Episode #181: Is Masturbation Damaging Your Brain? (Part 3 of 7)

I wasn’t addicted to porn — but I am here because someone I love was. And that changed everything.

Is Masturbation Harmless or Harmful?

I’m Dr. Trish Leigh, cognitive neuroscientist and author of Mind Over Explicit Matter. On Jubilee’s Middle Ground, I sat down with porn performers and NoFap voices to bring a different perspective: not personal addiction, but years of deep neuroscience, brain maps, and real recovery work.

Most porn users don't even know they're addicted—they just feel anxious, unfocused, disconnected, and stuck in a loop. I've seen thousands of brains that prove how porn hijacks your dopamine, rewires your reward system, and blocks real intimacy. This ties into the larger question of: Is Masturbation Harmless or Harmful?

Huge appreciation to Jubilee & LoveCommaNectar for hosting this raw, important discussion. If you haven’t watched it yet, you should — but trigger warning: if you’re recovering, stay here with me instead. This series breaks it all down with real science and real hope for real connection.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Masturbation has many healthy benefits, does it? Welcome back. I'm Dr. Trish Leigh, cognitive neuroscientist and author of bestselling porn addiction recovery book, Mind over explicit matter. I have recently been on Jubilee Media's The Middle Ground and had an invigorating discussion with porn performers and people from the NoFap community. And we had to agree or disagree that masturbation has many healthy benefits. Well, what do you think I said? Masturbation has many health benefits. Agreeers, please step forward. Well, you know what I said, if you followed me for any amount of time, is that this is a major misconception for many people. People who consume pornography and couple it with masturbation want to hear that it's good for them, right? And you can find professionals online who are eager to tell you masturbation is healthy for you, but there's a major distinction. The major distinction is compulsive masturbation versus masturbation that's not compulsive. So if porn use is in the mix, and let's just talk about how it unfolds for most people. Most people find porn when they're young. Research shows the younger you find it, the more you consume it over time. It's a fairly recent study. And actually they parsed it out. People who found porn at the age of 10 consumed more porn over time than people who found it at 11. Just that one year of brain development. Really wild, right? But here's the idea is that all addiction develops in a similar way. It starts as use and then that use becomes abuse, which means you're using too much. You're doing a thing or you're using a substance when you shouldn't be. So in the case of masturbation, now you have to masturbate in the mornings before you go to work. You should be getting ready, but instead you are masturbating so you can get that dopamine hit before work. Or perhaps you're using it as sleep medication. We talked about this on the middle ground that many people masturbate before bed to get that dopamine flood to knock them out. But it's a type of insomnia. It wakes them up three hours later or 3 a.m. and Now they're up because their brain cannot catch the sleep cycle and the circadian rhythms. So this is a big, huge misconception. Compulsive versus non. Use becomes abuse becomes compulsion. Compulsion is now you need to do this to not feel bad. And once you've kind of gone over that edge into compulsion, now if you don't masturbate, you feel angry and irritable. You feel sluggish. You can't think. You need your hit. But then, of course, that leads to dependency and addiction and then of course that leads to tolerance building and escalation so now you need more of it and it becomes the downward spiral that chains people to pornography and masturbation it takes them away from the real world relationships and this is the piece the porn performers aren't understanding and I don't think was necessarily characterized as well as it should have been and I should have done it also is talking about you know there's people who are watching porn either they're watching it on and off all day long they're watching it every night Or there's some people who watch porn for hours every day. So this is how we know it's addictive. And there is a definition to addiction. And I joked about it. I said, you know, you don't even have to know what the six check marks are on that list of if you're addicted to porn or not. Just try to quit. and see what happens. That's all you have to do. Then you know you need it. Well, there's qualifiers to the definition of addiction. And then I tell people, just try to stop watching. You don't even have to like tick the six boxes. And the discussion ensued, you know, porn even one time a month is shown to have negative effects. So this is big, real stuff. It's a compulsion to masturbation. Most people are addicted to masturbation who have had a porn habit. They need masturbation in a way that other people don't. So, If you have a compulsive masturbation habit, there are not healthy benefits. The number one thing that people talk about is prostate cancer. And there's a study that shows people who compulsively masturbate actually have less healthy prostates as they age. And that prostate cancer thing is the world's oldest excuse for people who have compulsive masturbation. No, actually, I've looked into the research and people who compulsively masturbate have less That's the out for people who want to masturbate. testosterone, depleting the prostate's ability to work well. It's a depletion behavior. It's a male performer. He likened it to a gambling addiction. And I agreed with him. Gambling addiction is a behavioral addiction. But then I went on to talk about how, you know, you can give up gambling. If you struggle with gambling, you go, I'm not going to gamble anymore. Where I more likened porn addiction to an eating disorder. The mechanisms in the brain are