In today's episode, Dr. Rena Malik, MD and guest Dr. Alok Kanojia tackle the rising issue of pornography addiction among young ...

porn-addiction-is-not-about-sex-how-to-break-free-ft-dr-k-healthy-gamer

Porn Addiction is Not About Sex | How to Break Free ft. Dr. K Healthy Gamer

what are some techniques that you use for people who have porn addiction like how do you help them get through that I I think a lot of it is like understanding their emotions so when I think about pornography addiction so remember that any addiction brings pleasure and takes away pain so if you can reduce the need to take away pain then you're you're going to melt away the pornography addiction so there are a couple of things that are correlated with pornography addiction so if you look at um multivariate regression analyses there are two variables that correlate very highly with pornography addiction one of them is meaninglessness in life so generally speaking if you can help someone have a reason not to watch pornography and jerk off in the middle of the day then that will help them a lot so what happens is this is my population but like you know these are people who are often times young men in their 20s and they're like falling behind in some way and it's like 400 p.m. on a Thursday they're not really working and like what else do they have to do so as start building a life of meaning like the need for pornography seems to decrease that's one thing the second thing is that often times remember this is emotional regulation and people will have a lot of stored emotions from things like traumatic experiences growing up romantic relationships all kinds of other stuff so as we metabolize that Storehouse of emotion it becomes easier to manage emotions from dayto day they're kind of like built up and your mind kind of stores them in the subconscious ious so if we look at something like processing trauma so I do a lot of like trauma processing for people with pornography addiction and that sort of takes some of the gas out of the tank that's fueling the addiction the third thing to do is to reduce emotions in the present so teach them alternate coping mechanisms um that can they they can use to manage emotions and often times it's like really life oriented stuff so if I'm living at home and my parents are toxic like learning to set better boundaries is one of the best things to teach someone who struggles with pornography addiction because usually what's going on is these are people that have someone in their life who is sending them to toxicity but they feel so guilty at cutting them out this can even be someone like a a romantic partner or spouse it can be a parent and as they're like receiving the stress it's almost like I I'll joke with some of my patients that you have an emotional umbilical cord they're connected to someone else and another human is like transmitting negative emotions to them like a product and then they have to turn to substances or pornography or whatever to like offload that emotional stuff so boundary setting emotional regulation techniques processing trauma and like really building purpose in life tends to be like a pretty good like good outcomes you know so many things come to mind but I think we're seeing particularly in young men like we know that amounts of sex or frequency of sex is decreasing and that the even birth rates are decreasing um and so do you think this is sort of part of all of this like external stimulation that's around and then they feel sort of I mean this is a theory for me right they feel wor less meaning right because they're not actually having success in finding someone or meeting someone or it's just easier to access pornography and then they're like you know they're still not connecting with other people they're they're using pornography because they still feel bad of course we talked about the cycle a little bit but is it sort of like are these things contributing to that when you say these things what do you mean like meaning are we seeing people get porn addiction because they're either having stress in their life so say they're not coupled with somebody say they are trying to meet people but they're having difficulty because I think the dating the dating world has changed right with dating apps and how people communicate and meet each other it's very different from when you and I were younger and so um I think that is is a very different different sort of place to navigate like women are looking for a certain kind of man and if you don't fill that category you immediately filtered out right so women are dating the top 5 10% of men are trying to aim for them and and then there's a a lot of men who are not having success in meeting women yeah so so it sounds like you have a theory that that's at play and I think that's completely reasonable so let's just play around with that a little bit so the first thing is that you know this idea that women are dating the top 5 to 10% of men I assume you're talking about like Tinder statistics yeah like those I mean because that's where you can filter by height and by you know yeah so I think that that there's a couple of interesting like like once you really look at the data which I don't know if you have but I'm I'm sure you know anyone who's trained in statistics so when when they say they're dating the top 10% of men there's this idea that one dude is dating like nine women whereas that's not usually what happens so if you look at something like Tinder it's like a 7 to n men to one woman like ratio so when they say they're do dating it's still often times one dude is dating one guy or maybe people are kind of at the top but like there's such a lopsided gender ratio that it's still like closer to 1 to one in some ways it depends on the studies that you look at and stuff like that so I think that this creates this idea that a lot of men have that like oh my God there's like