Every claim the course makes, and how strong it is.

"Pornography addiction" is not a diagnosis in DSM-5 or DSM-5-TR.

APA, DSM-5-TR (2022)

ICD-11 includes Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder (6C72), classified as an impulse control disorder rather than an addictive disorder. Pornography use can fall under it.

WHO ICD-11, 6C72

Whether compulsive pornography use is best modelled as an addiction is genuinely unresolved among researchers.

Kraus et al. 2018; Grubbs et al. 2020; Prause critiques

Most people who use pornography do not have a problem with it. Profile studies typically place around three-quarters of users in a non-problematic group.

Bőthe et al. 2020; Vaillancourt-Morel et al. 2017

Prevalence of problematic use has no single defensible number: it depends almost entirely on the instrument, the cut-off and the sample. In the largest standardised cross-national study the overall figure ranges from 3.2% (PPCS) to 16.6% (Brief Pornography Screen) across 42 countries. The Australian ASHR2 figure often quoted here — men 4%, women 1% — is something narrower: it is agreement with the single item "You feel you are addicted to pornography", asked only of respondents who had ever looked at pornography, which works out at roughly 3% of all men and 0.5% of all women.

Rissel et al. 2017, J Sex Res 54(2):227-240, doi:10.1080/00224499.2016.1191597; Bőthe et al. 2024, Addiction 119:928-950, doi:10.1111/add.16431

Men report problematic use substantially more often than women. The size of the gap depends on the instrument: in the largest cross-national study men were about four times more likely on the broadest screen (28.92% vs 7.01%), about six times on the PPCS-6 (18.60% vs 2.96%) and about nine times on the full PPCS (6.26% vs 0.72%). Single-item self-labelled "addiction" measures give the smallest gap, around three to four times.

Bőthe et al. 2024, Addiction 119:928-950, doi:10.1111/add.16431 (figures read from the paper's own tables); Rissel et al. 2017 (men 4% vs women 1%); Grubbs, Kraus & Perry 2019 (~11% vs ~3%)

Frequency of use alone is a poor indicator of problematic use. Distress, impaired control and functional impairment are what distinguish it.

Bőthe et al. 2018, 2020; ICD-11 CSBD criteria

Religiosity and moral disapproval predict feeling addicted to pornography even after controlling for how much someone actually uses.

Grubbs et al. 2015; Grubbs & Perry 2019, J Sex Res

The frequency × moral-disapproval interaction predicts felt addiction for pornography and gambling, but not for tobacco or illicit drugs.

Grubbs et al. 2022, registered report, Psychology of Addictive Behaviors

In a US national sample, around 11% of men and 3% of women reported some level of perceived addiction.

Grubbs, Kraus & Perry 2019, J Behavioral Addictions

A meta-analysis of 50 studies (50,000+ people, ten countries) found pornography consumption unrelated to intrapersonal satisfaction (body and self), but associated with lower interpersonal satisfaction — sexual and relational — across cross-sectional, longitudinal and experimental designs. The association is small, and analyses by sex were significant for men only. Reported effect sizes include r = −.13 (95% CI −.16, −.10) for men on interpersonal satisfaction and r ≈ −.11 for sexual satisfaction.

Wright, Tokunaga, Kraus & Klann 2017, Human Communication Research 43(3):315-343, doi:10.1111/hcre.12108. PARTIALLY VERIFIED: the paper is closed access and could not be retrieved. The study description, the null intrapersonal finding and "significant results for men only" are verified from the published abstract. The…

Across 30 national surveys and 31 relationship-quality measures, roughly half of the tested associations were significantly negative and roughly half were null.

Perry 2020

Some studies find curvilinear rather than linear effects — occasional use looks different from heavy use.

Willoughby et al. 2021

Porn-induced erectile dysfunction is a real clinical hypothesis with supportive case reports and clinician reports, but frequency-based population studies have not produced consistent associations. It remains contested.

