WHAT IF I DON'T HAVE THE WILLPOWER TO STOP?
I wasn’t a very good decision maker during my teenage years. My parents had a creek running through their backyard called “Muddy Creek.” A better name for it would’ve been “Fecal Creek” because the water was filled with garbage and it smelled like fecal matter.
During rain storms, the once calm and smelly creek would transform into a ferocious whitewater river. The garbage-filled rapids would violently beat against the jagged rocks. Needless to say, no one would ever want to swim in this water.
Except one time.
My friends and I thought it might be fun to jump in and face the rancid rapids. So, we dove into the water. We didn’t stop to think about safety; we just went for it!
Long story short, one of my friends almost drowned. He had to go to the hospital to get treated for the parasitic infection he contracted while nearly drowning in the poop water. He also received a week of diarrhea as an added “parting gift.” (My friends and I all received this gift as well.)
Bad Decisions = Bad Results.
We’ve all made poor decisions, but porn users are setting themselves up to be bad decision makers. Porn can literally hold a conscience captive. The area of your brain responsible for willpower is called the prefrontal cortex. It’s in charge of controlling your impulses and weighing the cost and benefits of your actions. Brain scans have shown that this area of the brain is smaller in regular porn users. So, using porn may literally shrink the brain, wear away the willpower, and kill the conscience. [1]
“Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed.”(CCC 1778)
You can see the weakened willpower of porn users in news headlines like “National spokesperson loses job due to porn habit!” and “Man crashes car and dies while watching porn on his phone!” It seems crazy to risk your life for an image on a screen, but you have to understand what these people were up against. They were fighting a battle with a weakened spirit and a damaged brain.
Porn can do more than damage a person’s character; it can damage their chemistry.
[1] Kühn, Simone, and Jürgen Gallinat. "Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated With Pornography Consumption." JAMA Psychiatry 71.7 (2014): 827. Web.
I wasn’t a very good decision maker during my teenage years. My parents had a creek running through their backyard called “Muddy Creek.” A better name for it would’ve been “Fecal Creek” because the water was filled with garbage and it smelled like fecal matter.
During rain storms, the once calm and smelly creek would transform into a ferocious whitewater river. The garbage-filled rapids would violently beat against the jagged rocks. Needless to say, no one would ever want to swim in this water.
Except one time.
My friends and I thought it might be fun to jump in and face the rancid rapids. So, we dove into the water. We didn’t stop to think about safety; we just went for it!
Long story short, one of my friends almost drowned. He had to go to the hospital to get treated for the parasitic infection he contracted while nearly drowning in the poop water. He also received a week of diarrhea as an added “parting gift.” (My friends and I all received this gift as well.)
Bad Decisions = Bad Results.
We’ve all made poor decisions, but porn users are setting themselves up to be bad decision makers. Porn can literally hold a conscience captive. The area of your brain responsible for willpower is called the prefrontal cortex. It’s in charge of controlling your impulses and weighing the cost and benefits of your actions. Brain scans have shown that this area of the brain is smaller in regular porn users. So, using porn may literally shrink the brain, wear away the willpower, and kill the conscience. [1]
“Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed.”(CCC 1778)
You can see the weakened willpower of porn users in news headlines like “National spokesperson loses job due to porn habit!” and “Man crashes car and dies while watching porn on his phone!” It seems crazy to risk your life for an image on a screen, but you have to understand what these people were up against. They were fighting a battle with a weakened spirit and a damaged brain.
Porn can do more than damage a person’s character; it can damage their chemistry.
[1] Kühn, Simone, and Jürgen Gallinat. "Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated With Pornography Consumption." JAMA Psychiatry 71.7 (2014): 827. Web.