Day two, I can see the flow of particles in the universe. Day three, I can smell colour. I’ve gotten violently aggressive, started hunting wild game by foot. I have a raging urge to run through a wall. I can sprint to the earth’s core.
Day four, I have mastered the art of sage mode. Now I can literally summon meteors at will. Women are dying to date me, and yesterday I threw a mountain into space, and that mountain is now the moon. Day 30, I can stay flaccid. Day 69, I can smash brick walls with my pinky. Day 366, Jordan Peterson is cleaning my room. Day 6780, I can tell my barber that I didn’t like my haircut.
So, is Nofap real or is it a myth?
If you haven’t seen the first one, quick summary: nofap is a fanatical, borderline religious group of people that believe you get massive multi-system benefits from not marching the penguin, cooking the cucumber, burping the worm. So, does it actually work? What’s the science behind it?
The Four Proposed Mechanisms
Broadly, there are four possible mechanisms that nofap proponents point to:
- Dopamine sensitivity reset
- Closing the self-image gap (and the associated guilt and shame)
- Preserving your “life force”, your prana, your qi
- Testosterone optimisation from sexual abstinence
1. The Dopamine Argument (The Most Plausible One)
Based on those possible mechanisms, number one is the most plausible: the dopamine sensitivity reset.
If we look at rat studies, it confirms this. If you introduce a new female rat (new sexual stimulus) to a male rat, they will become progressively desensitised to that new sexual stimulus. And that translates into humans needing more and more outlandish stimuli to achieve the same effect. Before you know it, you’re down the rabbit hole of hentai tentacle porn or whatever.
The other dimension to this is that from an evolutionary standpoint, watching other people copulate is digital cuckoldry. Imagine doing thousands of reps of that. Probably not very good for your brain.
Dopamine Dysregulation Looks a Lot Like Depression
If we look at this through the dopamine lens, the downstream effects of dopamine dysregulation produce symptoms that look a lot like depression:
- Low mood
- Sleep disruption
- Enhanced cravings
- Emotional reactivity and the binge-crave cycle
- Guilt and pleasure-seeking behaviour
- Worsened sexual performance
We’re also seeing on a large scale that there are growing rates of erectile dysfunction in young men. I think there are many possible causes for this, and I’ve also covered why I believe that environmental estrogens are a big driver. You can have a look at this article where I did my own blood tests and eliminated environmental estrogens and improved my testosterone levels.
The Shadow Side of Sexual Shame
This is a great lesson from Scott Kilby, psychotherapist and non-duality teacher. He asks: who are you vilifying sexually?
Who do you judge? Transgender people? Gay men? People who watch porn? Where are your sexual hang-ups? Because they are the cracks in your subconscious. If you follow those and identify where your particular judgments or hang-ups are, that’s what reveals your shadow side. These little cracks are pointers to the massive depths of our subconscious mind and point us towards big sources of our suffering.
There’s the classic homophobia study where they hooked up a bunch of men to a little elastic band around their willie and showed them gay porn. The more that somebody identified as homophobic, the more erectile response they had. Classic projection.
So basically, the more homophobic you are, the more gay you are in terms of arousal response.
“You Have to Experience It to Believe It”
In the last video, some people said: “I don’t care about the science. You have to experience it to believe it. If you haven’t tried it, you’re missing out.”
I grew up in a religious household with long periods of sexual abstinence. Did I notice a difference in terms of my mental state or my function? Zero.
That’s not to say you won’t experience a difference. It’s just that nofap is a bit of a religion, as you’ve probably seen from the subreddits. So you can prove it to yourself and see whether you feel any different. And if the idea of abstinence is so throbbingly hard, then maybe you do have a problem.
Who Would Actually Benefit?
Pathological fappers.
If you stop doing pathological amounts of anything, of course you’re going to see a benefit. My theory is that the behaviour of excess fapping, or excess drinking, or excess anything, is a symptom. There might be more underlying stuff that you need to deal with.
And of course, if you do anything to the point of detriment and then you stop doing that thing, you’re going to see an improvement in how you feel and how you function. No wonder people on 4chan and Reddit are saying “I’m feeling so confident, I’m gaining muscle” – because of course you can look people in the eye when you’re no longer ashamed about spending hours every day battling the one-eyed slinger, and suddenly you’ve got more energy to go to the gym because you freed up so much time.
The Verdict
It’s not a conspiracy, unlike some of the comments that think I’m somehow sponsored by Big Fap, as if there’s this group of evil masterminds funding your lightsaber practice with Captain Han Solo.
Is nofap going to improve your performance and give you spiritual powers? Probably not.
But if you’ve searched for this video, question whether you have a problem. If the idea of abstinence feels impossible, give it a go. Prove it to yourself.
The data suggests it’s probably not going to give you superpowers. You’re better off getting your dopamine from things like building your body and building your business, and that’s what this channel is for.