What an online 'porn addiction test' can and cannot tell you
Let us be direct before a single question is asked. No online quiz can diagnose you with anything, including this page. 'Porn addiction' is not a recognised clinical diagnosis in any major diagnostic system. The closest formal entity — Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder (CSBD), code 6C72 in the ICD-11 — is an impulse-control disorder that requires a qualified clinician to diagnose, not a checkbox form. Diagnosing it properly requires a clinical interview, assessment of the full history, and differential assessment against other conditions that can look similar.
Online self-assessment tools, even well-designed ones, cannot do that work. The most widely used research screening instruments — the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale (PPCS), the Brief Pornography Screen, and the CSBD-19 (designed to map onto ICD-11 CSBD criteria) — are validated research tools meant to be administered and interpreted in a clinical or research context, not standalone diagnostic quizzes. We will not reproduce them here and present them as diagnostic. What we will do is walk you through the territory they cover, in plain language, so you can assess whether your pattern warrants professional attention.
What honest self-assessment can do is genuinely useful: it can help you determine whether your pattern has the shape that clinical criteria take seriously, and it can turn a vague sense of 'this might be a problem' into specific, named observations you can bring to a professional assessment or act on directly. Those are two meaningful things, and they do not require a diagnostic label.
The diagnostic territory: what real screening instruments assess
Published validated screening instruments for problematic pornography use, and the ICD-11 CSBD criteria themselves, consistently probe the same six dimensions. Understanding what these are gives you a map for honest self-reflection.
Loss of control: the experience of repeatedly setting rules for your own use — time limits, content limits, situations where you will not use — and repeatedly breaking them despite genuinely wanting to keep them. Not occasionally failing to stick to an intention; repeatedly, across many attempts, over an extended period. This is the ICD-11's core criterion and is what distinguishes clinical compulsion from simply using something regularly.
Escalation: over time, needing longer sessions or more extreme, novel, or intense content to produce the same effect that less content produced earlier. This is the pattern clinicians describe as sensitisation — the threshold rising over time. Escalation matters because it suggests the behaviour is not in steady state but is progressively demanding more.
Priority and salience: pornography occupying more mental space, time, and priority than the person consciously wants it to — intruding on other activities, relationships, work, or sleep. This is different from deciding to spend an hour; it is finding that time is being taken that was not consciously allocated.
Mood regulation: using pornography primarily to manage uncomfortable emotional states — anxiety, boredom, loneliness, depression, stress — rather than for pleasure or arousal. Using it as a coping mechanism. This dimension is clinically important because it points toward the emotional function the behaviour is serving, which is often the most important treatment target.
Consequences: real, concrete harm in important areas of life — strained or ended relationships, reduced sexual responsiveness with partners, professional risk, significant loss of sleep, erosion of self-respect — combined with continuation despite those consequences. Consequences that are real but do not change the behaviour are the hallmark of compulsive patterns.
Distress: genuine distress about the loss of control itself — not purely about the morality or social acceptability of pornography use, but about the inability to regulate it in the way you want to.
The structured self-reflection
Sit with each of the following questions honestly. Writing your answers down materially changes what you see — externalising the pattern makes it harder to avoid. These questions are drawn from the territory the published clinical criteria probe; they are not a scored test and carry no diagnostic weight.
Control: In the past twelve months, have you set rules for your own pornography use — limits on frequency, time, content, or situation — and repeatedly broken them? Not once or twice, but repeatedly, across genuine attempts to keep the rules?
Priority: Has pornography displaced things you value — sleep, time with your partner, time with your family, professional work, or actual partnered sex — more than once, and more than you intended?
Escalation: Compared with two years ago, do you need longer sessions, more intense material, or more novel content to produce the same level of arousal or satisfaction?
Function: When you reach for pornography, what are you feeling in the five minutes beforehand — aroused, or something else? Bored, anxious, lonely, stressed, avoidant? If the answer is usually something else, pornography is functioning as an emotional regulation tool. That matters.
Consequences: Has your use cost you something real — a relationship difficulty or rupture, a sexual difficulty with a partner, professional risk, significant sleep disruption, or a consistent erosion of self-respect — and have you continued despite it?
Distress: When you imagine a month without pornography, what is the strongest feeling that arises? Indifference? Relief? Or something closer to anxiety or dread? If anxiety or dread, what does that tell you about the role pornography currently plays?
Honesty: Is there anything about your pattern of use — content, frequency, context — that you have never disclosed to any other person? Patterns that survive only in secrecy warrant attention regardless of what the answers to the other questions are.
Reading your answers — and the moral incongruence caution
There is no total score, and that is deliberate. The ICD-11 CSBD criteria are not a points threshold; they are a pattern of interacting features. The shape that matters is the combination: loss of control, plus real consequences, plus persistence over months, plus distress about the loss of control — not the morality of the behaviour.
If most of your answers cluster around that pattern — repeated failed attempts to control, real consequences, continuation, distress about compulsion — your pattern has the shape that clinicians take seriously. A professional assessment is the sensible, proportionate next step. Not because you are broken or beyond help, but because this combination of features rarely resolves through willpower alone in an unchanged environment, and appropriate support makes a real difference.
If your answers describe heavy but controlled use — you use pornography regularly or heavily but there is no loss of control, no escalation, and no real consequences — you likely do not meet any clinical threshold. You may still decide the habit costs more than it gives, and that is a legitimate personal reason to change it. You do not need a clinical label to justify changing a habit.
The moral incongruence caution is important here. Joshua Grubbs and colleagues have demonstrated across multiple studies — including a nationally representative sample — that the distress people report about pornography use is more strongly predicted by moral conflict between their values and their behaviour than by the actual amount they use or the presence of genuine loss of control. If your answers to the self-reflection above suggest that your primary distress is shame rooted in religious or moral beliefs about pornography — without actual loss of control or real consequences beyond self-condemnation — the evidence suggests the shame itself is the problem most worth addressing, and it is a different problem from compulsion. A therapist who understands the distinction is what is needed in that case, not a compulsive-behaviour programme.
The ICD-11 itself builds this distinction into the diagnostic criteria: distress that is entirely a product of moral disapproval of one's own sexual behaviour does not meet the threshold for CSBD. That is not a loophole. It is a clinically important precision.
When to seek a professional — urgently or soon
See a mental-health professional promptly — not after finishing a self-help programme first — if any of the following are true. You have made two or more genuine, sustained attempts to stop and have been unable to. Your use continues despite consequences you genuinely care about — a relationship, your sexual function, your professional standing. You are using pornography consistently to manage depression, anxiety, or intrusive memories that have other roots. Your use involves content that is illegal, that disturbs or frightens you, or that you cannot account for within your own values. The shame and distress around your use ever produces thoughts of self-harm or worthlessness.
In these situations, a self-assessment page is not the right tool. A qualified clinician is. Look for a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist, or accredited counsellor with experience in compulsive sexual behaviour or OCSB. Credential signals: AASECT certification in the US, COSRT in the UK, a member of the Society of Australian Sexologists in Australia. You are allowed to interview a prospective therapist about their approach — specifically, whether they work from the ICD-11 CSBD impulse-control framing or from an addiction model, and what their experience with pornography-specific presentations is.
A first assessment session is not a commitment to a full course of treatment. It is information, from a qualified person with your full history, about what your pattern actually is and what would most likely help. That information is almost always more useful than the most accurate self-assessment.
If the answer is 'not clinical, but not nothing'
Most people who search for a pornography self-assessment page land here: no diagnosis-shaped pattern of compulsion, but an honest sense that the habit is taking more than it gives — dulling partnered sex, eating evenings, leaving a residue of shame or disconnection that accumulates quietly.
That is a legitimate place to act from, and it does not require a clinical label to justify change. The useful framework is not 'do I have an addiction?' but 'is this serving me?' A habit that used to serve a purpose and no longer does, or one whose costs have gradually overtaken its benefits, is a reasonable thing to change on its own merits.
The structured route for this presentation: a defined reset period with the screen removed, long enough to observe what happens in its absence. Trigger-mapping — taking honest notes on what state you are in when the urge arises — so you know what the habit is actually doing for you emotionally. A replacement protocol for the urge window, because an urge without a replacement behaviour tends to return to its default route. And — the element most self-directed approaches skip — slow somatic re-training so that arousal stops depending on intensity and novelty and begins rebuilding around presence and embodied sensation. That last element is slow work and requires deliberate practice; it does not happen automatically when use stops.
That is what our Porn Detox programme is structured around. If you would rather talk to a person first, use the inquiry form and tell us honestly where your self-reflection landed. We will tell you honestly whether a programme, a therapist, or both is the right next step for what you have described.
This is not a diagnostic tool
Nothing on this page constitutes a diagnosis. The reflection questions above are drawn from clinical criteria territory but are not a validated screening instrument. A diagnosis of Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder or any other clinical condition requires assessment by a qualified mental-health professional. Self-assessment tools, including well-designed validated screening instruments administered properly, are screening aids — they indicate whether professional assessment is warranted, not what that assessment will conclude.
If you are in distress about your sexual behaviour and are unsure where to start, a GP is a reasonable first point of contact in most healthcare systems. They can assess whether a specialist referral is needed and, in systems with a mental health plan (Australia's Better Access pathway, the UK's IAPT/NHS Talking Therapies pathway), can facilitate access to subsidised psychological care.