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Do our lower attention spans cause us to have sexual problems?
Today, there is no question that attention spans are lower.
Way lower.
And the reason for that is that so many of us are seeking novelty all the time.
We keep our eyes on the constant input from our smart phones, tablets, and computers.
Psychologists have a name for this behavior — they call it “novelty seeking behavior.”
And all of the constant looking at our cell phone to get the next headline or Facebook message reinforces this behavior.
We feel compelled to look, to respond to it. And this pattern creates a stronger and stronger compulsion toward novelty-seeking behavior.
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The question is, do sexual behavior and sexual pleasure go downhill from all this novelty seeking?
This study is very well done and shows some striking results that can apply to all of us.
This study used only male volunteers.
All the volunteers were heterosexual men on the younger side.
The reason for this is because it’s typically easier to get younger men to volunteer.
Researchers assigned various tasks to each of the men.
Then they correlated these tasks to sexual images.
They exposed the men to this imagery again and again.
This process is called conditioning, of course.
And then, researchers scanned the brains of these conditioned men.
They looked at which brain centers light up with sexual and other conditioning.
Think of it this way.
Imagine that you are a normal person who is looking at Facebook.
And you spend time looking at online images of scantily clad or naked women and people doing various things, otherwise known as online porn.
Even just YouTube videos of cute young women exercising counts.
Is this going to cause you to have sexual problems?
My own experience is, “absolutely yes.”
I have found that is essential for men who have erectile dysfunction to stop the stream of sexual images and fantasy that is coming into their brains.
It can take quite a while, but the brain eventually rewires itself.
In this study, they found great reinforcement for what I have found.
First of all, the novelty seeking behavior activates the same part of the brain as other addictions.
The big issue is that after a while, you stop responding to sexual cues that are “normal.”
You begin to require what psychologists call “super normal” stimulus to get aroused.
In other words, the normal things don’t excite you anymore.
Now, the study also worked with a group of men who had problems with sex.
What they call compulsive sexual behaviors.
This could correspond to the heavy use of porn or anything else.
They found that the men susceptible to sexual problems got more habituated more quickly to sexual stimuli.
So, men who use online porn or look at images of many young women online are probably more likely to get used to these images.
And once they’re used to them, they find that these images no longer arouse them after a while.
This is how you link porn and ED.
These findings have potential wider relevance as the Internet provides a vast source of novel and potentially rewarding stimuli, particularly with respect to sexually explicit material.
Here’s the bottom line.
The Internet and the behaviors associated with constantly looking at our phones and computers hurt us.
They desensitize our mind.
These behaviors turn us all into men who do not feel much sexually.
We become men who need to escalate to new behaviors to get sexually aroused.
If we can fix this by removing the stimuli from our world, we can address the issues in our brains.
And then we can start recovering our sexual function.
As I say, desensitization is the cause of most event problems today.
And online porn and online novelty seeking even of non-porn contribute to desensitization.
The study proves it.
http://www.journalofpsychiatricresearch.com/article/S0022-3956(15)00313-1/pdf
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