Introduction
Have you found yourself questioning – ‘Am I wasting my time watching porn?’. Short answer Yes, but let’s break it down here.
There are new developments and evolutions taking place every day.
Many things have become a normal part of our daily lives, that we wouldn’t have imagined before.
Like, online shopping, food delivery apps, OTT platforms, and much more.
On this list also sits pornography.
The porn industry has evolved beyond limit and has become a “normal” part of daily life for many.
The stigma and taboo that once surrounded pornography have since vanished and the porn industry has now become a huge part of the internet.
It is readily available to anyone with a decent smartphone and internet connection.
Even if you’re not interested in watching porn, the marketers of the industry have placed several advertisements all over the internet in an attempt to lure in as many viewers as possible.
Their marketing strategies and the overly sexualized appeal of the industry clearly seem to be working as PornHub alone received 42 billion visits in 2019, 115 million visits every day.
Experts believe the numbers have grown drastically since then.
These were the views on a single website. Imagine, the views on all the websites combined, when adult entertainment websites make up about 12% of websites on the internet.
What does this say about our society?
Are we collectively undergoing Porn addiction? Are we wasting our precious productive time on porn sites?
Porn Vs Productivity
Does porn fit into any of those categories?
Let’s have a deeper look at how porn is affecting your life and productivity; what are the underlying negative consequences?
Potential Short-term Losses
Every passing second there are 28,258 active internet users watching porn, as per statistics.
Due to porn’s escalating and captivating nature, porn use can be extremely addictive. Which is why these statistics are not really surprising.
The more you watch pornography and surf such time-wasting websites, the more you start craving it.
If you don’t keep this “guilty pleasure” in check it can cause you some severe problems in the present and the future.
Every minute you spend watching porn is a single minute being taken away from your productivity and work.
A survey revealed that 20% of men in the US admitted to watching porn online during work hours.
If you spend merely 15 minutes watching porn every day, in about 6 months that accounts for 113 hours of porn being watched.
How do you feel having wasted 113 hours that could’ve been used productively?
When you indulge in a guilty pleasure, you tend to not quite realize how much time you’re actively wasting on it every day. 15 minutes might not seem like a lot at first, but in the long run, those 15 minutes wasted every day will affect you tremendously.
Especially when it comes to a guilty pleasure like pornography consumption. In fact, these elements are placed in a way that purposes only affects your emotional and mental health conditions in an adverse way possible.
In the beginning, you were probably not watching porn every day. But, now you do. This is because pornography addiction has an escalating behavior.
If you’re used to indulging in porn use once a week and it has brought you immense satisfaction so far, you’ll notice after some time that just watching it once a week won’t satisfy your needs anymore. This is what is called an escalation.
With passing time, you will need increasing doses of porn material to feel the same level of satisfaction you felt the last time you watched porn.
Today you might feel some sexual pleasure and satisfaction after watching one porn video, but in two-three days’ time, you’ll find yourself consuming three videos per day. This is how addiction begins. In fact, this is a prominently observed characteristic in porn addicts.
Plus, it’s not always about the quantity of porn. This also includes the kind of porn. You usually start with softcore porn and within a few months end up seeking out more extreme and hardcore porn.
The pornography use you indulge in has negative consequences on you mentally and physically. Both in the short run and long run.
What Happens if This Carries On
If you don’t recognize your porn problem and carry on indulging in it, the negative impact will be even greater in the future.
In About One Year…
As your cravings for pornography use escalated, in about one year you would’ve approximately spent around 456 hours watching porn.
Thinking of the time wasted here? You are correct.
That’s 19 whole days spent lusting over pornographic material that is rewiring your brain to become more and more addicted to it.
Before you realize it, porn would’ve taken over your life in ways you can’t even imagine.
Porn not only wastes time, but it also affects you both mentally and physically. This also applies to all the time-wasting games available on the internet.
In The Long Run..
With each passing day as you spend more and more time watching porn, you’ll start to notice it’s a negative impact on your work. Be it studies or professional work, porn affects everything.
In around 2 years you would’ve wasted 915 hours watching porn. Which is approximately 38 days’ worth of pornographic content. More than a month wasted unproductively.
As the year passes on and you regularly continue to watch porn feeding your addiction, pornography will start to affect everything in your life.
