106. 5 Realizations That Made Me Quit Watching Porn (Rebroadcast)

Starting at the young age of 10, porn became a habitual escape for me. Over time, I understood that it failed to provide lasting satisfaction, instead wiring my brain for lust. It gave me distorted views on sex and intimacy, drained my energy and focus, and led me to seek novelty over meaningful connections. These insights challenged me to align my habits with my personal growth and purpose. In this episode I share 5 powerful realizations that made me quit watching porn - for good!
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00:00 Introduction: Five Realizations About Porn

01:12 Personal Journey: Early Encounters with Porn

04:03 Realization 1: The Illusion of Lasting Satisfaction

08:01 Realization 2: Hardwiring Lust and Craving

10:40 Realization 3: Distorted Views of Sex and Intimacy

15:37 Realization 4: Energy and Focus Drain

19:41 Realization 5: The Addiction to Novelty

24:51 Conclusion: Reflecting on the Impact of Porn

25:58 Final Thoughts and Coaching Offer

ABOUT JEREMY LIPKOWITZ

Jeremy overcame addiction, shame, self-judgement, and depression in his early twenties with the help of mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness not only helped him let go of destructive behaviors, it also allowed him to connect with deeper meaning and purpose in his life.

For the past 10 years Jeremy has been teaching mindfulness and emotional intelligence practices at universities, recovery centers, and companies throughout Asia and the US. He holds a Bachelors and Master’s degree in Genetics and Genomics, and spent several years at Duke University working towards a PhD in Genetics & Systems Biology before he turned full-time to teaching mindfulness.

Jeremy is also an ICF certified Executive Coach. As a former scientist and academic, Jeremy has a great passion for bringing his EI based coaching skills into the corporate and professional world. He realizes how powerful & transformative these practices can be for skeptics and senior-level managers. He is known for his calm and grounded demeanor, his expertise in habits and high-performance, and his compassionate approach to transformation.

Transcript

  On today's episode, five realizations about porn that made me decide to give up watching it. So, let's get started. Stay tuned.


  So welcome ladies and gentlemen to another episode of the unhooked podcast. If you are interested in one on one coaching and getting support on healing from porn addiction, go to my website, JeremyLipkowitz.

com slash intro and you can sign up for a free discovery call to see if coaching is a good fit for you. You know, if you need that support on breaking free from porn or any kind of compulsive or unhealthy habit or behavior, that is what I do in this world. That's what I love to do. So definitely go and check out  to sign up for a free discovery call.



another beautiful day here in Bali. The skies are blue and the sun is shining and I couldn't think of a better day to talk about some realizations that I had in my own life in the past that really gave me a fundamental shift in my life that gave me the motivation I needed to finally stop watching porn and change my habits and behaviors.

And these, these fundamental motivations are important because it provides that fuel for your recovery. You know, it provides that incentive, the impetus, that motivation, the driving force behind breaking free from some of these habits that are no longer supporting the life that you want.  So today I'm going to be talking about five key realizations that I had in my own life related to porn and how I was spending my time and how it gave me the motivation to finally quit. 

So I was around 10 years old when I first remember starting to look at pornographic material. I remember in the early days obsessing over some of the sexy superheroes in the comic books that I was reading. And I remember also looking at the lingerie section of the catalogs that were coming in the mail. 

Eventually my home got dial up internet and I was able to start downloading. pornographic photos and videos from the internet. And by the time I got to college, when internet was more accessible, I had more privacy, I was watching hardcore internet porn on tube sites practically every night. Sometimes for an hour, occasionally for a couple hours. 

Every once in a while, you know, I would have a rough weekend, maybe wake up hungover, and there might be a session where I was looking at porn for more than a few hours.  And so, in many ways in my life, porn was my secret escape. It was my nightly routine. It was my medicine.  It was my way to soothe my insecurities and my, uh, my depression and all the negativity that I was feeling.

Porn was what gave me an escape from that. It made me feel like I was in control, made me feel powerful and alive, uh, and it was very compulsive for me and automatic. It was just what I did each night before bed.  And when something like that has been a part of your daily life and your daily routine from the time that you're 10 years old, you don't always see how it changes you over time. 

