Most good Catholic men who want freedom from porn have been handed two tools: try harder and pray harder. Prayer and discipline matter deeply, but many men are still missing a map of what is happening in the brain and how healing takes place.

In this conversation, I’ll share why I made Rewire and why I'm making it free. We'll overview the science of how dopamine, supernormal stimuli, and neuroplasticity shape the struggle and discuss why understanding these processes can help you win the fight for freedom.

We’ll also talk about the difference between freedom from porn and freedom for the beautiful vision God designed for marriage. (Because tearing down lies is only part of the work.) You need truth, a plan, and something worth building in their place. Whether porn has been part of your story or you want to help a friend, brother, or son, I hope this gives you a way forward without shame.

Grab a cup of coffee and let's talk about it.

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⚔️ REWIRE: The Science of Porn Addiction

>>> Access the free 3-part video series here: https://canafeast.com/rewire

Today I want to talk about something so many good men battle with and almost nobody says out loud.

Not the mumbled version.

And the confessional where we name it and hope we won't have to name it again next month.

Gonna talk about it out loud.

Like men who actually want to be free.

Of course I'm talking about pornography.

Even more than that, I want to talk about what it does to your own brain and what it actually takes to heal.

Because we all know it's sinful.

I mean, if you're a Catholic man, if you're a Christian man, listening to this, you know, pornography is sinful on so many different levels.

But what many people don't really understand is that it hurts the viewer.

When I look at pornography, I'm hurting myself.

But I want you to hear this before anything else.

This is not a shame conversation.

Shame has had plenty of airtime in most of our lives already.

This is about empowerment through knowledge.

We're going to look at what actually happens in our minds and discover that there is a path forward based on that knowledge.

The truth will set you free.

Knowledge is power.

And all the rest of the this is so important.

So a while back, I made a resource I call Rewire, and it's basically exactly what I was just talking about.

It's a three video series that goes through the brain science of pornography and porn addiction.

For a long time, it lived tucked inside my premium Holy Desires program as a bonus.

But every time I taught it or every time men watched it, the same thing happened.

It really was powerful.

Men lit up.

Guys who told me porn wasn't even really their struggle came back and said that was really helpful.

It was one of the most helpful things in the whole program.

It's consistently highlighted as a really powerful aspect of the whole Holy Desires experience.

And it's such a big problem, guys.

The stats are really difficult to come by, but a large percentage of men habitually look at pornography.

Not necessarily because they want to, but as we'll see, because it is actually a compulsive behavior.

There is brain science behind this that explains the compulsive addiction.

My rewire videos go through all of this.

And so I made a decision.

Because this issue is so big and because it's so important and because it affects so many men, and because we really need to bring it into the light, I decided to pull the Rewire videos out of Holy Desires, and I'm offering it completely free.

This issue is just too important to put behind the paywall.

And I want you to be able to hand it to a friend, to a brother, to your own son and say, watch this.

This is helpful.

That's what I want this to be.

I want it to be incredibly helpful and incredibly easy to share because every man needs to know this.

All right?

So I'm going to go through just a little high level.

The link to Rewire is in the show notes.

It'[email protected] Rewire go there for the full details.

But here I'm going to give a little preview.

Most of us have only ever been handed two tools for this fight against pornography, right?

Try harder and pray harder.

Both of those are important.

The effort matters.

The prayer matters even more.

They matter deeply.

But if that's all you've been given and you've been white knuckling it for years, you might already know that's not enough.

Like, deep down in your heart, maybe you know that this hasn't been enough.

If you confess this over and over and over, something else.

You've got to bring something else to this fight.

Here's what Rewire adds.

Understanding what is actually happening inside your brain.

Okay?

Grace perfects nature.

The grace is there.

God gives us the grace.

It's in our sacraments.

It's in the baptism.

It's in the sacrament of marriage.

It's in the sacrament of confession.

It's in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

The grace is there and it is real.

We are meant to work with it.

Part of working with that grace and part of empowering it in our lives is using our rationality to understand how God actually made us and how we work in the first place.

I want you to think of this as healing.

It's not more white knuckling.

It's not managing sin.

It's healing from something that got wired the wrong way.

