Overcoming porn addiction requires time and effort, but the reward is a better sex life | Ahona Guha

Rewiring your sexual patterns can help you surf the urge' and reconnect with your partner

• The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work

While there's often a general conception that the world is hypersexual and everyone is having lots of sex, the reality is quite different. Some international studies have found that rates of sexual activity are dropping overall. One of the reasons suggested to explain this decrease has been reliance on pornography and internet-based unpartnered sexual exploration instead of partnered activity.

Ben* came to therapy because of difficulties in his relationship with his girlfriend. He was 25 and his girlfriend was his first partner. They'd been together for a year and had just moved in together into a sharehouse. Ben said they were struggling to communicate about sex and had found it difficult to agree on sexual frequency. He admitted with some sheepishness that his girlfriend wanted sex more often than he did; he said he would be happy with sex once every two weeks.