Do you guys know what month it is? It's technically No Nut November! I'm Dr. Rena Malik,
urologist and pelvic surgeon, and I'm finally going to talk to you guys about
No Nut November or semen retention. If you're new here, I talk about all sorts of things,
sexual health, urologic health, bladder health, and much much more.
Make sure if you like what you see you, subscribe and share this channel with your friends!
so what exactly is no nut november well it's a practice of avoiding ejaculation for the whole
month of november not to be confused by no fap nofap is actually a website that offers resources
and a community for people who are struggling with porn addiction they do talk about abstinence for
some short period of time from certain types of sexual activities but avoidance of certain types
of sexual activities or porn watching is part of their philosophy or what they recommend as far
as resources are concerned but that is not what they are all about they are essentially trying to
help men improve their sexual well-being so how did this even come about well it's been around
for a long period of time in fact ancient taoist literature discussed semen retention as a way of
self-control they believed that ejaculating was actually losing control of oneself and
keeping it in or semen retention was actually a way to improve health and control of your body
proponents of semen retention say there are so many benefits to having increased mental clarity
increased concentration having better quality sperm increased testosterone deeper and happier
relationships and so much more but is it backed by science is doing this safe or can it potentially
harm you make sure you stick around till the end of the video where i talk about my thoughts
on semen retention the interesting thing about semen retention is it's actually in this specific
no nut november is recommended not to ejaculate that is very distinct from not having an orgasm
so they people will start and try to have orgasms without ejaculating during this process so they'll
do things like edging which is essentially the stop and start technique that we talk about for
premature ejaculation or they will do things like try to force retrograde ejaculation by pushing on
the perineum and forcing ejaculate to go back into the bladder people feel that this allows them to
have better orgasms and potentially multiple orgasms and longer sexual stamina so i'm going
to talk a bit about the small amount of data that we have on this practice and then after that i'll
talk about a little bit about the potential harms associated with semen retention first let's talk
about the thought that it increases testosterone so this is a very small study that was done on 10
men in the ages of 22 to 29 and what they did was they had these men it's on day zero
watch a film and the film was the first 20 minutes of the last 20 minutes were like a
emotionally neutral documentary in the middle 20 minutes they showed them pornographic material and
they encouraged them or asked them to masturbate and orgasm they then had them abstain for 21 days
from any sort of ejaculation on the 21st day they again showed them the same video during
these videos they monitored their heart rate and blood pressure continuously and they also
measured some blood levels for every 10 minutes and the whole process took about an hour they also
asked people to fill out questionnaires about how sexually aroused they were and the quality
of their orgasm like how intense was it how long was it and they captured all that information what
they found was that this period of 21 days of abstinence didn't affect any of the physiologic
changes that we expect to see during arousal and masturbation orgasm all those remained the same
they did find however that people had better sexual arousal subjectively felt like they were
more aroused and had longer duration and more intense orgasms after that period of abstinence
they also saw that starting at 20 minutes that if you look at baseline levels of testosterone that
they actually increased from the 20-minute mark onward during that second period after they had
abstained from intercourse or ejaculation for 21 days you can see that clearly here in this graph
but does that even make a big difference the thought behind why this happened is that these
people probably were more aroused or more enhanced after having these anticipatory cues of the the
video that was coming the pornographic material and they got excited more so because they had been
abstinent for 20 days what about sperm quality well there's one meta-analysis that looked at this
all of the studies that were included needed to look at men who were dropping off a semen analysis
after a certain period of time during which they were abstinent and they're required to document
how long that was and there were two things that they found that increased with longer abstinence
or greater than five days of absence and that was sperm count and semen volume the semen volume was
studied in 17 studies and out of those 17 studies 15 found a significant correlation of increasing
abstinence time with an increase in volume and in 11 studies that looked at sperm count 100 of them
saw an increase in sperm count after abstinence so generally what do i take away from this well
this testosterone study was really on a small number of people and very young healthy men so
will it apply to everybody i'm not really sure as far as sperm parameters we know that holding
off for a couple days is actually recommended in men who are infertile we actually recommend that
during the ovulatory period when you're trying to conceive that you have sex every two days rather
than doing it every day because sperm parameters do increase when you have a little bit of delayed
time between ejaculations so what do i think about semen retention or no nut november well i think if
you're getting benefits from participating in no nut november like you're feeling more clear you're
having deeper relationships you're feeling like you're more excited about being with your partner
and you're getting more clarity that's great go ahead and do it do not ejaculating doesn't have
any harmful consequences that we know of your body will essentially resorb the semen that you
don't ejaculate out and so it's not a problem if you haven't ejected for a certain period of time
however there are some concerns that i do have one is that when you're going through this process if
you're trying to really focus on having orgasms without ejaculation you can get very fixated on
that prospect you can get very fixed on edging and it can be very hard to have a relationship a very
meaningful important sexual relationship with a partner because you're very fixated on yourself
it can also cause a lot of stress and anxiety to go through no no november as i mentioned in
my previous video on masturbation there's a number of benefits to masturbation including better sleep
decreased heart rate decreased stress and a lot of increase in feel-good hormones the other thing
that i worry about is that people can get a lot of pain and discomfort in their pelvic floor or their
testicles a lot of you guys have heard of blue balls in fact there's very little data on this
in the scientific literature but it's called epididymal hypertension and the reason being
is that during arousal you get increased blood flow to the testicles as well as everything else
and usually that's decreased after you ejaculate but if you don't ejaculate that increased pressure
stays around and can be what we perceive as or what men perceive as blue balls and for some
people that can be quite painful and it can last for quite a bit period of time we also sometimes
see men who have elevated pelvic floor tone in men who don't masturbate or don't eject for long
periods of time because they're building up all this stress and tension in their pelvic floor
that can result in pain and while there's no data on this we'll sometimes recommend that these men
masturbate two or three times a week just to help with that pain so i think if you're gonna try to
participate a much healthier option is actually to go no fap to avoid pornography which has a lot of
potentially dangerous side effects if you're watching violent porn or porn that's not realistic
it can actually really affect your brain and the way you perceive sex
and the way you have relationships with other people so if you want to try something new for
november try to hold off on pornography rather than holding off on ejaculation i hope you all
learned something today as always remember to take care of yourself because you're worth it