pretty similar in that, you know, you have to eat. It is a biological process that keeps you alive. Most people want to have sexuality and they need it. It's evolutionarily, it is in there for them to have sex with a partner. Porn is not sex with a partner. It's artificial. It's high levels of dopamine, super normal stimulus, using a screen and yourself. It is not sex. People often confuse porn itself as sex. It's not. Not at all. Sex with a partner evolutionarily so that we procreate and that we pair bond. So I agreed with the male porn performer and I likened it to an eating disorder where you go back to the chocolate cake with the red and the blue and the yellow dye. So science shows those dyes are laden with chemicals and they are harmful to you. So when you have a compulsion to keep eating a giant sheet cake in your basement by yourself, when you take the sexuality out of it, it becomes clear that is a behavioral addiction, compulsion. If a person was hiding in secret, eating chocolate cakes with chemicals all the time, somebody would be concerned about them because that's very unhealthy. That is what I like in porn too, because people are hiding their behavior. It is proven to be bad for them. And we know from the science that it causes erectile dysfunction. It destroys relationships. It's at the core of mental and physical health issues. So, and it's highly addictive. We know this. So I liken it to an eating disorder. All of the performers think that masturbation is fine. The one female performer actually said that she thinks masturbation is really good to enhance her sacral chakra. Creative energy within your sacral chakra. And chakras are actually energy centers in your body that are aligned with where there's more nerve energy. But when you overstimulate a chakra, then they're no longer balanced. Sacral chakra is down near the sex organs and balanced. I pointed out that chakras, although we think of them as kind of fufu energy, they're actually linked to neurological energy as energy centers where there's neurons. And that if you're overstimulating one chakra, you become imbalanced in your nervous system and the other chakras. And she really didn't have much to say about that. But that we know is an overstimulation. So she says that she goes to masturbation to enhance her creativity. Now, from what I've already told you, you already know she thinks she's enhancing her creativity. Bye. Bye. Bye. without masturbation, you actually can stay in flow state with healthy circadian rhythms. If you stay away from masturbation, masturbation, and especially compulsive masturbation, it's swinging your brain in the pendulum effect, wired, then tired, wired, tired. Eventually that strain brain tips over into drained brain. What I've studied and I've now shown that this is the brain pattern of porn addiction and erectile dysfunction from porn addiction. Porn also distorts the arousal template. So it makes you want to go back to an experience in your real life, that which you have been consuming. And we know there's an increase in punching and slapping and choking and violent acts. So if you're out there and you're watching this, and those are the things that you find arousing, those are hypersexuality. And One thing that I was thinking when I was talking with the performers is that, you know, they're all looking at this whole thing from a hyper-sexualized view. And, you know, going back to the idea of hyper-sexuality, then it accidentally and inadvertently puts you in a hyper-sexual place where, you know, then... It feels empowering to you, but it might not necessarily be balanced. There is a funny story of the goldfish. There's a goldfish that's in a goldfish bowl and he's swimming around in the water. And another goldfish comes and sits on the rim and he says, hey, Mac, how's the water? And the first fish who's swimming around He says to the one sitting on the rim, what's water? If you've been in a hypersexualized system for so long, you don't even know you're swimming around in the water. That's what happens to hypersexualized people. The porn performers clearly are hypersexualized. That is their living. They're making money off of it. They are in it to win it. If you've been consuming porn for a long time, You're likely in the water and you don't even know how it feels anymore. Okay, so we did agree in this discussion on masturbation. The male porn performer, he asked the question to me that if his girlfriend is performing masturbation on him, his real girlfriend within the context of a sexual experience is that bad. And I retorted, no, it's in the sexual garden. Whatever two people agree on, as long as it's healthy, it's not hurting anybody, it's not objectifying anybody, and it's a shared experience, then let your freak flag fly is what I always say. Enjoy your partner in a healthy way that respects each other. Back to the definition of healthy sexuality. He didn't totally know what to say about that. He was a little stumped, not expecting me to say that, but that's the truth. What you do within the context of your sexual relationship in a mutually enjoyable and pleasurable way with connection that's the happiness trifecta so you know that's not compulsive masturbation where you're sneaking off to masturbate because you just saw somebody walk by and it triggered a dopamine release in your brain those are different so be aware of that and try to enhance your creativity in healthy ways recognize if you hear that you need to masturbate for your prostate think about this this whole discussion on the middle ground The reason I wanted to do it is to invoke more thought about your intimacy, your sexuality, and your purpose. So think about that one, okay? Think about all the time that you're masturbating, you're linking yourself to yourself. And if you're linked to yourself, there might not be room for anybody else. Okay, follow me through to the next section in this series because the next prompt was porn disrupts loyalty in relationships. Let's break it down.