What will start as distraction and temptation will grow into addiction leading to procrastination, guilt, and regret later.
Are you really looking forward to that?!
From work, physical health to even relationships, the porn you watch will affect every single aspect of your life.
Experts have found that excessively watching porn can cause severe damage to your mind and body in the long run. Some of them are:
- Sexual dysfunction (like Chronic Ejaculation Dysfunction)
- Insomnia
- Brain Fog
- Chronic Isolation
- Depression and Anxiety Disorders
- Lethargy and Fatigue
- Delayed Ejaculation
- Lack of Motivation
These are just some of the ways in which porn can affect you both mentally and physically in the long run.
Apart from this, porn can also have a massive impact on your relationships. Both platonic and romantic. But the larger impact is usually on romantic relationships.
Various research on porn and its impact have found that the more you indulge in porn, the more you end up losing interest in your real-life partners.
Some studies have associated watching a lot of porn with significantly less happy relationships and increasingly bad sex between couples. Whereas there are other studies that have found positive effects of watching porn while in a relationship.
More often than not, when one-half of the couple finds the other, constantly consuming pornographic content, it leads to the rise of suspicion in their mind.
In the long run, porn takes a lot more from you than it gives you in return.
Are the few minutes of pleasure that porn provides you, worth losing it all?
What you Could have Done with the Wasted Time
The cost of this is the high quality of life you could’ve lived.
Instead of whining about all the work you’re not getting done, waiting for signs to do something, to make a change, take the time to do it now!
Stop wasting time watching porn videos and procrastinating, and instead take the time to design and plan out your life. To achieve the goals that you’ve always wanted.
If you don’t take the decision to stop now, your addiction to porn is only going to get worse with time.
Stop before this addiction takes over your entire life and eats you up whole.
Imagine everything you could’ve done with all that wasted time.
Saved up and gone on your dream vacation. Start working out to take care of your mental and physical health. Started a new hobby. Visited family.
There is so much you could’ve done.
But instead, you’re stuck on your bed/couch wasting money on porn websites.
Soon once the aforementioned side effects of the addiction kick in, you’ll realize what a big mistake you’ve made.
But remember, it’s never too late to start over. You can bid this life goodbye anytime you’d like. All it requires is patience and willpower.
How You Can Stop This From Happening
As mentioned above, there is always time to turn around and put an end to this addiction once and for all.
Follow these tips and you should be able to save all the time that you’re wasting currently!
Believe In Yourself
Before you begin your recovery journey, you need to first truly believe in yourself.
Believe that you let go of porn and have a new fresh start to life.
If you have even an ounce of self-doubt hidden somewhere deep in your brain, it’ll only hinder your recovery progress in the future.
So, have faith in yourself. This is extremely important.
Block Porn Out Of Your Life
First, get rid of every single article of porn you have. Throw away every article or object, anything you have used as pornography, and clean out your computer and drive.
Next, install a porn blocker on all your devices.
There are tons of blockers available in the market. Do your research pick any one you’d like and install it on your computer and phone.
A porn blocker will automatically block out all adult content when you’re using the internet. This way you no longer have to worry about coming across porn and getting tempted to click on it.
Once you have a porn blocker installed, you can’t access any porn website even if you manually look it up. So you no longer have to worry about urges.
Start Meditating
This is the easiest and most effective way to keep your urges in control.
Anytime you have the urge to look at porn, just take some time out and practice some meditation and breathing exercises. Take a deep breath, distract your attention, and focus your mental health on meditating.
This should really help you suppress your urges. You can also seek professional help for mindfulness meditation.
Always Remember Why You’re Doing This
Quitting an addiction can be extremely hard. There will be days that’ll pass by easily and then there’ll also be days where you’ll be tempted to give up.
But at times like those, remind yourself what made you take this decision of quitting porn.
Remind yourself of all the pain and suffering you went through these past couple of months/years. All the relations and friendships you’ve lost. All the opportunities you’ve let slip away.
Remind yourself how you never want to go back and experience any of that ever again.
This should help you get through even the hardest of days.
Hopefully, this opened your eyes to the side effects of watching porn. The aforementioned tips should help you to stop wasting time on porn and get your life back on track.
Now you have the answer to ‘If I’m wasting my time on porn?’ So share in the comments what you’re going to do about this.
