Edging vs. Gooning: Why Both Destroy Your Baseline

If you’re wondering “edging vs gooning, which one is worse for me?”, here’s the short answer: Gooning breaks you faster, but edging keeps you trapped longer.

At Kaertala, we don’t “reboot” or “pause.” We quit. And to quit, you need to understand the machine you are fighting. It is not just a “bad habit”; it is a biological trap.

Quick Definitions

• Edging: Repeatedly approaching orgasm and stopping. Sessions are typically shorter (20–60 minutes) but frequent. It mimics the low-grade dopamine loops of social media scrolling.
• Gooning: Multi-hour stimulation that produces a trance-like state, time loss, and dissociation. Control is abandoned; sessions often last 4–8+ hours.

The Breakdown: Acute vs. Chronic

• Analogy: Edging is akin to Doom-scrolling (Chronic), while Gooning is like Binge Drinking (Acute).
• State: Edging maintains a mindful, “controlled” state. Gooning enters a dissociative, trance-like state.
• Cue Exposure: Edging involves moderate exposure that is often rationalized. Gooning seeks high intensity and constant novelty.
• Risk Profile: Edging normalizes the behavior over time. Gooning creates a massive crash and burnout.
• Long-term Impact: Edging maintains the addiction baseline, keeping the hunger alive. Gooning destroys the reward system through overloading.

The Mechanism: Why You Are Stuck

To understand why edging is a trap, you have to look at the dopamine signature.

Gooning creates a massive spike followed by a crash. It relies on “Transient Hypofrontality” [5] your logic center shuts down.

Edging, however, utilizes Reward Prediction Error [6]. The brain releases more dopamine during the anticipation of a reward than the reward itself.

By edging, you are soaking your brain in high-dopamine anticipation for 45 minutes without the “reset” of a climax. You are training your brain to detach arousal from resolution.

The “Supernormal Stimulus”

Why does this happen? Your brain cannot distinguish between a survival drive and a digital exaggeration.

In the 1950s, Nobel Prize winner Niko Tinbergen discovered that birds would abandon their own eggs to sit on giant, brightly painted plaster eggs. The fake egg was a Supernormal Stimulus a trigger that hijacked their instincts because it was bigger and brighter than reality.

Pornography is your plaster egg. It is hyper-stimulating, devoid of rejection risk, and endlessly novel. Edging allows you to bathe in this superstimulus without the biological “off switch” of orgasm, leaving your baseline permanently skewed. Well, not permanently, you can still change it, but you get what I am saying.

The Primer: How Social Media Engineers the Relapse

You usually don’t just wake up and decide to goon for 4 hours. The pathway is primed by Social Media. This is sudden, but straight to the point.

Research is increasingly showing a comorbidity between Problematic Social Media Use (PSMU) and Problematic Pornography Consumption (PPC). They are not separate addictions; they are different gears in the same machine.

1. Dopamine Priming: Scrolling Instagram Reels or TikTok creates rapid-fire, micro-spikes of dopamine. This raises your “boredom threshold.” Real life feels dull. When the scrolling stops working, the brain demands a higher-voltage stimulus to feel the same baseline [7].
2. The Algorithm Pipeline: Social media algorithms are designed to keep you on the app. They often funnel users from “thirst traps” (softcore) to external sites (hardcore). This is known as “escalation of cue reactivity” [4].
3. Erosion of Inhibitory Control: High-frequency social media usage correlates with reduced gray matter volume in the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex the same areas responsible for impulse control [8].

The Takeaway: You cannot quit a dopamine addiction while nursing a dopamine habit. If you spend 3 hours a day doom-scrolling, you are actively training your brain to seek distraction over discomfort. You haven’t quit the addiction; you have just switched dealers. If you want to stop the pornographic addiction, you must cut the feed that primes it.

The Physical Toll: It’s Not Just In Your Head

While we focus on the brain, we cannot ignore the body. Chronic edging creates a condition known as Pelvic Floor Hypertonicity.

When you edge, you are keeping your pelvic floor muscles (the BC/IC muscles) in a state of high tension (Kegeling) for prolonged periods without the release of ejaculation. Over time, this leads to specific physical pathologies:

• Hard Flaccid Syndrome: A chronic semi-rigid state caused by muscle spasm restricting blood flow.
• Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome (CPPS): Persistent discomfort in the perineum or lower back, often misdiagnosed as prostatitis.
• Urinary Issues: Difficulty starting flow or post-void dribble due to a tight sphincter. And I emphasize for the post-void dribble, due to a tight sphincter, not because something got broken.

