Why do I want porn when I'm stressed or after a bad day?

Start with the unremarkable part. People eat, drink, run, scroll, phone a friend and put the television on to shift how they feel, and porn is on that list for plenty of people who have no problem with it at all. Doing something because it changes your state is not evidence of anything by itself.

The reason it turns up in the research is definitional rather than dramatic. The Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale measures problematic use through six components — salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict and relapse — so "I use it to relieve bad feelings" is part of what the field's main instrument treats problematic use as consisting of. Two hedges belong with that. Not every instrument in the field is built that way. And a single component is not a diagnosis of anything; it is one of six things a questionnaire asks about.

What nobody has established is the causal story people usually want here. There is no study showing that stress causes porn use, that porn is an effective stress treatment, or that the relief is larger than it would be from something else that works. What is documented is that problematic use tracks distress far better than frequency does: among people who use frequently, the group reporting no distress and the group reporting impaired control and distress are distinguishable, and it is the second group that differs on depressive symptoms and self-esteem. Which way that runs has not been settled either.

The popular explanation is worth flagging as a teaching model rather than a finding. Cue, craving, behaviour, relief — with the relief reinforcing the cue — comes from behaviour-change writing, and whether craving is a necessary stage is exactly the contested part. The narrower thing the habit science supports is duller and more useful: a response repeated in a stable context gets strengthened by the repetition, until the context alone is enough to produce it. If bad days have reliably ended the same way, in the same room, on the same device, then the bad day itself has become part of the cue.

Two consequences follow, and neither of them is "try harder at eleven at night".

• Name the state, not just the trigger. Stress, anger after a row, flatness after a pointless day, boredom and loneliness are different jobs and they take different answers. Something that shifts your physical state — a walk, ten hard minutes, a shower, slow breathing — tends to answer stress, because physical states respond to physical inputs rather than to talking yourself down. It does not answer loneliness, which is why press-ups famously fail there.
• If the job is avoidance, the replacement is the thing you are avoiding. Ten minutes on the task you are dodging often kills the urge outright, because the urge was about the task. This is the least appealing item on the list and the one that works most reliably.

None of this requires you to first decide whether your use is a problem. If you want a reading on that, the honest test is distress, control and cost rather than a number of times per week. But knowing what the behaviour is for is worth having either way, because a habit that is doing a job does not disappear when you remove it. It leaves the job undone, and the job comes back — usually on the next bad day, at about the same hour.

Where this comes from

Read the full lesson: Give the loop something else to do →