How to stop masturbating: 8 tips to help you quit

If you want to stop or cut back on masturbating, the most effective approach is understanding why you want to change, noticing your triggers, replacing the habit with something else, and treating slip-ups with patience instead of shame. Quitting cold turkey usually backfires. People who try to stop abstinence-style commonly describe it as very difficult, with lapses being the norm rather than the exception, at least at first (Fernandez et al., 2021). There's no physical health reason you have to stop, but plenty of personal reasons are valid, and the approach below works whether your goal is quitting completely or just cutting back.

Your reason for wanting to change matters

Your reason changes which tips below will actually work for you, so be honest with yourself about it first.

It might be a personal goal you set for yourself, with no one else involved. For some people, it's part of an agreement with a partner about how they spend their time or attention.

Others have religious or personal values behind the choice. And sometimes the habit has simply started taking up more of your day, or your headspace, than you want it to.

All of these reasons are valid starting points. None of them require you to believe masturbation is inherently wrong before you're allowed to change your relationship with it.

A goal built on your own values tends to hold up better than one built on guilt someone else handed you. Spend a minute on your actual reason before you pick a strategy.

Is masturbating every day bad for you?

No, not on its own. Per the World Health Organization's ICD-11 classification, what matters clinically is whether you've lost control over the behavior and it's causing real distress or interference for six months or more (World Health Organization, ICD-11, 6C72).

That's the general shape of Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD), the category the WHO added to its ICD-11 classification. CSBD is defined by a loss of control, so a daily count on its own tells you very little. Someone who masturbates daily and feels fine about it isn't more affected than someone who masturbates twice a week and feels distressed by it.

That means there's no universal “too much.” If daily masturbation isn't interfering with your relationships, responsibilities, or sense of self, it isn't a clinical problem just because it happens often. If it feels compulsive and it's costing you real time, connection, or peace of mind, that loss of control is the part to look at.

If you want the fuller picture on frequency and what counts as normal, the ultimate masturbation guide for men covers that in more depth.

Does masturbating too much cause any physical harm?

No good evidence supports the two most common fears: that it lowers testosterone long-term, or that it causes physical harm to your body. Both trace back to myths.

Put together, these two findings answer a question a lot of people worry about: what actually happens if you stop? Physically, nothing bad happens if you stop, and nothing bad happens if you don't, either.

So there's no health case for quitting. If you still want to change the habit though, that's a personal call.

If it's technique rather than frequency that's on your mind, our guide on how masturbation technique can affect erections covers a related, commonly asked question.

Why cold turkey usually doesn't work

Cold turkey removes a coping tool all at once and tends to add shame on top of the original urge. That combination is a common reason abstinence attempts are experienced as very difficult, with lapses being common rather than rare, at least early on (Fernandez et al., 2021).

Here's the pattern: you decide to stop completely, you make it a few days or weeks, an urge hits, you act on it, and then the shame kicks in. That shame often does more damage than the original habit did. It also makes the next attempt harder, because now you're managing guilt on top of the urge itself.

That shame cycle comes from how cold turkey is set up. It sets an all-or-nothing bar and treats any single slip as total failure.

Framing change as one dramatic decision, quit today and never again, sets people up to feel like they've failed before they've really started. The tips below take a gentler route.

8 tips that actually help you cut back or quit

A combination of understanding your triggers, replacing the habit, riding out urges instead of white-knuckling them, and treating yourself with patience works better than abstinence alone.

1. Get honest about your triggers. Notice when the urge actually shows up, whether that's a certain time of day, a bored or stressed moment, or a scrolling habit right before bed. You can't change a pattern you haven't looked at, so spend a week just noticing before you try to change anything.

2. Replace the habit with something else. Willpower alone rarely holds against an empty space where a habit used to be. Have something ready to do instead: a walk, a workout, a call to a friend, or picking up something else with your hands. That way you fill the moment instead of gritting your teeth through it.

3. Try urge surfing. This is a mindfulness technique, originally developed for addiction relapse prevention, where you notice an urge and let it rise and fall like a wave instead of fighting it or acting on it right away (Marlatt & Gordon, 1985). Urges pass, and riding one out usually takes less effort than fighting it head-on.

4. Change your environment. Device settings, where you spend alone time, and what's within easy reach before bed all shape behavior more than sheer willpower does. Adjust the environment first, and you remove some of the friction of relying on self-control alone.

5. Practice self-compassion instead of shame after a slip-up. Treating yourself with the same kindness you'd offer a friend is a well-studied way to reduce shame and support psychological wellbeing (Neff, 2023). A slip-up tells you something useful about your patterns.

6. Get accountability that isn't shame-based. A friend, a partner, or a professional works better than a community built around “relapse” and “streaks.” Look for people who support you, rather than a scoreboard that turns every setback into a public failure.

7. Address what the habit might be filling in for. Stress, loneliness, boredom, and low mood often sit underneath a habit that feels hard to shift. Treating the behavior on its own, without asking what it's doing for you, tends not to stick.

The same pattern shows up in Mojo's own data. Among people starting Mojo's Break Free From Porn program, these were the top reasons they gave for their porn habit (Mojo onboarding poll data, Break Free From Porn, n=1,020, 2026):

• Comfort: 27%
• Stress: 25%
• Distracting or suppressing difficult feelings: 25%
• Boredom: 22%

8. Revisit your “why” regularly. Motivation dips for everyone. Coming back to your original reason for wanting to change gives you something to reset against when the habit starts to feel automatic again.

Why can't you stop, even when you want to?

Motivation naturally dips, and slip-ups are part of change. But if it feels genuinely out of your control and it's costing you real time, relationships, or responsibilities for six months or more, that's a different, rarer situation, and one worth outside support for.

For most people reading this, the goal is a personal preference. A smaller group are dealing with something that looks more like Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder, where the pattern genuinely feels out of their hands.

If that sounds like you, a licensed therapist is the right next step. Mojo doesn't diagnose or treat CSBD, so a therapist is the best person to help you work that out.

How Break Free From Porn helps if porn is part of the picture

If pornography is tangled up in your masturbation habit and you're finding it hard to change on your own, Mojo's Break Free From Porn program, built by Silva Neves, a COSRT-accredited psychosexual and relationship therapist, helps you understand what's actually driving the pattern instead of just telling you to white-knuckle it.

Silva Neves works with people dealing with exactly this overlap. His approach starts from a simple idea: distress usually has a root cause, and the behavior is often just what's masking it, whether that's stress, shame, or a life that doesn't have enough in it right now. The same overlap shows up in questions about porn and erectile dysfunction, a related but distinct concern for some readers.

Break Free From Porn is built for readers whose hardest part to shift is the porn itself. It's an evidence-based, shame-free program designed for porn-related patterns specifically.

If porn is genuinely part of your pattern, take a look. If it isn't, the tips above will do more for you. Explore Break Free From Porn, built with Silva Neves, COSRT-accredited psychosexual and relationship therapist.