Hypersexuality, hypersexuality disorder, or sexual addiction are all terms for people who have difficulty stopping their sexual behavior. It’s when you have a lot of sexual fantasies, urges, or behaviors that are hard to control, make you feel bad, or hurt your health, job, relationships, or other parts of your life as you can’t reach regular sexual gratification. In this article we’ll discuss sex addict symptoms and effective resources to help you overcome a sex addiction.
Behaviors Associated With Sex Addiction
Compulsive sexual behavior may include various sexual experiences that people find fun. Examples: masturbation, cybersex, multiple sexual partners, pornography, or paying for sex are things that people do. It may be called compulsive sexual behavior if these sexual behaviors become a big part of your life, are hard to control, and are disruptive or harmful to you or other people.
As long as it goes untreated, compulsive sexual behavior can harm your self-esteem, relationships, work, health, and other people. In addition, your sexual fantasies, urges, and behaviors can take up a lot of your time and make you feel as if they’re out of your control.
Some sexual behaviors make you feel you have to do them, and afterward, you feel relieved of tension. You also feel guilty or remorse about what you did.
Because you’re lonely, depressed, anxious, or stressed, you turn to compulsive sexual behavior to deal with them regardless of adverse consequences.
When To See A Doctor for Sex Addiction
Sometimes, getting help if you think your sexual behavior has gone too far can help you or other people. To start, ask yourself these questions before you seek a treatment provider.
- Can I manage my sexual impulses?
- Do my sexual behaviors distress me?
- Is my sexual behavior hurting relationships, affecting work, or resulting in negative consequences?
- Do I hide my sexual behavior?
Seeking help for compulsive sexual behavior or porn addiction is challenging, as it’s such a personal matter.
Biological Problems
An imbalance of the natural chemicals in the brain or the neurotransmitters, which are chemicals to help keep your mood in check. Serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine are three of them. There may be a link between high levels and compulsive sexual behavior or excessive sexual cravings.
Changes in the brain’s work may change because of the need to have sex. The changes are most pronounced in the brain’s reward centers.
Like other addictions, such as alcohol dependence, sexual cravings become more intense to get what you want or feel better like with any substance addiction.
People with mental health disorders or brain problems, and even disease or health issues such as epilepsy and dementia, can damage parts of the brain that control sexual behavior and make it hard for people to have sex.
Alcohol or drug abuse problems
- Some other mental health conditions, like a mood disorder (like depression or anxiety) or a gambling addiction, could be at play.
- There might be family members who have an addiction.
- A person who has faced sexual abuse in the past.
How to Identify When Someone is a Sex Addict?
Sex addiction is when you can’t control your sexual thoughts, urges, and impulses, or you can’t stop yourself from having them.
A person can have a lot of sexual urges, but sex addiction only refers to behaviors that are done too much and harm their life.
Even though sex addiction isn’t listed in the medically reviewed Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), research shows that excessive sexual behavior can function like how a drug addiction does.
A person who has a sex addiction may need to be sexually stimulated all the time. But unfortunately, this desire can make it hard for them to live their daily lives.
Sexual addictions can come in many forms, including addiction to:
- Engaging in sex with over one partner
- Craving sex so much that it impedes other things.
- Engaging in too many sexual activities even though you want to stop.
- Not being able to cut down on sexual activity.
- People who do things that are related to or could lead to sex
- Neglecting other things to get sex.
- Keeping up with sexual behavior even though it is bad for your relationships.
- Needing to increase sexual activity to get what you want.
- When you can’t have sex, you feel withdrawals or have bad feelings.
Sex addicts may persistently alter their activities to perform sexual acts, unable to control their behavior despite any consequences.
This compulsive sexual behavior can have serious personal consequences. Like drug or alcohol addiction, sex addiction can affect physical health, mental health, personal relationships, and quality of life.
Sex Addict Symptoms
Sex addict addict symptoms can show up both physically and emotionally. It’s up to a doctor to make a clear diagnosis, but here are some signs that could point to sex addiction:
Obsessive Sexual Thoughts
Someone who has a sex addiction may think about sex all the time. These thoughts of sex or sexual fantasies may become obsessive or make it hard to do other things.
Spending Excessive Time on Sex
If someone spends a lot of time and energy on sex, it could signify that they have a sexual addiction. This could be when you spend a lot of time trying to get sex, having sex, being sexual, or recovering from sexual experiences.
Feeling Shame or Depression
If someone needs sex that turns into an addiction, their sexual feelings might also be mixed with feelings of anxiety, shame, depression, or regret. The person may be ashamed of their sexual urges and how hard it is to control them. These feelings are common sex addict symptoms.
These people may even show signs of clinical depression, or they may have thoughts about taking their own life, too. If you’re sexually compulsive, you’re not alone. Sexually compulsive men were more likely to show signs of depression than the rest of the population.
Excluding Other Activities
A sex addict may become so obsessed with sex that they can’t do anything else. Many things could happen if they don’t keep up with their schoolwork, work, or personal lives. They may also be more interested in having sex than having fun with other activities or hobbies. They may have a hard time with friends, family, and partners because of this.
