Perceived Addiction To Porn Is More Harmful Than Porn Use Itself

It doesn’t matter how often you watch porn. What matters is whether or not you think you have an uncontrollable problem, according to a recent study published in the Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, a peer-reviewed journal. Perceived addiction to X-rated material is a better predictor of psychological distress than pornography use itself, the study found.

Researchers who conducted the study set out to explore the relationship between watching pornography and personal well-being. First, they surveyed more than 700 porn-watching adults about their relationship to explicit adult material, and found that participants’ beliefs that they had porn addictions significantly predicted bad feelings including anger, anxiety, depression and stress. (That held true even when researchers controlled for personality traits that might underlie both perceived addiction and psychological distress.) Pornography use itself only had a weak association with anger.

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