The Five Ways That Porn Is Making You a Lesser Man

I've spent more than two decades in ministry. I also train five mornings a week, I watch what I eat, and I guard my sleep. I've never seen those two things as being in conflict. You get one body. How you treat it says a lot about how you'll treat everything else you've been given.

So I want to talk about something that most of the men in my church are dealing with, and almost none of them will bring up. Pornography.

I'm not writing this to shame you. I've sat across the desk from hundreds of men. Husbands, fathers, young men, elders. I've heard the same story so many times I could finish their sentences. And I've watched, up close, what this habit does to a man over years. I've also watched what happens when he finally stops.

Here are the five ways I've seen it make men smaller than they were meant to be.

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The first wayIt dulls you.

Your brain has a reward system built for real life. A hard day's work. A good meal. A workout that leaves you shaking. Your wife's laugh. Porn floods that system with a level of stimulation that nothing in your actual life can compete with, and it does it on demand, endlessly.

The researchers call it desensitisation. I call it what I see in a man's eyes. The things that used to move him don't move him the way they used to. He's not depressed, exactly. He's just flat. And he can't work out why the life in front of him feels grey.

The second wayIt drains your drive.

Drive is a finite thing. The ambition to build something, to pursue a woman properly, to get up and train, to lead. Men who use porn heavily consistently tell me the same thing: they feel like they have nothing left in the tank. Not physically tired. Emptied out.

And then I hear from the same men a few months after they quit. The word they use most often is "hungry." They want things again. They're irritable in a good way. They've got an edge back. That edge was always there. It was just being spent in a dark room on something that gave nothing back.

The third wayIt isolates you.

A habit you have to hide changes how you carry yourself. You angle the phone away. You clear the history. You have a version of yourself you show your wife, your friends, your brothers at church, and another version that only exists at one in the morning.

That gap is exhausting to maintain. So men pull back. They get quieter in the small group. They stop looking their wife in the eye for as long. They tell themselves they're just tired. What's actually happening is that shame is doing what shame always does: it pushes a man away from the exact people who could help him.

Shame doesn't drive men to change. It drives them into hiding. And hiding is where this habit thrives.

The fourth wayIt weakens you where it counts.

I'll be blunt, because nobody else will be. I have had more than one young, healthy man in his twenties sit in my office and admit that he struggles to perform with his own wife. These are men who lift, who run, who are in the best physical shape of their lives. Counsellors and physicians who work with men report the same pattern, and it has a name now.

The body follows the brain. If the brain has been trained to respond to a screen, a real woman in a real bedroom can start to feel like not enough. That's not a physical failure. It's a trained one. And what's been trained can be untrained, but only once the screen is out of the picture.

The fifth wayIt splits you in two.

The word integrity comes from the same root as integer. A whole number. Undivided. A man of integrity is the same man at 10am in the boardroom, at 6pm at the dinner table and at 1am with his phone in his hand.

Porn makes that impossible. You end up living as two men, and the one you don't show anyone is quietly running the show. Every man I've ever counselled through this has said the same thing, in one form or another: "I just want to be one person again."

What I tell the men who come to my office

Here's what I've learned after twenty-two years of these conversations. Willpower isn't enough. Not because you're weak, but because of when the fight happens. It happens at midnight, alone, tired, with a device in your hand that can put anything in front of you in three seconds. No man wins that fight consistently. I certainly wouldn't.

So I tell them: stop trying to win the fight. Take the fight off the table.

Make the decision once, in daylight, when you're clear-headed and you mean it. Then put something in place that holds the line for you at 1am, when you don't.

That's why the tool I recommend to every man who asks is HardStop.

Being a man of God and being a healthy man are not two different projects. Discipline is discipline. The man who decides what goes into his body is the same man who decides what goes into his mind.

You don't have to fix everything today. You have to make one decision, while it's still daylight.

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This article reflects the author's personal experience and opinions and is not medical advice. HardStop is a content-blocking service and is not a substitute for professional counselling. If you are struggling, speak to a doctor, counsellor or trusted pastor.