Why NoFap Fails: Unrealistic Abstinence Goals and the Cycle of Relapse

The rise of NoFap

NoFap started in 2011, when web developer Alexander Rhodes shared a Reddit post inspired by a 2003 study claiming that abstaining from ejaculation for seven days could boost testosterone by 145%.

What began as Rhodes' personal one-week challenge quickly evolved into something far larger, and membership on the r/NoFap subreddit had exploded to over 1.2 million members by 2025 [1]. NoFap has now become a cultural phenomenon complete with books, podcasts, YouTube channels, and regular mainstream media coverage

The NoFap movement caught on because it promised a sweeping life-upgrade package: stop masturbating and watching porn and you’ll “reboot” your brain into a higher-performance version of yourself, capable of riches and success with women. Some of the alleged benefits include physical transformation and improved stamina, increased focus, motivation, willpower and self-esteem as well as regaining control over one’s sexuality and alignment with the best version of one’s self.

The NoFap Army, as dedicated members called themselves, transformed what began as a simple abstinence challenge into a comprehensive lifestyle movement. But if NoFap’s claims were true, then one of the most universal human behaviors would have to be a mistake that somehow survived millions of years of evolution.

Let’s take a step back and examine the cold hard facts, which will allow us to place NoFap in the proper context.

Masturbation is common in animals & humans

Why do animals masturbate?

Why NoFap is destined to fail

The cycle of relapse and shame

Nearly all men masturbate. They do for most of their life, though with decreasing frequency as they age. In surveys, 92-95% of men admit to having masturbated, and we can be pretty sure the real number is even higher [2]. The corresponding figure for women is close to 80%, and four out of ten women prefer masturbation over sex [3] .

The practice is also widespread among the animal kingdom, observed among hundreds species of mammals, birds, sea creatures and reptiles [4] . But it’s especially widespread among the primate order (monkeys, apes, lemurs etc.), where humans belong. There are over 500 primate species, ranging from the tiny mouse lemurs of Madagascar to the great apes like gorillas and humans.

The same agile fingers that allow primates to be prolific tool users also allow them to masturbate, often with the help of an opposable thumb. Over 80% of primate families have been observed masturbating, either in the wild or in captivity. Masturbation happens in almost all apes, including the large apes (humans, gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans).

While all biologists agree that masturbation in apes is almost as natural as breathing air, they don’t agree on the why. The evolution of this habit is a big unsolved mystery. Why do animals expend time and energy into a reproductive dead end, and why has natural selection not weeded out the practice a long time ago?

Evolutionary biologists have proposed two major hypotheses. According to the first, masturbation serves to speed up subsequent ejaculation with females. This benefits low-ranking males who are in usually in a hurry on account of threats from more dominant rivals. Masturbation is also thought to expel old and inferior sperm, increasing the quality of subsequent sperm and thereby also increasing a male’s chance of fertilizing a female [5].

Another hypothesis states that masturbation serves no reproductive goal whatsoever, but is merely an outlet of frustrated sexual energy. The “outlet” hypothesis treats the act as a pressure-release valve. Sexual arousal is metabolically expensive and cognitively distracting; if, for whatever reason, a male cannot convert that arousal into real mating, masturbation discharges the tension at trivial cost. In this view, masturbation is the behavioral equivalent of a sneeze: pointless in terms of reproducing, but useful for restoring physiological equilibrium.

Regardless of which explanation of masturbation we accept, the fact is that masturbation among men is not a biological aberration. It’s as normal and essentially universal primate behaviour. This inconvenient little fact suggests that trying to cut out masturbation by force, especially if one doesn’t have sexual access to a woman, is a losing proposition.

In a recent survey study with several hundred members of the online NoFap community, the average number of relapses reported was 20. A large portion of participants selected the maximum number which the survey allowed, which was 50 [6].

Even if we generously ignore all other considerations and focus only on the narrow criterion of the man not masturbating (the sine qua non of the movement) then NoFap is a failure. If a weight loss program had its average participant yo-yoing back to their starting weight 20 times over, they would soon go out of business in disgrace.

What the NoFap gurus won’t tell you is that, fundamentally, this lifestyle is not sustainable. You can’t will your way out of sexual desire, much like you can’t will your way out of desiring social contact with other humans.

Precisely because the success rates are so low, NoFap has spontaneously acquired many cult-like characteristics. For all their claims of superpowers, the leaders of the community are not keen to carry out systematic research into the real-life outcomes members experience. This has allowed them to carry on proclaiming their unrealistic goals, even as the contrary evidence continues to pile up.

