How to Stop Masturbating: A Habit-Change Plan for Adults

About this tool

How to stop masturbating is a habit-change question rather than a medical one, and that distinction matters before you start. Masturbation is a common adult behavior with no established physical harm: it does not damage the body, cause infertility or blindness, or drain some finite reserve. Survey data from a United States nationally representative sample, reported by Herbenick and colleagues in 2023, found that most adults have masturbated at some point, with men reporting it more often than women. Nothing on this page treats the behavior itself as a disease. What it treats is a pattern that someone has decided they want to change.

People arrive at this question by two different routes, and both are legitimate. In the first, the behavior has become compulsive: it takes hours, it happens instead of sleep or work, it continues after a genuine decision to stop, and the loss of control is the problem. In the second, the behavior is not out of control but conflicts with your values, faith or relationship commitments, and that conflict is the problem. The same 2023 survey found that the reasons adults gave for not masturbating included lack of interest, being in a committed relationship, and conflict with morals, values or religious belief. A plan that works has to respect whichever reason is yours.

The first useful step is not willpower, it is a functional question: what is this behavior doing for you? In practice the answers cluster. It discharges stress at the end of a loaded day. It fills a gap when you are bored and your phone is in your hand. It is how you get to sleep. It softens loneliness, low mood, or the hour after an argument. The 2023 survey listed stress relief, relaxation and help falling asleep among the reasons adults gave for masturbating. Whatever job the behavior is doing, that job does not disappear when you decide to stop, which is why plans built on prohibition alone tend to collapse inside a week.

Habits run on cues, and cues are easier to change than impulses. Research on habit formation treats an action repeated in the same setting at the same time as becoming more automatic with repetition: Lally and colleagues tracked daily behaviors in 2010 and reported a median of roughly 66 days to reach a plateau of automaticity, with wide variation between people and some values extrapolated beyond the study window. The practical reading is that a habit is tied to its context. If the pattern is phone in bed at midnight, the lever is not the urge at midnight, it is where the phone charges and when you go to bed. Change the setting first and you negotiate with a weaker urge.

Cues will still fire, and then you need something to do with an urge that is already present. Urge surfing, developed inside the relapse prevention tradition of Marlatt and colleagues and taught in mindfulness-based relapse prevention by Bowen, Chawla and Marlatt, treats an urge as a wave: it rises, peaks and falls on its own if you neither act on it nor fight it. You time it instead of obeying it. You notice where it sits in the body, name it, and let it pass, which usually takes less time than people expect. The Urge Surfing Worksheet walks through a single urge in detail and is the companion to this plan.

Removing a behavior leaves a gap, and something will fill it. Habit reversal, described by Azrin and Nunn in 1973 for nervous habits and tics and adapted widely since, pairs awareness of the cue with a specific competing response you perform instead. The competing response has to be available in the same moment and incompatible with the old one: a walk, a shower, a set of pushups, a call to a friend, moving to a room with other people in it. Vague intentions such as distracting yourself are not competing responses. Write the exact alternative down, decide where it happens, and rehearse it once while you are calm. The Building Habits Worksheet is built for that part.

Plan for the lapse before it happens, because the response to a slip predicts more than the slip does. Marlatt described the abstinence violation effect: after breaking a rule you set yourself, the explanation you reach for drives what happens next. If a single lapse proves you failed and the plan is finished, a lapse becomes a relapse within hours. If it means your plan met a situation it was not built for, you get usable information about which trigger to handle differently. A written lapse rule, decided in advance and limited to the first ten minutes, is worth more than a resolution. The Relapse Prevention Plan Worksheet sets one out in full.

Some patterns need more than a worksheet. Compulsive sexual behavior disorder entered the ICD-11 as an impulse control disorder, summarized by Kraus and colleagues in 2018: a persistent pattern of failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses over an extended period, causing marked distress or impairment in personal, family, social, work or other areas of functioning. The classification is explicit that distress arising entirely from moral disapproval of one's own sexual impulses is not sufficient for the diagnosis. If the behavior continues at cost to your work, sleep, health or relationships despite repeated attempts to stop, or if it sits alongside low mood, anxiety or obsessive patterns, a clinician who works with compulsive behavior is the right next step.

This plan is education, not treatment, and it makes no claim about what you should want. It does not say that masturbation is wrong, and it does not say that wanting to stop is irrational. It will not resolve a shame problem on its own, and shame is often the part that keeps the cycle turning: secrecy raises the stakes, the stakes raise the urge, the urge gets acted on, and the shame deepens. If pornography is part of the pattern, How to Stop Watching Porn covers the device and cue side in more detail. If the distress is heavier than the behavior itself, that is worth saying out loud to someone qualified to hear it.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked that the page states the medical position accurately, keeps the plan free of moral framing, and names the ICD-11 threshold for compulsive sexual behavior correctly.

References

1. Herbenick D, Fu TC, Wasata R, Coleman E. Masturbation prevalence, frequency, reasons, and associations with partnered sex in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic: findings from a U.S. nationally representative survey. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2023;52(3):1317-1331. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36575264/
2. Kraus SW, Krueger RB, Briken P, et al. Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder in the ICD-11. World Psychiatry. 2018;17(1):109-110. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20499
3. World Health Organization. Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder (6C72). International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision, 2019. https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en
4. Marlatt GA, Donovan DM, eds. Relapse Prevention: Maintenance Strategies in the Treatment of Addictive Behaviors. 2nd ed. Guilford Press; 2005.
5. Bowen S, Chawla N, Marlatt GA. Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention for Addictive Behaviors: A Clinician's Guide. Guilford Press; 2011.
6. Azrin NH, Nunn RG. Habit-reversal: a method of eliminating nervous habits and tics. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 1973;11(4):619-628.
7. Lally P, van Jaarsveld CHM, Potts HWW, Wardle J. How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology. 2010;40(6):998-1009.

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