Too Much Porn

Here’s How to Work out If You’re Watching Too Much Porn

by
(Last Updated On: June 29, 2019)

One of the questions that you might ask is “do I watch too much porn?” With this question, you might be trying to work out if you should be worried about how many hours of porn you watch. I can understand your concern about this, but you might be asking the wrong question.

Too Much Porn

Image credit © wittayayut - Bigstockphoto.com

Too much porn? – the variable standard

Dr. Nicole Krause reports that some men worry if their pornography use is a couple of times a week. Certainly, other men have expressed concern about pornography use which is even more infrequent than that. However, at the other end of the spectrum, there are men who give hours of the day – every day – to watching pornography. With these wide ranges of experience, how can you know if your pornography use is a problematic level?

Further, we probably should consider our other behaviours. For example, Dr Krause also mentions that average person watches television for about five hours per day per person. This raises the question: if you were watching an hour of porn a day and five hours of television a day, it would be reasonable to wonder which was the bigger problem.

The ultimate test

Ultimately, the best way to find out if your pornography use is excessive is to see if it’s causing problems in your life. For some men, the idea of using pornography is so unwelcome that using pornography even once or twice a year would be too much. For them, using pornography at all just doesn’t fit with the person that they want to be. On the other hand, there are people who use pornography much more often than and who are comfortable with it, and find that it doesn’t disrupt their life at all.

 

Limits of the addiction perspective

We need to be careful when we apply insights from what we might think as equivalent areas. For instance, many believe that pornography use is an addiction. If that was true – and it’s a questionable assumption that I’ll cover in another blog post – then addiction literature is going to be broadly relevant to pornography use as well. However, for now it can be valuable to take the Alcoholics Anonymous view on the use of alcohol; that is, alcohol is a problem for an individual if it makes their life unmanageable. Similarly, if porn makes your life unmanageable, then you probably watch too much porn.

 

Problem owenership

In this article I’ve talked about your pornography use being a problem in your life. That’s not the same thing as your pornography use being a problem in your partner’s life. Naturally, your quality of life is closely connected with your partner’s quality of life. However, we shouldn’t automatically assume that the best solution to the problems in your partner’s life necessarily involve you making changes. It might, but it also might not.

To summarise, it’s not how much pornography you watch. Rather, it’s the effect that your pornography use has on your life that’ll tell you if it’s problematic or not. If you feel the that porn is problematic for you, I offer individual counselling and couples counselling in Richmond in Sunbury.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Now, read about Stepping Forwards into a Life without Pornography.

– Tim Hill

The following two tabs change content below.

Tim Hill

I do this work because I believe that with the right help and support, people change – I see it all the time. Whether you are battling something big or small, I believe that change is possible even when you don’t know how to change, when things seem hopeless or when the odds are stacked against you