Because the goal is inherently unrealistic, the community is a very toxic environment, filled with members who ride highs while on a successful abstinence streak and fill with shame and guilt when they “relapse”. The language has adopted many features of Alcoholic Anonymous, with members talking about having a lifelong problem of addiction, being “in recovery”, and sharing many painful stories of failure and shame. In a recent survey, 29% of participants who relapsed report their failure makes them feel suicidal [8]. Ironically, the more engaged a participant with the NoFap forums, the more suicidal they tend to be. This is the opposite of what you want from an intervention that promises to improve peoples’ lives.

Predictably, given what we’ve discussed, the more members engaged with NoFap forums, the more their mental and sex life declined across the board. Higher engagement tracked with more anxiety, depression and erectile dysfunction. There is little doubt that by becoming involved with NoFap, most of these men prolong and add to their problems (studies find that pornography addiction resolves naturally for 95% of men within five years)[9]. Rather than improving their lives, NoFap makes it thoroughly unlivable. As one Redditor commented after 8 years of involvement:

Sources

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoFap

[2] Sommer, V., Thomsen, R., & Brindle, M. (2022). Masturbation in primates. The Cambridge handbook of evolutionary perspectives on sexual psychology.

[3] https://www.spencersonline.com/blog/masturbation-facts-statistics-trends/

[4] Roth, L., Briken, P., & Fuss, J. (2023). Masturbation in the animal kingdom. The Journal of Sex Research, 60(6), 786-798.

[5] Brindle, M., Ferguson-Gow, H., Williamson, J., Thomsen, R., & Sommer, V. (2023). The evolution of masturbation is associated with postcopulatory selection and pathogen avoidance in primates. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 290(2000), 20230061.

[6] Prause, N., & Binnie, J. (2024). Iatrogenic effects of Reboot/NoFap on public health: A preregistered survey study. Sexualities, 27(8), 1608-1640.

[7] Sommer et al, 2022.

[8] Prause et al, 2024

[9] Prause et al. 2024

[10] https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/n5csu7/i_have_survived_the_worst_days_of_my_life_after_8/

[11] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/27/health/this-is-life-lisa-ling-alex-rhodes-nofap-wellness

[12] Chandrasekaran B, Ghosh A, Prasad C, Krishnan K, Chandrasharma B. Age and anthropometric traits predict handgrip strength in healthy normals. Journal of Hand and Microsurgery, 2010;2(2):58-61.

[13] Levitt EE, Konovsky M, Freese MP, Thompson JF. Intravaginal pressure assessed by the Kegel perineometer. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 1979 Sep;8(5):425‑30.

Regardless, the data suggest that you will eventually grow out of masturbation naturally, particularly if there is the option of real sex. Masturbation rates peak during adolescence and early adulthood. As men age their frequency of masturbation naturally reduces, especially if they have access to sex through a girlfriend or wife[7].

That’s great, you say, but the problem is exactly that I don’t have a woman! We will come to that shortly, but first I want to expand on the wider effects of failing the abstinence goal again and again.

Disentangling masturbation, porn and abstinence

At its core, NoFap is a movement that started out with the good intentions. The problem was that it over-reacted, applied the wrong remedy and ended up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Let’s disentangle the factors at play, which will allow for a more realistic approach:

1) Porn. No matter how you look at it, pornography, especially in excess, is not healthy. Our brains evolved in small bands of 50 to 100 people, and an ancestral man might live his whole life seeing only a handful of women naked. Modern-day pornography blows that scarcity to pieces, as it asks the brain to process something it never evolved for.

The sexual novelty porn offers is endless. The male brain adapts to this stream by dulling its response. Ordinary intimacy starts to feel flat, while the need for more extreme material escalates. At the same time, the man’s brain compares the unrealistic images on his screen with his real-life options, who predictably don’t match up as well. The result is a thoroughly unsatisfying love life.

2) Abstinence. As we saw, total abstinence is not realistic. Even in the rare cases where a man succeeds with a pre-determined streak, the unbearable accumulation of sexual tension will hamper his life far more than any potential time and energy savings.

3) Masturbation. If you don’t have a sexual partner, masturbation is your only outlet for sexual release. Sure, it’s not as good as real sex, and a reminder that you couldn’t find a real woman, which is why you’re not particularly proud about it. But there is simply no alternative to masturbation.

The question that NoFappers never consider is how to masturbate. Reading a 2019 interview of Rhodes, the founder of NoFap, it becomes obvious that the way he was masturbating was responsible for much of his unhappiness[11]. When the reporter asks him how many times a day he was viewing porn, this was his response:

At least 10 times a day, if not 14, sometimes. I was going at it to the point where I was injuring myself. Chafing on my genitals. And I couldn’t even stop for a day to allow it to heal, just had to keep going. And I was, like, “This can’t be healthy.”

At a later point he describes how this affected his sex life as a young adult.

You also have this other effect called delayed ejaculation. It’s also called an orgasm that’s just difficult or impossible to achieve, and that was my main thing. I could not have an orgasm; I just couldn’t because my brain was attracted more to pornography over a real person.

