Am I addicted to porn? A 10-question self-check.

How to read your score

• 0–9. Low concern. Use is not strongly tied to the patterns the scale measures. Worth taking again in a month if you want to watch the direction.
• 10–19. Mild. A few patterns showing up. None of them are about willpower. All of them respond to a plan you build before the hard moment, not during it.
• 20–29. Moderate. Several patterns present at once. The band where a short structured plan starts to matter more than another round of trying harder.
• 30–40. Significant. Patterns are consistently present. Professional support is the recommended first step. Daily self-tracking can sit alongside that work and give your sessions something concrete to look at.

One score on one day tells you very little. The number that matters is the direction across a few months.

Signs of porn addiction

The word addiction gets used loosely here. What clinicians actually measure is narrower. A pattern of use the person feels they cannot stop, that is interfering with the rest of their life, and that keeps escalating. Day to day, it usually looks like this:

• Reaching for it on autopilot, especially during stress, boredom, or low mood.
• Time spent on it creeping up despite intent to cut back.
• Needing more extreme content over time to get the same effect.
• Use bleeding into times or places where it does not belong: work, public spaces, time with a partner.
• Heavy guilt or shame in the hours after, often followed by more use.

If you scored 20 or higher above, several of these are present at the same time. That is the band where a plan starts to do more work than willpower.

What causes compulsive porn use

There is no single cause. The research points to a few overlapping factors:

• Reinforcement. Pornography pairs a strong reward with low effort and high availability. The brain learns that loop quickly.
• Emotion regulation. A lot of compulsive use is, at heart, a way to manage feelings the person has not learned to sit with. Loneliness, anxiety, shame, anger, boredom.
• Attachment patterns. Anxious and avoidant attachment styles correlate with compulsive sexual behavior in several published studies.
• Trauma history. A meaningful subset of people with compulsive sexual behavior have a history of childhood adversity, including sexual or emotional abuse.

Knowing the cause does not fix the problem. It does tell you which kind of help is most likely to work.

How to stop lusting and start cutting back

There is no two-week reset that fixes this. What does help, in rough order of leverage:

• Track honestly for two weeks. You cannot change what you do not see. Most people are surprised by their own data inside ten days. The free daily recovery log is one minute a day if you want a structured starting point.
• Find your risk window. Almost everyone has one or two specific hours of the week when setbacks cluster. Plan around those, not around willpower in general.
• Block the easy paths. Content filters, app limits, the phone out of the bedroom. None of these cure anything. All of them lower the activation energy when you are tired.
• Replace the function. If use is regulating an emotion, find a different way to regulate that emotion. A ten-minute walk, a phone call, an actual sentence about what you are feeling.
• Have a sentence ready for the hard moment. Most people who fight this well have one short line pre-written for the urge itself. The free write your why tool builds one in sixty seconds.
• Get help if the score is in the higher bands. A therapist who works specifically with compulsive sexual behavior is the right call, not general counseling.

For a longer walk through the same idea, see how to overcome lust: a practical 30-day plan.

Where to find porn addiction therapy

If you are looking for a clinician, three places worth starting:

• SAMHSA's National Helpline. 1-800-662-4357. Free, confidential, available around the clock. They can refer you to treatment in your area.
• Psychology Today's therapist directory. Filter by "sex therapy" or "compulsive sexual behavior" to find clinicians who treat this specifically.
• AASECT. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists maintains a public directory of certified clinicians.

If you are in crisis right now, call or text 988.

Frequently asked questions

Is porn addiction real?

The term is debated. The DSM-5 does not list pornography use disorder. The ICD-11 lists compulsive sexual behaviour disorder, which can include problematic pornography use. What is not debated is that a real subset of people experience their use as out of their control, distressing, and damaging to the rest of their lives. Whether you call it an addiction or a compulsion matters less than what you do about it.

How do I know if I am addicted to porn?

The closest you can get without a clinician is a screening instrument like the one above. A score of 20 or higher is the band where structured help typically matters more than self-management. A score of 30 or higher is where professional support is the recommended starting point.

Can I overcome lust on my own?

Many people do, especially in the lower bands. The lower the starting score, the more likely self-directed change works. The article on how to overcome lust in 30 days walks through the version that works for most people.

Is therapy worth it?

For moderate and significant scores, yes. The therapists best equipped for this are ones who work specifically with compulsive sexual behavior. Cognitive behavioural therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and EMDR (where trauma is part of the picture) all have evidence behind them.

Will my answers be saved or shared?

No. The self-check runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server. The only thing that ever leaves the page is the final score, and only if you choose to share the URL yourself.