NoFap – How Long Do Urges Last? (Explained)

So you just started NoFap and now you are wondering how long it will take before it starts to get easier, huh?

You are probably asking some or several of the following questions?

Will NoFap ever get easier?
Will NoFap always be hard?
How long will the urges last on NoFap?

Well, you've found the right blog post because we are going to cover all of those today…

….starting, right now!

There are different kinds of urges on NoFap

If you found the video informative click here to check out my YouTube channel.

First you need to understand that there are different kinds of urges that you will run into during your NoFap journey and they all work a bit differently…

Addiction related urges ( you crave a dopamine fix).
Urges related to you wanting to escape some negative emotions.
Natural urges (your biological drive, stemming from your brains survival and reproduction mechanism).

Addiction related urges lasts: on average 4-8 weeks (but can also linger much longer)

These are the kind of cravings that do not necessarily have anything to do with you being horny. It is merely your addicted brain that is craving a “dopamine fix”.

You see, you have been blasting your reward system for so long with an incredible potent dopamine stimuli (online porn), and when you suddenly withdraw that stimuli, your brain is going to protest…

…and one way of protesting is in form of giving you aggressive urges.

On average, most guys start seeing a significant reduction in those urges between 4-8 weeks in, however, you need to know that we are now talking about those aggressive urges that torment you int the beginning of your NoFap journey, and while they start weakening around 4-8 weeks in, they might still crop up from time to time months to years later.

It is possible to get addiction related craving months to even years after quitting, but again, those aggressive persistent urges, that guys often experience in the beginning of their reboot, will drastically reduce around the one month mark.

For some people it can even happen a bit sooner, while for others it might take a bit longer. I personally noticed less urges after day 30 and then around day 70 the urges tok yet another step down in intensity…

Personally I remember the first time I managed to go about 70 days porn free, it was like all those nasty urges really had left me then and all that was left when I thought about porn was this “meeh feeling”, like I couldn't really understand why I had been that stuck to it.

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Urges related to escapism lasts: until you fix the underlying cause…

These “NoFap urges” are related to emotional issues.

One example is, you as a single man go out shopping for food. Then, while out on the town, you see happy young couples in love and when you get back home you start feeling depressed.

It is like you've got this black hole in your chest. At the bottom of that hole is the feeling of “loneliness”. You might be longing for connection. This can make you feel urges to fapp to porn, because your brain is conditioned to think that you have plenty of girlfriends there while, in reality, it will only make your underlying problem worse.

Now, the “longing for connection” thing there is a common issue often driving guys to seek comfort in porn binges, but it works the same with other negative emotions that arise from you having unresolved issues in your life.

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These are what I call “escapism urges”.

They are simply urges that arise from you wanting to escape some negative emotions. And they will pretty much last until you have solved the underlying issue that are causing those negative emotions…

…or until you find some other way of escaping them.

The escapism urges are almost never as “aggressive” as addiction related urges. That's not to say that they are pleasant, because they can indeed be very dark. Some guys actually describe them as feeling kind of like a “void” or a black hole in your soul.

Natural urges lasts: forever!

The last kind of urges are actually the natural urges.

These are the ones we are programmed with, to push us to approach the opposite sex in order to carry our DNA's to the next generation.

As I said in the video above – you did watch it, didn't you? – these urges will never go away, and more importantly, we do not even want them to go away.

Getting rid of these urges would be like getting rid of our sexuality which, in turn, would be like getting rid of an arm or a leg, or something else that is a part of us. We do not want to do that. Instead we should learn how to intergate it and use it to our advantage.

Now, in all fairness, there are some people who have managed to completely eliminate natural urges as well, but more often than not, that would included 8 hours of meditation a day and living in a monastery…

…yes, I'm talking about skillful, veteran monks here. But even most of those guys still have urges from time to time. They have just learned how to not to act on them.

How long does short term urges last? As daily – hourly urges?

Then we also have short term urges i.e. the ones you have on a daily basis.

If we are talking about the addiction related urges here, these can last anywhere from 1 minute to 30 minutes or so, depending on if you feed them or not (as in engage in drawing lustful feeling out of them) and how well you surf them.

In order to understand what surfing means, take a look at the video below.

If you found the video informative, check out my YouTube channel here.

If you master the art of surfing, the urges almost never last longer than 20 minutes, and most of the time, they actually go away much sooner than that.

Can I use urge surfing for natural urges as well?

Yes, and here too the urges almost never last longer than 20-30 minutes, if you master the art of surfing.

Maybe they last a bit longer here than the addiction related urges, since these kinds of urges actually are a part of us, like hunger and sleepiness, but again, even here urge surfing is effective.

I highly recommend you master the art of surfing, because you can actually use that technique to reduce the intensity of any strong emotions you are feeling…

…should you so desire.

Related posts:

How long do urges last on NoFap
Conclusion and final words

So to sum everything up; addiction related urges lasts on average between 4-8 months.

Urges that arise from your escapism behaviors never go away unless you find other things to escape into OR manage to solve the underlying problem.

Lastly, the natural urges will always be with you and you should be damn happy about that because, with a little practice, you can learn how to transmute that energy and then you'll be able to channel it into reaching whatever goal / goals you happen to be working on, much faster.

Thank you for reading.

-Scandinavian Bob-

P.S. Need my help with rebooting? You can click here to discover what kind of help I'm currently offering.

Related post: When does NoFap get easier