How Sex and Pornography Affect Your Academic Performance

It was 2008 and I was having a great time at Nekede Federal Polytechnic in Owerri Imo State, Nigeria. I was one of the best in the Department of Public Administration with a GPA in the first semester of 3.52 and a GPA in the second semester of 3.50, all on a scale of 4.00. The secret was simple, attend lectures regularly, rest well, and read every day. It was clear that with more effort I will graduate with distinction, which could lead to an automatic job to be a professor at the Polytechnic.

In my first semester of senior year, I met a student named Jane. Before, my relationship with the students was platonic. My close friends were my reading companions. Jane and I’s relationship gradually turned into a sexual type. Instead of going home to rest after the day’s lectures, I went straight to Jane’s shelter. I’ll be coming home late, too weak to read.

My nighttime reading also suffered, because I was busy making midnight calls and sleeping the remaining time. I spent most of the time discussing and visiting Jane. It got so bad that I couldn’t focus in class. I kept reminiscing about our entire sexual escapade as the lectures continued. Instead of reading for the proposed two hours, I will dedicate an hour and thirty minutes to remembering everything we did and only thirty minutes to skeletal reading. Concentration, reading, retention, and recall became a big problem.

I met my Waterloo when Jane told me she was pregnant. Immediately my focus shifted from academics to dealing with the child. We did everything we could to get rid of the baby, from drinking hot drinks to different concoctions, all to no avail. She kept crying around me, forcing me to get money for an abortion.

I got confused and lost total control of my studies. I couldn’t sleep at night because different thoughts were wrapping my mind. Am I going to be a murderer? What if she died in the process of an abortion? These and many more questions occupied my head. At one point, I started having nightmares. I kept seeing corpses. So graduating with Distinction was the lowest on my preference scale.

However, we consulted an abortionist and used my school fees to pay for his service. Painfully, I had peace. A few weeks later, I wrote my first semester HND1 exams. The result was published a month later and it became clear that it was impossible to graduate with distinction. My GPA was 3.27. He needed at least 3.71 to get to the top level. Everyone was disappointed, including my fellow readers.

I came back for my second semester determined to be the best regardless of the result of my last semester. I forgot my past and never remembered my sexual relationship with Jane. One night Jane invited me to come over to her house to have sex; I refused to go. She continued to attract me, but I stood my ground. I have decided never to have sex with anyone. She got mad and stopped talking to me, but I focused on academics. Jane begged and cried for my return, but I kept running. He started making all kinds of negative comments about me, even though I stood my ground. I read twice a day, once immediately after the day’s lectures and once in the early hours of the morning.

After our second semester exam, I nervously returned home to Port Harcourt. A few weeks later, my friend Chukwudike called me. He said: “George, our results are out; you are a record. Your GPA is 3.75, the Head of Department and most of the teachers want to know who Anyaehie George is.” Later I graduated as the second best in the department (level of distinction).

Lesson

According to information gleaned from a Canadian community health survey, 43% of teens ages 15-19 reported having had sex at least once. A survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire indicated that 42% of Internet users ages 10-17 reported viewing pornography online in the previous year.

Premarital and pornography has become a serious problem today because sex and pornography materials are easily accessible. Street sex vendors are everywhere in the neighborhood; we even have mobile or internet sex. Pornographic materials are just one click away. The actors of pornographic films are now recognized as celebrities, they are called “porn stars”.

Premarital sex and pornography are one of the cardinal causes of academic failure. How? A vital neurotransmitter in the brain is dopamine. It has many important roles; It serves functions such as voluntary movement, pleasure experience, motivation, reward, punishment, and learning. Sex and porn target the dopamine system to release large amounts of dopamine, resulting in experiencing a “high,” which often leads to addiction. When released, dopamine strengthens and reinforces new connections that are made in the brain while performing an activity. This, in turn, acts to encourage the individual to repeat the activity again so that they can feel that pleasure once more. And when the person refuses to repeat the activity, it generates depression, dissatisfaction and anger.

As nude or sexual images are shown physically or on screen, arousal occurs and the dopamine system is activated just as it would with drugs such as cocaine. The newly formed connections in the brain from having sex or viewing pornographic images are greatly enhanced by the massive amounts of dopamine that are released. Instead of moving into short-term memory, where these images can be forgotten after the screen is turned off, the dopamine boost ensures that they are carried over to long-term memory stores where they can get stuck in playback mode in the person’s mind. The troublesome fact about this is that the more something is remembered, the more it solidifies in the brain. That is why sexual adventures cannot be easily forgotten. You can narrate how the adventure began, how it progressed, and how it ended.

What is alarming about this information is that the brain acts as a complete entity; its plasticity is global. Change in one area affects other regions. Visualizations of sex and pornography can literally reconfigure overall neural connections. When the brain is reconfigured to focus on sex or pornography, reading, understanding, and remembering become difficult because the memory has long been occupied with sexual or pornographic images or scenes.

There is nothing as dangerous as “let me try it once”, because dopamine will get you addicted. The addiction begins from an encounter or scene. It progresses from the soft porn of reading texts describing sexual feelings and soft graphic images to the hard porn of graphic images of sex workers and graduates to real sex. Over time, the images imprint themselves on the mind of the user, leading to addiction to sex and pornography.

Research has shown that students who have sex perform lower than those who do not. Focusing on one area leads to loss of focus in another area. You cannot compare a married student to a single student; the single person will be more focused. That is why some schools do not admit married students. It is also important to note that many of the world’s greatest inventors refused to have sex or marry. Among them are the Wright brothers, George Washington Carver, Nikola Tesla, Paul of Tarsus.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *