When we partake in pornography, many times we lose sleep. How many of us have gotten out of bed late at night for whatever reason just to turn the PC on (even if for honorable reasons) and then sit for hours on end clicking away through various pornography sites? Some of us, may only click briefly and because of our guilty conscience we slip back into bed only to lie there with our mind racing. How many of us have lied in bed thinking about the days events either being disgusted, or angry, or even feeling hatred toward ourselves or feeling shame, guilt and even desparation, feeling like there is no hope? We lie there trying to go to sleep, but we can’t. Instead we find ourselves charged with a slew of emotional energy (or rather chaos). And, so what do we do? Some of us, continue to lie there until morning without any sleep while others can drift into a brief nap (that seems to only make us more tired). And then others of us, rationalizing even more, simply get up and act out. We turn the computer on again with a range of thoughts like “Well I’ve already messed up today, why stop now?” or “It didn’t make me sleepy the first time, but maybe it will help me go to sleep now?” So do the same thing, again.
We all know that men have a tendency to become sleepy after sexual intercourse; however, studies show that this is not the case with pornography or masturbation.
Prolactin…explains why men are sleepier after intercourse than after masturbation. For unknown reasons, intercourse orgasms release four times more prolactin than masturbatory orgasms, according to a recent study (Source).
So the idea that “if I masturbate, it will help me fall asleep” is actually a misnomer and a myth. Instead, many times the person is woken up even more, which can be quite dangerous. Studies have recently shown that it is worse to have a lack of sleep than to drink alcohol.
After 17-19 hours without sleep, corresponding to 10:30 pm and 1:00 am after waking at 6 am, performance on some tests was equivalent or worse than that at a BAC [Blood Alcohol Content] of 0.05%. Response speeds were up to 50% slower for some tests and accuracy measures were significantly poorer than at this level of alcohol…After longer periods without sleep, performance reached levels equivalent to the maximum alcohol dose given to subjects (BAC of 0.1%). (Source).Â
In In the Shadows of the Net: Breaking Free of Compulsive Online Sexual Behavior, Patrick Carnes begins the book with addicts’ stories of how they forsaked sleep to engage in online sexual behavior. Later, he says, “there is a quality of desparation that interferes with work, relaxation, and even sleep” (49). In the same book, Dr. Carnes speaks about how someone can enter an online trance-like state similar to those who enter a gaming trance, playing games hours on end thinking that only minutes have passed (4, 13, 18, 48-50, 105). If someone engages in pornography in the late night, then this surely costs someone sleep!
Then addicts enter this cycle, trigger leads to pornography which leads to less sleep which leads to being tired, which is often translated into a trigger, which then leads to more pornography, and so on. For most porn addicts, boredom, stress, and fatigue (tiredness) are triggers for their addiction.
Beyond all this, your spouse (let’s assume a wife for argument sake) also loses sleep. She lies awake thinking about what’s happened, why it’s happened, what she could have done differently, why she isn’t enough, etc. etc. Beyond her mind racing as she lies in bed next to you (or maybe in another room or altogether another place), she has dreams, bad dreams. They usually consist of the porn addict husband cheating on her in front of her with women she knows and women she doesn’t know, both unknown women, prostitutes, or even women you have mentioned that she hasn’t met. Arterburn, Stoeker, and Yorkey talk about this in Every Heart Restored. This is not some strange phenomenon. Instead it is God working and not allowing you to get away with it. This is a blessing in disguise. God wants to draw us near to him, even if that means that we must lose everything; he is after all the giver of everything good. But more on this later.
Are you tired of losing sleep? Then let this be an additional motivation for you and your recovery. I know it helps motivate me (because I LOVE SLEEP!). Let’s don’t allow pornography steal sleep from us anymore!
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