Mental Health

A man I work with hit eighteen days last month and sent me a screenshot of the counter like a trophy. Two nights later it was back to zero, and the next text was a different man entirely: maybe I am just broken.

He is not broken. He was keeping score of the wrong number.

Compulsive porn use is not a frequency problem you solve by counting days. It is a feeling problem, and the count quietly hides the thing actually driving it. Your brain learned a pathway to the fastest relief in the room, and consistent with what we understand about how the brain adapts, that pathway can be redirected. That is the premise of the work I do with men, and the research this year keeps saying the same thing, in four different voices. After more than 4,100 sessions with over 2,400 men, the pattern is consistent: the men who get free are never the ones who counted the longest. They are the ones who finally stopped counting and started listening.

Why does the urge get worse when you try to stop?

Most men walk in asking the same question: if I really want to quit, why does it feel harder the moment I try? The urge is not random. It is a learned response to a feeling, and the moment you take away the response without addressing the feeling, the feeling gets louder. That is not weakness. That is a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do. The men I work with are almost always stronger than the story they tell about themselves, and recognizing this mechanism is the first step out.

Is compulsive porn use really about how much you watch?

A nationally representative US study published this year in Archives of Sexual Behavior found that compulsive porn use and psychological distress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness, are what the authors call trait-like partners. They do not line up as one clean cause and one clean effect, and the research does not tell us which comes first. They travel together. And the two sharpest markers were not how much a man watched. They were whether he felt lonely around his use and distress around it. Consistent with the emerging evidence, the question that matters is not how many days you string together. It is what state you keep reaching into the screen from.

Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2026. The two sharpest markers were emotional, not behavioral.

Why the pain, not why the habit

Gabor Mate spent his career with the hardest addictions, and one line of his has stayed with me for years: the question is never why the addiction, it is why the pain. Addictions, he writes, always originate in pain, and you cannot understand one without asking what relief it provides. The screen is not the disease. It is the painkiller. You can count clean days for a month, but if you never ask what the painkiller was for, the engine underneath keeps running and the count is just a measure of how long you white-knuckled it. That is why I built ARISE around three layers, the neurological, the emotional, and the relational, because each one is a different doorway into the pain the screen is medicating.

Compulsive use and distress travel together. The day-count touches only the screen step and leaves the rest of the loop turning.

Does relapsing mean you failed?

Here is the part the streak culture will not tell you. A 2026 scoping review in Sexual Medicine Reviews looked at the best available treatments for compulsive porn use and reached a blunt conclusion: there is still no standardized, evidence-based protocol, and not one study even measured complete abstinence as the outcome. Sit with that. The serious research on this does not treat a flawless streak as the goal, because that is not how a regulated behavior changes. So a slip is not proof you are broken. It is information. It tells you which feeling, which hour, which trigger still owns you, and that is something you can actually work with. Shame is not.

What works instead of counting days?

None of the men I have watched get free did it by counting. They did it by working the feeling the screen was there to numb.

Be honest about severity first, because this part costs me clients to say. If your use is light and recent, you may not need me at all, and you should run the move below before you pay anyone. If it is already running your nights, and especially if you are noticing that anxiety, depression, or sleep are affected, that is when structured help earns its place, and a professional evaluation for anything else traveling with it is always appropriate.

The move you can do tonight does not fight the urge. The next time it climbs, before you reach, name the feeling underneath it, out loud or on paper: am I lonely, anxious, bored, tired, ashamed? You are not trying to win a standoff. You are answering Mate’s question in real time, why the pain, so you can meet the feeling instead of medicating it. The counter never once asked you that. This does, and it is the actual work.

What is this actually costing you?

I sat across from a man last year, successful by every external measure, who said the truest thing I heard all month: I am not even avoiding people anymore. I just stopped wanting them. That is the cost most men do not say out loud. It was never a number on a screen. It is that the screen is the one connection that asks nothing of you, and the more you lean on it, the more the real thing, the kind that is awkward and uncertain and asks you to show up, starts to feel like too much. A lot of capable men are quietly deciding it is not worth the price. You do not just want to stop a behavior. You want the appetite for real connection back, and the nerve to pay for it. That is the prize, and I have watched ordinary men reach it, not by counting and not because anyone shamed them, but because they finally treated the feeling instead of the frequency.

If this is hitting close to home

The most useful next step is not a sales pitch. It is a short, completely private self-assessment built around those three layers I mentioned: the neurological, the emotional, and the relational. It shows you which one is actually driving your pattern, so you stop guessing and start working the right thing. We do not do shame and we do not count streaks. We work how the brain and the feeling underneath it actually operate.

