Hi there, person who saw NoFap® on Showtime’s Dark Net! We’re happy that you sought us out, and this page is here to welcome you to the concepts presented on the show, along with resources for getting the help that you might need.

What is NoFap?

NoFap® is a comprehensive community-based porn recovery website. We offer all the tools our users need to connect with a supportive community of individuals determined to quit porn use and free themselves from compulsive sexual behaviors. With our website, forums, articles and apps, NoFap helps our users overcome their sexual addictions so they can heal from porn-induced sexual dysfunctions, improve their relationships, and ultimately live their most fulfilling lives.

• Click here to learn more about NoFap!
• Click here to meet the team that makes it all happen!
• Click here to join the NoFap community!

What is porn addiction?

NoFap’s users often use the phrase “porn addiction.”  What exactly do we mean by that?

Porn addiction is a process whereby the brain learns to prefer pornography over real human beings.  It involves a series of brain changes that “rewire” you towards pornography and away from real partners.  This happens because your brain is designed to learn what kinds of stimuli most benefit your own survival and the survival of your genes.  Porn addiction, in a sense, is your brain “learning” that porn is a much better (or at least EASIER) way to spread your genes around than real sex.  It doesn’t realize the difference between the people in porn and real partners, so it thinks that in pornography it has hit a genetic jackpot.

The reason why activities like eating and having sex feel so good is because your brain knows that these two activities increase the likelihood of your own survival and the survival of your genes.  So when you come across food or a potential partner, it learns to associate whatever is in the environment at the time with that beneficial stimuli.  Eating and orgasming only reinforce this learning by releasing neuro-chemicals and a protein called Delta Fos B, which wire together everything associated with that particular stimuli.  It does this so that when you encounter environmental cues associated with beneficial stimuli, it can give you a jolt of dopamine, the “wanting” drug.  When this happens, you experience significant urges to interact with the beneficial stimuli, either by eating or having sex.

However our brains evolved in conditions of scarcity.  There was never enough food, and finding a potential mate that wasn’t related to you was difficult.  So the brain never evolved an “off switch”.  It never had to deal with conditions of abundance, and so it never learned that too much of a good thing can be harmful.  Today we live in a world where food and sex are abundant.  Food is as close as the nearest fast food joint, and sex is always available, as long as you have an internet connect and a device to connect with it.  So when your brain comes across abundance, either in sex or food, it believe that the abundance is likely just a fluke and will disappear at any moment.  And so it activates a binge mechanism, so that you will “get it while the gettin is good.”  It floods your brain with dopamine, even after you’ve already eaten or orgasmed to a porn site, urging you to consumer more.  It overrides your natural feelings of satiation to keep you eating and fertilizing as many mates as possible.

Because of our brain’s ability to learn (called neuroplasticity), your brain starts to wire everything together associate with pornography.  Every time you edge or orgasm to pornography, your brain reinforces this wiring. Eventually your brain will get to point where it is entirely biased towards pornography and doesn’t even see real partners as sexually significant stimuli.  It’s no longer programmed to respond to real partners.  All it wants is porn.  It wants you to keep making new generations of children with all the people in porn it thinks are real people.  So it keeps your brain flooded with dopamine, constantly urging you to look at pornography and masturbate.  This is what is behind porn addiction, and sometimes porn addiction can get so bad that porn addicts are not sexually interested in real partners, and male porn addicts have difficulties achieving erections during sex.

Have more questions?  Check out our article on Porn Addiction!

Do I have a porn addiction?

The three main markers of pornography addiction are 1) an increase in pornography use over time, 2) an increase in the intensity of pornography used, and 3) and inability to stop using pornography despite negative consequences.  If you find yourself using pornography many times a day, escalating to more graphic, violent or deviant porn, and/or continuing to use porn despite its negative impact on your relationship with others, your career, your education, and your health, you are most likely a porn addict.  We have found in our community that pornography addiction is associated with several common physical and psychological symptoms.