“By doing nofap, I was forcing myself to be someone else and I obviously lost all my friends and wasted 8 years of basically being insane and sexually frustrated. It would suck all my willpower and focus away [10]”

He would go on to add how ditching NoFap had improved his life all-around:

“Once I stopped nofap, I just accepted that I am who I am, which is introverted, insecure, kinda know-it-all asshole, kinky and not perfect. I just became me. Now I can actually focus on the bad qualities of my personality and change them and that's only if I really want to. All of a sudden I became confident. There was no longer that little voice in my head that told me that I need to change and that I am addicted to porn and etc.”

A better way to reset

If someone had regular vaginal sex 14 times a day or even used an artificial silicon vagina, surely they would not harm their penis to the point of chaffing it. But the vast majority of men masturbate using the palm of their closed first, which harms the penis by generating tremendously more force than what it was designed to withstand. Let’s look at some numbers.

The average man can generate up to about 180 mmHg (millimetres of mercury) of pressure with a full-strength fist in a grip test.[12]. Even if he only uses 20–30% of his maximum force when jerking off, this still works out to around 35–55 mmHg. By contrast, the human vagina rests at ≈ 5 mmHg and rises to 15 mmHg when a woman squeezes voluntarily or involuntarily (e.g. during orgasm) [13]. In other words, the pressure on the penis during masturbation easily exceeds vaginal pressures by 2–4 times during an average squeeze, and 7–11 times compared to the vagina at rest. Not only that, but the closed fist can hold that force far longer than any vaginal contraction during intercourse.

Over time, the penis becomes desensitized to the moderate force of the vagina, which isn’t actually designed to deliver force as much as texture. The vagina provides friction, warmth, lubrication, and shifting textures as muscles contract and relax. This variation is what makes sex pleasurable and sustainable. By contrast, the “death grip” with a closed fist creates uniform, high pressure that no vagina could (or should) replicate. That’s why conditioning yourself to need that level of force trains the body away from real sex.

This high-pressure style also feeds directly into porn use. As the penis grows numb from constant squeezing, the brain compensates by demanding louder visual signals. A man finds that the same clips no longer work, so he scrolls for more extreme material to get the same hit. The mechanical desensitization of the body and the escalating novelty-seeking of the mind reinforce each other, dragging him into a loop of harder grip, harder porn, and weaker satisfaction from both.

The entire flawed logic of NoFap starts off as a reaction to porn and its harms. For sure porn is not ideal, and all other things being equal, a man’s life will be better without porn in it. The point, though, is that porn, abstinence, and masturbation are separate issues. NoFap treats them as one tangled knot and tries to chop the whole thing off. The result is miserable men flogging themselves for a normal drive, failing impossible abstinence streaks, and ignoring the real culprit: the combination of high-force masturbation and compulsive porn use. Untangling those threads shows a clearer path forward:

1) Complete abstinence is not a realistic or even desirable goal. It will only make things worse by layering restleness, guilt, shame and lowered self-esteem on to the existing problems. The key question is how you go about release, if sex is not on the table.

2) Pornography is not good, and all else being equal your life will be much better off without it. On the other hand it’s also not the end of the world, and you don’t have to beat yourself up about watching porn.

3) The real damage, and that which is also most easily avoidable, is caused by the method of masturbation. It is not masturbation itself that ruins a man’s sex life, but high-force grip masturbation, appropriately called “jerking off”. The penis was not meant to be violently jerked, at least not on a regular basis. By gripping harder than any real partner ever could, the man trains his nervous system into a state of artificial demand. Over time this leads to reduced sensitivity, which means ordinary sex feels flat and underwhelming. Erections become less reliable, and climax becomes a drawn-out struggle. Delayed ejaculation, the very frustration Rhodes described, appears as the body is unable to finish without extreme stimulus. Layer on top of that a worsening porn habit, driven by the need for more novelty and intensity to replace what the body no longer registers, and the cycle is complete. Instead of a healthy sex life, the man is left chasing pressure and pixels while drifting further away from the natural responses that should have been his by default.

If you’ve made it this far, I want to firstly congratulate you for having the kind of focus most people have lost. You’re not someone with popcorn brain, flicking from one distraction to the next. You’ve stuck with a long argument because you actually want to understand what’s happening to you and how to fix it. That willingness to sit with the uncomfortable truth and look for real answers is rare and already puts you ahead of most men.

Secondly, it shows you’re serious about change. You’re not chasing hype or magical thinking, but rather something that actually works. And because you’ve already proven your patience and persistence, you’re exactly the kind of man who will benefit most from this new approach. Go here to learn the revolutionary method that resets your body, restores your sensitivity, and ends the vicious cycle of sexual frustration for good.