Most men have one dominant layer. The free assessment shows you yours in three minutes.

FAQ

Should I stop counting days? Counting can give you early structure, but the research does not treat abstinence as the goal, and the count quietly hides the emotional driver. Track the feeling you use inside, not only the streak.

Does a relapse mean I failed? No. It is data about which state still drives the reach, and that is exactly what you build the next step on.

Is compulsive porn use really tied to loneliness and anxiety? Yes. A 2026 nationally representative study found that compulsive use and distress are trait-like partners that travel together, with loneliness around use as a key marker.

When should I get professional help? If your use is running your nights, affecting your sleep, your relationships, or your ability to focus, a structured program can do what willpower alone cannot. The free assessment is a good first step.

About the author

Jeffrey Ly holds an M.A. in Clinical Psychology with Marriage and Family Therapy training and has conducted 4,100+ sessions with 2,400+ men. He is a clinical consultant, not a licensed therapist, and ARISE is training and education, not therapy or medical care.

Connect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn

Many of the successful men I work with describe the same strange sequence. Doctors, founders, men running solid businesses. A real win lands, a strong quarter, a promotion, a deal that finally closed. A few people reach out to say well done. Then the night comes, and somewhere after the last message goes quiet, they end up alone with a screen into the early hours.

The bigger the day, the emptier the night that follows. Most of them cannot explain it, because on paper it was a good day, the kind they’d worked hard to earn.

That is the pattern I see constantly in high-functioning men: the quiet link between loneliness and porn, where the emptiest nights tend to follow the most successful days. I want to take the mystery out of it, because the success and the screen are not a contradiction. They are the same story.

Here is what I tell every man I work with: this is not a willpower problem, and you are not weak. Your brain learned to do something, and brains can learn the opposite. That is the whole premise of the work.

Three Quarters of a Million Men, One Quiet Problem

A 2026 survey of more than 7,000 single men aged 18 to 35 in New York, reported across regional outlets, found that half had no female friends at all. Nearly three out of four who were not using dating apps said they had simply stopped trying to find a partner. Most said their social lives had moved almost entirely onto screens. I will be straight about the sourcing: that figure comes from a regional news report of the survey, not a peer-reviewed paper, so I hold it more loosely than the clinical research below.

That is an estimated 761,000 men in a single state whose most consistent companionship arrives through a glowing rectangle. And it is not an outlier: the Pew Research Center documented the same national retreat in 2025, with men reporting fewer close friendships than two decades ago. The coverage called it a loneliness epidemic and stopped there, at the level of a feeling. But loneliness stopped being just a feeling the moment researchers started measuring what it does to the body.

Loneliness Is Not a Mood. It’s a Medical Event.

In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory, with the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad as lead author, reframing loneliness as a public health threat on the order of smoking. The mortality impact of chronic disconnection is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. It raises the risk of premature death by roughly 26%, heart disease by 29%, and stroke by 32%.

Increased risk associated with chronic loneliness. Source: U.S. Surgeon General Advisory, 2023.

Sit with those numbers, because they tell you loneliness isn’t soft. It’s a sustained biological stress state that damages the body the way a pack-a-day habit does. The same advisory found that in 2020 the average American spent about 20 minutes a day in person with friends, down from 60 minutes two decades earlier. Among people aged 15 to 24, that in-person time dropped nearly 70%. An entire generation has been quietly starved of the thing its nervous system needs most.

Among 15- to 24-year-olds the drop was nearly 70%. Source: U.S. Surgeon General Advisory, 2023.

And a nervous system in that kind of deprivation does not sit quietly and wait. It goes hunting for relief, and it reaches for whatever delivers the strongest, fastest signal.

Why the Screen Wins When You’re Starving

When you’re genuinely connected to people, ordinary moments produce enough dopamine to keep you steady. A real conversation. A hand on your shoulder. Someone laughing at the thing you said. Your reward system stays calibrated to human-scale pleasures, and that’s enough.

Strip those connections away and the most efficient dopamine source ever engineered is sitting in your pocket. Pornography delivers a spike that dwarfs anything an ordinary interaction provides: unlimited novelty, instant access, zero risk of rejection. A brain starved of real reward and offered synthetic reward on tap does the logical thing. It rewires to prefer the screen. Not because the screen is better, but because it’s louder.

