Resensitize Your Pleasure Pathways

For those struggling with Porn Addiction Program urges to binge watch porn, check social media or eat sugar, it’s important to know that you can retrain your brain for sustainable pleasure. A simple daily practice like eating meals by hand or introducing intentional challenge into everyday activities can help recalibrate your brain’s dopamine receptors so you can experience joy from more healthy sources.

Pleasure is a natural human experience, but it’s often hijacked by consuming things that give the false impression of pleasure but are actually addictive. For example, many women use pornography and hypersexual content to numb pain, discomfort or negative self-talk. Fortunately, the same brain-changing strategies that can reverse addiction can also retrain the brain to find true pleasure in things such as meaningful relationships, fulfilling hobbies and new adventures.

A major component of the pleasure-pain balance is a hedonic hotspot located in the ventral pallidum. This tiny spot in the subcortical forebrain is a crucially important modulator of pleasure, allowing us to feel intense pleasure from a variety of experiences including sensory food and drug pleasures (such as sucrose) and human cultural and sexual pleasures. However, a lesion of this spot abolishes normal pleasure and shifts the hedonic impact of sucrose from ‘liking’ to ‘disgusting’.

This phenomenon has led some researchers to suggest that the core of addiction is a lack of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens and striatum. While this does make sense in terms of incentive-sensitization, it is largely misleading as to why individuals experience addiction.

Dr. Trish Leigh & Co.
6110 Falconbridge Rd STE 101, Chapel Hill, NC 27517
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