It's a lot like gaining weight slowly over many years. So each day you might just be gaining a little bit of weight, you know, imperceptibly. You can't see it from day to day, the change. But after a few years or after a decade, there's a massive difference from your starting point to the end point.  So much so that sometimes you can barely recognize who you are anymore. 

Now, in my life, at some point I could no longer ignore what was happening and how far off center my life had become because of porn.  The hints and the realizations and the consequences of my porn habit started to pile up and I started to see more and more clues that my porn habit was causing a lot of the problems in my life. 

So today on the episode I want to talk about a few of the key realizations that I had that made me decide to ultimately give up watching porn for good. So what were the things that I noticed, that I saw, that I realized about my life and about porn that made me give it up?  So, starting off  The first one is the realization I had that no amount of porn would ever provide me with lasting satisfaction or happiness.

Now, don't get me wrong, porn is exciting. Porn is pleasurable, it's captivating, it feels good. You know, it hits directly on those dopamine and adrenaline buttons in your brain.  There's always something new and exciting to watch, a new actress, a new genre, a new, you know, just something to explore and discover.

It's like that Easter egg hunt. And it makes you forget about your real life problems. You know, it is a good escape mechanism in the sense of it actually does help you escape your real life problems. But we know that escape, isn't actually a long term viable option for many of our problems. You can't escape paying your taxes.

You can't escape doing your coursework or your, you know, career. You can't escape your relationship problems. So the question is not whether or not porn feels  The question is, is it giving you what you truly want?  And if you're like most men, and if you're like me, the chances are what you really want deep down is to feel connected to your purpose, to be grounded at your core, and to love others and feel loved by those around you. 

So many of us want to feel that sense of deep inner fulfillment. Or a sense of meaning and purpose in our life, where we're helping others, growing as a person each day.  And the truth is, porn doesn't give you any of that. It doesn't give you meaning, or purpose, or growth.  It might give you a momentary satisfaction, or a momentary escape,  but even that doesn't last.

And in fact, it ruins your ability to find satisfaction in other things because of the way that it affects your dopamine system, kind of fries your brain.  So, the truth is, and this is one of the things I realized, is that pleasure on its own can't provide lasting satisfaction. Any kind of pleasure, whether it's porn, or chocolate, or, you know, Netflix, none of these things can provide lasting satisfaction. 

Instead  Pleasure, it's like the cherry on top of an already fulfilling and meaningful life. This strategy of just trying to have more pleasure and string together more moments of pleasure, it just doesn't work. I've tried it many times in my past, so have countless others, and chances are you've tried it as well.

Relying on sugar and porn and video games and social media, they all feel good in the moment, but their fleeting sends pleasures. They don't provide that lasting sense of inner fulfillment.  We know that hedonism as a strategy doesn't work. You know, how many depressed celebrities do we need to hear stories of to see that more pleasure doesn't bring more happiness? 

So at some point in my life I started shifting my focus from wanting just temporary satisfaction  to wanting long term happiness and fulfillment. I started noticing that Oh, okay, this just temporary pleasure again and again and again. It just feels empty. There's no meaning behind it. There's no richness to it. 

And that what I really wanted was that sense of inner fulfillment, was connection and  connecting to my purpose.  So I came to see that all the porn I was watching would never be enough. I could watch all the porn in the world and it would never actually make a dent on the things that were important to me.

So that's the first realization I had. The second one was that watching porn was actually hardwiring lust and craving into my mind.  So there was a moment in my life where I realized that Lust itself was causing me suffering.  Not necessarily even causing me suffering, lust itself was suffering.  And I'm not talking about desire or attraction, which can actually be rich and beautiful and fulfilling experiences.

I'm talking about craving. or thirst for sexual experience. It's that particular flavor or type of desire that is needy and clingy and desperate. You know, it's that silent or quiet voice in your mind that secretly whispers to you, Ah, you know, you must have this. And if you don't get it, you can't be happy.