The neuroscientist Kent Berridge spent years on this at the University of Michigan, and his incentive-sensitization research with Terry Robinson reframes the whole trap. There is a difference between wanting something and liking it, and the two run on different brain systems. The wanting system, driven by dopamine, can crave a reward with overwhelming force long after the liking system has stopped enjoying it. That is the state most men are in by the time they reach me. They do not even like what they are watching. Their brain just wants it, and wanting is the harder of the two to break.

How Loneliness and Porn Feed Each Other

A study of 1,247 people by Butler and colleagues, published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy in 2018, modeled pornography use and loneliness as predictors of each other and found a significant link in both directions. Lonely men are more likely to develop compulsive screen patterns, and those patterns then deepen the loneliness, because every hour in synthetic reward recalibrates the brain so real connection registers a little fainter the next day. Eye contact starts to feel like effort. A conversation at a party feels flat next to the intensity of the night before. So he withdraws, which makes him lonelier, which sends him back. The loop tightens one notch at a time.

Each turn of the loop makes real connection register a little fainter and the screen a little louder.

Dr. Kevin Skinner, a co-author of that same study and the author of Treating Pornography Addiction, names the endpoint plainly: a new kind of loneliness, the loneliness of a man whose relationships are increasingly with images instead of people. He is not choosing screens over people. His brain has quietly stopped registering people as the better option.

It does not stay in the mind, either. When the brain gets conditioned to screen-level intensity, the body follows. A 2021 study in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance of 3,419 men aged 18 to 35 found that 21.48% of the sexually active ones already had some degree of erectile dysfunction, climbing with more problematic pornography use. The wider trend is real too: a 2025 narrative review of erectile dysfunction in young men reports psychogenic ED in men under 40 rising to somewhere between 14 and 28%, up sharply from the single digits a generation ago. These are men in their twenties whose bodies no longer answer a partner the way they answer a screen.

What Actually Breaks It (and One Thing You Can Try Tonight)

None of the men I’ve watched get free did it on willpower. White-knuckling fails because it fights a brain-state problem with discipline. Here’s the honest part, the part that costs me a client: if your severity isn’t high, it usually isn’t worth bringing in a professional yet, and if it’s already severe, where the isolation runs deep and it’s draining the rest of your life, that’s exactly when it is.

For everyone in between, the real question is whether you’d rather not gamble on it, because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound, sometimes a ton, of cure later, and the men who deal with a small problem early are the ones who almost never let it grow into a large one. If your isolation is mild and recent, you may be able to move the needle yourself with two changes, and I’d rather you try them first.

The first is connection so small it feels pointless. Not a new best friend by Friday. A real exchange with the guy at the coffee counter. One text to someone you’ve been avoiding. Showing up once a week to anything where bodies share a room. The bar is deliberately low, because the brain rebuilds reward pathways through repetition, not intensity. Twenty small reps beat one grand gesture.

The second you can do tonight. At 10pm, depleted, boredom and loneliness and stress all feel identical, and the hand moves toward the phone on autopilot. Before you pick it up after eight at night, pause five seconds and ask one question: what am I actually feeling right now? Five seconds. It interrupts a loop that’s run unchallenged for years, and that interruption is where change starts to live.

If you try those for a few weeks and the pull is still running your evenings, that’s the signal the pattern is deeper than circumstance, and that’s the point where working with someone who understands the mechanism actually earns its place. Not before.

What This Pattern Means for Successful Men

The New York study made headlines because 761,000 is a frightening number. But the number was never the story. The story is that a generation of men has relocated its inner life onto screens, and the high-functioning men I work with are among them. The ones who come out of it do not get there because anyone shamed them, and not because they found hidden discipline. They get there because they finally understood that the silence after the celebration wasn’t a character flaw. It was a nervous system that had never learned another way to be filled. Once a man can see that mechanism, he can build something better around it.

If this is hitting close, the most useful next step is not a sales pitch. It is a 3-minute self-assessment built around what I call the three layers: the neurological, the emotional, and the relational. It shows you which one is actually driving your pattern, so you are not guessing. We do not do shame and we do not do streaks. We do how the brain actually works. Across more than 4,100 clinical sessions, the men who name their layer are the ones who stop guessing and start changing it.

Across more than 4,100 clinical sessions, the men who name the pattern are the ones who stop guessing and start changing it.

About the Author

Jeffrey holds an M.A. in Clinical Psychology and Marriage & Family Therapy and is the founder of ARISE. Over more than 4,100 clinical sessions, he has helped high-achieving men overcome compulsive porn use and rebuild the connection it quietly eroded. His work combines neuroscience, clinical psychology, and practical behavioral strategy.