male, masturbationI’m asking specifically about male masturbation, which can be frequent starting in adolescence.
Can excessive male masturbation cause any adverse physical or mental effects, and if so what?
Summary
Masturbation doesn't have any insidious negative effects that sneak up on you if you do it too much. There are physical limits on how much you can masturbate safely, and practical limits on how much and in what ways you should masturbate to avoid impacting other parts of your life, but in general the physical problems are very obvious and temporary, and you should be able to monitor for yourself whether your masturbation has too much influence on your sex life or your life as a whole. What a healthy amount of masturbation is varies from person to person, and many areas on this subject are lacking in solid scientific research, but if you use common sense and temporarily abstain from masturbating if it becomes painful or if it starts to dominate your life then you should be fine, and will be able to learn the right amount of masturbation for you from experience.
Physical risks
There are some possible injuries from motions of masturbation, especially rapid and forceful masturbation, such as friction burns and more rarely penile fracture, all of which are also risks in having sex. The risk of these injuries can be reduced by using lubrication. The most common physical problem is simply soreness and possibly minor swelling with it; this should go away after a few days of abstinence. Penile fracture from too much impact is very painful and obvious and you should go to a hospital right away for surgery. Peyronie's disease, scarring in the penis that causes misshapenness and pain, may be caused by sex or masturbation that is too forceful, but it is not well understood. You can read more about health effects of masturbation in this Skeptics.SE question. Just don't masturbate if it hurts, and talk to your doctor if it doesn't resolve itself in a few days; you should be able to figure out the right amount of masturbation for you from experience.
Mental risks
There is no credible evidence of lasting psychological damage due to masturbation. Masturbation as a Means of Achieving Sexual Health by Walter Bockting and Eli Coleman, published in the Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, states
Despite the scientific evidence indicating that masturbation is generally a normal variant of sexual expression and that it does not seem to have a causal relationship with sexual pathology, negative attitudes about masturbation persist and it remains stigmatized.
The most common mental problem around masturbation is the habituation of masturbation, where masturbating becomes necessary emotional support, sleep aid, or simply routine rather than something you enjoy. If it begins to interfere with your life such as with urges to masturbate at work then that is a sign you should cut back for a time. Communities such as reddit/NoFap have formed to provide support for people who would like to cut back. Also discussed is specifically pornography addiction, where the porn becomes more and more about novelty, seeing all sorts of taboo or bizarre scenes just one click away, rather than aiding masturbation or showing the sex you're interested in. Infocomedical site cracked.com did an informal study on pornography abstience, and out of 94 regular porn users, 52 (55%) failed to made it one week without porn. They attributed the failures mostly to boredom, saying that people with other hobbies were much more likely to maintain abstinence. However, though these patterns of behavior are commonly referred to as addiction in popular discussion, scientific study is lacking on whether it qualifies as addition. The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Review of the ‘Pornography Addiction’ Model by David Ley, Nicole Prause, and Peter Finn in Current Sexual Health Reports says
The addiction model is rarely used to describe high-frequency use of visual sexual stimuli (VSS) in research, yet common in media and clinical practice. The theory and research behind ‘pornography addiction’ is hindered by poor experimental designs, limited methodological rigor, and lack of model specification.
and advises
Since a large, lucrative industry has promised treatments for pornography addiction despite this poor evidence, scientific psychologists are called to declare the emperor (treatment industry) has no clothes (supporting evidence). When faced with such complaints, clinicians are encouraged to address behaviors without conjuring addiction labels.
The Atlantic has an excellent article on pornography addiction, where it discusses in-depth the debate on its existence, and the experiences of the author and various people he has spoken to, and concludes that whether this pattern of behavior is a full addiction or merely a compulsion or whatever have you, in some people it is a struggle great enough to be worth seeking therapy and other treatment for. Since there is so little reliable information to suggest treatment or prevention, or indeed whether it's something you should really worry about, the only solid advice can be to use common sense: Monitor your own masturbation habits, and cut back if you feel they are becoming unhealthy.
Sexual risks
Masturbating is healthy even if you are also in a sexual relationship. Scientific consensus, such as described by the aforementioned Masturbation as a Means of Achieving Sexual Health, is that masturbation is a healthy part of any sexual life, for example being very useful when your libido and that of your partner are not in sync. Though use of pornography should not be considered evidence of a desire to cheat in a monogamous relationship, some partners may be uncomfortable with it or with masturbation in general, and you will have to decide how important it is to you when negotiating with them.
A common way you can run into difficulties with masturbation is if you regularly masturbate in an unusual manner that cannot be replicated in sex. Sex columnist and author Dan Savage advises that your body gets used to orgasming from the way you masturbate, and if this cannot be replicated in sex then you may have difficulty achieving orgasm. His recommended treatment for this is to spend a month or so masturbating only in the way you'd like to orgasm in sex, and not allowing yourself to orgasm if this is not successful, to encourage your body to adjust.
The adverse physical effects of excessive masturbation could include friction burns, blistering or abrasions and the growth of skin tags in susceptible individuals. The use of lubricant would reduce this, but masturbation is not always undertaken with lubricant - either artificial or natural. Should an erection be maintained for more than four hours continuously, the effects of priapism may occur, notably pain and potential tissue damage.
The psychological effects may include addiction in susceptible individuals - it can be shown that some individuals have "addictive personalities", and are more susceptible than others.
As for how much is bad: that can vary between individuals, so no definite number can be given. There is the factor that it is harmful to remain erect for more than four hours, otherwise, as long as no obvious physical damage or pain is being inflicted, it is not physically "too much". Mentally... for a particularly addictive personality, once could be enough to create an addiction, but that would be considered an extreme case.
There is no amount of masturbation that is bad for you physically, except when you include amounts at which things like 'brushing your hair' or 'shaking hands' is bad for you. Masturbation is a very low risk activity, like walking in the park. You can, in fact, get skin irritation from excessively shaking hands.
Just like for women, it is by far the safest form of sex.
The only reason people wonder about how much masturbation can be damaging, and not how much walking can be bad, is because of stigma associated with it. Did you ever wonder about the burn marks you could get while shaking hands excessively?
(...) there's nothing specific about masturbation that's the problem. Compulsive masturbation is like any behavior that disrupts your life -- whether it's compulsively playing poker or buying Beanie Babies on eBay.
Male Masturbation: 5 Things You Didn't Know -- WebMD
Now, that is not to say that the intensity cannot be overdone. Although rare, penile fracture can result from very forceful masturbation. If you include things like sex toys getting stuck, there's a whole range of possible adverse effects, but that's beyond the scope of your question.
Köhler [MD, MPH] has seen guys with it after vigorous masturbation. "Afterward, the penis looks like an eggplant," he says. "It's purple and swollen." Most men need surgery to repair it.
Male Masturbation: 5 Things You Didn't Know -- WebMD
Keep in mind that masturbation is actually associated with many health benefits. As long as you are not ashamed to do it, there is no psychological issue with doing it. It reduces stress, keeps sperm quantities in normal range, and is associated with a lower risk of prostate cancer.
While there is no exact number of times that’s considered “too much”, it’s still not good to exaggerate.
I’ve read an article about masturbation, back in the day when I started puberty, and there were 2 keypoints to the article:
As a side-note, during puberty, I had periods where I’d masturbate 5-6 times a day, and everything’s OK with my body, so there’s no physical degradation or anything, however you should consider the fact that when “creating” sperm, your body does use some important substances, so it’s best not to do it too often.
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