The NoFap Testosterone Myth

In 2011, an American web developer launched a subreddit called r/NoFap after reading a Chinese research paper on Reddit.

The paper reported that men who abstain from ejaculation for seven days experience a sharp testosterone spike on day seven. The developer himself had been struggling with porn dependency since his early teens. “If that’s true, I’ll try it,” he posted, and started the community with a few followers. Within six months, it had ten thousand subscribers. Within a year, thirty thousand.

A decade later, in December 2021, the paper that started it all was formally retracted by its publisher.

But the community kept growing, and the phrase “+145.7% in 7 days” detached itself from the paper and continued circulating online as a standalone meme.

Even after retraction, the citations don’t stop

The paper was pulled. The Journal of Zhejiang University-Science retracted it in December 2021 after being unable to locate two of the four authors and learning that the remaining two had also published the same data in a Chinese-language journal.

But most NoFap-adjacent content and downstream summary sites haven’t updated. The cited evidence is still the same: “A 2003 Chinese study showed testosterone spikes on day 7 of abstinence.”

A retracted paper isn’t much of a foundation. There’s barely any replication. The sample was 28 men. Testosterone peaked only on day 7 and returned to baseline by day 8. That’s the entire finding.

The quieter, more rigorous research is elsewhere

A 2016 medical review noted that erectile dysfunction rates in young men have risen at a pace that traditional factors (age, vascular health, psychological stress) can’t explain. The suspected driver is excessive internet pornography use. Multiple clinical case reports describe ED resolving after patients stop consuming porn. “Don’t lose function” is a more concrete and immediate concern than “raise testosterone.”

A 2014 brain-imaging study from the University of Cambridge compared brain activity during pornographic video viewing in men with compulsive sexual behaviour and healthy controls. The same brain regions that fire in drug addicts seeing drug cues fired more strongly in the compulsive group when they viewed porn. At the neural level, compulsive responses to porn share structure with responses to cocaine and alcohol.

In 2018, the World Health Organization added Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder to ICD-11. The diagnostic criteria: failure to control intense sexual urges, life impairment, continued behaviour despite negative consequences. Logically parallel to the criteria for alcohol and drug dependence.

These findings don’t produce flashy numbers like “+145.7% in 7 days.” They don’t make the news. But for the question of whether porn consumption can become a serious problem for some people, they offer a far more reliable foundation.

Porn fits the addiction profile too well

Available anywhere, anytime, free, infinite. New stimuli never run out.

Pornhub launched in 2007. Before that, the supply chain ran through magazines, DVDs, and paid sites. After 2007, porn became “free, unlimited, with unlimited novelty”—a different category of product entirely.

From an addiction-research perspective, this is a near-perfect environment for habit formation. If alcohol came out of every household tap, free, 24/7, addiction rates would be dramatically higher than they are now. Porn approaches that situation.

It isn’t that specific genres or specific sites are uniquely harmful. It’s the general principle that intense stimulus over-exposure alters reward-system sensitivity—the same principle that drives addiction across substances. The broader question of how digital consumption interacts with recovery is covered in The Technology and Recovery Paradox.

For background on how addictive patterns form, see Why People Become Addicted.

”Will T rise” and “Is the pattern compulsive” are different questions

When NoFap gets debated, two arguments tend to get tangled together.

• Testosterone axis: Aiming for “raise T” based on a retracted paper and a misread number. When the motivation lapses, the practice ends.
• Compulsive pattern axis: Checking whether your relationship with porn has become compulsive and whether life is being affected. A well-established framework in addiction work.

These are different conversations. The first rests on weak evidence. The second is well-grounded addiction science.

So fighting over “does testosterone rise” misses the point. The motivation that actually drove the founder of NoFap to start the community (a teen-onset porn dependency) was always about the second axis, not the first. The retraction doesn’t invalidate his practice. It just means the label that got stuck on it was wrong from the start.

What to use as the metric

Total abstinence doesn’t have to be the goal. Breaking the compulsive pattern is.

Track time. Write down triggers. Reduce the problematic pattern—that counts as progress.

When you slip, don’t punish yourself. As covered in Stop Blaming Yourself, harsh self-criticism makes the next slip more likely.

The metric isn’t “did testosterone rise” but “is my relationship with porn this month more settled than last month.” That metric has actual evidence behind it, and it’s harder to abandon when motivation wavers.

References

• Jiang, M., Xin, J., Zou, Q., & Shen, J. W. (2003). A research on the relationship between ejaculation and serum testosterone level in men. Journal of Zhejiang University-Science A, 4(2), 236-240. (Retracted December 2021)
• Park, B. Y., Wilson, G., Berger, J., Christman, M., Reina, B., Bishop, F., Klam, W. P., & Doan, A. P. (2016). Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports. Behavioral Sciences, 6(3), 17.
• Voon, V., Mole, T. B., Banca, P., Porter, L., Morris, L., Mitchell, S., Lapa, T. R., Karr, J., Harrison, N. A., Potenza, M. N., & Irvine, M. (2014). Neural correlates of sexual cue reactivity in individuals with and without compulsive sexual behaviours. PLOS ONE, 9(7), e102419.
• World Health Organization. (2018). International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision (ICD-11). 6C72 Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder.
• Snopes (2021). Does Not Ejaculating for 7 Days Increase Testosterone by 45%? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/increase-testosterone-45-percent/
• Kelly, D. (2021). Nofap: can giving up masturbation really boost men’s testosterone levels? An expert’s view. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/nofap-can-giving-up-masturbation-really-boost-mens-testosterone-levels-an-experts-view-157701