You aren’t just frying your receptors; you are physically exhausting the muscles required for healthy function.

The Data: You Are Not Alone (But You Are In Danger)

The question is then, how come this wasn’t really a problem in the pre-Internet era? We are a generation hooked to a point we refuse to acknowledge.

• The “Gender Gap” is Closing: While historically considered a male issue, recent data suggests the gap is narrowing.
• The “Addiction” Rate: Approximately 10.3% of men and 3% of women report an inability to stop despite wanting to [3].

The Cruelest Stat: Wanting vs. Liking

Neuroimaging studies from Cambridge University have shown that the brain activity of compulsive porn users mirrors that of drug addicts (specifically cocaine and alcohol) [4].

The most terrifying stat is the gap between Wanting and Liking. As addiction deepens, the brain’s “wanting” system (craving, driven by dopamine) skyrockets, while the “liking” system (pleasure, driven by opioids/endocannabinoids) drops.

The “Alternative” is Insight, Not Distraction

Most advice suggests replacing the behavior with “healthier alternatives” (pushups, cold showers). While good, they are not a cure. You don’t need to distract yourself from the urge; you need to dismantle it.

1. Stop Negotiating

The urge to edge starts with a rationalization (“I’m just checking,” “I’m stressed”). The moment you debate the urge, you have already lost. I have to repeat this, the moment you debate the urge, you have lost. The only effective response is to recognize the signal for what it is: a dying neural pathway screaming for food.

2. No Blockers

I don’t recommend relying on software blockers. They are fragile. If you rely on a digital wall to stop you, you are outsourcing your agency to a piece of code that you can eventually bypass. True cessation comes from internal resolve. I mean, just be honest, when did blockers ever work? You just turn them off and go to whatever websites you need afterwards.

3. Sit with the Friction

When you stop, you will feel bored. You will feel a lack of stimulation. This is not a symptom that needs fixing; it is your brain healing. The “boredom” is just the absence of hyper-stimulation. Let it be there. A massive thing here is that you will be significantly more motivated to do things about yourself and about yourlife.

If You Relapse

If you slip, do not treat it as a moral defeat. Treat it as data.

Ask yourself the surgical questions:

1. The Bridge: What was the specific emotion I was trying to numb? (Anxiety, loneliness, boredom?)
2. The Blade: What was the lie I told myself that gave me permission to start?

Identify the cue, analyze the failure in your logic, and move on.

Stay strong, and believe that you have a better future ahead of you. Because you do. And, we will always be here for you, for that is our purpose. Kaertala was made to help users quit pornographic addiction, it was designed from ground up to not need any willpower. It is free because we believe nobody deserves to suffer. And we believe that every single human on this earth deserves to be better. Try it today, change your life for the better.

References

[1] National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Drugs, Brains, and Behavior: The Science of Addiction. https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction

[2] World Health Organization (WHO). ICD‑11: Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder. https://icd.who.int/

[3] AddictionHelp.com (2024). Porn Addiction Statistics: Rates, Demographics & Effects.

[4] Voon, V., et al. (2014). Neural correlates of sexual cue reactivity in individuals with and without compulsive sexual behaviours. PLOS ONE. (Comparing porn addiction to drug addiction).

[5] Dietrich, A. (2003). Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness: The transient hypofrontality hypothesis. Consciousness and Cognition.

[6] Schultz, W. (2016). Dopamine reward prediction-error signaling: a two-component response. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[7] Meshi, D., Tamir, D. I., & Heekeren, H. R. (2015). The emerging neuroscience of social media. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(12), 771–782. (Neural overlap between social media rewards and addictive behaviors).

[8] He, Q., Turel, O., & Bechara, A. (2017). Brain anatomy alterations associated with Social Networking Site (SNS) addiction. Scientific Reports, 7, 45064. (Evidence of gray matter reduction in impulse control centers).

[9] Bőthe, B., et al. (2021). The overlap between problematic social media use and problematic pornography use. Addictive Behaviors. (Direct statistical correlation between the two habits).