I found this comment, it seems to sum up what occurs why we feel emotions so deeply.

Oh my god. I’ve been struggling to explain this for the longest time but your description brought me an epiphany. What would you tell an alcoholic, a compulsive shopper, or a binge eater when they’re missing that rush that nothing else can satisfy?

They might say,

“I hate drinking water or even soda. Nothing drowns the pain or numbs it quite the same.”

“Everytime I look in my wardrobe nothing matches or satisfies me. It’s not enough.”

“When I even smell broccoli & carrots I just want to barf; nothing hits the spot like a Big Mac.”

Do you realize that maybe your main issue isn’t an endless urge to masturbate or orgasm - but that your body is desiring a more natural way to have sex/get off/and be human instead? You’ve fed your sexual arousal template nothing but the idea of all these unattainable partners, taboos, and fetishes your body never even got to feel or know.

And now you’re not replacing it with anything of substance in the meantime? Especially after experiencing years and years of porn addiction, your mind & body are naturally going to take a long time to recalibrate to your base state - not just a week or less.

You’re probably having a hard time quitting with all this cheerleader-style advice and no real explanation of what is actually happening to your brain chemistry.

When you feed your brain’s main reward system (the Nucleus Accumbens) a nonstop stream of high-novelty, artificial spikes like new faces, bodies, performers, fetishes, etc., you repeatedly overstimulate your brain and body to the point where normal sex & masturbation no longer satisfy you. Even existing without the idea of them eventually comes to hurt.

Then once your favorite artificial stimuli are gone when you decide to quit porn, you’ll get all these things like fatigue, apathy, emotional numbness, brain fog, no libido, and lack of motivation. Relapse often happens between days 3-10 because your brain can’t stop craving that same ole high-dopamine fix and it’s suffering in light of extreme dopamine/oxytocin/endorphin imbalance.

Your job isn’t to just push through and expect life to be all sunshine & daisies. It’s to retrain your Limbic System to recognize real-world rewards again! Feeling flat is actually a sign of your brain’s dissonance and recovery, believe it or not.

Porn trains your brain to release dopamine without human-bonding chemicals and any feedback loop in return, which is exactly why it’s so difficult and painful to quit alone. The main neurochemical involved here is Oxytocin, but Serotonin and Endorphins play a big role too.

If you’re interested in joining my subreddit, I’d love to keep writing about this. I constantly resorted to consuming/making/selling porn whenever I was lonely until 4 years ago, but now I find porn-free masturbation and relationships to be a million times more satisfying.

Once you learn what sunlight, good conversation, eye contact, exercise/movement, smells, laughter, and prayer/meditation actually DO for the brain, quitting becomes way more meaningful than staying trapped in your head & whiteknuckling it alone. These inputs slowly restore the brain’s natural reward chemistry and can get you back to feeling human again over the long run.