How I Succeeded at No-Fap for 101 Days
Tl;dr: it is such a complex topic that I encourage you to read the entire thing.
Are you addicted to p*rn? If you’re a guy reading this, the chances are strongly not in your favor.
If you’re a girl, you’re less likely to be addicted to p*rn, yet female consumption has evolved significantly over the past decade.
As narrated by Gary Wilson (a personal hero of mine) in his great p*rn experiment, 100% of guys in the West watch p*rn.
Now, it’s quite rare to find statistics where you have 100% of something, except for p*rn (even though 96% would have been more convenient for the power of the message).
P*rn is a bit like cigarettes, it doesn’t bring anything good to your life but merely destroys parts of your brain.
I won’t get into the harmful effects of p*rn here because there already is plenty of literature about it.
What I will do instead is to narrate my two no-fap experiences and give you some tricks to help you succeed.
Why No-Fap?
We all have our reasons. Being a guy, I can only speak from a male perspective as I expect the problem for women to be somewhat different.
So why would you want to go on a no-fap experiment? I see four different reasons and all of them have one common root: you’re juicing out like a degenerate:
– you want to break your p*rn addiction
– you want to break your fap addiction
– you want to resensitize your p*nis
– you want to increase focus, energy, and creativity
Let’s address all of these reasons.
Fapping, to a great extent, is linked to p*rn.
As such, an enormous majority of the guys that embark on a no-fap experiment do it because they have gotten too deep into p*rn and noticed that it was f*cking with their heads.
Their minds have gotten so accustomed to p*rn that they always need more “p*rnographic” content to get off as they consume increasingly borderline videos showcasing actors being strangled, hit, raped, or made to vomit from the sexual act.
In his book “Your brain on p*rn”, Gary Wilson tells the tale of a straight guy that couldn’t get off to women anymore and had to watch male gay p*rn instead.
While everyone watches p*rn, not all people need p*rn to get off.
I have met guys fapping up to 6 times a day and they didn’t always use p*rn to do so.
In these cases, one would want start a no-fap to decrease orgasm addiction.
The third reason concerns p*nis resensitization due to what is known as the “death grip syndrome“.
For some people, constantly fapping decreases the sensitivity of the nerves.
To come, they have to increasingly tight their grip around their limb, which decreases sensitivity even more and one quickly gets into a vicious circle.
While experiencing orgasm remains possible (yet painful in the most extreme cases) through masturbation, victims of the death grip syndrome find it harder and harder to come when their limb is “naturally” stimulated throughout sexual intercourse.
The impossibility to reach orgasm decreases confidence can lead couples to break up and can even lead to depression.
It was the reason why I embarked on my second no-fap experiment. People that experience the death grip syndrome must leave their p*nises alone for 4-6 weeks, the time for the nerves to repair themselves.
Finally, the last reason to embark on a no-fap isn’t a reason per se but more a by-product of the no-fap: the mental benefits.
The first time I embarked into no-fap, I was impressed with the increased energy, creativity, and mental capacities I had gained then lost the second I touched myself on day 101.
I can’t explain why people on no-fap benefit from this boost of focus and neither can science.
If I had to guess, I’d say that fapping is a high-energy activity and that not doing it simply allows you to recycle this energy into something else.
What Happened to Me During These Two Experiments
Straight from the start, I must warn you. Your no-fap experiment will not solely depend on your capacity to no-fap or not no-fap.
It will also depend on your diet, sleep schedule, social activity, physical exercise, stress levels, mood, nutrition, age, overall health, weather, and more.
While I see sleep and nutrition directly impacting the rest of my life, I’m afraid the rest of my life directly impacts my no-fap.
Therefore, it is very difficult to judge if what I have felt during these experiments was caused by the no-fap or was a consequence of something else.
Obviously, it also varies from an individual to the next.
The No-Fap Timeline and the Flatline
The timeline of no-fap is divided into three parts: beginning when energy, testosterone, and concentration increase; the flatline when energy and desire decrease; end when after 2 weeks/years, the individual has recovered mental sanity.
The flatline may be the reason why no-fap is so hard. During flatline, it is not rare to encounter depression, losing all desires for people and things in general, having no energy, and overall, no wish to do anything.
The flatline may last between 2 weeks, and there have been reports of flatlines lasting up to two years.
The length of the flatline will be proportional to the impact p*rn has had on your brain.
The more p*rn you consumed and the youngest you were when you started consuming, the bigger impact has been and the longer the flatline will be.
Being part of communities such as the no-fap forum, this subreddit, or the yourbrainonporn website helps, as many guys share information on the process.
Might as well say it now: the flatline is an extremely difficult period.
My First No-Fap Experiment
I started my first no-fap on the 3rd of January 2016 after I read “Your brain on p*rn”. Since I couldn’t get rid of p*rn, I had decided to do a no-fap.
Here are the non-edited notes from my journal.
