Pieter van der Heyden | 1558 | The Met Museum
A nofap urge comes on suddenly and makes you feel out of control of your will and your body. It’s like a computer virus has infected your operating system and is holding it hostage until you relapse; which ultimately makes you feel worse than how you felt before and takes you farther away from the path.
The short-term fix is never the long-term cure.
The choice to walk the path of abstaining from self-stimulation and/or adult content is one of discipline. If one can be disciplined in one area of his life, he can be disciplined in all others. We know this because Musashi said, “If you know the way broadly you know it in all things”. So by choosing to be disciplined in this area of our lives, we know that discipline will come easier to us in other paths of our lives.
The path of abstaining from self-stimulation requires doing nothing. Meaning, that if you meditated in a room for 365 days straight you would be successful on that path and you would have developed discipline.
It’s wise to have a disciplined pursuit that requires inaction as a vessel to pour discipline into masteries that require action, like learning to play piano, or martial arts training.
There are many reasons why someone will follow the path of abstaining from self-stimulation. Whatever your reason, below are strategies to fight off urges when they come.
Let us know in the comments what strategies you use and this list may be updated.
Prayer & Meditation
You can pray even if you do not subscribe to a congregated religion like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. You can pray to the universe. You can ask the universe for strength regardless of your beliefs.
Praying and communicating with the dead keeps them alive. Our friends, family, and even the heroes we have never met from the near present and the distant past live on through us and can be used as spiritual guides as we go throughout our lives.
When you have a self-stimulation urge, ask for guidance from the dead. Or just be aware of them, and think if they would want that for you, or if they would want you to do something else. You don’t have to live for yourself. Live for others.
Living for yourself can be of little motivation. Living for a child, a friend, or another loved one is motivating because it is bigger than you. Similarly, living for those who have passed, living through their honor, can take you to new levels as you seek to reach greatness for ‘ALL OF US’ instead of ‘me’.
Breathing exercises
Breathing exercises can calm an unwanted libido. Breathing exercises can also fill you with the warm feeling you may be seeking out.
With nofap, a relapse is often a pull at your mind because you are in a rut, or feel some kind of emotional pain, and you want to flood your brain with pleasure chemicals to wash the pain away. Flooding your brain with post-self-touch chemicals is like washing away dirt with hot dirty water; you’re still dirty, and may even feel worse afterward.
Breathing exercises can bathe your mind and spirit. Consider finding a breathing exercise you like and using it as a defense mechanism against Nofap urges. Wim Hoff teaches his method on YouTube for free.
Going on a walk or run
Sexual energy is physical energy. Sexual energy begs to be released physically. You can choose to release it in a different way than the way it calls to you.
Going on a walk, or a run, has numerous benefits for fighting off Nofap urges. First, you’re forced to go outside where you will not relapse. So you are taken out of the area where the relapse can occur. Second, you are releasing physical energy, which will satiate a sexual urge.
A twenty-minute walk can delete your urges.
Related Nofap content
Going on a walk is a good urge defense because it is accessible to everyone. A walk can be five minutes, a walk can be two hours and it can happen anywhere.
Physical training and the gym
Just like with walking, going to the gym will release the physical energy that is begging to get out of your body. By going to the gym, you invest your sexual energy into making yourself physically stronger and faster, as well as making you more healthy, and generally more attractive.
The gym doesn’t have to be lifting weights, although that is a great option. It can be a rock-climbing gym, Yoga studio, cycling–anything that involves physical training.
Sauna
If you have access to a sauna–which likely will be connected to the gym–sauna when you have a self-stimulation, because it takes no effort. You just sit.
If you can go to the gym and then sauna, that’s even better. Sometimes it can be difficult to wedge effort in-between an urge, so sitting in an artificial, aggressive climate is an involuntary effort; you don’t have to do anything physical to get the physical release.
