A couple of questions about what ejaculation does to our body

Streaks affect people differently, so your results may vary. Many people report positive outcomes to abstaining, but even those outcomes may differ from yours. All I can do is give you anecdotal evidence based off of my own experiences. Which I will do now.

For me, this is true. Tasks that seem menial, I end up just straight up doing it and being happier in the end for sticking to it. It definitely helps my productivity. However, while you're talking about fapping less, I refuse to do it at all. You may or may not get the same result if you decide to limit your masturbation to, say, once a week.

Hm... being a virgin, I can't really say, but I see no reason it would be the same, at least not completely.

To reference esoterics, the loss of semen in a male can actually be detrimental to his overall health, which has been observed here by some that go through "semen retention" streaks, including myself. Chinese esoterics state that a man loses a bit of his life-force every time he ejaculates because in order to give life, you must take away some of your own. Women lose some of their life-force by giving birth. (part of the reason why women tend to live longer)

The only time a man can ejaculate without losing some of his life energy is when the semen goes completely inside the body of a woman. Which means having sex with condoms, when it comes to lifeforce, isn't any different than masturbation.

(there are ways to not only prevent your lifeforce from being drained, but to actually regain it back, but I'll only mention those if asked)

You should note that this is all just food for thought, I'm not greatly familiar with these specific esoterics and admit to not being able to substantiate them. However, based off of my own experiences with streaks, there does seem to be some merit to them.

However, porn seems to have a greatly detrimental effect on the brain itself. Speaking for myself, one time, I binged by doing it 4 times in one day and I felt absolutely awful afterwards. I had a headache, unwanted thoughts barraged my mind, I had severe brain numbness, my memory went to shit. Took me about a week to recover from that.

However, nobody seems to mention the same effects when having sex with a condom, so I would imagine it's not as unhealthy.

Just my two cents. Take what you will from it.

Yeesh, less often. I would never encourage anybody to masturbate more to deal with pain. Go out and talk to someone. Or workout to fight through the fustration.

I also don't encourage finding a sex buddy and having sex with her as often as possible, but I'm not as against that as masturbating with or without porn (except for the risk of unwanted pregnancy).

Actually, I'm the same way, for the most part. On a prolonged streak, I'm pretty much mostly inactive down there and it's due to a flatline, which according to many members on here, is important for a reboot. But should the unthinkable happen and I give in, my libido roars back to life, giving me urges to binge, and many erections. It's just in a more unhealthy way since I shouldn't need porn to kickstart my libido.

Sexual dreams are more common for me during longer streaks. Morning wood... I haven't figured out yet. Sometimes it's common early in a streak, sometimes it's common over 10 days into a streak, etc.

I hope this helped at least somewhat. Hope you officially join the community!

 

Hey @frusciante54, I think you're over-simplifying what dopamine is and how it affects our emotions and that's causing some confusion.

Firstly, what is dopamine? Dopamine is a molecule that is released during some brain processes and affects other parts of the brain. Dopamine is usually involved in reward systems (making you want to do something again) but dopamine is also CRUCIAL for simple brain communication, so if it ran out, you'd be dead.

Dopamine is released during arousal, not just ejaculation. And when we get aroused by porn (flat, HD, extreme images), dopamine strengthens our arousal brain systems to respond to that kind of stimuli, whereas if it was real sex, dopamine would be strengthening a response to the smell in the air, the feeling of skin on skin, the visuals of a person moving in 3D. So dopamine helps to condition your brain to respond highly to porn and not to real life.

So, with that in mind, lets have a look at your questions.
1) I don't buy that masturbation uses up your dopamine so you run out of happy hormones. The classic response to having sex is that you feel great.
I think a lot of people have lots of shame attached to their masturbation/porn habits and they don't ever address them. They hide their sexual secrets from the world and everyday they go about their lives with the weight of secrecy on their shoulders - and this leads to depression. Stress and secrecy and feeling like you're doing something wrong makes you mentally ill. If you truly think that what you're doing is somehow immoral or is contributing to your unhappiness, you should stop doing it, and you'll find that you become happier.

2) Again, same as above - you don't run out of dopamine. Go have lots of sex as long as its healthy and you're not hurting anyone.

3) Lots of people ejaculate to take their minds off the emotional pain they have. It doesn't deal with the situation. By not masturbating, you have to deal with your feelings, which helps speed things up emotionally.

4) People describe the chaser effect - the effect of ejaculating recently puts your mind into a sexual state and makes you crave release more. Like if a lion was wandering around the Sahara alone, they'd conserve their sexual energy because it wasn't important, but once they found a mate, they'd have sex and then their sex drive would kick into gear and they'd want to have sex as much as possible in order to make sure the lioness gets pregnant.

Hope that all makes sense. A lot of this is neuroscience and it isn't well understood even by the people studying it. The brain is the most complex thing in the universe and we're all just guessing really.

 

It is not about running out of Dopamine. Basically everytime you masturbate to porn you get a huge rush of dopamine making you feel pleasure. But over time if you masturbate to porn excessively the constantly high dopamine levels means that your dopamine receptors loose sensitivity to dopamine meaning that you need more dopamine to feel the same high. This is why people transition to more hardcore or abnormal forms of porn after they do not get the same affect with the porn they used to watch.

The way this affects everyday life is that because your dopamine receptors are so insensitive from the porn addiction, everyday social interactions ect. do not release enough dopamine to stimulate the receptors to get a response. This is why porn addicts often feel numb or emotionless and can contribute to social anxiety and depression. Hope this helps (I study biochemistry at university).