“
– 31st December 2015: first day p*rn free
– 3rd January 2016: first day fap free
– 24th day (fap count): wet dream
– 87th day (fap count): wet dream
– 101th day: I fail. Ongoing mood: depressed
Impressions: the first two months were an emotionnal roller coaster. I got very horny, thinking of girls all the time, then having a stamina at zero. Afterwards it gets stabilized, I started getting energy…a lot of energy, way too much. I got more social, more motivated etc…however, once i have nothing to do, i think about sex and fapping. Therefore i always need something to focus my energy on, or I am screwed
“
It fits with how I remembered it. You need to take into account that at the time, I had a heavy-carbohydrate diet, no social life, and was depressed.
Today, I know for sure that the “emotional roller-coaster” came from the carbs and suspect it was amplified by the no-fap.
The enormous bump in energy I got towards the end probably arrived around day 93.
At the time, I wanted to reach 100 days and failed at 101 because my testicles were about to explode, and I legit could not standstill.
My Second No-Fap Experiment
I did this one for several reasons. First, I wanted to resensitize my p*nis as my inability to reach orgasm during intercourse incredibly frustrated me.
Second, I started my zero-carb carnivore diet on the 17th of April 2020 and the no-fap on the 4th of May 2020.
During that period, I was extremely tired because of the keto flu and the fat-adaptation of my body, so I wanted energy.
Now it is important to specify that four years later, I am no longer depressed nor eating carbs or drinking alcohol.
I go to the gym, work, and use all the energy I have. As such, I expect the absence of both the energy boost and emotional roller-coaster to be correlated with the lack of carbs.
– day 1: 4th of May 2020
– day 50: wet dream
– day 70: a subtle boost in creative energy
– day 80: the wet dream
I seriously think that the carnivore diet greatly impacted the experience on several levels.
We need to understand that the outcomes of a carnivore diet and a no-fap are similar: more energy, more focus, more creativity, more testosterone.
In my second experiment, the main differences between pre and post-no-fap times were my concentration capabilities, focus, and creative energy that moderately increased.
In the first experiment, the difference in energy and self-confidence were huge.
Therefore, I believe that people that lead a crappy lifestyle are the ones noticing the biggest differences, but that no-fap won’t extensively impact an already healthy lifestyle.
How to Succeed at No-Fap
Let’s be fair, I have failed multiple times to do 100+ no-fap experiments.
In four years, I have done only two, while having tried maybe 30 or 40 times.
In this section, I share what helped me succeed and what influenced my failures.
In both cases, the answer is the same: myself.
What Helped Me Succeed
I did the first no-fap with a friend of mine who had introduced me to the book “Your brain on p*rn”.
The fact that we were doing it together helped me tremendously because no-fap suddenly became a competition.
If my memory is correct, my friend failed around day 70, when he got a girlfriend and even relapsed into p*rn.
When I questioned him, he said he had read studies saying that eventually, p*rn wasn’t so dangerous.
I was extremely disappointed that he used selected science to make up his reality.
It was the beginning of the end of our friendship.
Needless to say that having someone else doing this with you helps tremendously, but beware of who you choose.
In their fall, they might take you with them.
Since I was alone for the second experiment, I had to come up with a new system, so I started counting days on my whiteboard.
Sadly, I failed several times, on day 5 and even day 15 (more on that below).
I had to change my strategy.
I changed my mindset and used the endowment effect to acquire some discipline.
I also added the goal I was aiming at on the whiteboard: 100 days.
On my first day, I wrote “1/100”. At least, I then knew where I was going.
The next day, I changed to “2/100”.
What Influenced My Failure
“Dopamine calls upon dopamine”.
The quest for pleasure made me fail.
Every. Single. Time.
Coming home drunk and horny, I wouldn’t hesitate to break the no-fap AND the non-watching p*rn policy.
Smoking weed also encouraged me to break my no-fap. Sugar did too.
If you want to succeed at no-fap, it will be way easier if you decrease dopamine-activities altogether, except maybe for video games since they decrease testosterone.
But well, it’d be like fighting diabetes with medicines instead of fighting it with meat.
Is No-Fap Dangerous?
I have no clue, and I don’t think science knows either. Studies are saying that one needs to come 21 times per month to avoid testicle cancer.
There are also studies saying that meat promotes diabetes…
I can only speculate here, but having reached my 100th day some days ago, I had to decide whether I wanted to go back to masturbation or continue the experiment, so I looked at the animal kingdom.
On average, it seems that animals living in places where there is winter will mate during a specific part of the year.
Other animals will have sex all year long while others masturbate several times a day.
There doesn’t seem to be a rule here.
In any way, the body seems to act on its own through automatic releases known as “wet dreams”.
Over the past few years, I have learned to trust my body much more than ideological science, religion, or pharmaceutical companies.
Plus, I’m enjoying the creativity burst and willingness to do things, so I think I’ll keep the no-fap until at least I engage in intercourse again.
The Bottom Line
No-fap is an under-researched yet high-yielding results activity helping break p*rn and masturbation addiction, develop creativity, focus, and energy and fix death grip syndromes.
It is also a very high effort-costing activity with high chances of failure.
However, as with all things, the harder it is, the more benefits one gets out of it.