Think your chronic masturbation habit could be negatively impacting your relationship?
Well, you may be right. And you’re also not alone.
If you don’t spend much time on internet forums, you probably missed the millions of men who have already been sharing their struggles in love and sex, and the direct connection to how much they masturbate.
For years now, guys have been coming together to not cum together (at least, that is, via masturbation. Some might go as far to not ejaculate at all – even with a partner – but that’s another conversation altogether, with its own array of purposes and benefits).
Many of these men have discovered first-hand how abstaining from masturbation can have absolutely transformational effects on the health of your relationships, as well as your entire life as a whole.
This experiment, or even permanent lifestyle, for some, is called “NoFap” – which is slang for “no masturbating.” It can also be known as “Nop/Nom” – or, no porn, no masturbation. The slang term “fapping” came from the general sounds of slapping skin contact while you’re beating your meat in the heat of the act.
There are varying levels of abstaining from self-pleasure, that should be deployed based off of your current situation. If you explore your body in a slow, sensual, mindful way without the use of pornography on an every now and then basis, you probably don’t need to abstain from masturbation unless you choose to. But if you’ve been masturbating daily to pornography for years, then you are undoubtedly draining your energy unnecessarily and this experiment could be worth a one-month test.
So, if you’re sensing issues related to masturbating, and are curious about what trying NoFap can do for your life, I’m about to give you the skinny on how it works, what problems it addresses, and what kind of powerful results you can expect to see.
First, you should know: There is nothing “wrong” with masturbating.
Poison and violent crime aside, pretty much everything is good in moderation. But doing NoFap isn’t about the morality, or “wrongness,” of it.
Many modern men have had an unbroken, chronic masturbation habit since puberty, which has gone far beyond healthy self-pleasure. For many, it has become a full-fledged addiction – something they feel helpless to control, and is compulsively done to the point of creating negative consequences in their lives.
The NoFap movement emerged because guys everywhere were experiencing huge problems, and they started noticing the undeniable links to masturbation. It has nothing to do with guilt, shame, religion, or morals. It’s strictly about what was causing your life to work, or not work. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with engaging in masturbation. But if you’re doing it every day, is that the most effective use of your life’s energy?
So, in the safety and anonymity of online chat forums, guys started talking about it. They began opening up about their addictions to masturbation and porn, and the havoc it was wreaking in their lives, especially in their sexual and romantic relationships. Then, tons of other guys began leaping forward to relate and share the exact same issues.
Here is a short list of common ones guys experience:
- Erectile dysfunction
- Premature ejaculation during sex
- Loss of attraction for their partner
- Depression, apathy, and loss of energy
- Lack of drive – in career, fitness, and personal life
- Lack of desire to have sex, or seek partners
- A heavy and toxic sense of despair and shame around feeling out of control
Through the NoFap challenge, countless men have seen each of these problems vanish, and be replaced by a quality of life they’d never experienced before. They feel more present, powerful, confident, and healthy, and above all, their relationships were never better.
Alright, how is this all related to fapping?
Two Cruxes of the Issue
When you screw with your dopamine reward mechanisms, it has huge consequences in all areas of life, but specifically with your significant other.
Dopamine is what causes you to feel motivated to do things, and feel sexually aroused. When you’re flooding your brain all the time by masturbating, you’re doing two things:
- Depleting your stores of dopamine, so you feel less pleasure and motivation overall, and
- Increasing your tolerance, so you need even more stimulation and novelty to produce dopamine, in order to feel its addictive beneficial effects.
It’s just like drinking alcohol or smoking pot: Someone who regularly has a lot of it, for a long period of time, will start to need much more of it in order to feel the same buzz.
So, your relationship, your partner, and most things in natural life, can’t provide enough dopamine, and so you begin to stop feeling as interested in them.
As a result, your regular life can start to feel dull and grey, or numb, and your days become about chasing the high (whether you know it or not) which leads you to things like chronically jacking off – even when you weren’t aroused – and spending more time on your phone, or in other mindless distractions.
If you feel like you’re always lazy, don’t take much action, and are easily distracted, this is probably why.
It’s also important to note here that, for a lot of men, masturbation is usually attached to pornography, which brings its own unique brand of negative impacts on relationships. This is the second major piece of the problem.
(By the way, if you’re specifically struggling with porn-induced erectile dysfunction as well, I’d recommend checking out my deeper dive article on that here.)
Adding heavy porn use to a chronic masturbation habit messes up the arousal circuitry in your brain even more.
For men, sexual imagery is a big trigger for dopamine. And so are things like mate novelty, colourful imagery, and quick cut editing. This makes porn tube sites the most diabolically perfect dopamine dispenser.
