This category usually sells the opposite answer, so here is the honest version first. Nobody has measured this. A drop in libido, mood and arousal during abstinence is described again and again in rebooting journals, and it has never been the subject of a formal study — no duration, no frequency, no cause, and no recovery curve. Every timeline you were given, including the one you are now measuring yourself against, was invented by someone repeating forum lore with a confident face.
The evidence under the abstinence literature generally is thinner than its tone suggests. The best-known piece of it is qualitative: an analysis of 104 rebooting abstinence journals, in which abstinence felt impossible at first and became attainable with cognitive-behavioural strategies plus social support. Self-report, no control group, third variables not ruled out. It is worth knowing about, and it cannot tell you what month four is supposed to feel like.
It is also worth checking what you were expecting to improve. A lot of what gets promised — drive, confidence, colour coming back into things — was borrowed from a dopamine story that does not say what it is quoted as saying. Dopamine is more closely associated with the anticipation and pursuit of a reward than with the pleasure of consuming it: wanting rather than liking. Removing a strong source of wanting does not, by any established mechanism, hand back a general capacity for enjoyment on a schedule. If the plan was that abstinence would do that work on its own, the plan had nothing behind it, and its not working is a fact about the plan.
So what should have moved? The things that distinguish a problem in the first place. Problematic use tracks distress far better than frequency does, and the group that differs on depressive symptoms and self-esteem is the distressed, impaired one rather than the high-frequency one. Run that check honestly:
- Distress. Does this bother you less than it did? A drop here is a real result even at unchanged frequency.
- Control. Does your behaviour match your intention more often than it used to?
- Cost. Hours, sleep, conversations, things built. Has anything concrete come back?
If those have moved and it still does not feel like a transformation, that is not you failing to respond. That is what change looks like without a soundtrack. If frequency is the only thing that changed, you have removed a behaviour without touching what it was doing for you, which is a common place to get stuck and not a defect in you.
When it is not an app-shaped problem
There is a reading of this question that deserves a straight answer rather than encouragement. Consider a professional if you have made serious, structured attempts and nothing shifts; if low mood or anxiety is in the picture and does not lift when the behaviour does; if compulsivity shows up elsewhere too, in spending, gambling or substances; or if there is trauma underneath it, which is common and does not get resolved with habit tools. Ask for someone experienced with compulsive sexual behaviour working in CBT or ACT — that is where the treatment evidence sits, and it is honest to add that those studies carry a high risk of bias and small samples. It is still the best-supported route there is, and better than another month of waiting.
Two specific things not to wait out. A flat stretch during a change of habits is one thing; two weeks of not caring about anything is depression, and it wants a GP. And if arousal has not returned, that wants a doctor rather than more abstinence — whether porn causes erectile dysfunction is genuinely contested, with supportive case reports on one side and population studies that have not produced consistent associations on the other, and erectile problems have plenty of established physical causes. Assuming yours is the porn is how people miss something treatable.
Months of effort with nothing to show for it is a miserable place to be standing. It is not evidence that you are broken. It is evidence that you have been measuring yourself against a number somebody made up.
Where this comes from
Read the full lesson: When it's not working →
Sources and how strong they are (6)
- AnecdotalThe "flatline" — a period of dropped libido, mood or arousal during abstinence — is consistently reported in abstinence journals and is named in the review literature, but it has never been measured prospectively or in a general population.
- Fernandez DP, Kuss DJ & Griffiths MD 2021, Arch Sex Behav 50(2):711-728, doi:10.1007/s10508-020-01858-w, PMID 33403533, PMC7889567
- Mead D & Sharpe M 2020, Int J Environ Res Public Health 17(10):3462, doi:10.3390/ijerph17103462
- Ince C, Antons S, Ashton S, Borgogna NC, Brand M, Briken P, Castro-Calvo J, Chen L, Coleman E, Efrati Y, Fernández DP, Fuss J et al. 2026, J Behav Addict 15(1):32-98, doi:10.1556/2006.2025.00337, PMID 41879870, PMC13132360
- AnecdotalA qualitative analysis of 104 rebooting abstinence journals found abstinence felt impossible at first and became attainable with cognitive-behavioural strategies plus social support. The benefits members attributed to abstinence were a regained sense of control over their use, and improvements in mood, energy, mental clarity, focus, confidence, motivation and productivity, less emotional numbness, and social and sexual functioning. Sleep is not among them — the paper's only mention of sleep is a healthier sleep routine adopted as one of the lifestyle changes made to support abstinence. The same paper is also the only systematic catalogue of what members themselves say triggers them: external cues (electronic media and social feeds, seeing attractive people in real life, being alone in one's bedroom), internal cues, chiefly negative affect, and the "chaser effect" — cravings that follow any sexual activity engaged in during abstinence. Alcohol appears nowhere in it. Self-report only; third variables not ruled out.
