Sex addicts develop patterns of tolerance to their own levels of excitement (the "high").
Over time sex addict needs more exotic, more erotic, more dangerous sexual activity (stimulation) to produce the same high.
Example:
Masturbation - initially sex addict gets aroused quickly and is satisfied after masturbating only once. However, after a while, he needs more graphic images, more explicit porn, and needs to masturbates many times a day (compulsive masturbation) to be satisfied
Watching porn on the web - initially even soft porn is "exciting and satisfying", however in time - more is needed: hard porn, children pornography, etc.
Sex addict becomes accustomed to the "high" and it no longer has the same capacity to create the high that it did originally.
It takes more and more of the addictive behavior to produce the same results.
For sex addicts there is a definite amount of physical tolerance involved in an escalating addiction. The chemicals are not ingested from a source outside the self but are instead produced entirely from within. Our bodies have, essentially, two nervous systems, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.
The sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight response) wakes us up, turns us on, alerts us, arouses us, and stimulates us. It is our adrenalin system. It makes us feel alive and ready to engage.
On the other hand, our parasympathetic nervous system calms us down, puts us to sleep, helps us to relax, turns us off, and lets us disengage from the world. It is our soothing system, and makes us feel peaceful and content.
In a sex addiction, the addict is overusing the sympathetic system.
While the sympathetic nervous system is being overtaxed, the parasympathetic system is also working overtime (one may think of the sympathetic system as the accelerator and the parasympathetic system as the brake). After the addict has over-stimulated himself, it takes more to calm down - e.g. sleep problems may develop - at one point one orgasm may have been enough to bring on a sense of relief and relaxation, but over time, the addict may need more and more orgasms or he may start using other ways of inducing sleep like drugs or alcohol.
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“Growing Tolerance” means needing more frequent or more intense experiences to achieve the same effect. For example, why did Bob increase the number of times he visited the strip club? Because he “needed” more visits to achieve the same effect that the first visit had given him. At the first visit to a strip club, all the sights, sounds, and smells are new, exciting, and illicit. By the third or fourth visit to the same club the newness has worn off and even the dancers are no longer as titillating as they were before. Bob found he had to stay longer, waiting for the “better” dancers to perform, and had to visit more often. Soon, that club was no longer exciting enough and he began to cruise other clubs in town, driving farther and farther in search of that continually retreating high he had found in his first visit. He had developed a “tolerance” to experiences that had once been sufficient to excite him. Another way to obtain more intense experiences is to cross forbidden boundaries. Engaging in illicit behaviors, doing something you are not supposed to be doing, increases the high.
See also: