The longest I went was about three weeks, meaning no sex and no masturbation —and therefore no orgasms—for 21 days. It turned my life around ; I got work done, I kept my house clean, I finished off personal projects that procrastination had always forbid me from finishing. I realized that a self-enforced period of blue balls can actually be a lot better for the mind, body, and soul than I'd first assumed.

Chastity is not a foreign concept to me. More than once I've been in a relationship where, because I and the other person were heavily into starving ourselves of sex for sexual reasons, abstinence was enforced.

So it's clearly important to keep bashing away—but abstaining for a few weeks at a time certainly has its benefits. Benefits I thought I'd share with you here, backed up with scientific facts provided by Professor Pfaus.

"[Masturbation] is a great stress reducer—there's evidence that having sex or masturbating can reduce our resting heart rate for up to 12 hours. Plus, it does our sex lives the world of good to learn our sexual rhythms. We connect [through masturbation] to the types of action that we see in erotic or pornographic visual stimuli. This feeds our sexual fantasies, which is an enrichment of our creative process."

However, it does need to be mentioned that having a DMC with your own junk every once in a while is a very healthy thing to do, encouraged by actual professors. For instance, Jim Pfaus—professor of neuroscience at Montreal's Concordia University—told me this:

I have little to absolutely no knowledge in the field, but I figured there must be some kind of scientific link here; since semen contains testosterone, it follows that if you keep that testosterone off tissues and all to yourself, like some sort of spermy Scrooge, you'll end up with more "drive." Right? Kind of.

In the three weeks that I abstained, I wrote 20 articles, built a bed, started work on a book, and began eating salad, like any proper, functioning adult with a fear of imminent heart disease should. As soon as I started going at myself again, all that productivity disappeared, shot up the wall in a long, thick arc of lost potential.

"Holding semen in does not increase the likelihood that any of the constituents will 'leak' back into the blood," explains Professor Pfaus. "However, if you are holding it in, that means you are not having sex or masturbating, which could increase your arousal in anticipation of actually having sex. I think this is the 'energy' that the purveyors of tantric sex talk about. Learning how to maintain erection and hold off ejaculation makes the orgasm experience more intensely pleasurable. This is true for us and rats. So the increase in 'energy' is more psychological and belief-driven than anything else."

This is the increase in energy I experienced. After setting "no masturbation" as a kind of personal challenge, I quickly discovered that I needed other things to occupy my mind. And what's a better distraction from your thoughts than trying to assemble a flat-pack bed invented purely to destroy long-term relationships?

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There was a time, roughly a millennium ago, when I'd wake up in the morning and the whole world would seem bright and exciting and full of opportunity. Now I'm a grown man, each morning instead seems to bring back pain, 20 unread emails before I've even managed to brush my teeth, and some guy who takes an inexplicable amount of time to withdraw cash from the ATM.