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Comment on Why isn't jerking off more valorized as an easy dopamine hit that's also literally good for you?

Masturbation is totally normal and healthy, and you’re spot on that it shouldn’t be demonized or shamed. Tons of medical authorities and scientific studies have found that masturbation has all sorts of physical and mental health benefits. It’s a safe way to feel good sexually, relieve stress, sleep better, and possibly even reduce risks of prostate cancer and boost immune function.

At the same time, it’s important to have a balanced and psychologically flexible relationship with masturbation and sexuality. As psychologist Steven Hayes, a leading expert on psychological flexibility, explains: getting too fixated on any one activity or coping mechanism, even a healthy one, can lead to psychological inflexibility if it is used to avoid experiencing your life fully(A Liberated Mind by Steven Hayes). This means getting stuck in rigid behavior patterns to the point that it messes with living a full and meaningful life.

So while I’m totally with you that masturbation is healthy and that bullshit social taboos against it should be rejected, it’s also good to be mindful about your motivation behind doing it. Are you doing it because you’re escaping pain? Or are you doing it because it aligns with your values and makes your life meaningful? If you rely on masturbation too much and don’t have ways of accepting your emotions and connecting with the world, it could potentially tip into unhelpful psychological rigidity and a frustrating life. The key is to be able to experience masturbation while still staying flexible enough to show up fully for the rest of your life too.

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MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
What if I’m masturbating because my body demands I masturbate when I look at porn, even though I’d rather just look at porn without masturbating?

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- snek_boi@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thanks for the response. What you’re describing - feeling a bodily urge to masturbate when viewing porn, even if you’d prefer not to - is very common. We’re kinda designed so that our bodies respond to sexual stimuli. Many people can relate to that internal tug-of-war between an impulse and a conflicting desire.
  
  From a psychological flexibility perspective, the key is to approach those urges with mindful acceptance rather than struggle against them. Fighting with or trying to suppress an urge often just makes it grow stronger, like a beach ball you keep trying to push underwater - it keeps popping back up with greater force (1). Instead, psychological flexibility invites us to open up and make room for the urge, observing it with curiosity and letting it be fully present in our awareness.
  
  This doesn’t mean you have to act on the urge. In fact, by giving it space to exist without resistance, you gain the ability to unhook from it and consciously choose how to respond in line with your values (2). You might say to yourself “I’m having the thought that I need to masturbate right now” and feel the sensations of that urge in your body, while still maintaining the freedom to decide if acting on it is truly what you want.
  
  Imagine for a moment that a dear friend or loved one came to you struggling with this same dilemma. How would you respond to them? Most likely with compassion, understanding, and encouragement to be kind to themselves as they navigate this very human challenge. We could all benefit from extending that same caring response to ourselves.
  
  At the end of the day, you’re the expert on your own life and what matters most to you. By practicing acceptance of your inner experiences, unhooking from unhelpful thoughts and urges, and clarifying what you truly value, you can develop psychological flexibility to pursue a rich and meaningful life - whatever that looks like for you. That means that there’s no one “right” way to relate to masturbation and porn. The invitation is to approach it mindfully and make choices that align with the kind of person you want to be.
  
  (1) You can check out the “rebound effect” or “ironic process theory.” It’s been studied extensively in the context of thought suppression. The seminal paper on the topic is Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5–13. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.53.1.5
  
  (2) This meta-analysis reviewed laboratory-based studies testing the components of the psychological flexibility model, and how psychological flexibility techniques increase behavioral flexibility. Levin, M. E., Hildebrandt, M. J., Lillis, J., & Hayes, S. C. (2012). The impact of treatment components suggested by the psychological flexibility model: A meta-analysis of laboratory-based component studies. Behavior Therapy, 43(4), 741-756. doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2012.05.003
  
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  - MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Mindfulness sounds like a lot of work when I’m already planning to get genital nullification surgery
    
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    Notyou@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes, but I feel mindfulness can solve many problems. I’m not sure how many of your problems will be solved with surgery, but you might need to mix in a bit of mindfulness for good measure.
    
