'I couldn’t stop watching': Personal stories of how porn obsession takes over lives

Shaun Flores was 11 years old when he first started watching porn, after being introduced to it by a friend.

"I was hooked almost immediately," the now 30-year-old says.

"It was just like, wow, what is this that people are doing where they look like they're just having the time of their lives."

Shaun’s curiosity quickly turned into something that he found difficult to stop.

He describes watching porn morning, noon and night, saying it became as "common as brushing your teeth".

Shaun has shared his story in a new BBC iPlayer series, Sex After.

"I realised there was an issue when I had no energy to do anything," he says. "I didn't want to play football, I just wanted to be inside.

"But there was the guilt and the shame that came with it, and no matter what I tried to do, I couldn’t stop watching it.

"That's when I knew there was something up."

While not everyone who watches porn will develop an unhealthy relationship with it, Shaun isn’t alone in his viewing habits.

Ofcom’s Online Nation 2024 report suggests 29% of UK adults accessed online porn in May 2024. Additionally, new research from addiction treatment centre, UKAT, suggests that millions of Britons are viewing pornography regularly - with 1.8 million watching daily, some multiple times a day.

According to treatment providers, more people are seeking help for problematic porn use.

Dr Paula Hall, a UKCP-accredited sexual and relationship psychotherapist at The Laurel Centre, in London, specialises in helping people affected by sex addiction and porn addiction.

"The numbers of clients seeking help with pornography problems at The Laurel Centre have doubled over recent years, as have our requests from health professionals for further training," she tells the BBC.

Dr Hall explains that they have also seen a growing number of younger people seeking help.

"Ten years ago the majority of our clients would have been married men in their 40s and 50s who were seeking help because their partner had discovered their use of sex workers," she says.

"But increasingly, our clients are in their 20s and 30s, many of whom are single, who are recognising the growing toll of porn use on their lives and on their ability to get or maintain a relationship."

Lee Fernandes, lead therapist at the UKAT Group, also says the number of people they treat for problematic porn use has risen "significantly" in recent years.

They now receive multiple enquiries for help from people struggling with their porn use every single day. Prior to 2020, it was one or two enquiries a week

Fernandes explains that advancements in technology and the subsequent easy accessibility of porn is making it easier for people of all ages to access sexual content online. He believes his is contributing to the increase in people seeking help that he has experienced.

"It's not very hard for someone to pull out their phone, go onto a site and look at porn, whether they're 12 years old or 60 years old," he says. "It is quite troubling."

According to Fernandes, other reasons for people watching porn online include curiosity, boredom, stress relief and lack of sexual satisfaction.

While porn use might start for these reasons, Fernandes describes it as being "very addictive".

"It fulfils that dopamine reward system," he explains. "Once you start it's quite difficult to stop."

However, while problematic porn use might mimic an addiction, it isn’t diagnostically recognised as such.

Instead, it is categorised as problematic online pornography use (POPU), or compulsive behaviour.

For people who develop this relationship with porn, the effects can be negative.

And for the youngest in society who are growing up with free, hardcore content at their fingertips, the impact of early overexposure can be far reaching.

The Children’s Commissioner for England promotes and protects the rights of children.

Recent research from their office found that, in 2023, 10% of children had seen porn by the age of nine and 27% had seen it by age 11.

"Young people tell me their exposure to pornography is widespread and normalised – with the average age at which children first seeing pornography being 13 years old," Dame Rachel de Souza, the current Children’s Commissioner, tells the BBC.

"Pornography is no longer confined to dedicated adult sites – children tell me they can see violent content, depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sexual acts on social media.

"The implications of seeing this kind of material are vast – my research has found that frequent users of pornography are more likely to engage in physically aggressive sex acts."

De Souza adds that it is "vital" for high-quality relationship and sex education to be given parity of importance with other subjects to help young people understand that pornography is unrealistic.

Silva Neves, a psychotherapist who specialises in the treatment of compulsive sexual behaviours, agrees that viewing porn at a young age can have a negative impact.

However, he emphasises that the lack of quality sex education for young people leads to them looking for information elsewhere.

"They’re then going to see hairless vulvas," he says. "They're going to see 9in penises.

"They're going to see hard intercourse lasting for 30 minutes and choking, and all these things, and they're going to think, ‘ok, so this is sex’.

"But it’s much easier to point the finger at porn and say porn is the problem."

Courtney Daniella Boateng, 26, first started watching porn when she was at primary school.

For her, it was partly driven by the lack of proper sex education available to her. She explains that her classes at school were focussed on the biology of reproduction, rather than the experience of sex.

She says that the taboo that seemed to exist around it made it even more fascinating to try and understand it.

"I ended up searching for sex videos," she explains. "It was a very wide door that had just blown open into a whole new world."

Courtney started off watching sporadically, sometimes on the weekends or occasionally before school. But then, she says, it turned into almost every day.

"That was when I started to realise this is having a negative effect on me because I'm doing this way too often," she says.

Courtney lost her virginity when she was 18 - a moment she describes as "terrible".

"It never felt like real life matched up to the hype...that I got from watching porn or masturbating," she says.

Courtney eventually realised that she had an unhealthy dependency on porn.

"I would always find myself fighting whether I could actually stop and it would literally just leave me feeling so powerless," she said.

She stopped watching porn in her early 20s and decided to become celibate. Along with her fiancé, they have committed to abstinence until after their wedding.

For Shaun, his excessive porn habit led to him being “exhausted” from masturbating.

"I think the role that it [porn] had to play was that it distorted my sense of self, and gave me a dysmorphia around sex, or my body, or my penis," he says.

However, experts say it is important to recognise that, for many people, it is possible to have a healthy relationship with porn. For some, there may even be benefits.

For example, research conducted by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) suggests that porn provides a way for young people unsure of their sexuality to understand themselves better.

‘’We must remember that an unhealthy relationship with porn only occurs when the individual has lost the power of choice; they cannot function normally in their day to day lives without watching porn," concludes Fernandes.

“We would urge anyone who thinks they fall into this category to seek professional help."

"It's left me with a lot of unlearning to do," says Courtney. "I have had to learn what realistic sex was.

"I have had to learn to love my body and not compare it to other women's bodies.

"I have had to learn to love and not objectify people, men and women. And not just see them as sexual objects, but actually see them as people.

"If I could rewind the clock, I wouldn't have started it."

For Shaun, giving up is one of the "best decisions" he’s ever made.

"The addiction made me lose connections and now I'm trying to be connected to people that I generally love and I really care about," he says.

Additional reporting by Michelle Barratt and Fiona Paus.

If you have been affected by the issues raised in this story you can visit BBC Action Line.