- Fernandez, Kuss & Griffiths 2021, Archives of Sexual Behavior 50(2):711-728, doi:10.1007/s10508-020-01858-w, PMID 33403533, PMC7889567
- Well establishedDopamine is more closely associated with the anticipation and pursuit of a reward - "wanting" - than with the pleasure of consuming it - "liking".
- Berridge & Robinson 1998, Brain Research Reviews 28(3):309-369, doi:10.1016/S0165-0173(98)00019-8, PMID 9858756
- Berridge 2007, Psychopharmacology 191(3):391-431, doi:10.1007/s00213-006-0578-x, PMID 17072591
- Well establishedProblematic pornography use tracks distress better than overall frequency of use does. People who use frequently without distress and people who use frequently with it are distinguishable, and it is the problematic group that differs on mental-health measures - most clearly on depressive symptoms and self-esteem. Adult ADHD symptoms are a further replicated correlate (see C51), measured almost entirely by screening questionnaire rather than diagnosis. Loneliness is a further cross-sectional correlate of pornography use, measured once in a sample of 1,247 and modelled by its authors as potentially bidirectional.
- Bőthe B, Tóth-Király I, Potenza MN, Orosz G, Demetrovics Z 2020, J Sex Med 17(4):793-811, doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2020.01.007
- Butler MH, Pereyra SA, Draper TW, Leonhardt ND & Skinner KB 2018, J Sex Marital Ther 44(2):127-137, doi:10.1080/0092623X.2017.1321601, PMID 28448246 (published online 2017)
- Dropped as a source, because it does not resolve to a paper containing this claim — Grubbs et al. 2020, Clin Psychol Rev 82:101925, doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101925, PMID 33038740, whose systematic review of 415 studies cuts the other way on confidence
- Mixed evidenceMeta-analytic evidence supports CBT and ACT for problematic pornography use and related depressive symptoms, but the studies carry a high risk of bias and small samples.
- López-Pinar C, Esparza-Reig J & Bőthe B 2025, J Behav Addict 14(2):630-643, doi:10.1556/2006.2025.00018, PMID 40126561
- Mixed evidencePorn-induced erectile dysfunction is a clinical hypothesis supported by case reports and clinician reports. Frequency-based population studies have not produced consistent associations, and the one longitudinal study to measure erectile function with a validated instrument over a year found that self-reported problematic use correlated with erectile difficulty at any single moment, that mere use did not, and that no pornography variable predicted the trajectory of erectile function. It remains contested.
- Park BY, Wilson G, Berger J, Christman M, Reina B, Bishop F, Klam WP, Doan AP 2016, Behav Sci 6(3):17, doi:10.3390/bs6030017, PMID 27527226, PMC5039517 — carries a 2018 correction, Behav Sci 8(6):55, doi:10.3390/bs8060055, PMID 29857562, disclosing that co-author Gary Wilson is the author of Your Brain on Porn and removing the academic editor's name; see C58
- Cuts toward an association — Jacobs T, Geysemans B, Van Hal G, Glazemakers I, Fog-Poulsen K, Vermandel A, De Wachter S, De Win G 2021, JMIR Public Health Surveill 7(10):e32542, doi:10.2196/32542, PMID 34534092, PMC8569536
- A practitioner magazine commentary, not a peer-reviewed study — Kirby M 2021, Trends in Urology & Men's Health 12(2):6-10, doi:10.1002/tre.791
- Grubbs JB & Gola M 2019, J Sex Med 16(1):111-125, doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2018.11.004, PMID 30621919
- Dwulit & Rzymski 2019, J Clin Med 8(7):914, PMID 31247949
- Landripet & Štulhofer 2015, J Sex Med 12(5):1136-1139, PMID 25816904
- Prause & Pfaus 2015, Sex Med 3(2):90-98, PMID 26185674
- Not a retraction — a published Comment on Prause & Pfaus 2015: Isenberg RA 2015, Sex Med 3(3):219-221, doi:10.1002/sm2.71
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