
You can have these conversations internally, this internal dialogue with these parts of your mind. It's very powerful and it's incredibly strange. But once you start experiencing it and you actually have these inner dialogues, you're like, wow, I am learning so much about myself. I had no idea I could approach myself like a schizophrenic or like someone with multiple personality disorder. But it really is amazing how our mind is divvied up into these different identities. start practicing that. Ask, what are you protecting me from?
Right? This part of you that's pointing to gaming or watching porn. What do you fear? What do you fear would happen if you stopped using gaming or porn? You can ask that part of your mind that in meditation, in prayer, right? In introspection, going inside, writing about it. It's very powerful. So again, this can be an out of the box way to view the mind, but the unconscious mind is extremely powerful and speaking to it in these ways while being still writing out the impressions that you receive can be life changing for people. It has been for me.
Number six is to, and I've already mentioned this, but choose noble pleasures over base pleasures. You don't need to eliminate all enjoyment in life, but you want to start asking, does this activity, whatever it might be, and I've mentioned multiple, does this connect me to truth and goodness? Do video games connect me to truth and goodness? Does porn connect me to truth and goodness? You might be like, no, of course it doesn't, right? Or does it disconnect me from my body, my purpose, my relationships?
So you want to ask this with things other than just video games and porn. Ask this consistently in your life and start to make some other choices. What noble pleasures might you start doing instead of these base pleasures? What would serve you better? So here's a challenge for you. What would happen if you took 30 days off from both porn and gaming? Not as a punishment, but as a spiritual and neurological experiment. What new talents might emerge? What discomfort might finally be felt and healed?
Jake Kastleman (27:02.582)
What renewed meaning, intimacy, or motivation might you experience? Okay, that's a big ask. 30 days. But if you can focus on that, you can start building in these noble pleasures, building in connection with other people, building in some of these exercises, these things to repair your dopamine-urgic system. You can start to make this progress. Aim for the 30 days. If you don't do perfect at it, that's okay. But set your goal. If you fail along the way, get back up and get started again.
See what happens. Okay, you're not your urges. You're not your screens. You are strong. You are capable and I and you can become the man that your loved ones need. So have you noticed a link between gaming and your porn use? I want to I want to hear from you. You can send me a message jake no more desire calm. Have you noticed a link between gaming and porn use? Have you tried stepping away from both what happened?
I would love to hear from you and your experience with this. Send me a message or join my newsletter to get support. You're not alone in this battle, my friend, and you don't have to fight it without brothers beside you. So shoot me those messages. Let me know how this 30-day challenge goes for you and what you experience. God bless and much love, my friend.