Experiment from a User (60 Days NoFap)

I recently came across an anonymous user who laid out his whole plan for 2 months without PMO. It's older, but I think it's good to review information and to continue discussing what people are doing, and what works versus what doesn't.

Let us know what you think. It helped me reconsider how I view orgasms and masturbation during a reboot.

Here's the thread:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I ceased masturbating (and watching porn) for exactly two months and in my experience there are startling physiological and psychological effects from doing so.

I'd like to share my experience here so others can learn about what it's like to cease masturbating (and ejaculating) for this long a period. I know people are interested because my close circle of friends were absolutely shocked I went this long and were dying to know the details.

(Everything I'm about to cover is also from: How can I get through my self-imposed masturbation moratorium?)


DISCLAIMER:
This was a personal experiment, not a scientific one. I am not a medical professional. Do not take this information as medical advice. (Even if you wanted to sue, who the hell is "Anon User" anyway? But I digress...)


First some quick stats about me:

• Age: 20-something
• Gender: male
• Health: very healthy (exercises often, eats properly, doesn't take any medications)
• Testing: Health was confirmed through physical exam halfway through experiment (blood tests showed all biomarkers to be in normal ranges (except PSA, will discuss later); doctor said I have the cardiovascular health of an athlete)
• Religious and Moral Background: nothing that bears relevance (did this for secular, medicine/science/psychology/sexuality studies on self). I don't care for celibacy. We should all be thinking about / having sex within the healthy bounds of doing so (hopefully often).
• Sex Drive: strong
• Sexual Activity: low (none)

The last point is particularly important, because from now on, we will discuss things in terms of ceasing to ejaculate, not ceasing to masturbate.


Experimental conditions:

• No masturbation
• No pornography
• Two months (60 days)

Conclusions - PHYSIOLOGICAL:

• If you're a young 20-something male who has strong libido, it is definitely not healthy to cease ejaculating.
• There are real physiological effects from ceasing to ejaculate for weeks and/or months at a time.
• I found myself randomly "blue-balled" about once each day, for stretches of days. This started happening somewhere between the end of the third to fifth week. With no woman in sight, simply thinking about a female or momentary sexual thought, would trigger blue balls, and it hurt.
  
• I also had general discomfort in my pelvic region and even strange tingling sensations when I was urinating at times (also kicked in after week 3-5, can't remember exactly).
• My PSA level (prostate-specific antigen, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro...) was OFF THE CHARTS. This is the biomarker used to screen for prostate cancer and is now no longer recommended for healthy males (but I have a family history and have it included in my blood tests anyway).
• Typical PSA range is between 1 - 4. I was at a 7.3. (This, to my knowledge, would indicate aggressive, late-stage prostate cancer under normal circumstances.) My blood work from the prior year's physical exam had a PSA within the normal range, giving more credence to the fact that this was caused by my experiment. [UPDATE: I had my PSA checked again 2 weeks after I started to ejaculate again and it was back down to 1.6, within the normal range.]
• Basically: my prostate had swollen/inflamed quite a bit, right during the time of this masturbation moratorium. I will be so bold as to claim that the moratorium caused the prostate sensitivity (given all other variables). There's basically almost no chance I developed prostate cancer (at my age) at the exact same time I ceased ejaculating.
• We can conclude that the constant horniness/arousal with no outlet/release literally inflamed my prostate and other reproductive organs (scrotum was visibly enlarged a bit as well). There was also probably (no ultrasounds or other scans performed to confirm) some fluid backed up as well. Nothing serious but enough to cause discomfort and weird sensations.