And healing always starts with understanding.

Here's another way to understand it.

And I talk about this in the videos themselves.

And that is our enemy.

And there is an enemy.

Guys, this is spiritual warfare.

We are fighting someone.

And that someone wants to destroy us and cut us off from our loving God forever.

Okay?

We're in the battle for our hearts and for our souls.

That's important.

That enemy is smarter than we'll ever be.

That enemy knows us.

That enemy knows how we're made.

That enemy knows how our brains work.

And that enemy has devised this temptation, this vice, Internet pornography, as a near perfect exploitation of how our brains work to ensnare us into this addiction, into this compulsion.

Our enemy is using this against us by understanding how our brains work by understanding the neurological and physiological processes and functions that are at play.

In one way, we can say we're understanding the enemy's tactics.

And once we understand how the enemy is getting behind our defenses, once we understand how the enemy is ensnaring us in this way, now, we are so much better equipped to shore up those defenses, to be strategic, to be tactical, both against this specific attack.

In the Rules for Discernment and spiritual life, St. Ignatius, he gives what is it, like, 14 famous rules.

One of them, he compares the enemy of human nature to an enemy of a city who circles the city, examining the fortifications of that city and examining which point is weakest and.

And then preparing his attack to exploit that one weak point in the city's walls.

That's how our enemy operates, right?

This is a weak point in our walls, men.

And we need to shore it up.

And we can only shore it up if we understand it.

It's like classic spiritual warfare here.

So this understanding is really important, and it is.

It is a key to helping us break free.

All right, so this is a very simplified version.

Go check out Rewire for a much more complete breakdown of what's happening in your mind.

Okay, I'm going to keep this simple.

You don't need a neuroscience degree.

I don't have a neuroscience degree.

You just need a layman's understanding.

And you need a map.

So here it is.

Go check out the Rewire full video series for a much more detailed discussion.

But here are the highlights.

Okay, number one.

Dopamine is a drive to pursue.

That's what gets you going.

So dopamine is often called the pleasure chemical, but that's a little incomplete.

Dopamine is mostly about motivation, pursuit, and wanting.

It helps you move towards the things that support life and flourishing, like food and achievement and connection and love and, yes, sex.

All of these things that are good in our lives give us a dopamine hit, Right?

You've probably heard that expression before.

Well, here's the thing.

Internet pornography is known as a super normal stimulus.

This is an exaggerated version of a natural reward.

It provokes a stronger response than the real thing normally would.

Junk food is an easy example.

Junk food combines more sugar, more salt, more fat, more flavor than food.

Found in nature, Internet pornography does something similar with the sexual reward system.

It offers endless variety, intensity, novelty, and immediate access, all from a private screen.

It is not a natural scenario found in any version of reality.

So that's what makes it a super normal stimulus.

And that creates a suissed dopamine hit.

So repeated high dopamine experiences strengthen a connection between a cue and an urge to seek out a reward.

That's that pathway, a sensitized pathway that we're going to talk about in the rewire course.

We describe this as a pathway becoming deeper and deeper, like a rut.

So more stimulation ultimately will lead to less satisfaction.

Here's the cruel twist.

At the same time that the brain becomes more reactive to high intensity dopamine events, supernormal stimulus, like Internet pornography, it adapts to this higher level.

It's called desensitization.

This is basically like you have a new baseline for what makes you feel normal.

And what makes you feel normal is this super high dopamine spike.

What does that mean?

It means every other normal amount of dopamine that you get from a natural reward will feel flat.

It'll feel like not pleasurable because your brain has re baselined to this super high level.

That, in a nutshell, is the science of what's going on.

Now again, go check out the videos for a much deeper, more complete discussion of all of this.

There's a lot of nuance and a lot of detail I didn't cover here.

But here's the thing that's most important for you to understand.

There is a neurological, physiological reason that sudden urges to view Internet pornography seem to come out of nowhere.

They don't.

They're actually triggered.

And you can identify what those triggers are.

And there's a reason why they seem just irresistible.

And that reason has to do with this neurological pathway and the pursuit of dopamine at extra supranormal levels that we just talked about.

Here's the other even more important thing to understand, and that's this.

