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Short answer: there is no good evidence that masturbation lowers your baseline testosterone or causes erectile dysfunction. Testosterone fluctuates briefly around sexual activity and returns to normal. The most widely repeated claim in this entire subject — that seven days of abstinence raises testosterone by around 45% — comes from a study that was formally retracted in December 2021, a fact almost nobody repeating it seems to know.

The evidence on pornography is more complicated, and honestly contested among researchers. This article sets out what is established, what is disputed, and what is simply folklore.

A note on why this article exists. Ayamveda sells Ayurvedic supplements. This article recommends none of them, mentions none of them, and links to none of them. It exists because the information available on this subject is unusually poor — split between health sites that dismiss the question and communities that take it seriously but get the science wrong. Neither is much use if you're the one worrying at one in the morning.

What the Evidence Says, at a Glance

Does Masturbation Lower Testosterone?

No. There is no evidence that masturbation reduces your baseline testosterone level. This is one of the more firmly settled questions in the area, and it is worth separating two things that get constantly conflated.

Short-term fluctuation is real. Hormones move around sexual arousal and orgasm. Prolactin rises after ejaculation and is thought to underlie the refractory period — the interval before arousal is possible again. These are transient changes measured over minutes and hours.

Baseline level is a different measurement entirely. Your baseline is the level your body maintains over weeks and months. It is governed by age, sleep, body composition, illness, stress and genetics. Nothing in the literature indicates that ejaculation frequency meaningfully alters it.

The confusion arises because people read a study measuring hour-to-hour movement and assume it describes long-term levels. It doesn't. A blood test taken the morning after sexual activity will look essentially the same as one taken any other morning.

If you suspect your testosterone is genuinely low, the answer is a morning blood test rather than a change in habits — the symptoms of low testosterone overlap heavily with ordinary fatigue and stress, which is why guessing from symptoms alone is unreliable.

Does Not Masturbating Increase Testosterone?

The evidence for this rests almost entirely on one small study, and that study has been retracted.

If you have encountered the claim that seven days of abstinence produces a testosterone spike of around 45%, you have encountered Jiang et al., published in the Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE A in 2003. It measured serum testosterone daily in 28 volunteers during abstinence and reported a peak on day seven reaching 145.7% of baseline.

That figure went everywhere. It is the empirical backbone of an enormous amount of abstinence content — forum posts, YouTube videos, coaching programmes, and a good deal of wellness writing.

Even taken at face value before retraction, the study never supported what it was used to support. It described a transient peak during a short abstinence window, then explicitly reported that no regular fluctuation followed. It did not show that abstinence produces a sustained increase in baseline testosterone, and nobody has shown that since.

None of which means men who abstain are imagining their experience. Reduced compulsive behaviour, better sleep, more time, a restored sense of control — these are real and can meaningfully change how someone feels. The point is narrower and worth stating precisely: the subjective benefit may be genuine while the proposed hormonal mechanism is unsupported. Those two statements are entirely compatible.

Can Pornography Cause Erectile Dysfunction?

This is genuinely disputed among researchers, and anyone telling you it is settled — in either direction — is overstating the evidence. Here is the actual state of play.

The evidence against a link

Landripet and Štulhofer (2015), published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, analysed four large online samples of younger heterosexual men — 2,737 men across Croatia, Norway and Portugal, and a further 1,211 Croatian men. They found little evidence of association between pornography use and desire, erectile or orgasmic difficulties. Their conclusion was that pornography does not appear to be a significant risk factor for younger men's sexual difficulties.

An integrative review of observational studies (Dwulit and Rzymski, 2019) reached a similar position: little or no evidence of association between pornography use itself and erectile dysfunction, and no evidence of a causal link between any pornography variable and ED.

The evidence for a link

Park et al. (2016) published a review with clinical case reports proposing that heavy internet pornography use may contribute to sexual difficulty through changes in the brain's motivational circuitry — the mesolimbic dopamine pathway. It is an argued mechanism supported by clinical observation.

That is an important qualification. A review with case reports is hypothesis-generating. It is not a controlled trial, and it cannot establish that pornography causes the difficulties described in the cases.

What reconciles them

The finding that appears most consistently, and which almost no consumer article mentions, is this: the association is with self-perceived problematic use, not with use itself. Men who describe their own use as compulsive or distressing report more sexual difficulty. Men who simply use pornography, without that distress, largely do not.

Even that association is cross-sectional — a snapshot in time. It cannot tell you which came first. Distress about pornography could contribute to sexual difficulty; sexual difficulty could equally drive distress about pornography; and anxiety, relationship strain or depression could plausibly produce both. Longitudinal studies controlling for confounders are what would settle it, and they largely haven't been done.

Is "Porn Addiction" a Real Diagnosis?

Not under that name. The World Health Organization's ICD-11 includes Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder (code 6C72), classified among impulse-control disorders — not among addictions or substance-use disorders. The term "compulsive" was chosen deliberately in place of "addiction," reflecting genuine and continuing scientific disagreement about whether an addiction framework fits the behaviour.

The diagnostic criteria centre on a persistent failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses, where the behaviour becomes a central life focus to the neglect of health, relationships or responsibilities, where repeated efforts to reduce it fail, and where it continues despite adverse consequences or despite yielding little satisfaction.

Two things follow. First, this is a real, recognised condition, and men who meet these criteria deserve proper clinical help rather than a forum thread. Second, the criteria are about impaired control and functional harm. They say nothing about frequency, and nothing about pornography specifically.

Only a qualified clinician can make this diagnosis. Reading the criteria and recognising yourself is a reason to book an appointment, not a diagnosis in itself.

How Often Is Too Much?

There is no clinical threshold, because frequency is not what clinicians assess. The question is whether the behaviour is causing harm — not how it compares to an imagined average.