Conclusions - PSYCHOLOGICAL:

• There are real psychological effects from ceasing to ejaculate for weeks and/or months at a time.
• Negative effect #1: Ejaculation is typically a great stress-reliever, something that can keep you level-headed and in many ways relaxed and at peace. Without ejaculation, you'll need some other outlet. If you don't exercise or somehow physically exert yourself (which typically causes a mild high akin to ejaculating, if done properly), you'll start to act differently. You'll be more agitated and irritable. You'll be quick to enter arguments, on a short fuse, the person no body wants to mess with. In a word: you're going to be sexually frustrated like you've never been in your life.
• Negative effect #2: You'll start to feel like a "sexless" man. With no outlet to release your sexual energy, you'll just have to keep suppressing and ignoring that aspect of your psyche. If you do a good job at this, it'll just creep on you throughout the day. You'll start to think "Hey, so and so has really nice tits. Wait... I shouldn't really care. I don't want to feel frustrated. Man... that's weird. How empty and sterile."
• Positive effect #1: You begin to separate fantasy from reality. Now, there's a whole philosophical argument about how fantasy can be used to sufficiently satisfy key human motivations and how that might be OK evolutionarily, etc... but without digressing into more complex bio-ethics, etc... I'd like to say for the record that it's nice not to program your brain to believe that wanking yourself off is in fact reality, is in fact some concrete pleasure activity. It's not. It shouldn't be. You should be having sex with other people.
• Positive effect #2: You'll develop greater sexual outlook and clarity. This is related to separating fantasy from reality. If you have an imagination that's wild enough (like I do), you'll just take your fantasies to points that will never become real, and a result, real sex can never measure up. There's an inherently desensitizing, deconstructing effect masturbation has on your long-term sexual psyche. Free yourself of your own notions of sexuality and explore with someone in the real world.
• Some would go so far as to say that the desensitization caused by masturbation and porn has reached an epidemic scale in our society. See this 2011 story from New York Magazine entitled "He's Just Not That Into Anyone" found here: http://nymag.com/news/features/7... See also: Will Wister's answer to Can frequent use of porn and masturbation affect male lifestyle and sexual performance?
• Positive effect #3: You'll start to develop a sense of healthy detachment from having to masturbate. You'll look at your male peers who feel compelled to masturbate every 2-4 days as somehow weaker, uncivilized, low will-power individuals. In other words: you'll feel morally and spiritually superior to others.
• Positive effect #4: You'll start to date and pursue women more aggressively. This does in fact happen. After a week or so, there's a hot fire under you like never before. In the absence of helping yourself out, you have to find some else to do it for you.
  
• Other note: I had as an original goal of this experiment to help re-approach sex as a love-making activity and not merely the objectivization of women as a piece of meat to penetrate and get my high off. I can now say that ceasing to masturbate/ejaculate didn't help do that. If anything, you're hornier and more animalistic than ever. Women definitely do become pieces of meat. Interesting take-away...

I hope it goes without saying that the negative effects trumped the positive effects quite a bit, at least in my situation.

The issue is: if you stop masturbating but continue to ejaculate through a partner, then you're going to get through this. You're going to be fine. There are no negative health issues arising from that at all. In fact, your sex game will be taken to the next level (because ceasing to ejaculate for stretches of time means the next time you're with your special person you are an animal that's ready to go, enhancing the experience for everybody, plus the orgasm's way more intense, which will hopefully translate into a more intense orgasm for your partner as well, win-win)!


What's it like to actually go through with this:

• Ceasing to ejaculate has its ups and downs.
• At first it's really tough. That first week is definitely bad. There'll be moments when you really want to let off steam and you can't.
• It definitely gets easier after the first week to ten days.
• Your friends will be astonished (really, floored) by how long you've gone, but you'll realize that it's just not that bad after a certain point (and that holds for only a couple weeks, since the negative effects kick in after week 3-5.
• There'll also be stretches of days where the thought of masturbating won't even cross your mind. You're just not thinking about it, you're busy.
• Overall, it's tough. But it has it's ups and downs.

Why I stopped at exactly two months:

• After a few weeks of blue-balls, other pains and tingly sensations, and just generally feeling too sexually frustrated to continue, I gave up the moratorium.
• My body was giving me signals and I had to listen.
• The whole thing had become something really unnatural.
• I also never experienced any nocturnal emissions during this period. This struck me as very odd, as I've experienced them before, especially as a teenager. I sure could have used this and it would have made things easier, but it just never happened. Go figure.
  