You know, that is what craving or lust or thirst is. It's that feeling that you need to have that thing, and if you don't get it, you'll never be happy. Understanding that lust itself is a state of suffering.  And this is one of the key realizations I had when I discovered the concept of neuroplasticity, and I started seeing that I was actually strengthening my lust and craving every time I looked at porn. 

And I remember reading this quote that said this, it said, Neurons that fire together, wire together.  And it made it clear to me that every time I was logging on and watching porn,  I was strengthening the neural pathways of lust in my mind. I was deepening  my addiction to sexual imagery and sense pleasure.

That I was actually creating my own suffering. I was laying the bricks of the prison that I had found myself in.  So after a while, You know, a decade of watching porn had caused my brain to be a lust machine.  Almost everywhere I turned, whenever I saw someone that slightly, you know, attracted me physically, I would think lustful sexual thoughts.

I would objectify that person. And I would start thinking, I need to have that person. I need to talk to them. I need to,  you know, get with them.  And the pathways of lust in my mind were like superhighways. It felt like I couldn't turn them off.  And when I started realizing that I actually wanted to feel different mental states, like contentment, and inner peace, and friendship, and compassion, I knew that porn was molding my brain in the wrong direction, and that I needed to stop. 

So that's the second, uh, key realization I had that made me decide to give up porn.  The third realization is that porn was actually giving me a very distorted view of sex and intimacy and also a distorted view of women's bodies.  So most men, and myself included, is included in this, start watching porn from a very young age.

You know, eight, nine, ten years old. Some before that, some after that, but you know, it's very young when we start engaging with pornographic material.  And it's long before most of us start becoming sexually active with partners.  And because most men start so young, porn is an incredibly powerful influence on men's views, on sex, and intimacy. 

So, for better or for worse, porn is one of the primary forms of sex education for young boys and for young girls as well. You know, girls watch these things, too, and learn about what is expected of, of them and, you know, what they expect in the bedroom through porn.  But, the thing that no one tells you when you're first getting into porn is that it's a fantasy.

Now, of course, it's a fantasy, but you don't  You don't, you don't stop and think about that when you're a young kid watching it. So porn, it's not real sex, and it's definitely not real intimacy.  Porn is largely created by men, for men, and for the sheer dopamine hit that it releases. It is not created to give you a sense of how to act as a good sexual partner, or how to treat a woman with respect, or even how to make a woman orgasm. 

You know, in porn, we get taught that women are always ready and willing for sex, that women always like it harder and faster and rougher, and that there's no such thing as conscious communication before or during sex.  Now just think, have you ever watched a porn video where the woman actually turns down sex?

And the man respects that wish.  Of course you haven't, right? Because if that happened, it wouldn't actually be porn. It would just be a man saying, Hey, do you want to have sex? And the woman saying, No, thanks. And then they walk and go in separate ways. Instead, every time a man wants sex, the woman is ready and willing.

So just think about how that is distorting.  People's views of sex, if that is all they're watching every night for 10 years before they have a sexual experience.  Now, even if you're watching homemade porn, you're still getting that highly distorted view of sex because no one is posting the bloopers or anything about the messiness of real human connection. 

Now, even with homemade porn, As a user, you're still searching for whatever particular niche, or genre, or,  uh, you know, sexual act that you're interested in. So you're getting that distorted perspective.  Even more disturbing, you know, a recent survey of the top films on the homepage of places like Pornhub, uh, you know, most common porn sites, they found something like 90 percent of the top videos were violent, or abusive, or degrading towards women. 

So there's really no way around it that porn is a poor representation of sex and intimacy.  In addition to the distorted  view of sex, porn was giving me a very unrealistic expectation of women's bodies.  And it does it for many other people who watch it on a regular basis. Because instead of seeing real women with a little bit of belly fat, or cellulite, or body hair, you become accustomed to perfect porn star bodies.

With makeup, and implants, and photoshop. And you're also, again, because you're searching for specifically what you want, you are hardwiring your brain to only get aroused with that very specific niche that you're looking, looking for.  You know, one of the clients I work with was telling me that he can really only get aroused and only, uh, gets, you know, hard for blonde women with big boobs.