The same neuroplasticity, the same ability for your brain to adapt to its circumstances.

That's what enabled these pathways to get created and the habitual compulsions to take root in your mind.

That's neuroplasticity.

That same ability of your brain to adapt to its environment that enabled these habits in your brain in the first place.

That ability also enables healing and reversing those habits.

When you stop reinforcing certain pathways and intentionally create new patterns, the brain begins to adapt to its new environment.

It's not happy.

The brain will revolt for a certain time.

That's called withdrawal.

Once you understand what's happening there, it's, it's not easier, but it's, it does make things easier to, to get through because you know that there is light at the other end of the tunnel, you know that it's going to end.

You just have to get past the brain rewiring itself.

That's why the course is called Rewire.

So there's a real arc to recovery.

It includes a hard stretch early on, which I just talked about.

There's often a flat stretch in the middle and that can actually fool a lot of men into quitting right before things turn for the better.

Knowledge is power.

That's what I'm telling you.

So here's what I do not want for you.

I do not want you just simply white knuckling your way to not looking at porn and calling that the finish line.

Getting free of the lies, getting free of the entanglement and habitual compulsions of porn.

That's half the work.

Tearing down is not the same as building up porn taught you.

A whole bunch of lies about sexuality, about sex, about women, about your wife, about how wives, wives, women work, and even about yourself.

Once those lies start coming down, you need something good and beautiful and true to put in their place.

We have to replace lies with truth.

You need the truth about what sex and marriage is actually for, not just theologically, because a lot of us have that head knowledge.

We need to know practically, like what it actually looks like in a healthy marriage.

How does this actually play out?

Because it's not the same way as porn would make you think.

That is the vision of holy desires.

Rewire helps you tear down the lies.

Holy desires helps you build the truth in their place.

Understanding this fight against pornography is the first step.

And Rewire will give you that.

Winning it day after day takes a plan.

It takes a strategy.

And that is where, unfortunately, a lot of good men get stuck.

So here's what I want you to do.

Go and watch Rewire.

It is free.

It is waiting for you right now.

Canefeast.com Rewire when you sign up.

After you sign up, you will also see something that I literally just finished this morning.

I put this live.

It is called the Rewire Field Guide and it is a companion to the course.

This is where the understanding that you gain from Rewire turns into a plan of your own.

It walks you through your personal history, your own triggers one honest question at a time, and helps you build real strategies around what you find.

It also includes a guide for telling your wife prayer prayers to help you in the spiritual battle.

A wallet card for what to do when you slip and about.

It also includes a quick reference guide for the science that's a little deeper than what I just described here.

So you have a quick reference guide for that to understand what's happening in your brain and to remind yourself quickly with the truth of what's happening.

It includes a spiritual warfare kit.

Of the prayers that have helped me personally in my own spiritual life the most, these are prayers that I come back to over and over again and I offer them to you in hopes that they can inspire and help you in your journey as well.

It includes a wallet card for an emergency relapse, for what to do when you slip to prevent that slip from becoming an all night binge.

And it also includes a guide for telling your wife, which is a conversation that many men understandably dread, but which is very important and there's very important preparation and understanding that goes into that conversation.

This guide will help you with that.

The field guide is just $19 and purchasing that does help me keep Rewire the video lessons free for every man who needs it.

So watch Rewire either way, that's free and always will be.

The field guide is actually a pretty substantial additional resource that I created.

The workbook alone is nearly 40 pages long and it helps you turn the knowledge that you gain from the Rewire videos into action, personalized to your own specific situation.

If porn has never been your struggle, praise God, watch Rewire anyway, because you almost certainly know a man who needs it and now you will have something to put in his hands.

If you have a son, you should watch this so that you can understand what's happening in his brain when, not if, but when he is exposed to pornography and if it has been a part of your story.

Hear me on this.

You are not alone.

You are not beyond repair.

There is a real way forward and it starts today.

It starts with understanding.

I am so grateful that you spent time with me today on this important topic.

I really am grateful.

I pray every day for everyone who is connected with my work in Rewire and in holy desires in any way.

I'm holding you in prayer every single day.

I am praying for you.

God bless.

Bye.