Stopping masturbation is difficult because it becomes a learned habit reinforced by the brain’s reward system, emotional triggers, and environmental cues. Over time, masturbation can shift from a voluntary behavior to an automatic response to stress, boredom, or fatigue, making it feel compulsive rather than intentional.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it so hard to stop masturbating?
It’s difficult because masturbation becomes tied to habit loops triggered by stress, boredom, or routine. The brain learns to associate it with relief, making the behavior feel automatic rather than a conscious choice.
Is masturbation addictive?
Masturbation is not classified as a chemical addiction, but it can become a compulsive behavior—especially when used to cope with emotions or paired with pornography.
How long does it take to stop masturbating?
There is no fixed timeline. Some people improve within weeks, while others take longer depending on how ingrained the habit is and how effectively they address triggers and routines.
Why do urges feel automatic?
Urges feel automatic because repeated behavior strengthens neural pathways. Over time, specific cues like time of day, location, or emotional state can trigger the behavior without conscious decision-making.
What’s the best way to stop masturbating?
The most effective approach is to identify triggers, change your environment, and replace the habit with a different response. Trying to rely on willpower alone is usually not enough.
How to stop masturbating (Without relying on willpower)
Masturbating is one of the most natural sexual acts, and often one of the earliest sexual acts that people experience. It’s easy to do, does not require a partner, and can be done privately. Masturbation is personal. But it’s not always good.
There is such a thing as too much masturbation.
Further reading: Am I jerking off too much?
If you’re struggling with an addiction and compulsion to masturbate, it can be frustrating to read about how natural it is or how enjoyable it is for other people when you want to be able to stop. If you want to take your life back and learn how to stop masturbating, let us help.
Why Do You Want to Stop Masturbating?
This is different for everyone, but if you’re here, then you probably want to stop masturbating because it feels like it’s overtaking your life.
Maybe you can’t get through a movie or an episode of a television show without feeling the urge to jerk off.
Or maybe you have to rush into the bathroom at a party because you see someone and find them attractive, and suddenly, it’s time.
Perhaps you’re one of those guys who wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep without rubbing one out.
If you sound anything like the description above and you want to stop masturbating, I guarantee it’s not because you haven’t tried.
The truth is that you have an addiction to compulsively jerking yourself off, and this is one of the hardest addictions to quit.
But this article is here to help. But before we can do anything, there is one thing that I need from you:
You have to want to quit—not for anyone else but yourself.
The research on this is definitive. When someone is intrinsically motivated to make a change, rather than because of social pressure or guilt, they are far more likely to follow through and stick with it (Deci & Ryan, 2000).
You don’t need a rock-bottom moment or anyone else’s approval.
You just have to want to quit.
When Does Masturbation Become a Bad Habit Instead of a Choice?
Masturbation begins as a voluntary sexual behavior. When you feel like you are no longer in control of the decision, this is where the problem begins.
"The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken."
-Warren Buffett
The transition from a choice to a habit is so gradual that it often goes unnoticed.
Every time you use masturbation for stress relief, distraction, or sleep, your brain associates it with a release from negative feelings. The more this happens, the more you want to masturbate just to avoid experiencing the slightest amount of stress.
Over time, those stress cues are all that you need to trigger the desire to masturbate (Wood & Neal, 2007).
Habitual behavior is your brain trying to help you by being efficient. Your brain wants to help you feel the positive outcome, and if masturbation helps get you there faster, then it will default to that every time you feel distress.
Unfortunately, your brain can’t distinguish between the habits you want and the habits you don’t. You’ll know if your masturbation has shifted from being a choice to a habit by the following signs.
Masturbating feels automatic rather than wanted
If you try not to give in to masturbating, you feel restless, irritable, or can’t concentrate until you do give in
You find yourself acting without even realizing what you are doing
The urge to masturbate comes at predictable times: late at night, after a stressful event, before an anxious event, or when you’re bored
How Pornography Turns Masturbation Into a Stronger Habit
Pornography makes masturbation harder to stop because it removes friction.
Further reading: Why can’t I stop watching porn?
You don’t have to imagine anything or wait for arousal to build naturally.
Porn is immediate. It gives your brain a fast path from urge to reward.
Habits get stronger when the payoff is quick, predictable, and always available. Porn adds all three. It gives you novelty on demand, endless options, and a level of stimulation that real life can’t compete with. If masturbation already feels like your go-to response when you’re under duress, pornography only tightens the noose around your habit.
Further reading: Can you quit porn cold turkey?
The other way that pornography makes the habit more sticky is that it trains you to expect constant novelty.
When your brain gets used to fast switching, intense visual stimulation, and instant access, it adds another layer to the compulsion. Your brain has gotten used to a very specific, highly stimulating pattern of arousal that—when coupled with masturbation—poses a high degree of challenge to overcome.
