5 Ways Pornography Will Ruin Your Life
November 21, 2017
Noting that viewing porn results in “a wide range of devastating consequences for you and others, including those closest to you,” they have listed five ways pornography usage will ruin one’s life, unless he pursues a “battle plan to conquer sexual addiction.” They are:
Truth #1: Pornography damages your brain
When viewed in a brain scan, a porn addict’s brain looks similar to a heroin addict’s. This is because of two key factors.
First, the brain is always changing in response to one’s thoughts, actions, and experiences, and by repeating them, it strengthens the related neural pathways. In other words, the more you use porn, the stronger its grip on you becomes.
Dr. Jes Montgomery, a psychiatrist and addictionologist, states in the Conquer Series:
“The brain will do the thing with which it is most familiar. Addiction provides a powerful pathway from ‘I don’t feel good’ to ‘I feel magically wonderful.’”
Second, watching pornography bypasses and weakens the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and decision making, by sending jolts of dopamine directly into the limbic system, which experiences pleasure and is more prone to impulsive action. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to experience normal pleasure.
Truth #2: Pornography will thin out your wallet
Men who are addicted to porn have been known to stay up late at night watching it, which results in their coming to work on just a few hours’ sleep. This alone has an adverse effect on work performance, but there are many who can’t even get through a workday without a “fix.”
In a 2013 Forbes article, Cheryl Conner noted that 25 percent of working adults admit to looking at pornography on a computer at work. A 2010 Nielsen study put that percentage at 28 percent. On average, it’s 13 minutes per visit, or roughly 1 hour, 38 minutes, per month. That’s more than 30 hours in on year.
For a business, multiply that by the 25 percent of employees, and it amounts to a tremendous loss of productivity and income opportunity. That’s why most employers make it a firing offense—and why almost half of all porn addicts get fired for that very reason, according to the Family Research Council.
Truth #3: Pornography will destroy your marriage
No woman can compete with endless images and videos of online porn, because men who view porn tend to have less desire for their own spouse. For many women, trust is eroded by a husband addicted to pornography—a wife, fiancée, or girlfriend who discovers a man’s porn viewing habits will have her trust broken.
A 2016 Science Magazine study revealed divorce rates double when people start watching porn. A groundbreaking article in Time adds:
Previous studies have found that porn has an accelerating effect on a deteriorating marriage: husbands in poor relationships tend to consume more sexually explicit material, and consuming more sexually explicit material also leads to poorer relationships.
If your marriage is on shaky ground already, viewing pornography will only speed its demise. Further, porn usage can lead to increased risk of infidelity, another major cause of divorce.
The Psychology of Popular Media Culture notes:
If pornography consumption leads to more positive extramarital sex attitudes as the results of the panels suggest, pornography consumption may be a contributing factor in some divorces via extramarital sex behavior.
Truth #4: Pornography can have Devastating Effects on your Children
A study by the Marriage and Religion Research Institute notes:
The impact of a parent’s use of pornography on young children is varied and disturbing. Pornography eliminates the warmth of affectionate family life, which is the natural social nutrient for a growing child.
Research presented in the academic journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity adds other losses and traumas related to the use of pornography when a child is young include:
- Stumbling upon pornographic material a parent has acquired
- Encountering a parent masturbating
- Overhearing a parent engaged in “phone sex”
- Witnessing and experiencing stress in the home caused by online sexual activities
- An increased risk of children becoming consumers of pornography themselves
- Witnessing and being involved in parental conflict
- Exposure to the commodification of human beings, especially women, as “sex objects”
- A greater risk of parental job loss and financial strain
- Higher risk of parental separation and divorce
- Decreased parental time and attention—both from the pornography-addicted parent and from the parent preoccupied with the addicted spouse
Pornography usage can ruin your life and the lives of your children.
Truth #5: Pornography Leads to other Sins
Pornography is a sin that leads to many other sins. Among these are lying, misuse of financial resources, and marital infidelity.
Those who “almost got caught” may have lied their way out of their situations, violated work rules, or hidden evidence of their pornographic activities. In the midst of an addition, a man will do things he might not have ever considered just to get another “fix” from his drug of choice.
• • •
Beyond these five truths is the reality that one’s relationship with God is severely damaged by viewing porn. He sees every mouse click, every touch of the screen, and every second spent viewing porn is a second of fellowship with the Lord that is lost forever. As one former porn addict put it:
“In my addiction, I frequently had days where I felt that I had spent more time seeking porn than serving Christ.”
Sadly, porn use in the church is so pervasive that it’s become virtually indistinguishable from the world on the issue. Josh McDowell of Josh McDowell Ministries wrote in a God News article that pornography is an epidemic in the church of which most people are unaware.
Basically there’s two types of men in the evangelical church—those that watch pornography and those that lie. At least 78.8 percent of men who attend evangelical churches are watching pornography. Probably 80 percent of all evangelical youth pastors also watch pornography, and now, the greatest increase is among women and young ladies.
Pastor James Reeves of City On A Hill Church in Dallas-Fort Worth has successfully tackled porn addiction in his church and has a more dire warning:
“This problem is going to sweep through the Church like a tsunami wave of destruction and we’re not prepared for it.”
The producers of the Conquer Series ask that you imagine the revival the Church would experience if the time and energy spent on porn were redirected to serving the Lord. They offer their six-DVD series as a way to freedom, and even for those who aren’t consumed with the addiction, it offers a means to prepare to win the battle for sexual purity.
The powerful cinematic series, hosted by former Marine Corps fighter pilot and pastor Dr. Ted Roberts, includes biblical principles and daily practices to help men overcome the temptation to consume porn.
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