This scientist doesn’t speak in terms of addiction-related changes, but he describes how learning changes the brain. Addiction is pathological learning. This exchange appeared on Reddit.com under “AskScience.”
In /r/nofap there’s a move to ‘reboot’ one’s overstimulated brain to restore the sensitivity to sexual arousal. (The whole mechanism is described at www.yourbrainonporn.com) However there is a period during this abstinence called ‘flatlining’ where you have little to no libido, and it happens to pretty much all the guys who do it. For some there’s only one flatlining period, for others there are more. For some it lasts days, for others months.
My question is why does this happen? I would have expected that abstaining from these things would increase libido, so I’m wondering about the scientific explanation for this (either physical/chemical or mental). Thanks.
Reply
I think the reason we might assume libido to increase is because we intuitively accept the idea that our behavior is controlled by basic drives (hunger, sex, etc) and that we work to return these levels to some kind of homeostasis. This is essentially what the psychoanalysts argued with their “steam engine” theory of anger (also known as ‘catharsis theory’), in that you have to “let off steam” sometimes so that you don’t take it out on other people and so you can get it under control.
Turns out, these ideas of behavior aren’t very accurate. Drive theory turned out to be a very poor explanation for behavior, and it reached the point where to explain behavior, we had to keep creating new “drives” like “money drives” and “exercise drives” etc. It became unscientific, unparsimonious, and was dropped from science (a good discussion can be found in Mazur’s “Learning and Behavior“). This isn’t to say that there aren’t foundational or basic biological elements which influence, direct, or control certain behaviors, but just that thinking of them in terms of “drives” or us trying to “satisfying urges” doesn’t explain behavior very well.
Whilst it may make sense to us on an everyday level to believe that “venting” can relieve an urge to do something, the actual fact is that the opposite occurs. What happens is that standard behavioral laws still apply to our behavior; that is, if the consequence of an action is pleasurable, then we are more likely to repeat it (operant conditioning). So instead of relieving our urges, we actually start to strengthen these associations and make them more likely to occur again in the future. This means that if we’re angry and we go beat up a punching bag for 30 minutes, our anger will increase and we will be more likely to snap at people.
The same principle applies to all behaviors, and so it should apply in the case of abstaining from sexual gratification. When you abstain, you are not only reversing the effects of habituation on sensitivity, but you’re also putting yourself through a kind of “extinction procedure” where you are decreasing a behavior (in this case the “urge” or “libido”) by removing the positive reinforcement that comes along with it.
And then there’s the fact that you’re breaking a number of behavioral chains and sequences by abstaining – so previously turning on your computer late at night might have led to a certain activity, now all it signifies is that you’re browsing reddit or ebay or something. These cues that trigger behaviors are discriminative stimuli, and just like people who try to quit smoking but find it more difficult to resist when they’re drinking (because they used to do the two together), you can get the same thing with activities like masturbation. Changing your behaviors can break these behavioral chains, which in part account for the associated feelings of arousal and our libido.
tl;dr: Basic behavioral mechanisms can account (at least in part) for the phenomenon you described – operant conditioning, habituation, extinction, etc.
Original poster (again)
Interesting, do you imagine the pleasurable stimulus (libido in this case) would settle a new lower baseline permanently, or would it eventually go back to original levels after the body has become ‘accustomed’ to the new sensitivity?
Reply
Well I have no evidence or research to back this up, but I would have assumed that it would be temporary – at least for most people. This is due to the simple fact that 1) there are many, many cues which can trigger a behavior that can be difficult to get rid of for ingrained patterns (which is why it’s hard to shake bad habits), and 2) genital stimulation generally feels pretty good, so even when you’re not actively engaging in masturbation, there’s still touching from cleaning genitals in the shower, accidental effects of fabrics rubbing against them, for guys there are erections from arousing visual stimuli, etc, and all this will usually make people want to keep doing it rather than abstain completely.
Whether it returns to the “original levels” or not is dependent on the consequences of the behavior. Different patterns of reinforcement whilst re-creating similar behavioral sequences may result in it being less frequent, or perhaps even more frequent.
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