7 Masturbation Myths Destroyed by Science

This topic attracts confident claims in both directions, and most of them are wrong. Below are seven common ones, and what the evidence actually supports. Some of these will not be the answer you expected from a site about quitting porn, which is rather the point of a page that says "by science" in the title.

Myth 1: "It raises your testosterone"

The frequently cited study found a temporary spike around day seven of abstinence, which then settled back to baseline. It was small, and it measured a short-term blip rather than a lasting change.

There is no good evidence for a durable testosterone increase from abstinence. If you want to move your testosterone, sleep is the lever with real support behind it: sustained short sleep measurably lowers it in healthy young men.

Myth 2: "It damages your body"

Claims about blindness, hair loss, weakness, and shrinking are folklore with no evidence behind them. Major health bodies treat masturbation as a normal part of human sexual behaviour with no established physical harm at ordinary frequencies.

Being accurate about this matters. Frightening people with invented physical consequences produces shame, and shame is one of the more reliable predictors of a habit continuing rather than stopping.

Myth 3: "Any amount is a problem"

Frequency alone is a poor measure and clinicians do not use it as one. What matters is function: whether you can stop when you decide to, whether it is interfering with work, sleep, or relationships, whether it has escalated, and whether it is being used to manage distress.

The World Health Organization's ICD-11 includes compulsive sexual behaviour disorder, and its criteria are built around loss of control and impairment, not a number per week. Someone doing it rarely but unable to stop when they intend to has more of a problem than someone doing it more often without any of that.

Myth 4: "It is the same as porn use"

They are usually bundled together and they are not the same thing.

The mechanisms people describe as problematic mostly attach to the porn side: escalating novelty, conditioning arousal to a screen, and the endless supply that makes stopping harder. Those are properties of the content, not of the act.

This distinction has a practical use. Plenty of people find that removing the porn resolves what they were worried about, without needing to eliminate masturbation. Others choose to stop both, which is a legitimate personal decision. It is just a different decision, and worth making deliberately rather than by assuming they are one problem.

Myth 5: "It always causes erectile dysfunction"

Overstated. The evidence around porn-related erectile difficulty is genuinely contested, and major urological bodies do not currently recognise it as a distinct diagnosis.

What is well established, and far more important, is that erectile dysfunction is often an early sign of cardiovascular disease, and is also commonly caused by diabetes, low testosterone, and several everyday medications including SSRIs and some blood pressure drugs.

So if you have ED, the correct first step is a doctor, not a ninety-day challenge. Assuming porn is the cause is how a treatable heart or metabolic problem gets missed.

Myth 6: "I can stop any time I want"

This one is usually testable, and testing it is more informative than arguing about it.

Count the number of times you have decided to stop and then not stopped. If the number is above two or three, the belief is not describing your behaviour, and noticing that gap is not a moral failure. It is the same pattern found across habits that are easy to access and produce fast relief.

Myth 7: "Willpower is the answer"

Self-control is not a fixed tank, but it does reliably degrade with tiredness and with the number of decisions you have already made that day. That is why almost nobody relapses at 10am.

Which means relying on willpower is relying on it at the exact hour it is weakest. The research on behaviour change consistently favours changing the situation over strengthening the resolve: making the thing harder to reach, deciding in advance with specific if-then plans, and removing the option entirely where you can.

That is not a defeatist position. It is what actually works.

The honest summary

Masturbation itself is not the problem the internet says it is. Compulsion is a real problem, escalating porn use is a real problem, and losing your sleep to either of them is a real problem with well-documented consequences.

Aim at those rather than at a number, and you will be aiming at something that actually exists.

If your issue is the content and the access rather than the act, that is the part worth removing. See how a block you cannot bypass works, read the erectile dysfunction recovery plan, or check where you stand with the porn addiction test.