What the science says about masturbation and health

What the studies say overall

Masturbation is common at any age. Among people aged sixty to seventy-five in four European countries, between four and almost seven in ten men and between three and four in ten women had masturbated in the previous month (Fischer et al., 2022).

What is associated with distress is not masturbating a lot or a little, but the gap from what one would like: in a large Finnish survey, those who masturbated more or less than they wanted had more sexual distress (Huang et al., 2023).

In young men, frequency did not appear to influence erectile dysfunction, whereas problematic pornography use was associated with it (Jacobs et al., 2021), and in a urology clinic, men who preferred to masturbate with pornography over sex with a partner had more sexual dysfunction (Berger et al., 2019).

In a review on long-distance relationships, masturbation helped with sleep and managing stress, although excessive use was associated with more anxiety (Kusuma et al., 2026). And among users of a menstrual tracking app, orgasm was more frequent alone than with a partner (Hewings-Martin et al., 2026).

Beliefs about whether it is healthy carry weight.

In a survey on Reddit, those who wanted to stop masturbating did so mainly because they saw it as unhealthy (Zimmer et al., 2020), and among Black women in the United States, the messages they had received came from religion, family and friends, and were more often mixed than negative (Thorpe et al., 2023).

Where they disagree

Some studies link it to benefits, such as better sleep or reaching orgasm, and others to anxiety or dysfunction (Kusuma et al., 2026; Hewings-Martin et al., 2026; Berger et al., 2019). The difference usually lies in the context: excessive use, problematic pornography or distress about one's own frequency, rather than masturbation itself (Huang et al., 2023; Jacobs et al., 2021).

Limits of the evidence

Almost all are cross-sectional surveys: they show associations, not causes (Huang et al., 2023; Jacobs et al., 2021; Berger et al., 2019). Some samples are very particular, such as users of an online forum or patients at a urology clinic (Zimmer et al., 2020; Berger et al., 2019).

The studies, one by one

We have gathered 8 verified studies. Each summary is our own; the quotation in inverted commas is taken word for word from the original abstract, in English.

Other topics in the library

• Vibrators9 studies
• Vibrators for men7 studies