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    catsarebadpeople@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Asks question about psychology and masturbation. Gets well thought out response with source material and excellent advice. Responds to said comment in a rude way.
    
    EveRYoNe is sO tRanSpHobiC!!
    
    Lol. No. Your response was shitty and had nothing to do with the topic or the incredibly well thought out and empathetic response that you received. That’s why you’re being downvoted. Your gender does not give you permission to treat others poorly and you’re acting no better than actual transphobes.
    
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    TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Mindfulness sounds like a lot of work when I’m already planning to get genital nullification surgery
    
    Being present with yourself and learning to sit with your thoughts (mere transient, ephemeral nothingness) is probably not going to be more work than undergoing literal surgery.
    
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TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Thank you… most of the responses in this thread are really immature, arrogant, entitled, and pretty fucking cynical.

I work with people with severe depression and also the occasional sex/porn addict. Sexuality can lead us to some healthy lifestyles and can function as a healthy coping skill but it’s also one that’s easy to overdo. There are folks out there who try to treat their depression by masturbating all day long. They’re desperate for any hit of pleasure, and they have quite literally milked that cow dry.

This post reminds me of the Reddit marijuana communities, that rubber-banded so far beyond reasonable moderated consumption of a helpful medicine, but refused to see how maladaptive their ritual had become. That’s the immature, arrogant part. And the entitled cynical part is the attitude that any criticism of my precious coping tool is a criticism of me, and the cynicism is that the only reason to criticize it is because of a corrupt society! Jesus fucking christ this thread broke my brain, you all broke my brain, we all suck.

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- maybeoneday@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ve ended up having sex with my marijuana and smoking my semen… And I can’t help but ask myself, where did it all go wrong?
  
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lightnsfw@reddthat.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Psychological inflexibility here means getting stuck in rigid behavior patterns to the point that it messes with living a full and meaningful life.

Rigid behavioral patterns like having to work 40 hours a week, shop, feed yourself, clean, do laundry, go to the doctor, pay bills and so on, over and over and over again for the rest of your life?

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- TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Bro you can’t just list basically every human ADL and say it’s too much work. Just say “I’m struggling with depression” like a real man and get some help
  
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  - lightnsfw@reddthat.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well excuse the fuck out of me for not having enough free time to actually enjoy my life.
    
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    TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    you cant compartmentalize things like that. there aren’t “chores” vs “fun” and everything you have to do is pain and the fun is just the chemical rushes. you gotta learn to enjoy the little things, enjoy yourself while you’re doing your job or your chores, have some gratitude that you still live and breathe. you probably are gonna wanna get screened for depression
    
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daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I mean that’s definitely just a checkout aisle self-help book, though. Psychology, along with nutritional science and some other softer, more survey-based fields, has been suffering a pretty massive replication crisis, where something like 50% of papers are totally incapable of being replicated, depending on the journal and subject.

So I dunno, I’d generally be pretty skeptical of anything a book like that says about how you have to live your life or what you should be doing or how you should be doing it. Even if it’s something like “mindfulness”, right, generally thought to be a therapeutic practice, which we’re extracting from zen buddhism or whatever, just like carl jung travels around and extracts a bunch of “archetypes” from other cultures and then supposes that they’re universal when really it’s all just kinda some schizo bullshit canon he’s coming up with on the fly.

I uhh, I don’t like the scientific paint that is painted onto psychology and psychotherapy, is I guess what I’m saying. The attempt at formalization. What is just as good for one person, to be mindful, is probably something that someone else should rather not think about at all. Maybe even as a functional adaptation, a functional delusion that they can go on believing, and still end up having a fulfilling and uplifting life for everyone around them.

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- TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I mean that’s definitely just a checkout aisle self-help book, though.
  
  Hayes is not a checkout aisle self-help book lol he pioneered a major branch of CBT
  
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  - daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Hayes is not a checkout aisle self-help book lol he pioneered multiple major branches of CBT
    
    I mean, both can be true, right. It’s not uncommon for pretty popular scientists to get into kind of the grift economy after a little while. Jordan peterson has how many citations to his scientific papers or whatever? But then he still rolls around and spews a bunch of bullshit that’s sort of framed under the guise of his psychological background, and you can still tell is pretty easily influenced by his jungian type bullshit. I dunno, been a while since I actually looked into him, but it shook my ability to trust psychology more as a field, after that one.
    