And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, if that's just what you're interested in, but just to notice how much we hardwire that and force our brain into that kind of constricted view of, okay, what are we interested in?  So this was a big realization for me, as I was seeing how perfectionistic I was becoming with my partners. 

How I was sabotaging my own happiness because of my need for this type of body or that type of body.  So porn was really giving me false expectations of sex, and intimacy, and women's bodies, and this was just another reason that I started to realize I needed to quit.  Now the fourth reason, the fourth insight I had was that porn was depleting my energy and my ability to focus. 

So this is another problem with Porn that doesn't necessarily get as much attention as some of the other consequences of porn addiction and that it's simply that it's an energy and time drain.  So even if there were no negative consequences or long term problems of porn, which there are, it would still be a huge time suck, a huge distraction, pulling your time and energy and resources away from more important aspects of your life. 

Now, a side note, I don't want to get this into, you know,  therefore it's a sin, or therefore it's wrong, because it's, you know, a time suck. Like, there are plenty of things that you do that just take away time, but you do it because they're, they're joyful. You know, like, you might just, uh, go walk and enjoy the sunset, or play a sport.

But most of these other things at least also have some other benefits, and don't have so many, you know, negative side effects or consequences. But the thing is, is that porn is particularly, uh, powerful in the way that it can suck away time and energy from you.  So the first one, time. You know, when I was in college, porn was my favorite way to procrastinate.

It ate up most of my free time, as well as time that wasn't free, when I should have been studying, or working, or going to the gym. And again, this is the problem, is when it becomes compulsive, when it becomes this habitual compulsive thing that you're, Not in control of that is when it starts to have those negative consequences because it's eating away time that you don't even have  I personally sometimes imagine what I could have done with all the time that I spent on porn You know if I had spent that time and energy I could have learned new languages, grown businesses, you know, mastered different sports or different crafts, the possibilities of what I could have done are endless. 

And instead, I spent my time, you know, hunting for new images of naked women on screens. That's how I spent  so much of my free time when I was younger, and it's, it's just depressing to know that it was wasted in that way.  Now, even when it's not time that's being wasted, it is also a drain on your emotional resources.

So we know that, you know, excessive ejaculation and masturbation actually depletes you.  That it lowers your testosterone, uh, you know, you feel more exhausted and drained. Emotionally you feel kind of irritable.  Your brain feels fried and your confidence can actually be drained. So your motivation to get out into the world, to be, uh, you know, standing in integrity and confidence is also depleted. 

You know, for me, I found in many ways it was just lowering my mental and emotional resilience, and it made me less likely to be emotionally available for friends and people I cared about.  So particularly if you are single and using porn, and one of your aspirations is to find a partner, particularly a long term partner, someone you want to grow with, but even if you just want to date casually, porn is stealing your energy away from that.

You lose your motivation to get out there and talk to women. You lose your confidence. You lose your ability to get out of your comfort zone.  Because porn just doesn't work.  So if you care about using your time and energy in ways that support your growth, using porn on a daily basis just doesn't make sense. 

And that is the fourth realization I had that made me decide to give it up.  Now the fifth and final realization, and in fact, you know, I was thinking about making this list, and there's actually ten or twenty realizations I had, but these are some of the top five. And the fifth one is that porn was making me look for novelty in my relationships rather than looking for the depth of intimacy. 

So one of the interesting things about modern day porn is that it's very different from the porn of the past. So the point of the past, you know, it would be a magazine or a VHS tape that you had to put into a VHS player. And you would have one actress that you were looking at, or maybe a couple of actresses at your fingertips. 

But modern day porn exists on these tube sites, which emphasize variety and accessibility and volume. There are, you know, some statistics I heard, like something like a third of all. internet sites are porn. Something like that. Um, there's also other statistics like 70 percent of all internet downloads are porn.

