Sex addiction: Signs, symptoms and side-effects

Sex addiction usually starts small, with early behaviours like excessive porn use or using sex or masturbation to cope with anxiety, loneliness, depression, or boredom. These activities trigger a rush of chemicals in your brain that make you feel briefly better. Your brain then starts linking sex with emotional relief, and previously occasional sexual behaviour becomes your automatic response to any negativity in your life.

But just as you can build a tolerance to alcohol or drugs, you can soon need more frequent sexual activity or more extreme content to feel the same way. This may mean that “regular” porn stops working, so you move to hardcore material, or that occasional hookups are replaced with more risky encounters.

Once addicted to sex, you spend hours every day thinking about it, planning it, or engaging in sexual behaviours while everything else in your life falls apart.

Sex addiction is a behavioural addiction like gambling addiction or shopping addiction. It takes control of your brain’s reward system, just like alcohol or drug addiction, but through behaviour rather than substance use. Sex triggers chemical releases that create good feelings, but if you do this repeatedly, especially when stressed or upset, your brain treats sex as the answer to any difficult feeling.

Here are some other factors that increase the risk of sex addiction:

• Shame driving the destructive cycle of sex addiction because you feel too embarrassed to get help
• Possible chemical imbalances in the brain
• Constant availability through porn, “hook up culture”, prostitution, and dating apps
• Co-occurring sex addiction and mental health (thought to be present in 88% of cases), and using sex to cope with difficult symptoms
• Early sexual experiences, including sexual assault and trauma
• Loneliness, isolation, or a lack of real human connections or romantic or sexual partners

Recovery doesn’t mean never having sex again, but rather developing a healthier relationship with sexuality.

There is no traditional detox stage as required with drug or alcohol addiction, but a period of initial abstinence is important and will likely need professional support. Behavioural rehab provides this support and then different types of therapy to identify which specific behaviours must stop, which need boundaries, and which are healthy to keep.

Ideally, rehab programmes should combine both evidence-based therapies like CBT and trauma-informed therapy and holistic therapies like mindfulness and meditation. You should also look for one-to-one therapy sessions and group sessions, because both together often provide the most important breakthroughs. Not all rehab centres offer this, and many centres don’t treat sex addiction at all, so you may need to shop around a little.

After rehab, you need to take steps to stop yourself falling back into old behaviours once you are no longer in the safety of residential care. If you choose a rehab centre that offers aftercare, alumni services and relapse prevention planning, these can help a lot with adapting to home life again. You can also look for local support, like ongoing therapy and Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings.

We understand that reaching out for the first time can be very scary, but it is where healing begins. Contact us today, and we will go through all the best treatment options step by step and help you overcome sex addiction for good.