Park et al. 2016; JMIR 2021 international survey; Kirby 2021

Rates of erectile difficulty and low desire in men under 40 appear higher in post-2006 studies than in pre-internet-video ones, but causation is not established and measurement differs across studies.

Park et al. 2016; Erectile Dysfunction in Young Adults narrative review 2025

A randomised trial of 12-session ACT (n=28 adult men, all but one from the same religious community) found a 93% reduction in viewing against 21% in a waitlist group; 54% complete cessation at post-treatment, 35% at three-month follow-up, with 74% still showing at least a 70% reduction. Small, narrow sample.

Crosby & Twohig 2016, Behavior Therapy 47(3):355-366, doi:10.1016/j.beth.2016.02.001, PMID 27157029

Meta-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.

Systematic review/meta-analysis of PPU interventions

A systematic review of 47 prospective short-term abstinence studies across six behaviours found abstinence shows promise for pornography use, while noting that counterproductive effects — rebound, compensatory behaviour — were poorly measured.

Fernandez, Kuss & Griffiths 2020, Clinical Psychology Review

A qualitative analysis of 104 rebooting abstinence journals found abstinence felt impossible at first and became attainable with cognitive-behavioural strategies plus social support. Self-report only; third variables not ruled out.

Fernandez, Kuss & Griffiths 2021, Archives of Sexual Behavior

A preregistered survey of 587 men in reboot communities found perceived relapse commonly followed by shame, worthlessness, sadness and in some cases suicidal thoughts. Forum cultures were also documented as hostile in ways unrelated to recovery.

Prause & Binnie 2023, Sexualities

There is no sound evidence that ejaculatory abstinence produces a meaningful hormonal benefit. The widely repeated "testosterone peaks on day seven" figure rests on a single study of 28 men that was retracted in 2021, was published twice, and has never been independently replicated. Nothing supports sustained hormonal benefit from long-term retention.

Jiang M, Xin J, Zou Q, Shen JW, J Zhejiang Univ Sci 2003;4(2):236-240, doi:10.1631/jzus.2003.0236, PMID 12659241 — RETRACTED 10 December 2021 (Retraction Note doi:10.1631/jzus.2003.r236). The retraction is recorded independently by PubMed (publication type "Retracted Publication"; "Retraction in: J. Zhejiang Univ…

Claims that semen retention raises pheromones, attracts partners, or produces superpowers have no supporting evidence.

No credible evidence base

The "flatline" — a period of dropped libido, mood or arousal during abstinence — is consistently reported in abstinence journals but has never been formally studied.

Fernandez et al. 2021

Anti-masturbation anxiety was consolidated by the anonymous English tract Onania and by Tissot's L'Onanisme (French 1760, Latin 1758). Onania's date is contested: commonly given as c.1712, argued by Stolberg to be 1716, with recent estimates spanning 1708-1716 and the earliest surviving copy the 4th edition of 1718. Its authorship is unknown. Tissot popularised the claim that semen was worth many times its volume in blood but did not originate it: his 1758 Latin credits Galen and gives half an ounce, and the 1760 French drops Galen for "the physicians of all ages". The ratio has been traced to Avicenna (c.1027), reaching Europe via Michael Scot's Latin translation (c.1215). Historians dispute whether Onania marks a genuine rupture (Laqueur) or repackages anxieties already present in earlier theological and medical discourse (Stolberg).

Stolberg 2000, J History of Sexuality 9(1/2); Janssen 2025, J Psychosexual Health 7(2):187-191, for the ratio's transmission; Laqueur, Solitary Sex. NOTE: these citations are carried over from an independent fact-check recorded in supabase/migrations/20260829120000 and have NOT yet been re-verified against the primary…

John Harvey Kellogg prescribed a plain, deliberately unstimulating grain diet as one of several treatments meant to suppress masturbation (Plain Facts about Sexual Life, 1877, pp. 311-13: "Graham flour, oatmeal, and ripe fruit are indispensables of a dietary for those who are suffering from sexual excesses"), and Sylvester Graham had made the same diet-and-chastity argument in 1834. That much is well established. The further claim that this campaigning motivated the invention of corn flakes is NOT supported: flaked cereal was developed at the sanitarium in 1894 and patented in 1896 as an easily digested food "particularly well adapted for sick and convalescent persons", corn flakes specifically followed in 1898, and no edition of Plain Facts examined (1877, 1881, 1910) mentions them. Graham likewise promoted graham flour and bread, not the branded cracker, which Nabisco mass-produced in 1898, 47 years after his death.

