There’s an old joke:
Doctor to Patient: You need to stop masturbating.
Patient to Doctor: What? Why?
Doctor to Patient: Because I’m trying to examine you.
When you’re trying to enlarge your penis using safe, natural methods,  masturbation is no laughing matter.
Turns out, engaging in a ménage-a-mois (or “fapping” as the kids call it) can seriously reduce your penis enlargement gains.
It’s not fair. It’s not right. But “not fair” and “not right” aren’t the same thing as “not true.”
Going nofap has been conclusively shown to help with erection quality issues (more on that in a minute), but it’s also being linked more and more definitively with improving penis enlargement gains.
The reasons for this exist in the short-term and the long-term.
Let’s look at these reasons so you can see why friends don’t let friends fap while undergoing a penis enlargement regimen.
Fapping Hurts Erections
The quickest and best way to make your penis look and be larger is to get a real quality erection.
No, seriously. Your average penis grows by 2 inches in length and circumference when it’s hard. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
Your penis enlargement exercises can get you similar gains over time, but while you’re waiting for that, a solid erection is your only route to a member large enough to be proud of.
If you’re getting quality erections reliably. The trouble is, fapping, especially to pornography, can hurt your erectile quality (source).
It works like this.
As you probably know, testosterone is the hormone most responsible for men’s libido and erectile health. Higher testosterone = better erections, higher libido, and (importantly for our purposes) a bigger penis and testicles.
When you masturbate, you burn testosterone. Every time. That’s testosterone your body could be using to have an erection, keep that erection, and make it longer, harder, and stronger.
The takeaway here:Â In the short-term, masturbation uses testosterone in real time. Save that testosterone for erections, tissue growth, and other things your body puts it to work for.
Fapping Hurts Growth Gains
That testosterone burn I mentioned earlier doesn’t only impact your short-term potential for growth gains. It can be a gift that keeps on giving.
Your specific penis enlargement exercise is just step one in the penis growth process.
Step two is letting the tissues in your member heal, which creates more tissue and a larger penis. Testosterone is one of the hormones responsible for driving that healing process.
Since fapping burns that testosterone for other things, there’s less testosterone to drive the healing. Worse, less testosterone can mean smaller junk. Injections of extra testosterone have been used as an invasive (and dangerous) medical way to stimulate penis growth.
Although I don’t recommend that treatment, it’s important to pay attention to its opposite.
If more testosterone = better penis growth, less testosterone = worse penis growth.
And since fapping means less testosterone… I don’t have to finish that thought for you. You’ve got it figured out.
Fapping Burns Out Your Dopamine Response
Testosterone is the hormone responsible for the physical side of getting an erection and keeping it until you orgasm.
Dopamine is the hormone responsible for why it feels so darn good. This hormone is produced by your brain to let you feel pleasure. It’s what the body triggers when people use drugs, experience happiness… and when they get sexually aroused.
When you masturbate to porn, you trigger the production and consumption of dopamine.
With the occasional fap session, this isn’t usually a problem. But if you do it a lot, especially to porn, you develop a tolerance to dopamine in the same way a type 2 diabetic has developed a tolerance to insulin. It takes more and more dopamine to get your body to become sexually aroused.
If it’s harder to become sexually aroused, you get erections less often and the erectile quality suffers. That’s a rough time for any man, whether or not he’s trying to enlarge his penis.
Specifically for penis enlargement, that lack of sexual arousal means your body produces less testosterone and also responds less to the dopamine your body produces.
We’ve already talked about why testosterone is important in the healing part of your penis enlargement exercise regimen. When you add dopamine burnout to the equation, it only makes the situation worse.
Fapping Makes You Lazy
There’s been a lot more research recently into this connection between regular porn consumption and laziness. Results from numerous studies suggest that regular porn users feel less motivated, more tired, and sometimes even severely depressed.
One study out of URI asked adolescent boys to self-report their pornography use, and some of the comments were striking.
Most of the subjects in the study reported a lack of motivation, overall laziness, weakness, and low energy levels. Some of them even reported feeling “tainted” or “disgusted” about the habit.
Overall, many of the comments in the study expressed very negative feelings about pornography use. Some subjects even said it was a full-on addiction for them which they couldn’t break even though they knew it was hurting them in numerous areas of their lives.
The study offers a compelling explanation for why so many answers like this were received. The researchers state that the adolescent brain goes through a period of dramatic change before it matures. This period is critical for growth, and it’s during this time that the brain is most likely to be altered by external stimuli like pornography.
The researchers also note that when the brain is exposed to new stimuli (like pornography), new neural connections are formed. In the highly malleable adolescent brain, consistent pornography use can cause serious changes to the part of the brain that controls its natural “reward system” a/k/a dopamine release.
Excessive porn use can in fact damage the reward system in the brain, making it difficult to find pleasure and joy in everyday activities because the brain’s natural dopamine release isn’t working properly. That’s why porn makes you feel so lazy and unmotivated. It’s giving you an artificial dopamine release and making it harder to get that release from natural, healthy sources.
The researchers in the URI study also note that these changes in the adolescent brain can easily carry over into adulthood and influence adult behaviors. The brain maintains some plasticity during adulthood, so although these changes might not be as severe after adolescence ends, they are still possible.
With all that said, don’t get discouraged if you have a porn habit you’re struggling to break – there is some good news here too!
The study also reports that once consistent users break their porn habits, their brains do slowly revert back to a normal state. Subjects reported increased motivation, happiness, better sleep, and relationship improvements (especially with women) in only a short time after stopping pornography use.
One Last Thing…
If you stop masturbating to porn (which you should), you will probably hit a “flatline” soon after you stop.
“Flatlining” is a time of very low libido and little-to-no erectile function. It usually only lasts a week or two, but has been known to last a month or more. It’s a result of your body’s dopamine response settling into a new, more natural, pattern.
While it settles into that new balance, you’ll have low sex drive, weak erections, fatigue, loss of motivation and depression.
But don’t panic…
This isn’t your little buddy abandoning you forever. It’s a normal part of the nofap process. Once your dopamine response returns to normal, your libido and erectile function will return to normal as well.
Nofap Penis Enlargement – Conclusion
Some of the things I report on here in this blog are matters of opinion, or open to debate. Penis enlargement isn’t well-studied, so there’s room for ambiguity.
That’s not the case with fapping while you’re trying to make big gains.
Here are the key takeaways:
- Masturbating saps testosterone in the short-term, causing problems with getting erections.
- That lost testosterone also translates to slower gains, since testosterone is a key hormone in the healing process that makes your tissues heal back larger
- Masturbation also messes with your dopamine, which can cause long-term erectile dysfunction and other sexual problems
- Put it all together: lay off on the fapping while you’re engaged in a penis enlargement program
I’m not saying a once in a while session will wilt your willie. Letting off some sexual steam occasionally never hurt anybody.
But regular masturbation, especially to hard-core porn, is a no-no both for general sexual health and specifically for penis enlargement gains.