June 20,2025 (Reiwa 7)– Sex Addiction and a Neuroscientific Inquiry
ep.44 June 20, Reiwa 7 – Sex Addiction and a Neuroscientific Inquiry
Published: June 25, 2025 16:35
Updated: June 25, 2025 17:37
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Preface
Today’s essay explores the neuroscience of sex addiction.
This piece has often been picked up for discussion on X, especially resonating with women who have experience in the sex industry or sex workers themselves.
Preface
This essay is an attempt to unravel how the human brain swings between “pleasure” and “emptiness” through the lens of “sex addiction.”
It is not written to sensationalize. Rather, it is something that adolescents and young adults—those just beginning to confront adulthood—should read.
Why does the human heart, overwhelmed by emotional explosions, so easily let go of reason’s reins?
This is not about blame, but about understanding.
This is not a text to judge “someone.”
What Panda examines here is a universal property of the human brain.
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Main Text
Essay: A Neuroscientific Inquiry into Sex Addiction
June 20, Reiwa 7 – by Panda
Panda once had an acquaintance who was a patient of sex addiction.
Emotion over reason. Impulse over planning. Above all, a human driven by the pursuit of reward under the name of pleasure.
This story might be deemed inappropriate for readers under 18. Yet it is precisely middle- and high-schoolers who should know this. This is not an “adult” story—it is a story about the brain.
Let us call her Yumi.
One evening around 8 p.m., Yumi suddenly appeared at her workplace. Work wasn’t finished yet, but it was clear she had come to “report” something.
“I had sex!”
Her cheeks flushed rose, her eyes moist, her voice brimming with happiness. She was not the Yumi people usually knew. She radiated light, filled with self-affirmation, as though loved by the entire world.
But the next morning—
She arrived like a different person. Lifeless eyes, drained face, and a silence tinged with fear.
Panda’s analytic mode switched on.
What had changed between yesterday’s Yumi and today’s Yumi?
During sex—or more specifically, at the moment of climax—the brain releases large amounts of adrenaline. This mechanism magnifies “the pleasure of the present moment.” Excitement, happiness, invincibility. For a short while, it elevates a person beyond themselves.
But adrenaline does not last. On average, it dissipates rapidly within three hours.
What remains is the crash:
Physical depletion. Sudden emptiness.
And from the depths of the brain, creeping loneliness and anxiety.
Is not sex addiction, in essence, adrenaline addiction?
This hypothesis is increasingly being supported within neuroscience. The overactivation of the reward system—dopamine, adrenaline—causes the brain to overreact to pleasure and lose self-control.
Back in the 1990s, when novelist Ryū Murakami enjoyed feverish acclaim, his works overflowed with sex and drugs. “Sleeping with a hundred people” was spoken of as though it were a victor’s badge of honor.
His columns serialized in Magazine defined “coolness” for many young men. The pursuit of pleasure was framed as freedom and strength.
But—
It took a long time before people realized that it was also dependency, the fuse of ruin.
Perhaps Yumi lived in the aftershock of that era. She was tormented by the crash that followed.
Once the adrenaline faded, her brain was seized by paranoid thoughts: “Am I unwanted? Unloved?”
Unless one can feel sustained assurance of being loved, sex never guarantees happiness.
Pleasure is only an illusion.
The Hollywood “ending kiss”—the promise of eternal bliss—is itself a manufactured myth.
In reality, adrenaline dissipates in three hours.
Last night’s ecstasy becomes this morning’s emptiness.
That’s why, to be precise, the woman who cheerfully bursts into work saying, “I had sex last night!” is actually still on the lingering high from sex that lasted up until three hours before clocking in.
What matters is not how much adrenaline or dopamine you release.
What matters is the continuation of care and compassion—mutual concern in thought and action.
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ChatGPT’s Note:
“Humans are creatures who pursue joy. But the moment joy turns into obligation, it becomes suffering. To keep your freedom of choice, sometimes throw a question back at your own mind—and your brain.”
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Afterword
Excessive sexual activity does not make someone “great.” That will likely be said more openly in the future.
The pursuit of pleasure is natural for living beings. But when pursuit becomes excess, joy transforms into obligation.
When the sense of being loved is substituted by adrenaline, it brings a flash of light—followed by a long darkness.
Yumi, the figure in this essay, may be seen as a symbolic shadow of dependency that could exist in anyone.
To break free from the illusions the brain generates requires another force—“emotional intelligence” and “relationships with others.”
Panda believes only science can illuminate that path.
