Porn addiction is becoming a major problem at work.  Technology is a mission critical tool for both work and pleasure and the lines are blurring every day.  Gone are the days when your work phone was actually located at work.

More and more of my clients are struggling with porn addiction or compulsion, even under the threat of termination.  This porn addiction or whatever you call it is producing some really poor decisions with very serious consequences.

Check out the photo and the video.  Talk about wrong place and wrong time!  The man is on TV being interviewed and on the computer screen behind him is a picture of a nude model on his coworker's computer screen.  By today's standards the picture of the model is tame - they came from a GQ photo shoot of Victoria Secret Model Miranda Kerr.  He did not get fired, but did suffer some embarrassment.

I know many of you can relate to this fear of being caught.  I talk to great men like you who have done great things but everyday that struggle with this compulsion or porn addiction.  Many of my clients are just one click away from being fired - I help them make positive choices.  You can too!

From where I sit, porn in the workplace is a growing epidemic.  Look what happened at the Securities and Exchange Commission allegedly at the height of the financial crisis.  Senior staffers were consumed with porn while working (many of my clients use porn as a coping mechanism so this is no surprise to me).  The headline, "Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis" was everywhere.  Here is a summary of the allegations from an SEC memo to Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA):

• A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office - he agreed to resign.
• An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography" - he received a 14-day suspension.
• Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418.

Statistics from Nielsen Online show that at least twenty-five percent of the seemingly hard-working people hunched over computers in their cubicles are actually looking at porn.  Do they all have a porn addiction?  Maybe you’re one of them.

What you might not know is that time wasted on porn while at work not only costs American businesses a ton of capital, it may be stopping you from increasing your personal income.  Your porn addiction or compulsion is holding you back.

Make More Money - Quit Porn

In my counseling practice, Compulsion Solutions, which focuses exclusively on sexual addiction and porn addiction, I have seen countless men waste thousands of hours a year on porn and other sexually compulsive behaviors.  Think of the lost productivity.  Imagine the opportunities that slipped away.  I can relate.

In fact, I was a sex addict myself and estimate that my compulsion costs me over five hundred thousand dollars in wasted man-hours.  Wasted time costs not only income but career advancement, movement to a job that might be better suited, and possibly even business relationships.  If you make 65,000 per year, watching one hour of porn a day costs your employer approximately $10k.  Think of the cost to you.

For a porn devotee, almost everything else takes a back seat.

At this point you might be wondering, “So what if one-quarter of the people where I work are looking at porn online during working hours? What can I do about it?” I have seen men turn their lives around by learning to understand and deal with their sexual compulsions and porn addictions.  They start living more fulfilling personal lives, and often make new career choices, sometimes increasing their incomes by millions of dollars.

If you want to do something right now that isn’t a waste of time, one of the ways to help yourself that I talk about in my book, "Breaking the Cycle: Free Yourself from Sex Addiction, Porn Obsession, and Shame", is to create a ritual. For example, I use what I call the beard test. Whenever you find yourself wanting to watch porn or act on a sexual compulsion, run your hand across your face, feel the stubble of your beard, and realize that you’re no longer a kid with peach fuzz.

Embrace your manhood as you feel the stubble of your beard, and also be compassionate with yourself. But be relentless, too. Taking even one step towards freedom from sexually compulsive behavior can help you get back to work, and maybe even make more money.

How about it?  I don't want you to be one of the statistics I site below.  Don't let porn addiction or your porn compulsions get in the way of a happy healthy life.

Some other interesting porn in the workplace statistics and stories that will blow your mind:

• 70% of all web traffic to Internet pornography sites occurs during the work hours of 9am-5pm.
• 27% of Fortune 500 organizations have defended themselves against sexual harassment suits from inappropriate emails.

Another report estimates that annually over 85 billion dollars of productivity are lost to workplace viewing of pornography, although this statistic lumps porn in with other non-work-related web-use.

Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography from their government computers, grew sixfold last year inside the taxpayer-funded foundation that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants, according to budget documents and other records obtained by The Washington Times.

News sources recently exposed more than thirty senior employees at the Securities and Exchange Commission whose pornography addictions led them to spend up to eight hours a day online viewing and downloading pornographic images while at work instead of policing Wall Street. See Daniel Indiviglio, Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis?, (Apr. 23, 2010), ; Jonathan Karl, SEC and Pornography: Workers Spent Hours on Porn Sites Instead of Stopping Fraud, (Apr. 22, 2010).

The law is unclear whether Internet pornography addiction qualifies as a protected disability.

A third of companies have had to discipline staff for misuse of the Internet.

Most studies show 70% of companies have had sex sites accessed using their network.