But, in using them way too much over time, you train your sex drive to only passively respond to this artificial digital experience, with a level of novelty and intensity that is utterly impossible to recreate in real life.
This is where the extra layer of conditioning comes in.
Where you would normally expect to get your engine revved and mind engaged by seeing a real woman in the flesh, and feel motivated to action, you instead struggle to feel much arousal at all. You feel like your mojo has been killed.
But when you’re alone with your computer and millions of free videos, containing every possible kink at the touch of a button, your loins will scrape together the will to weakly rouse from their slumber.
What does all this amount to?
With NoFap, we’re basically resetting your brain’s arousal circuitry, and sparking a ton of positive changes.
This means you’ll not only start feeling more attracted to your partner, but you’ll actually experience deeper feelings of love, gratitude, presence, and meaningful connection.
I’ll explain all this in a few seconds. But first I should mention a few things that you need to know…
NOFAP WARNINGS:
– This is probably going to be hard as fuck. But that’s why it’s so powerful.
I’m assuming that you’ve been fapping freely for many years, without a second thought. So be prepared for your mind to pull out every trick in the book to pull you away from abstaining from masturbation. One of the most common early-days hacks that men engage in is trying “edging,” where you rationalize that it’s okay to touch yourself a little bit, as long as you don’t orgasm. The logic being that you’re just revving your engine without spilling your energy.
This is total bullshit. Playing with your penis for any reason besides washing it for a few seconds, or grooming, is masturbating. Don’t let your inner cum-junkie make any concessions, compromises, or have you weasel your way into loopholes and technicalities.
If you’re looking to reset your dopamine receptors, then abstaining full-stop (at least for a period of time) is going to get you the results you’re after.
It’s going to take serious commitment to yourself, your relationship, and your life. But you can reclaim so much confidence, energy, and power in the process.
– You need to give this a bit of time.
While a few of these benefits might appear almost immediately, most of them require some time to develop. Many of these problems are rooted in physiology, and it takes time for your body and brain to reset and rebalance. Depending on the severity and longevity of your chronic masturbation/porn-use habit, it could take anywhere from 1-10 months for significant erectile changes to stabilize, for example.
If you’re a daily masturbator, take this on for one week to start, to make it digestible for your mind. Then go for a full month.
Knowing all that, here are seven ways NoFap improves your relationships.
1. Stronger erections
When you take a sustained break from masturbation, you’ll begin recovering long-lasting, rock-hard erections.
Much of this has to do with the replenishing the body’s stockpile of chemicals that trigger and facilitate the process of getting an erection. Until now, these chemicals have been constantly depleted, while you probably still continued to push through to jack off with medium strength erections.
Plus, with the hyper-stimulation of porn out of the way, your brain will start to get switched on by much more subtle and natural stimulus. It could be anything from your partner’s scent, to the look of their legs in jeans, the feeling of their hair, or maybe even for no reason at all.
Rather than feeling that empty, semi-firm, half mast of a hard-on – that’s just enough to get the job done of whacking off – you’ll reclaim the throbbing, fully engorged, pelvis swelling erections.
I’ve experienced huge erectile benefits within just one week of engaging in NoFap. I could box 12 rounds with it like a heavy bag and it would keep bouncing back. But some clients I’ve worked with, who have had more severe issues, said that they experienced more remarkable improvements after a few weeks – and that it was totally worth the wait.
2. More sexual energy/desire
Quite simply, when you’re not popping the valve open all the time, your sexual energy gets concentrated and intensified.
Think of building your sexual desire like building a fire. If you’re constantly stamping it out, by blowing loads and dumping your energy, your drive will feel like an ashy bed of flickering embers. But if you leave it alone and give it a little time, it will start to roar to a blaze, and you’ll feel it much more strongly.
When you’re regularly masturbating, you might lie beside your partner and feel a limp, lazy vacuum in your pelvis. It’s like there’s no fire or desire. If anything, you might have the urge to sneak away and watch porn on your phone in the other room.
But on NoFap, you’ll feel that stoked, buzzing fire, ready to go, and it’s way easier to switch on. You’ll feel more inclined to initiate. You’ll be more attracted to your partner (or, if you’re single, to women in general).
And as I’ll touch on in a point further down, this sexual energy is good for much more than just fucking.
3. More attraction for your partner
It’s very common for chronic male masturbators to lose their spark of attraction for their significant other. Because when you’re constantly masturbating (especially to porn) you stop noticing her in the same way.