You can get a home sauna, but unless you’re willing to spend a few thousand, it won’t be as good as a hardwood sauna construction. Fighters, including Khabib Nurmagomedov, have used this style portable sauna when cutting weight in hotel rooms, if they do not have access to a permanent wood sauna.
By using the sauna you are also in public, which defeats the urge to self-touch which is often associated with loneliness and other negative feelings born from isolation. Be aware you can feel lonely and isolated even if you are in the presence of another person. Consider talking to a stranger in the sauna and try to make a connection.
Physical training releases chemicals that make you feel good, which makes the sensation of loneliness go away.
If you’re abandoned on an island, do pushups.
The more you go to a gym or a sauna–a third place–the stronger your community association with that place. This reduces loneliness.
If you are lonely and struggling to find friends and companions, find third places and join their communities. Gyms, coffee shops, libraries, etc. Be seen and people will naturally become comfortable around you.
Be as Public as Possible
When you feel an urge, retreat from the home and advance into the public. This can mean many different things. You can open all the blinds in your home, or make your space more public by leaving your bedroom door open. Exposing your urge to the light can sanitize it.
Go somewhere public. Break the ritual by leaving it. You can reward yourself for fighting an urge and go get a coffee and spend time in a coffee shop, go shopping, handle a chore, or anything outside of the house and the areas that reinforce the habit we are trying to destroy.
Reward yourself when you break the ritual of a habit you want to destroy; this further damages the ritual by rewarding alternative action.
Put Your Phone Away
Put your phone away. Deeply away. Out of reach.
Put an object or a totem on your phone, in silent mode, face down. By setting an object on your phone you are creating an extra step that helps prevent unconscious phone reaching.
We reference phones because the phone is a gateway to self-stimulation. Other devices may be too. Consider how you can put devices away that cause you to reinforce a habit you are trying to destroy.
You can get a safe for cheap and put your phone in there and lock it. Then, slide the safe under your bed; this creates multiple steps, or multiple opportunities to save yourself from the bad habit you are trying to remove.
You can also get a timed box that unlocks after a specific amount of time is reached. So if you’re feeling out of control, lock your phone up for ten minutes, or more. This is valuable beyond Nofap.
Call someone
Calling someone is another version of being in public. You can still be alone in your home, but while being on the phone you are attached to another person, which is sort of like being in public.
If you have earbuds you can talk on the phone while doing another task, like cleaning. Or something physical–which can include cleaning–so you are quasi-public and getting physical activity.
You don’t have to say the reason why you are calling. You can just connect with a friend, family member, or even better if available to you, a grandparent. Let us routinely call our grandparents.
Given that self-stimulation can be borne from loneliness, calling someone you care about gets in front of the issue. You also opened up a public channel.
You don’t have to say the reason you are calling; you shouldn’t. Some battles, like internal ones, are better fought alone. Other battles are better fought together. You have to be grounded and aware to determine how your battles are progressing.
The unconscious living of life will put life out of your control.
Cold shower or cold water
Cold water is always available. You don’t have to take a cold shower either, but you should have some kind of discipline with cold, which can be as easy as finishing a hot shower with cold water–known as a Scottish shower. You can get a towel warmer relatively inexpensive which is a generous award for being cold.
If you feel an urge and do not want to take a shower because it will set you back somehow, splash cold water on your face. This provides physical stimulation in a way that does not betray your Nofap discipline. When you have an urge, you need to expel it. The sensation of cold affects Body, Mind, and Spirit–all pillars. Splashing water on your body, whether from the sink or the shower, will give you the physical sensation your body yearns for.
Takeaways
Nofap urges are more difficult the more this habit is codified in the operating system of your mind. The more you fight against the habit, the weaker it gets.
You may one day be in a place where you don’t have urges to fap or self-touch. You may always have to be aware of urges, and even if you don’t have them, Black Swan events are always a potential threat.
Understand that the path will always be there for you to follow. Sometimes we stray from the way, but the way is always the way.
These are methods used to prevent a nofap urge. If you have other suggestions, let us know and we will update this article.