Useful questions to ask yourself:

• Is it interfering with work, study, sleep or relationships?
• Have you repeatedly tried to cut down and been unable to?
• Are you continuing despite it making you feel worse rather than better?
• Has it displaced other things you used to care about?

If the answer to all of these is no, frequency alone is not a medical concern, regardless of what a comparison thread suggested. If the answer to several is yes, that is worth discussing with a doctor or therapist — and the frequency still isn't the point.

One further complication worth naming: moral incongruence. Research consistently finds that men whose behaviour conflicts with their own moral or religious values report significantly more distress about it, at the same level of use, than men without that conflict. Distress is real either way — but it is worth knowing whether what you are experiencing is a behavioural problem or a values conflict, because they call for quite different responses.

Fertility, Muscle and the Rest

Sperm count. Frequency affects the individual sample, not underlying fertility. Shorter abstinence intervals produce lower volume and count per ejaculate; longer intervals raise volume but can reduce motility. For semen analysis, clinics typically specify an abstinence window — usually two to seven days — precisely because of this. Normal sexual activity does not deplete fertility.

Muscle and gym performance. No good evidence supports the idea that masturbation impairs training, strength or recovery. The claim traces back to the same testosterone misunderstanding addressed above. Sleep, nutrition and training consistency dominate here by an enormous margin.

Hair loss. No credible evidence. Male pattern baldness is driven principally by genetics and androgen sensitivity at the follicle.

Prostate health. The largest dataset points the opposite way to the folklore. Rider et al. (2016), published in European Urology, followed 31,925 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, recording 3,839 prostate cancer diagnoses. Men reporting 21 or more ejaculations per month showed roughly a 20% lower risk of prostate cancer diagnosis compared with those reporting 4 to 7 per month. This is observational — an association, not proof of cause, based on self-reported frequency — but it is a large, long-running, well-regarded cohort, and it does not support the idea that frequent ejaculation is harmful.

What About Brahmacharya?

Brahmacharya is a spiritual and ethical discipline, not a clinical intervention, and it is more honest to treat it as what it is.

In classical Ayurvedic and yogic tradition, brahmacharya refers to restraint — often, though not exclusively, sexual restraint — undertaken as part of a broader path of self-discipline. It sits alongside conduct, diet and mental practice within a philosophical framework about how to live. Related concepts such as shukra dhatu, the reproductive tissue in Ayurvedic physiology, and its relationship to ojas, the subtle essence associated with vitality and immunity, form part of that system.

None of this is the same claim as "abstinence raises serum testosterone by 45%." The classical texts were not making a measurement about a hormone that would not be isolated for another two thousand years. Retrofitting modern endocrinology onto them does no favours to either the tradition or the science, and it is how a retracted 28-person study ended up being cited as ancient wisdom confirmed.

Men who practise brahmacharya for spiritual reasons need no scientific justification for doing so, any more than fasting or meditation requires one. The problem arises only when a philosophical practice is sold as a hormonal protocol — at which point it becomes a testable claim, and the test does not currently support it.

When to Speak to a Doctor

Regardless of anything above, book an appointment if:

• Erectile difficulty persists for more than a few weeks across different situations, including on waking
• You have lost morning erections consistently over months
• Sexual difficulty is accompanied by chest pain, breathlessness on exertion, or symptoms of diabetes — erectile difficulty can be an early vascular signal
• You and a partner have been trying to conceive for a year without success
• You meet several of the ICD-11 criteria described above
• Distress about this is affecting your mood, sleep or relationships

Erectile difficulty in particular is worth taking to a doctor rather than a supplement aisle, because the causes worth catching early — vascular, metabolic, hormonal, medication-related — are exactly the ones that respond well to being caught early. Never stop a prescribed medication on the suspicion that it is responsible; raise it with the prescriber instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

Most of what circulates about masturbation and male sexual health is not supported by evidence, and the single most-quoted statistic in the field comes from a paper that no longer stands. Masturbation does not lower your testosterone, does not damage your erections, and does not deplete your fertility.

The pornography question is legitimately unresolved, and the honest answer is that researchers disagree. What emerges most consistently is that distress about use tracks with difficulty more closely than use itself does — which suggests that how you relate to the behaviour may matter more than the behaviour.

If you are worried, two things are worth more than any amount of reading: get a morning blood test if you suspect a hormonal problem, and speak to a doctor or therapist if erectile difficulty persists or if the distress itself has become the problem. Both are ordinary medical conversations. Neither is anything to be embarrassed about.

Related reading on this blog: one man's account of compulsive use, how digital habits affect sexual performance, performance anxiety, and the broader question of what "normal" means.

Sources

• Jiang M, Jiang X, Zou Q, Shen JW. "A research on the relationship between ejaculation and serum testosterone level in men." J Zhejiang Univ Sci A 2003;4(2):236–240 — retracted 10 December 2021 (retraction notice: doi 10.1631/jzus.2003.r236).
• Landripet I, Štulhofer A. "Is Pornography Use Associated with Sexual Difficulties and Dysfunctions among Younger Heterosexual Men?" J Sex Med 2015;12(5):1136–1139.
• Dwulit AD, Rzymski P. "The Potential Associations of Pornography Use with Sexual Dysfunctions: An Integrative Literature Review of Observational Studies." J Clin Med 2019.
• Park BY et al. "Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports." Behav Sci 2016.
• Rider JR et al. "Ejaculation Frequency and Risk of Prostate Cancer: Updated Results with an Additional Decade of Follow-up." European Urology 2016;70:974–982.
• World Health Organization. ICD-11, code 6C72 — Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder.
• Snopes fact-check: "Does Not Ejaculating for 7 Days Increase Testosterone by 45%?"