A recent study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior examined the impact of a week-long period of abstaining from pornography use on withdrawal symptoms experienced by regular pornography users, finding no effect.
Withdrawal refers to the psychological and physical symptoms that arise when one discontinues using a substance or engaging in a behavior they have developed a dependence for. Common symptoms include depressed mood, anxiety, irritability, and insomnia.
With growing access to the internet and digital technologies across the globe, pornography consumption has become highly prevalent, especially in the developed world, with roughly 47% of men and 16% of women in the United States reporting using pornography over the past year. Thus, studying the negative side effects of regular pornography use has piqued the interest of psychologists.
In this work, David P. Fernandez and colleagues examined the effects of abstaining from pornography to shed light on the potential consequences of discontinuing pornography use among individuals who engage with it regularly.
A total of 176 psychology undergraduate students at a university in Malaysia were included in this study. Participants had to be at least 18 years old, and regular pornography users. This was defined as having watched pornography at least 3 times a week in the 4 weeks leading up to the study. The researchers reasoned that defining “regular” use as such would provide a minimum frequency that would render 7 days of abstinence a significant enough deprivation from pornography use to induce withdrawal symptoms.
Participants were randomly assigned to either the abstinence or control group. They completed a daily survey that assessed daily frequency/duration of sexual behavior, abstinence effort, craving, positive and negative affect, and withdrawal symptoms. Baseline data, alongside demographic information, was also collected in order to see how much participants deviated on the outcome measures of interest following 7 days of abstinence from pornography.
The researchers found no support for their predictions. Whether participants were assigned to the abstinence or control group made no difference on their craving, negative or positive affect, or withdrawal symptoms during the experimental period, when accounting for baseline scores. As well, abstaining from pornography did not disproportionately impact participants with higher levels of problematic pornography use.
However, there was some evidence that highly problematic use alongside high frequency of pornography consumption was associated with stronger effects of craving when participants’ past 4-week frequency of pornography use reached the threshold of daily use.
A limitation to this work is that 64% of the sample was female. Given men generally have higher sex drives and use pornography more so than women, it may be that these results do not generalize across both sexes.
The researchers write, “Future studies could consider restricting inclusion criteria to just male participants to examine whether abstinence effects manifest in a male-only sample or run adequately powered studies with both genders included (but with narrower inclusion criteria for baseline [frequency of pornography use; e.g., ≥ six times a week]) to investigate potential varying abstinence effects by gender, if any.”
The study, “Effects of a 7‑Day Pornography Abstinence Period on Withdrawal‑Related Symptoms in Regular Pornography Users: A Randomized Controlled Study”, was authored by David P. Fernandez, Daria J. Kuss, Lucy V. Justice, Elaine F. Fernandez, and Mark D. Griffiths.