Kellogg, Plain Facts about Sexual Life, Battle Creek 1877, pp. 233ff., 311-13 (the title Plain Facts for Old and Young, which this register used to pair with 1877, first appears in 1881); US Patent 558,393, filed 31 May 1895, issued 14 April 1896; Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, 1834, pp. 59-60; Markel…

Nineteenth-century cures included genital surgery on children, restraint devices, and dietary regimes.

Hunt 1998; Stengers & Van Neck

No Nut November began as an Urban Dictionary entry in 2011 and went mainstream around 2017; it originated as satire.

Urban Dictionary 2011; Rolling Stone; Wikipedia

NNN and NoFap have been partly co-opted by far-right and conspiratorial online movements, documented by journalists and researchers.

Dickson, Rolling Stone; Prause & Binnie 2023

Taoist jing and Hindu brahmacharya frame seminal retention as conserving vital essence. These are spiritual and philosophical traditions, not empirical findings.

Historical and religious texts

Marlatt's relapse-prevention model identifies the Abstinence Violation Effect: after a lapse, attributing it to a permanent personal flaw predicts a full return to the behaviour.

Marlatt & Gordon 1985; Curry et al. 1987

In a randomised study of 123 undergraduate smokers undergoing a cue-exposure procedure, brief urge-surfing instructions did not reduce reported urges but did reduce smoking over the following seven days.

Bowen & Marlatt 2009, Psychology of Addictive Behaviors 23(4):666-671, doi:10.1037/a0017127, PMID 20025372

Suppressing sexual thoughts produces a rebound effect — the thoughts increase.

Efrati 2019; broader thought-suppression literature

Research on problematic pornography use has been predominantly male-focused, and data on women are comparatively sparse. In the largest standardised cross-national study (N=82,243, 42 countries) 0.72% of women met the PPCS cut-off, 2.96% the PPCS-6 and 7.01% the Brief Pornography Screen, against 6.26%, 18.60% and 28.92% of men. A defensible general-population range for women is roughly 1-7%, and the spread is driven by which instrument and cut-off is used rather than by real disagreement. Whether women face greater stigma for use is asserted in the secondary literature but has not been measured.

Bőthe et al. 2024, Addiction 119:928-950; Rissel et al. 2017 (1% of Australian women); Grubbs, Kraus & Perry 2019 (3% of US women). The "1-23%" this register used to carry is a background sentence in Bőthe's introduction, reaching here via Klau et al. 2026, J Sexual Medicine; its 23% is Lewczuk et al. 2022, meaning…

Sexual minority men and women tend to report higher problematic use than heterosexual peers, with exceptions by measure.

Understanding Differences in PPU, 2022

From 25 July 2025 the UK Online Safety Act required "highly effective age assurance" on pornography platforms. Ofcom reported 69M+ age checks across 32 sampled services in H2 2025, checks on all top-ten UK sites, and children encountering effective checks rising from 25% to 43% between July 2025 and January 2026. VPN downloads spiked.

Ofcom 2026, statutory report on age assurance

Habitual behaviour is usefully taught as a four-part loop — cue, craving, behaviour, relief — in which the relief reinforces the cue-behaviour link. This is a teaching model from popular behaviour-change writing, not a finding. The established science underneath it is narrower: habits are context-response associations strengthened by repetition in a stable context, and whether a craving is a necessary stage is exactly the contested part.