    I admire the skepticism but you haven’t read it and clearly haven’t taken time to fully understand it. he isn’t making prescriptive claims. he’s speaking on behavioral science. “A happens, then B tends to happen. C happens, then D tends to happen. do what you will with this info.”
    
    No yeah for sure I haven’t read it, don’t claim to have read it, I’m just extremely skeptical of that kind of book, which presents science to the public at large, because most of the experiences I’ve had with that sort of thing have been damaging psuedoscientific bullshit that I slowly have to talk my friends out of. Which becomes much harder when they think they know things on a topic because they’ve read like one book about it. I don’t even try to talk them into a different stance, I just try to talk them out of the kind of, oversimplified takes which they tend to get from these types of books. Steven pinker type books, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” type books, “The Bell Curve” type books, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, “Poor Dad, Rich Dad”, shit like that. Admittedly not all of those are science guys, and some of that shit’s kind of old, but, you see what I’m getting at, it all blends together for the public. Pop psychology, that’s probably the term for that specific type of book, and uhh, yeah, that book gave me that kind of vibe.
    
    If I’m really being skeptical, than, not evaluating anything else, because I just got up and still haven’t finished my coffee, the first study at the end of your post has two experiments. The first has a sample size of 34, the second has a sample size of 44. I dunno if I would say that you can really extrapolate anything from such an incredibly small sample size, to be honest. Especially one that’s like, taken from standard college campus volunteers. I know there are lots of scientific studies that rely on sample sizes which are pretty small, and I would throw that criticism at those studies, too. Shit happens in nutrition and exercise science too, I know for sure, which is why you see shitty fad diets circulate so much. I dunno, maybe I’ll read the rest of the paper, but that’s just like my general, me throwing shit at psychology as a field, right? But, maybe more, like, maybe more to, I think, some sort of point, if I have it, right:
    
    and we humans clearly need treatment.
    
    Like what do you mean by this? Because you’re looking at this through “treatments”, right, and I dunno if that’s the correct lens with which to view most people’s problems that they have in life. I mean it’s not a fuckin, incredibly new take, right, but like, you have a society where you’re expected to work 9-5, probably more, hours, five days a week, probably go in on a rental with your significant other, or increasingly, with your significant others, for like, 60 something years of your life? It’s not a shocker when we’re experiencing increasing amounts of depression at large, then, to me. That people have problems with that. I mean like, does changing society at large, qualify as a kind of patient treatment? I suppose my problem, if I’m really trying to have one, is just kind of that like, there’s not really any amount of psychological help which makes it better that your fingers are getting crushed in industrial machinery. Psychological help, in that case, just looks like copium. I don’t think psychology can help a lot of those problems, I think the best it can do is put a band-aid over a crippling tumor, which is nothing.
    
    If you were to ask me what we were to do with the mentality I have, I’d probably want to incredibly balloon sample sizes and drastically increase the amount of evidence that we’re collecting, compared to just like, some guy’s written observations on like 50 people in some random experiment. Probably though, this is impossible, because school funding does not look to be going up anytime soon and google isn’t gonna share their massive amounts of data they’re collecting on people, and even if we had a glut of data to go through then we’d probably still be having to come up with and apply some sort of framework to it. At which point we just end up with a bunch of hacky bullshit, where you just take the noise and draw something in it and then say that this was somehow a natural occurrence, so you’d also need more rigorous standards for what conclusions we’re actually able to draw from the noise.
    
    Then, even if you were able to do that, you’d still have no real way of distinguishing, say, one set of noise from another set of noise, to compare the two and draw a conclusion, because we’re just playing with like, one set of data, in a vacuum, compared to another set of data drawn from a vacuum, and there’s too many variables which might effect one outcome compared to another. So you’d probably need to be gathering pretty rigorous data over the course of many years before you’d be able to draw a real conclusion. Even then, the data might not be good enough, I dunno if you’d have enough information.
    