What Makes It So Hard To Stop Masturbating?
Understanding the why can help you stick to the process without shaming yourself for the times that you inevitably mess up.
Your reward system works against you. Masturbation activates the mesolimbic dopamine system—the same circuit involved in eating, social bonding, and substance use. This system evolved to motivate an approach toward biologically important outcomes. When that system is regularly activated by a specific behavior, it creates a motivational pull that does not care about long-term goals (Berridge & Robinson, 2016).
Trying to suppress all thoughts and feelings related to masturbating backfires. Research on thought suppression suggests that attempting not to think about a behavior actually increases its presence in your brain. In fact, trying to suppress a thought can make it more likely to return (Wegner, 1994).
Willpower is a finite resource. Self-control wears down as the day goes on. This is why it’s so hard for many people to resist at the end of the day. They’ve already used up all of their willpower. At night, your emotional regulation capacity is at its lowest, and it’s easiest to slip back into bad habits.
Your environment is loaded with cues. Habit research consistently shows that context cues, such as specific locations, times, devices, and emotional states, are powerful triggers of automatic behavior. Most people who struggle to stop masturbating are still experiencing the same environment that they previously experienced — and are exposed to all of the same triggers.
Now that you understand why you want to stop — and why it's been so hard — let's talk about what you can actually do about it.
We’re not going to try and white-knuckle our way through this. Habit change is a process that progresses through small, compounding actions over time.
The steps below are drawn from behavioral research and personal anecdotes, and they're designed to work synergistically.
Identify Your Personal Triggers
Masturbation isn’t a habit that just appears. Until you know what those triggers actually are, you’re trying to stop a behavior without actually understanding where it starts.
Spend one week just paying attention.
You need to track the context around your behaviors. When you feel the impulse to masturbate, jot the answers to these down:
What were you doing right before the impulse hit you?
How were you feeling?
What time was it?
Where were you at?
Most guys find that there are three to five different triggers that are responsible for cueing up their urge to masturbate.
Emotional states: anxiety, boredom, loneliness, or stress after a long day
Specific times: late at night or first thing in the morning when you’re alone
Environmental cues: being in bed with your phone, a specific sequence of behaviors that lead there automatically
Physiological states: Fatigue or restlessness that aren’t even really about sexual desire
Once you’ve figured out your triggers, you have a target. You don’t need to attack it just yet, but the mere act of noticing a “trigger moment” will help you slow down automatic behavior. It helps to create a beat of actual choice before you act (Bowen & Marlatt, 2009).
Change Your Environment
If your phone is in your bed, it’s late, you’re tired, and you’re alone, then the battle is pretty much over before it starts. You’re not going to out-willpower an environment that’s been set up to make the habit feel effortless. So don’t try. Change the environment instead.
Change the parts of your environment that trigger you. Even things that seem unrelated, like a landscape painting in your room that you always look at before jerking off or a particular song that always gets you in the mood. These are the little things you hopefully noticed in the first step.
Put that painting somewhere else or keep it in the closet for a few months. Take that song off your app or move it to another playlist.
These are some of the most practical changes that we see that actually move the needle:
Keep your phone out of the bedroom
Rearrange furniture
Plan something in your highest-risk time windows
Use a content filter
Avoid the rooms and places where you most commonly masturbate
The goal is to make sure that the “least path of resistance” is less obvious to your brain, so the cues happen less often, and abstaining doesn’t feel so hard.
Recovery Guides
Replace the Habit
This is the step that most people skip because it’s the hardest. It requires active “doing,” and a lot of us don’t want to take the time for it. But this is also the reason that most attempts to stop masturbating fail, and probably part of the reason why you’re here.
You can’t just stop. Your brain doesn’t delete a habit because you’ve decided to quit. The loop of → the cue, the behavior, the reward → that ALL stays intact in your neural wiring even through stretches of abstinence.
What changes is what wins when the cue shows up. So instead of trying to resist, build a different response to the same triggers. Create a new habit and rewire your brain.
Here’s the cool part. The replacement doesn’t need to be elaborate. Our brains are highly evolved and great at holding onto a new habit once we’ve really set the grooves down. It doesn’t matter if the new habit is a 10-mile run or simply drinking a cool glass of water.
Whatever you use to replace the masturbation urge needs to be something that you enjoy. An episode of a TV show, a delicious snack, a short 5-minute meditation, a leisurely walk listening to a podcast, calling a friend or family member, writing in a journal, reading a chapter in a book, listening on shuffle to a favorite songs playlist… whatever you want to do, it needs to be something that you genuinely like and enjoy and will distract you enough.
It’s not about finding a permanent substitute for masturbation. It’s about giving your brain somewhere else to go when the cue fires, so that you don’t end up stuck in the default of masturbating.