You default to using other means of channelling and releasing your sexual energy and “meeting your primal needs.” Biologically, some part of you feels satiated, or spent, and there’s no reason for the body to trigger arousal and motivation – because it thinks that the job has been done.
NoFap restores your natural balance and rhythms of sexual arousal. As the dopamine system resets, and your brain acclimates to the real world, you’ll start feeling a lot more sexual towards your partner.
You’ll stop preferring mental fantasies, and fake women in fake scenarios. And I mean “fake” in the sense that porn actors spend hours in hair and makeup getting ready for the shoot, plus, they’re getting paid to act through the entire thing.
Again, porn can be enjoyed in a healthy way. But the way most men use it is taking a significant toll on their brains, without them even knowing it. It programs them to be attracted to anything but their partner, or a real woman.
4. More presence and connection in your lovemaking
In the moment, the intensity of your conscious experience increases BIG time. Rather than practicing disappearing in mental and digital fantasies, you are there – in your body, feeling all the sensations.
You’ll also experience way more raw fierceness and strength in your sexual desire. You’ll have the overwhelming desire to take and ravish your partner, and energetically enhance the experience.
Most guys notice that the whole sexual experience just feels richer, deeper, and more nuanced, in a way they’ve never experienced before.
5. More motivation and energy in your life
All this sexual energy you’re cultivating isn’t just fire for sex – it’s fire for life.
It pushes you into a state of alertness, presence, and desire for action across the board.
Instead of hitting a button and constantly getting a dopamine fix, you’ll actually be motivated to go out and hunt for them in the real world, by doing things like making tangible progress on your career goals, working out, or taking risks.
Also, NoFap is no small task. You’re conquering a long-standing addiction – something that had a hold on you, and felt outside of your control. This builds huge confidence. The experience of applying mind over body and conquering those formerly compulsive urges makes you feel powerful.
You’re also freeing up a ton of mental and physical energy that would otherwise be going down the drain. All of that energy has to go somewhere. And you can funnel it toward making shit happen, and building things in the real world.
6. More focus that you can bring to your conversations
If the intimacy in your relationship was like the heat in a house, having a masturbation and porn habit would be like leaving all the windows open.
All of your energy gets diffused and escapes the container. A cold relationship is one where people stop having the inclination to create mental intimacy with each other. They’re not bringing fresh eyes and curiosity to their partner. There are many other things that can cause a relationship to go cold, but chronic masturbation and the depletion of your sexual energy is certainly one.
As you stop distracting yourself so much, that curiosity comes back in full force, just like it probably was at the beginning of the relationship, when you were still getting to know each other.
7. More energy to channel into loving your partner well
With all of this extra desire, energy, and interest, you’ll feel more inclined to channel your love and attention into your relationship.
Guys on NoFap find themselves thinking ahead to consider and anticipate her needs, or performing little acts of service, and telling her how they feel more often.
Women have reported suddenly feeling a steadily growing flood of attention from their man, like he was less distant and distracted. That’s because he’s “closed the windows,” so to speak, and stopped diffusing his energy in the overuse of masturbation.
The result is your partner feeling more seen, loved, and appreciated, which creates an upward spiral in your relationship, and takes you to levels you’d never have gotten to otherwise.
NoFap seems overly simple, or maybe even trivial, on the surface. But as tons of other guys can attest, it will change the way you experience yourself, your partner, and your entire life.
Again, don’t expect an entire world of difference in just a few days. You may indeed feel some things within the first week. But especially in terms of your inner fire, confidence, motivation, erections, and intimacy, that stuff may take up to a few weeks. That’s because, on top of the physiological resetting the body has to do, you need to start racking up the wins in your life in order to build momentum.
Every time you get the urge to masturbate and you choose not to, it’s like cracking open a hidden Easter egg with psychological power inside. It increases your confidence and builds the muscles of your mental will, while adding a little more energy to your mojo stockpile.
Pretty soon, you’ll feel ablaze with fire for life and way more excited about your relationship.
And if you’re really serious about tackling this challenge, I highly recommend having an accountability partner. It will give you way more resolve, and help you produce even deeper insights into your process.
If you don’t have a friend who you feel comfortable sharing this challenge with, there are hordes of communities and forums online where you can find awesome support.
You’ve got this!
Dedicated to your success,
Jordan
Ps. If you enjoyed this article, you’ll also love checking out:
– Supercharge Your Sex Life (video series for men)
– How To Recover From Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction
– Wanted: Strong Men For Soft Times
– How To Start And Run A Men’s Group Successfully
– 5 Ways To Help Reduce The Male Suicide Rate
– 11 Ways To Be A More Attractive Man (or How To Fight Entropy 101)