these Chads at the top that are like banging lots of girls I don't think the reality is quite like that when you really look at the statistics so that's one piece but I think another thing to really consider that that I think you kind of hit the nail on the head is that it is harder for men and women to find a good match yeah there are many reasons for that I think one reason is that so if we look at like what women want in partners and this is generalizations um so you can look at statistics right so like the idea of a dating a dude who lives at home at the age of 28 is like ah I don't want someone who's living with their parents but 50% of people under the age of 30 who are adults still live with their parents men and women both yeah so the economic situation is changing so the idea of like an independent man at 28 just doesn't apply to 50% of the population yeah another good example of this is most women I want to say like statistics or historically somewhere around 70 to 80% of women will want to date a man who makes more money than they do but 60% of college graduates are now women so what we're starting to see is as equality of income increases that expectation becomes harder and harder to fill so whatever the reason is and there are all kind of challenges that women have as well they get tons of dickpics and all kinds of other things yeah so it's definitely making it harder for men to date now that's just on the gender side but there's a whole other set of things that's like screwing up dudes too which is that you know as men like we have very poor emotional regulation skills we're not really taught how to express emotions Beyond anger um we're unlikely it's like hard for us to engage in Psychotherapy which I don't think is a weakness of men I think there's some systemic biases in Psychotherapy that are against men so if you look at studies on couples counseling like you ask ask men why don't you want to go to couples's counseling and what they what happens is they feel outgunned so anytime they go see a couple's counselor their female partner assuming a heteronormative relationship knows how to articulate their feelings and the man doesn't know how to do that so the the the wife is like articulating like he does this and this makes me feel this way and the therapist kind of like gets on their side and so men sort of feel like outmatched and I think that there's a good reason for that mhm so men are are really struggling right now I think there's a lot of this dating stuff going on there's a lot of expectations that are changing and then there's a lot of like distortions so if you look at I recently saw a paper on incels where their beliefs about what women want are quite divorced from reality so there are these ideas that oh like you know the top 10% of dudes are dating all the women so they assume that okay like what that means right we can sort of like apply the transit of property is that this woman I'm talking to is only interested in a dude who's in the top 10% but if you actually ask women like who are you interested in and who do you date it's much more wide and accepting than most men are like understand you know it's interesting because in the same breath I I I don't disagree with you but I I want to kind of push back a little bit because you said it's not cute to date someone who's living at home whatever right you're like that's sort of a turnoff and so that's half the male population who's living at home with their parents right and then um you want people who make more than you and women are more often graduating college getting hired degrees getting higher positions and the average salary of a man is $45,000 in the US so it sort of seems like there are I mean maybe they're not dating the top 10% of men only maybe they're just not dating right yeah you know I think that's part of it too so I'm how is that a push back no no so my point is like so so meaning that there is the the large majority of men are not finding matches is exactly what you said but they're not finding matches because women are choosing not to date because their expectations are not being met which is sort of what you said but it is I mean so they're not wrong in the sense that this woman wants something different than what I have to offer but they're wrong in saying they only want the 10% of men they just want something different than what I can offer yeah so I think that there's like both can be true so I think the challenge now is that like see we used to need Partners mhm so now what's happened is our society has become so independent that a man is not even competing against another man a man has to add value to a woman's life more so than the stress or annoyance that he brings and that's true for both genders so like this is what's going on is like now it's just easier for me to live by myself than it ever used to be and so now really what what both genders are competing against is like is this other person's life better alone or with me there's also other interesting statistics like if we look at like men under the age of 30 and stuff like that so if you look at like there's also a gender I mean sorry an age Gap issue so if you look at women who are 28 and you compare them to like men who are 28 that's kind of a mismatch but if you look at like uh I forget what the statistics are but there's like a interesting statistic about people under the age of 30 and like I think maybe like 50 to 70% I'm Rusty on the statistic of men are not dating or don't have aren't partnered under the age of 30 but that number is lower for women and the reason for that is because they're dating older men yeah so it's very common so that excuse the the statistics in some way too so the younger generation is having less sex they're less often dating they're less often than having children and that leads to the possibility of our our difficulty in perpetuating our population having a aging population that's not replaceable okay I think it's important to remember that globally this is a trend in some places right so basically developed nations are seeing this way more so I remember talking to a colleague of mine in China and so basically like you know China had this one child policy for a while and I heard recently that they have this new policy well they where they will subsidize your third and fourth child mhm so what's going on in parts of China in South Korea in Japan less so in the US is exactly what you're describing which is that for every I think we're having like the lowest birth rate is like 67 so they're not even having one to one yeah so this is very scary from an aging population but there are other parts of the world like if you look at like South America or areas of like the Middle East or Africa where people are having still lots of kids um and so I don't I don't think the species is going to die out I think what's going to happen is like in developed Nations they're going to have this huge problem of like not having enough young people to support the old people yeah so that I agree with was there I sorry I forgot your question no I think that's the issue and so like my question is like what can we like this is an issue right this is a is more societal issue than an individual issue but it's a problem and so what do you think like are there things that you think that we should be addressing yeah so I I think that I don't focus on societal issues I know it's kind of weird so despite the fact that we have this like large scale approach I still at my heart am a clinician so when I work with men who are struggling to date or working with women who are struggling to date what I always focus on is the individual and so I think what we really need to do like what I would love to do is like make a school for crappy boyfriends I don't know if I could do that for crappy girlfriends because I don't know what it's like to be a crappy girlfriend like but I I think that there's a lot of like skills training that we're seeing so like what what should we intervene in I think social skills atrophy is huge so what's happening when we start to use technology is like as you know any part of your brain that you don't use like rusts so if you don't speak a language you'll forget it because your brain is like hey we don't need this so as we move to like text based communication what started to happen is our empathic C circuits have started to atrophy so we're seeing a rise of social anxiety and why is that that's because when I sit with you I see body language I see facial I interpret it and so this part of my brain works well but now the more that we text then when we meet in person I'm going to feel incredibly anxious so we're seeing a rise in social anxiety in both genders so that's really what I think we need to Target is like how can you be a more emotionally available partner how can you be like more confident in yourself we're seeing like low self-esteem problems a lot of Shame you know and social skills atrophy so these are the things that I kind of focus on and like how can you whether you're a man or a woman we have everyone in in our community like become just a better human being and then I think as you become a better human being what we tend to see is that the relationship kind of like comes pretty naturally but this is not a societal program I'd love to make it one well I think I think if you did it on an individual level for many many people at scale it would help Society overall right like because I think you're right social skills are definitely less less robust right in the in the age of technology I worry about how our kids I mean I sort of force my kids to like communicate with people we go out like you have to have a conversation you have to learn those skills because otherwise you know they'll be looking at their phone or looking at devices or Ian they don't have a phone but like they'll be looking at some TV or something else or trying to get a dopamine fix through something else and so um that is you know a real problem I think in society today in our at least in the developed countries where there's lots of access to these things absolutely and I I think now that I realized it so so we have lectures on those topics so even at scale I know I sort of said I work with individuals but what I've sort of done is like we did two lectures on communication and relationships and we have two lectures coming up on like how to build meaningful connections and and so there's a lot of science that we can really utilize and once we understand how connections form so I think like a good example of this is people don't realize what leads to attraction so the science of Attraction is like really fascinating and the interesting thing is that Tinder does the data points that Tinder collects don't correlate at all with attraction so your interests and things like that don't actually govern attraction in the brain so it's interesting things like shared emotional experiences so there's a super fascinating study where they had people go on first dates on a rickety Bridge or a stone bridge and on the stone bridge it's stable and it was like whatever but when you have people meet in the middle of a rickety Bridge your sympathetic nervous system is activated both people are a little bit scared and anxious and when there's an a similar emotional experience it can even be negative um this results in like some kind of bond being formed emotionally so there are some of these things like you have to you know keep your date under 75 minutes because something happens in terms of like attraction and stuff like that there's a lot of stuff that we can actually teach people to help them kind of like compensate for the social skills atrophy that's interesting that's really fascinating

Dr.

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