    I’d maybe lean more into neuroscience to try and cut out some of the external noise, some of the factors that might fuck your shit up, but then that’s also not quite a good method because it doesn’t really cut out the external noise so much as ignore it, and you can still end up finding FMRI signals in a dead fish.
    
    So, I dunno, probably I’d just use science for maths and astronomy and physics, stuff like that, and then otherwise I’d dismiss it, in looking for philosophies and methods with which to live my life or shape my being around. Or, you know, try to take it as it comes, and not really accept claims at face value. I’ve tried mindfulness, and I’ve found it wanting, because it just caused me to dissociate whenever I encountered an outcome I didn’t really like, and then instead of responding to things naturally, and flying by instinct, it causes me to kind of be like, the guy who smokes weed and then becomes hyper-aware of everything they’re doing but then their actual behavior devolves into nonsense.
    
    Then, when I got farther than that, and I started to observe that behavior in the abstract, then it just sort of struck me as like, none of this realistically gives you a particular value judgement, right. It’s fine enough to just say, like, ah, well, think about it more, evaluate your life more, think about the long term consequences a little more. But, that train of thought doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to be making the correct judgements, and even over a lifetime, it might very well be that I could try everything and still come to the wrong conclusions, wrong judgements, or the right conclusions and right judgements, or whatever. I could be a hyper-conscious CEO evaluating my own life totally inaccurately and still be getting by fine and dandy, and I could be a homeless guy with accurate takes but still have a shit life. It’s basically nonsense, to just be like, oh, well, think about it a little bit harder, just be a little bit more conscious, because that isn’t nailed down to anything in particular.
    
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    TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I respect your skepticism and I can see why you would mistrust the field broadly based on those figures in it. I just don’t think we need to throw out the whole field because of bad actors. Someone like Jordan Peterson is widely discredited in the field.
    
    Treatment IS important. There are REAL problems with roots in our own psychology. It is not purely psychological, but always biopsychosocial. Disregarding the psychological is not the way to treat biopsychosocial issues. In fact, it is one of the only ones we have any real agency or control over. And the more we develop psychology, the more just our understanding becomes. Think about 50 years ago when almost everything was just called “schizophrenia” and we treated people by shocking the shit out of them. That’s where we’d still be if we didn’t do this kind of work.
    
    When someone comes to me writing in pain from traumatic flashbacks, or wildly out of control of their lives due to mood swings, or losing grasp on what is real or not, or paralyzed with anxiety from the rat race you’re talking about, or they just plain cannot enjoy anything anymore and want to kill themselves… it is a low priority for me to discuss systemic issues with them. We can acknowledge them as a tool for alleviating shame and guilt surrounding mental disorders, and we can brainstorm ways to work around them, but expecting a suicidal client to begin marching in the streets? That is not going to be a sustainable means of making their immediate lives better. It is often more of a distraction than anything. Systemic justice and advocacy work is the kind of thing you do for no singular client in particular, and usually done in addition to the individual work.
    
    But mental health treatment is how we help people find peace right here and now. It is how we empower people to find agency in their own lives, and help make them strong enough people to go out and support others in the longer term. It’s the people who do not treat their mental health that end up devoting themselves to bizarre causes. I mean, think about how many Q anon supporters have addictive or psychotic tendencies.
    
    If you acknowledge that there are real mental disorders (with both internal and external etiology), and you acknowledge that treating the individual can be a positive step towards addressing systemic issues, then the question becomes what kind of treatment should we use? That’s where the scientific method comes in too. Yes there will always be problems and questions, but we do what we can with what we have.
    
    I have seen people make real progress and really turn their lives around. That includes the masturbaters too lol, who do come through from time to time. Helping people figure out what is truly important to them can help them find strength to endure the shit they cannot change. Helping people build tolerance for and even appreciation for pain can help them make decisions that give their lives greater meaning. It helps people free themselves from the grasp of addiction and start giving back to others. It helps people find reasons to live. It is doing an immediate, person-to-person good. I don’t know what kind of world you dream of, but I hope it is one with room for that kind of justice.
    
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