If you watch a lot of porn in order to get sexually aroused, stop doing it as health experts on Sunday emphasised that watching excessive sexual content may affect your performance in the bedroom.

According to the experts, watching excessive porn is like any other addictive substances that lead to unnaturally high levels of dopamine secretion.

“This can damage the dopamine reward system and leave it unresponsive to natural sources of pleasure. This is why users begin to experience difficulty in achieving arousal with a physical partner,” Arti Anand, Consultant — Clinical Psychologist, Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi told IANS.

The experts emphasised that porn interferes in your sexual life in other ways, too. It sometimes sets high expectations for people who think sex should be done in certain ways, which they saw in porn videos.

“Porn is similar to movies where we see that the actors are decked up on certain occasions. So here also they are decked up for the act and that’s not the actual thing,” said Sanjay Kumavat, Consultant Psychiatrist and Sexologist, Fortis Hospital, Mulund, Mumbai.

“People tend to feel that this is how sex should be, as porn sets their expectations high and they feel these are the methodologies one needs to approach and eventually they end up having an inferiority complex or premature ejaculation.

“These people may develop a complex feeling about the size of penis or breast or the stamina and may land up not performing well in real sex situation,” Kumavat added.

A study presented during the 112th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Urological Association showed that there was a correlation between pornography use and sexual dysfunction in those men who reported a preference for masturbation to pornography rather than sexual intercourse, with or without pornography.

“Visual stimulation will often increase sexual arousal in both men and women, but when the majority of their time is spent viewing and masturbating to pornography, it is likely they will become less interested in real-world sexual encounters,” said researcher Joseph Alukal from New York University.

Porn addiction is something that is relatively new in the study of addiction as compared to that of alcohol and other substances.

“Though both addictions affect the body negatively, porn addiction is watching something on screen while in substance abuse you are ingesting a substance like alcohol, which can cause further harm to parts of your body like the liver,” said Ashish Kumar Mittal, Sexologist and Psychiatrist in Columbia Asia Hospital, Gurgaon.

However, he mentioned few things that may help people with porn addiction to overcome it.

“Some simple steps could be discarding all porn-related content you keep and make it harder to access it. Installing anti-porn software could also help,” Mittal added.

“Distracting oneself when the impulse hits is helpful and you can take your time to plan a list of activities that you can indulge in to distract yourself. Keeping a journal to monitor your emotions and progress will also help. Approach a medical professional for treatment can also help tremendously in your journey to recovery,” he noted.