NoFap is an online community, and a website of the same name, built around abstaining from porn, masturbation, and orgasm, usually with a 90-day target. It began as a Reddit forum in 2011 and is now one of the largest places online where people talk about trying to stop watching porn. It is not a treatment, a clinic, or a research body, and this site is not part of it.
Most people find it after a bad evening, wondering whether to start a counter. This page puts the community’s vocabulary next to the research, claim by claim. Some of it holds up. Some of it does not.
Evidence strength: early for the effects of abstaining; the community’s own accounts are lived experience, not outcome data.
Where did NoFap come from, and how big is it?
NoFap was founded in June 2011 by Alexander Rhodes as a subreddit, with the website following; the name is a trademark. According to Wikipedia, citing press coverage, the founding thread was a Reddit discussion of a 2003 study about abstinence and testosterone. The site reported over 350,000 registered members in January 2024, and the subreddit around 1.2 million in August 2025. Wikipedia has the history. Researchers writing in 2021 put the subreddit at roughly 116,000 members in 2014 and more than 500,000 by 2020. Fernandez, Kuss and Griffiths.
The word comes from “fap,” internet slang for masturbation. Members describe themselves as “rebooting.”
What is the NoFap technique?
There is no single technique. There is a shared vocabulary:
- PMO stands for porn, masturbation, and orgasm, the three things members abstain from in the strictest version.
- Reboot is the period of abstinence. Researchers who analysed rebooting journals describe the metaphor as a brain restored to its factory settings. Fernandez, Kuss and Griffiths. It is a metaphor from the community, not a description of any measured process in the brain.
- 90 days is the conventional length of a reboot. Wikipedia describes the goal.
- Flatline is a stretch of low desire during abstinence, covered below.
Two of those behaviours are worth separating before you start. Abstaining from porn and abstaining from masturbation are different decisions with different reasons behind them, and the evidence for each is different. If you want a fixed period, No Nut November is the one-month version of the same idea. And if you are here because an urge is happening right now, the community has “emergency” pages for that moment; ours is here.
Does NoFap have benefits?
The forum has been studied directly. Researchers analysed 104 abstinence journals written by men on a rebooting forum. Members mostly started because they believed they were addicted to porn or blamed it for sexual difficulties. They found abstinence very hard, because of habit and the many everyday cues for watching. Those who kept going credited social support and accountability above all, blocking software as a modest extra barrier, and day-to-day strategies such as exercise, meditation, socialising, and a better sleep routine; trying to suppress thoughts about porn was described as counterproductive. The benefits members reported were self-attributed, and the authors say prospective studies are needed before abstinence can be called an intervention. Fernandez, Kuss and Griffiths.
The physiological claim at the community’s origin has not survived. The often-quoted finding that testosterone peaks on day seven of abstinence comes from a 2003 study of 28 men, retracted by the journal in 2021. A retracted paper is not evidence; the original record carries the notice. We found no published replication. “Superpowers,” as members call the expected gains in energy, focus, and confidence, have not been shown to follow from abstinence, and neither has harm from it.
For a month of abstinence, the one survey of No Nut November found no difference in sexual wellbeing between participants and non-participants. Garas, Levang and Pukall. The details are in our No Nut November guide.
What we know: members who persist credit support, barriers, and everyday habits; the reported benefits are their own attributions; the testosterone claim rests on a retracted study.
What we do not know: what 90 days does, because no one has measured it prospectively, and whether people who post about benefits differ from people who stop posting.
How long does it take to do NoFap?
As long as you decide. Ten days, 30 days, 90 days, and six months are community milestones, not findings, and lists of what to expect at each one are collected from posts by people who felt something worth posting about.
What happens if you don’t masturbate for seven days? On current evidence, nothing you can predict. The only widely cited seven-day study concerned testosterone and has been retracted. A randomised seven-day trial exists, but it tested abstinence from porn, not from masturbation: 176 regular porn users, and no overall group difference in craving, mood, or withdrawal-like symptoms; an exploratory result suggested more craving only in people with high problematic-use scores who also watched daily. Fernandez and colleagues. For a week without masturbation there are no good data at all.
So a hard first week is not a rule you have to pass through, and neither is a good one. Keep your own log instead of borrowing someone else’s calendar; our guide to changing your porn use shows what to record. If you failed NoFap, or reset a counter, start from what happened rather than from day zero.
What is the NoFap flatline?
Flatline is the community’s word for a period during abstinence when sexual desire drops, sometimes with low mood and a sense of disengagement. Members in the journal study used it for a marked loss of libido, and some for a broader flatness that worried them. Fernandez, Kuss and Griffiths.
It is a description, not a stage. No prospective study has measured how many people experience it, how long it lasts, or what it means. Low desire can also come from stress, sleep, mood, medication, or a relationship, and none of those wait for day 30. If desire stays low or erections become unreliable, do not wait out a self-imposed timeline before you talk to a clinician.
What do researchers say against NoFap?
Two findings matter most.
First, the wish to abstain from masturbation tracks beliefs more than behaviour. In an online survey of 1,063 people recruited through Reddit, motivation to abstain was associated with seeing masturbation as unhealthy, with conservatism and religiosity, with lower trust in science, and with self-rated hypersexuality; it was not associated with behavioural markers such as the maximum number of orgasms in a day. Zimmer and Imhoff.
Second, feeling that porn is a problem is strongly tied to moral disapproval of one’s own use, over and above how much a person watches. A meta-analysis, mostly of cross-sectional studies, established that pattern. Grubbs and colleagues. A later analysis of 112,397 people in 16 countries found moral incongruence and sexual shame among the five strongest predictors of problematic-use scores, alongside frequency and using porn to avoid feelings or reduce stress. Bőthe and colleagues.
These are associations, not proof that a forum causes anything. But they suggest that an identity built on counting failures may work against you: shame and moral disapproval travel with the feeling that use is out of control, whatever the frequency. That is a reason to keep the counter in proportion, not a reason to dismiss the difficulty people describe. “Porn addiction” is not a diagnosis, while compulsive sexual behaviour disorder is; the terms are explained here.
The community has also drawn public criticism beyond the research, including over content in some of its spaces; Wikipedia’s article summarises that record. Judge a forum by the threads you actually read.
What can r/NoFap do for you, and what can’t it?
If you were looking for the forum itself, it is at r/NoFap. Journal writers credited other people, above everything else, with keeping them going. Fernandez, Kuss and Griffiths. Support and accountability are real resources, and a forum can provide them at three in the morning.
A forum cannot assess you. It cannot tell whether low desire is a flatline or depression, whether an erection problem is vascular, or whether repeated failed attempts mean you would benefit from structured help. If you are still deciding whether your use is a problem, look at control and consequences. If attempts keep failing, therapy has some evidence, which is more than a timeline has.
What to keep, and what to drop
Keep the parts that journal writers found useful: noticing cues, recording what happened, telling someone, and treating a lapse as one record rather than a verdict.
Drop the superpowers, the guaranteed calendar, and the identity. You are a person changing a habit, not a day number.
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