It's just, there's a crazy amount of porn on the internet now.  And in case you haven't seen porn recently, I'll just describe it for you. So just imagine YouTube  and in, you know, instead of cat videos and homemade bloopers and tech reviews, imagine that you go to YouTube and there's just an infinite variety of videos.

pornographic material that you can search based off of keywords. And so you can find anything, any scenario, any combination, any body type that you want. If you can imagine it, you can find it.  Now, most men, and I was one of them, treat porn like, uh, treat a porn viewing session like a hunt, you know, searching for  specific keywords and genres, and you're scrolling through hundreds or thousands of thumbnails looking for that best video to finish on. 

And on any given night, you might see thousands of different women, and each new clip you see, each new thumbnail, each new position, it gives you that little dopamine dump. You know, you're on the hunt for this magical video.  And again, you're seeing hundreds or thousands of different women in a single night. 

And  You know, no two nights. It's not like, you know, you watch a porn video and the next night you're like, Oh, yeah, let me just go watch that same porn video.  You just want something new, you know, you don't want to go back to the same video again and again and again because there's so much variety and Going back to the same video doesn't give you the same dopamine dump. 

So, what's the effect of this is you end up getting addicted to novelty.  You end up getting addicted to the chase for something new.  Every night you want a new video, something better than the previous night, something more exciting, more attractive, more taboo, you know. It's not intentional, but  this is just how, you know, how it develops over time is you end up looking for something new.

New and more exciting.  And this is one of the signs of any addiction, is that you get desensitized. You get habituated to the standard dose of whatever experience it is. If you're addicted to, you know, a particular drug, you need more and more of that drug, higher and higher doses, to get the same effect.

So with porn, you need a video that you haven't seen before. Something, you know, new and fresh and more exciting. So, that's what porn is. Plain, vanilla sex with the same woman you've seen again and again just doesn't cut it.  And again, no one is doing this intentionally, but because of neuroplasticity, this actually rewires your brain, and you end up treating your real life dating in the same way. 

And this was one of the realizations that I could see in my own life, how I was unintentionally approaching my dating life like I was approaching porn,  rather than looking for someone where I could grow and have a deep connection with, I was just looking for, you know, a fresh new face, looking for someone new. 

And I was noticing that I would get bored easily, not because anything was wrong with the women I was sleeping with, and in fact they were incredible, amazing women, but it was just because my brain was hardwired to want something new.  And it is, you know, one of the things that I still feel the lingering effect of that in my life is just that search for novelty, that search for, ooh, I want something fresh, I want something new. 

So one of the key insights was in realizing I didn't want to be jumping around from relationship to relationship all my life. And instead, I wanted to find depth and intimacy and vulnerability. You know, I wanted to learn how to be grateful and appreciative and contented with the partner I was with. 

rather than, you know, feeling like I was just using them and then looking for something new.  So when you are focused on novelty, that kind of connection can't happen. So that again is the fifth realization I had about porn and what it was doing to my mind that made me want to quit.  So there you have it.

Those are some of the top insights or the top realizations that I had that gave me that motivation that said, okay, I really need to get my life in order and stop watching this again, not because it's not pleasurable, but just because it was moving my, my life in the wrong direction.  So there's nothing wrong with watching porn, but it's recognizing what are the effects of it, you know, and at the scale that you're watching it at,  what are the consequences of watching to that degree?

If you watch porn once every three months, Many of these issues that I'm talking about, you know, won't really  take a, you know, play a role in your life. But if you're watching on a daily basis or every other day, these things are going to be popping up in your life. So you have to just look at yourself, be honest with yourself.

You know, is this supporting the life, my dream life that I want to build?  So I hope this helps you gain some clarity, uh, on whether porn is helping you or holding you back. Again, you know, just putting it out there. If you are interested in one on one coaching and getting support on healing from porn addiction, go to my website, JeremyLipkowitz.

com slash intro and you can sign up for a free discovery call to see if coaching is a good fit for you. You know, if you need that support on breaking free from porn or any kind of compulsive or unhealthy habit or behavior, that is what I do in this world. That's what I love to do. So definitely go and check out  to sign up for a free discovery call.

So I hope you're all doing well. That's it for today and I'll catch you guys on the next episode.