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Gooning is a form of prolonged masturbation that can last for hours or sometimes even days attempting to achieve a trance-like mental state through a total focus on arousal. And while many people masturbate on a regular basis, the question of can you masturbate too much has come into focus as searches for the word gooning have increased by 800% in the last year. So today we're looking at what happens if you never stop masturbating. Gooning is adjacent to edging, which is when you masturbate with the intention to get close to climaxing, but then you try to hold off or delay your orgasm. But edging is actually a clinical term that has a history in sex therapy, often
used as an intentional technique to help with premature ejaculation. While gooning tends to be more about the state of constant arousal and is almost always linked with a massive amount of pornography consumption, labeled goon fuel, in order to stay aroused for incredibly long periods of time. After all, it's difficult to stay aroused for hours or days without external stimuli. This hijacks nervous system in novel ways unseen in the history of homo sapiens. One of the most significant impacts of pornographic binges according to research is diminished pleasure in life overall. When you binge pornography, you
create a down regulation in the reward system of your brain. This is due to greater dorsal cingulate activation happening while watching porn for long periods of time. One survey on 100 gooners found that they masturbate daily for two to three hours, but only do eight to 12 hour masturbation gooning sessions once per month. But this can still severely impact your brain and body. There are four main stages of sexual arousal: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. And gooning requires prolonging the plateau stage. In fMRI scans, we can see the orbitofrontal cortex continuing to fire, which leads to a state in which people have
decreased fear, anxiety, an inability to make logical decisions, to reason, and have decreased social value judgments. This may sound ominous, but many gooners actually like this feeling and find it freeing. In fact, in the gooning community this is known as the goon state, a term which many describe as a meditative ego death that comes with masturbating for hours on end. The more you goon or hold your masturbation session in the plateau stage, the more your brain changes. And over time, the gray matter, specifically in the dorsal cingulate of the brain, is altered, which changes your anticipation of rewards. Studies show it
creates a dysfunctional enhanced preference for sexual novelty. This manifests as desensitization, habituation, and a search for more novel porn for longer masturbation sessions to satisfy your cravings. Essentially, it creates a feedback loop in your brain. The more you goon, the more you want to goon, the more you goon, the more you want to goon, and so on. On top of this, pornographic binges decrease connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, which can have serious impacts on your executive functioning. Increases impulsivity, causes cognitive rigidity and the inability to shift your attention, interferes in working memory capacity, creates deficits in emotional regulation, and causes your brain to
have a preoccupation with sex and sexual impulses. These findings are reminiscent of other behavioral addictions such as gambling and even some substance dependencies. Even more, pornographic binges often lead to a decreased interest in having sex with real-life partners, as well as a decrease in erection quality. AKA, makes your boners less hard. Other studies have found that what gooning causes in your brain leads to something called quantitative escalation. It's a fancy way of saying it leads to longer and increased time spent masturbating. As well, it also leads to qualitative escalation, which means engaging in increasingly provocative content, watching fast-moving compilation videos, and
moving frequently between preloaded porn tabs, known in the gooning community as tab jumping. This all relates to another part of gooning culture, which is called feeding, when you send someone else either through Discord or internet chats specific pornography that you love, keeping other gooners fed with novel porn. The thing is, a study on gooners found that while binging pornography and being in this hyperactive fed tab jumping state allowed them to feel excitement and pleasure while turning off thinking and emotions, unfortunately, immediately after the binge, the study found all subjects experienced negative emotions such as shame, loneliness, disgust, guilt, anger, sadness, and a sense of
hopelessness. Research into problematic porn use or PPU actually found a really interesting correlation. The easiest way to diagnose or know if somebody had problematic porn use was actually just to find out what their longest masturbation session was recently. The longer that session was or the more likely somebody was to have gooned, the more likely they actually were to have a pornography disorder and be labeled as having PPU. Now, problematic porn use has increased significantly since COVID. On March 11th, 2020, COVID-19 was designated a pandemic and by March 25th, 2020, Pornhub views spiked by 24%. Other studies also found that masturbation and pornography consumption increased
significantly during the pandemic with an increase in pornography use being associated with the severity of outbreaks. This all could be related to how gooning or internet porn binges are used for people to self-regulate, to not have to deal with painful or negative emotions or feelings. Two studies referenced how internet porn creates instant artificial happiness. The temporal dissociation or trance-like state observed in the pornography literature may be a form of escapism. However, this greater use of provocative sexual media for both men and women lowered their satisfaction with their partners in real life. And it led to less time spent having sexual intercourse again in real life with
their partners. What's interesting is these studies found that a trigger for pornographic binge sessions are decreased mood, anxiety, depression, but then increasing the amount of masturbation sessions that you do causes decreased mood, anxiety, and depression, which leads to the concept of porn being addictive, which is still hotly debated within the scientific literature. However, porn does fall into something called the triple A influence. The three A's are one, accessibility. It's easily accessed on your phone now. Just 20 years ago, you'd have to use like a dial-up computer. A few years before
that, you'd be buying a magazine. Two, affordability. For the most part, porn is free now. Again, not that long ago, it was expensive and you'd be paying for like static images. And three, anonymity. No one needs to know that you're looking at porn. In the past, you'd have to ask someone to buy porn or to see where the porn was. Now, just on your break from work, you can just like go to the bathroom stall and watch it. The accessibility, affordability, and anonymity of porn could be a reason why it's become a bigger part of people's daily lives, could lead to an increase in binge sessions, and see why more and more people have now become gooners. One
survey on people who goon found that one in seven people admit that they need more extreme or niche content in order to stay aroused. 16% experience the urge to goon even when they hadn't planned to. 8% struggle to stop once they start. And 7% report soreness, exhaustion, and a nose dive in desire for real partners. At the end of the day, while masturbation is a completely normal and healthy human activity, extremely long sessions usually require pornography or other external stimuli in order to stay aroused for that long, which can lead to some pretty severe habituation and sexual desensitization, and ultimately have some pretty negative impacts on your life. Thank you so much for
watching. If you want more information on our personal opinions on gooning, you can click our podcast here. This information is fascinating and they're continuing to publish new and new research on this as again, this is becoming a bigger part of people's daily lives. So we'll keep you posted on the updated scientific literature. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you soon and uh peace.