• My doctor requested another blood test, and specifically asked me to ejaculate this time, to confirm that my stratospheric PSA levels were really caused by this whole experiment.
• Basically: I was medically ordered to ejaculate.

What I think about medicine's view on masturbation/ejaculation:

• After this whole thing, I can't help but wonder why there isn't more medical information about the importance of ejaculation.
• Prior to starting this experiment, I had originally thought that all the advice about how necessary it is to 'clean the pipes' is just a myth propagated by men to encourage frequent masturbation.
  
• WOW, how wrong I was! That's certainly not a myth. Men should definitely be reminding each other of the importance of 'cleaning the pipes.'
• But why doesn't a family physician or some other doctor tell you at 18 or something that you should be sure to ejaculate frequently (or else you'll start getting all the symptoms we've discussed so far)? I'd like to engage in some serious and frank discussions with physicians here about this.

What it felt like to finally ejaculate/orgasm after two months of ceasing:

• See also: Orgasms: What does it feel like to finally ejaculate/orgasm after months of ceasing?
• My semen was yellower than normal, but nothing out of the ordinary. I wasn't shocked by the yellowness. I've witnessed that coloration before by ceasing for a week or so. This suggests that there's a drop off to the yellow-ing of semen after a certain period of time.
  
• It was not painful.
• It was not an out-of-body experience.
• I did not see or communicate with God or some other higher power.
• It felt AMAZING.
• I was euphoric for a good 20 minutes.
• No, my orgasm was not some 4-hour long tantric, ether-experience.
  
• I had an orgasm that felt like it lasted for about 45-60 seconds, which is really long for me. It was intense!
• I just had to lie down and chill out for a little bit, feeling the biochemical feedback course through my body. The inner animal within was re-awoken, and in little spurts of neurotransmission it said "thank you."
• You could probably net these benefits after holding off for about 7-10 days. I think the marginal increase in pleasure from holding off really starts to drop off after that point.
• To be sure: I haven't performed a "stepped" test to specifically target that dynamic, but I feel safe in saying that a 7-10 day cessation is going to be good enough to feel an intense orgasm for most healthy males.

[original post: https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-get-through-my-self-imposed-masturbation-moratorium/answers/1080735 ]

 

I would have to concur with a basic analysis that there does not seem to be any relationship between prolonged periods of sexual abstinence and unusual, physical effects. What I think happened is the psychological aspects of the experiment started to brush into the actual science. He makes a rudimentary conclusion that because he is experiencing some abnormal discomfort -- because he has decided to stop ejaculating for 2 months -- that this is the causal link to a theory for affirming that ejaculation is necessary for sexual health. I think the theory is interesting in itself, however, so I am looking into it now and again.

He also did not mention the events leading up to his "blue balls" episode. It might have been the case that he was edging himself in a way, by simply being in close proximity to an attractive person, that he was sitting in a certain way or doing something that could cause the effect. Because there was no documentation on a daily basis, I would not recommend taking this as scientifically accurate. It was really the psychological journey that he describes that I found interesting.

 

I would agree, in the sense that you would have to conquer the psychological parts of the addictive behavior, through an extended period in a reboot, before you can even begin to take the steps of prioritizing or controlling the other biological aspects of chronic PMO addiction. The rewiring is the most important thing to keep in mind.

I wouldn't say to try to organize PMO behavior because of the body's need to ejaculate. If your body requires this, then let it find time on its own to take care of the excess sperm or "sexual energy." I was reading about nocturnal emissions being more common the longer you go without auto-erotic activity (though, I leave in the caveat that everyone is different, and will experience different things at different times).

Though, I've never heard of a conspiracy to get men to ejaculate? Is that true?

At any rate, I think this post serves as more of an insight into how careful we need to be about how we mentally perceive our reboots, and how we can organize our lives to better achieve the results we want to see. In this guy's case it was "NoFap for 60 days, then O." But, it, as you say, is not a strategy that everyone here can adopt. We should keep in mind that as much as this is about rebooting, it is also about rebooting to the point that the temptations are organized and controlled.