Physical Symptoms of Porn Addiction

• Sexual dysfunctions, such as erectile dysfunction and delayed ejaculation
• Decreased sensitivity from overstimulation
• Fatigue

Psychological Symptoms of Porn Addiction

• Low self-esteem or confidence
• Sense of shame
• Low mood or agitated mood
• Lack of motivation
• Decreased libido
• Disinterest in sex in favor of porn
• Clouding of consciousness, or “brain fog”

How to cure porn addiction

You probably heard the word “reboot” thrown around quite often in the Dark Net episode. The process of Rebooting is the cure for porn addiction.  Rebooting is the term coined by recovering porn users for the process of abstaining from pornography, masturbation, and sometimes orgasm altogether for a sufficient duration to recover from these negative effects. By abstaining from problematic sexual habits, we can “reboot” the brain to factory settings.

Although we at NoFap may have our recommendations on effective ways to reboot, no two people will have the same rebooting experience. In fact, people choose to reboot in many different ways, all of them valid.

To start a reboot you must first setup parameters. What sexual behaviors are you going to abstain from? Just porn, or porn and masturbation (while leaving yourself open to have sex with real people), or porn and any form of orgasm altogether?

Once you have established your parameters, you must set your duration. Do you have a porn-induced symptom you are try to reverse like porn-induced ED? If so, then you might want to reboot until your symptoms clear. Or you could take up successive monthly challenges, or the NoFap gold standard of 90 days.

Once you choose a duration for your challenge, it’s important that you stick to it until the end. That said, don’t get too hung up on deciding on the perfect duration for you. It’s best that you just choose a duration and get going! After a period of abstinence from your chosen sexual behaviors, it’s fine to increase your duration if you feel like your brain needs more time to reboot.

Click here for more information about the rebooting process!

How to get help and support

NoFap® offers the tools and accountability you need to stay clean and end your compulsive porn habit.  If you think you might have a porn addiction and need help quitting, sign up for our online forums.  Once you have signed up and confirmed your account, please introduce yourself in the Newbies section!  When you’ve done that, you can set up your day counter, which makes it easy to track your porn habits.  After that you can either start your own rebooting journal in the appropriate section, find an accountability partner, or sign up for NoFap Premium, which gives you access to our live chat feature and instant support in case of urges.

If you find that the accountability NoFap’s forums offers just isn’t cutting it, you might find Reboot Camp helpful. Reboot Camp is a self-development series that offers a comprehensive program on porn addiction and rebooting. It focuses on the idea of habit replacement, and includes a comprehensive videos series, as well as exercises, community support, and mentoring calls from either Alexander Rhodes or Reboot Camp co-founder Mark Queppet. Quitting porn can be hard, but Reboot Camp gives you all the tools you need to overcome obstacles and end your addiction to pornography.

Our founder, Alexander Rhodes, will be answering your questions live on Digg!

On Monday at 2 pm ET, Alex will be answering questions on Digg.com. Stay tuned on NoFap’s social media pages for more information on this.

Thank you to all of the awesome cast and crew who made this series possible.

The “Dark Net” docuseries was created by Mati Kochavi of Vocativ, a media company that focuses on generating deep-web related content through the use of data mining. Danna Rabin, COO of Vocativ, is the executive producer, alongside of Vivian Schiller of Vocativ, and David Shadrack Smith of Part 2 Pictures.

The main crew and producers of the NoFap episode include Jenny Kubo, Rebecca Cameron, Lindsay Washick, Clair Popkin, Peter Richardson, Ryan Carli, Justin Duffy, Jen Baker, and Mark Gazica.

The episodes features a number of NoFap’s users, including Matthew Plummer of Team NoFap, along with NoFap founder Alexander Rhodes.

Closing Thoughts

NoFap is excited that mainstream media has started to broadcast information about the quiet epidemic of pornography addiction sweeping the world, and looks forward to continued coverage on the issue. Television networks and production companies are always welcome to contact us for potential collaborations.

Need support?

Click here to join our awesome community of Rebooters from around the world.

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