Masturbating Excessively
It’s healthy to masturbate but masturbating too much can be a sign of sexual addiction, so don’t do it all the time! Compulsive masturbation, masturbating at the wrong times or masturbating so much that it hurts or makes you feel bad could be signs of this.
Engaging in Risky Sexual Behavior
Sometimes, men with a sex addiction can make people do excessive sexual activities that aren’t right or safe when they have sex. This can include sex in public, sex without protection, sex with prostitutes, and sex in front of others.
Sometimes, this can cause someone to get sexually transmitted diseases, like HIV. Sexually compulsive people are more likely to get a sexually transmitted infection, like HIV, if they have a history.
Cheating on Partners
Someone with sexual addiction may feel compelled to seek sex with new partners, even if this means cheating on a partner or having an extramarital affair. As a result, they may seek out one-night stands regularly or even cheat multiple times with different partners.
Committing Criminal Sex Offenses
In extreme cases, people may do things like stalk, rape, or abuse children. Even though some people who commit sexual crimes may also be sexual addicts, there is no proof that sexual addiction can make someone do something.
Treating Sexual Addiction
The best form of treatment for sex addict symptoms involves eliminating triggers and urges for porn so there isn’t a constant battle.
Eliminating Your Triggers and Urges to Watch Porn
The best type of individual counseling focuses on helping men effectively deal with their triggers, because without knowing how to identify and eliminate them, you’ll always be vulnerable to another relapse.
For example, let’s say you see an attractive woman at the gym and it triggers you to think sexual thoughts about her. Later on at night it can turn into scrolling on your phone looking at pictures, which eventually leads you to porn. Before you know it, it’s already too late because the temptation is so strong and you mess up again and feel guilty about it.
The key to finding freedom after you’ve identified the trigger is to reprocess it internally in a way that eliminates the power it has over you. You might have any number of different triggers, but the process is the same.
Developing the ability to remove the intensity or emotional pull of your triggers is the only way to become free, because you can’t just avoid triggers of stress at work, quit going to the gym or grocery store, stop watching TV or seeing attractive women when you’re out. So if those external triggers don’t stir up the urge or desire to watch porn or compulsively pursue sex, you won’t ever begin the search in the first place.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Sam Tielemans, has developed a unique approach to help men reprocess their triggers to eliminate their urges and cravings for pornography, which is often the reason why men end up relapsing, despite their best efforts to stay strong.
If you want help identifying and reprocessing triggers so you find freedom from your compulsive urges, this podcast episode outlines the steps to this approach so you can try it for yourself.
Other types of treatment for sex addict symptoms can include:
- One-on-one therapy using a mental health professional
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to treat sex addiction
- Group therapy in American Addiction Centers
- Support groups (like alcoholics anonymous)
- Inpatient treatment center
- Marital therapy or marriage counseling
Causes
It’s possible to be addicted to sex for a long time and not know why. A sex addiction can be thought of in some ways as impulse control, OCD, or relationship disorder. But much more commonly, sex addiction is a coping mechanism for negative emotions. Here’s one of the best resources available to help you identify the root cause of your addiction so you can properly treat it.
When someone turns to sex to cope with stress or other negative emotions, the dopamine rush reinforces their behavior, so they continue to seek for sex when things get overwhelming as an escape. Over time it develops into a habit that becomes difficult to break without the right tools.
Getting Help
A specialized therapist should only treat sex addicts. This could be a psychologist, psychiatrist, or sexual counselor. If the sex addiction is linked to an anxiety disorder or a mood disorder, medicines may be used as part of the treatment plan to help the person get better.
Here, there aren’t any rules about how to use medicines to treat a sex addiction that isn’t one of these clinical disorders.
First, see your family doctor or a group in your neighborhood to be medically reviewed before progressing. About 21.5 million people in the United States who are at least 12 years old had a significant problem with drugs and alcohol.
This figure comes from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) says that gambling addiction is an addiction. In most cases, treatment for gambling disorders is part of the same type of therapy as drug and alcohol abuse treatment.
Sex Addiction and Compulsive Sexual Behavior Treatment
Though sex addiction doesn’t have an official diagnosis or there are treatments for it and sexual dysfunction. Academic research institutions and the APA looked into adding it to its fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders under the title “hypersexual behavior disorder.”
Because of this, the symptoms of sex addiction, such as a loss of control and a disregard for risks and consequences, are very similar to those of other types of addictions.
What does a person who is addicted to sex have to do? 12-step programs like Sex Addicts Anonymous or Love Addicts Anonymous are common ways to treat sex addict symptoms, but most people find that they are ineffective because they don’t address the root cause.
Some behavioral addictions don’t fit the classic definition of physical addiction. Still, they have many of the same psychological and social characteristics as physical addiction, and they will respond well to traditional types of addiction treatment, too.
Finding the proper healthcare professional or sex therapist who can provide medical advice that fits porn addiction can help more than any diagnostic criteria and peer-reviewed studies. Unfortunately, you can also find the Food and Drug Administration has approved no medication to help.