What Progress Actually Looks Like When You’re Trying to Quit
Here’s something nobody tells you going in: the urges often get worse before they get better.
That’s not you failing; it’s your brain throwing a tantrum because it’s not getting what it wants.
Your brain will notice the missing reward and turn up the volume, trying to get it back. If you know that it’s coming, it’s easier to ride it out. If you don’t, it feels like proof that you’re broken, and you give up.
Real progress doesn’t look like a perfect streak. It looks like the gaps between slip-ups are getting longer, even when you’re not perfect.
Further reading: How to handle a porn relapse without spiraling
It looks like catching yourself before you act, rather than only realizing what happened after.
It looks like an urge that shows up and then just passes, without you doing anything. That’s huge. It looks like getting back on track faster after a setback, rather than writing off the whole week.
You’re going to slip up. That’s not a prediction; it’s basically guaranteed. Research shows that most people make multiple serious attempts before something actually sticks (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983).
A setback resets your streak, but it doesn’t reset your brain, and it doesn’t erase your progress.
The work you’ve done is still in there. So, stop keeping score and beating yourself up—literally and figuratively—for not being perfect.
Should You Get Help If You Can’t Stop Masturbating On Your Own?
If you’ve tried to stop multiple times and it keeps not working, then that’s a problem, but it’s not a sign of a character flaw. It’s a sign that you might need more than solo willpower and solo problem-solving skills.
Some honest signs it's time to bring in support:
You've made serious attempts to quit, and it hasn't held (more than once, over more than a few months)
It's actually affecting your life (your job, your relationships, your sleep)
The guilt and shame between episodes are here, and they don't go away
You genuinely don't know what to do with yourself when the urge hits, and you try not to act on it
Therapy isn't a last resort. It's just a tool. And for many guys, it's the tool that finally makes the difference.
Accountability matters too. Not because someone is watching you, but because sharing your goal with another person changes how you see yourself in relation to the behavior.
Further reading: How to help a porn addict
Research backs this up (Prestwich et al., 2012). It's a big part of why Relay works for the guys who use it.
The Real Goal: Regaining Control Over Your Sexual Habits
You probably don’t actually need to avoid masturbation for the rest of your life. That’s probably not even your goal.
What most guys want when they try to stop masturbating is to get their life back. They want to feel like they’re the ones making the call—not the urge or the habit.
You want to masturbate because it genuinely feels good. Not because it’s a distraction from emotional stress, pain, anger, or disappointment. You want it to be a genuine, healthy release.
That’s what you want for yourself. To take back control. That's what we want for you, too.
You're not broken. You've just got a habit your brain learned really well.
And habits can be unlearned. You can do this.
If you need accountability and guidance, Relay can help.
Common FAQs on quitting masturbation:
Is masturbation addictive?
Masturbation itself isn’t classified as a chemical addiction the way substances like alcohol or nicotine are, but it can become a compulsive habit, especially when it’s paired with pornography or used as a primary way to cope with stress, boredom, or loneliness.
When a behavior feels difficult to stop, even though there are negative consequences, psychologists refer to it as a compulsive behavior rather than an addiction.
How long does it take to stop masturbating?
That depends on how long you have been masturbating and what triggers your desire to masturbate. For some people, the behavior is situational and easier to change once they adjust their routine or limit their porn consumption. For others, especially when the habit has been reinforced for years, breaking the pattern can take longer and might involve replacing triggers, restructuring routines, and building new coping mechanisms.
Does quitting masturbation increase sexual desire and sexual interest?
In many cases, yes, it does. When masturbation becomes frequent, sexual release can become routine rather than relational. Taking a break often lets sexual energy build up naturally again, which people find usually improves their attraction, motivation, interest, and engagement with human partner(s).
Is masturbation unhealthy?
Occasional masturbation is widely considered a normal sexual behavior. Problems come when it becomes habitual, secretive, or dependent on pornography, or when it replaces intimacy in a relationship. The issue isn’t the act itself, but the pattern and the context surrounding it.
Further reading: How porn ruins marriages
References
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychological Review, 114(4), 843–863. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843
Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (2016). Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. American Psychologist, 71(8), 670–679. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000059
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34–52. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.101.1.34
Bowen, S., & Marlatt, A. (2009). Surfing the urge: Brief mindfulness-based intervention for college student smokers. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 23(4), 666–671. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017127
Prochaska, J. O., & DiClemente, C. C. (1983). Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: Toward an integrative model of change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51(3), 390–395. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.51.3.390
Prestwich, A., Conner, M. T., Lawton, R. J., Ward, J. K., Ayres, K., & McEachan, R. R. C. (2012). Randomized controlled trial of collaborative implementation intentions targeting working adults' physical activity. Health Psychology, 31(4), 486–495. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027672