The four-stage loop (cue → craving → response → reward) is James Clear's, set out at jamesclear.com/three-steps-habit-change, where Clear credits Charles Duhigg — whose Power of Habit loop has three stages, cue → routine → reward — and Nir Eyal, and footnotes Damasio and Feldman Barrett. For the underlying habit…

Implementation intentions - plans in the form "if situation X, then I will do Y" - reliably improve goal attainment. Across 94 independent tests the effect was d = .65, which the authors describe as medium-to-large.

Gollwitzer & Sheeran 2006, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38:69-119, doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1

The Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale measures problematic use through the six components of Griffiths' (2005) model - salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict and relapse. Not every instrument in the field is built this way: the Brief Pornography Screen, which produces the highest prevalence figures quoted at C05 and C06, is a short screen rather than a six-component measure.

Bothe et al., The Development of the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale (PPCS), J Sex Res 2018;55(3):395-406, doi:10.1080/00224499.2017.1291798

Sleep loss reliably degrades emotional functioning; its effect on impulse control is smaller and less consistent. Meta-analysis of 154 experimental studies finds sleep loss reduces positive affect, raises anxiety symptoms and blunts arousal in response to emotional stimuli. For inhibitory control the picture is mixed: a single night of restricted sleep produces no detectable effect, and across the wider executive-function literature the effect on interference inhibition is small.

Palmer et al. 2024, Psychological Bulletin 150(4):440-463, doi:10.1037/bul0000410, PMID 38127505 - preregistered meta-analysis, 1,338 effect sizes across 154 studies, N=5,717: all forms of sleep loss reduced positive affect (SMD -0.27 to -1.14), increased anxiety symptoms (SMD 0.57-0.63) and blunted arousal to…

Shame is a concealment emotion associated with withdrawal and hiding, and predicts poorer behaviour-change outcomes than guilt, which is behaviour-focused and action-oriented.

Tangney, Stuewig & Mashek 2007, Annual Review of Psychology 58:345-372, doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070145, PMID 16953797, PMC3083636; Tangney & Dearing 2002

Concealing pornography use from a partner is associated with greater distress and lower relationship satisfaction than using openly. Whether being found out is worse than telling them - the comparison the phrase "discovers rather than being told" implies - has not been tested.

Resch & Alderson 2014, J Sex Marital Ther 40(5):410-424, doi:10.1080/0092623X.2012.751077, PMID 23898992

Problematic 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.

Bothe et al. 2020, J Sex Med 17(4):793-811, doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2020.01.007

Nightshore is a paid subscription product, and companies in this market - apps, blockers, coaching, residential programmes, supplements - have a financial incentive favouring the addiction framing. This is a disclosure about the app and the market it sits in, not an empirical finding.

docs/premium.md, which records Nightshore Premium as a RevenueCat subscription; the course's own commercial position

Increasing the friction of a behaviour - moving the cue further away, reducing availability, breaking the sequence that leads to it - reduces how often it occurs. The direction is consistently found and the effects are moderate, but the evidence is graded low-certainty, comes mostly from short laboratory studies of food, and has never been compared head-to-head with intention-based approaches. What is separately well established is that intentions on their own translate weakly into behaviour.

Hollands et al. 2019, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews CD012573.pub3, doi:10.1002/14651858.CD012573.pub3, PMID 31482606

Dopamine 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, and Berridge 2007, Psychopharmacology 191(3):391-431, doi:10.1007/s00213-006-0578-x, PMID 17072591

Identity-consistent self-description travels with habit maintenance; which one pulls the other is not established.

Verplanken & Sui 2019, Frontiers in Psychology 10:1504, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01504

In a nationally representative Australian survey, 84% of men and 54% of women had ever looked at pornography. Among those ever-users, 76% of the men and 41% of the women had looked in the past year — which is roughly 64% of all men and 22% of all women surveyed.

Rissel et al. 2017, J Sex Res 54(2):227-240, doi:10.1080/00224499.2016.1191597, PMID 27419739