Thinking about masturbating today.

So I've gone almost five weeks hard mode with little to no urges.

"POSSIBLE SPOILER"

The other day I was in the grocery store and and saw a girl with a t-shirt and nothing but a bathing suit below. I was totally caught off guard because I hadn't seen a female that exposed in awhile due to nofap. I didn't expect to see this in a grocery store so I wasn't mentally prepared I guess.
Anyway, I need not say that I became overwhelmed with urges and spent that night awake and trying not to M.
For the past few days my balls are aching like crazy.
So I'm starting to wonder if holding myself from release is starting to become unhealthy for me. But, I'm afraid that if I decide to M, I will experience the chaser effect and fall right back into old habits. I don't want to abstain from M forever because it could be awhile before I meet someone to have real experiences with and I don't want to go much longer without release.
So my question is, how do you know when it is safe to return to healthy masturbation without porn?

 

Really? And you base this on what?

 

Sorry to hear that you crashed after doing so well. I guess it's a part of the rebooting process for most of us.

This is my first attempt at rebooting. Although I haven't really felt all that different from before, I can say that I feel a lot less dirty and ashamed of myself.
I'm gonna try and keep this streak going. My goal is to motivate myself to get out there and find a relationship. This will be tough since I'm old and all the good ones are taken. Not having much motivation yet. Maybe I just need to sit with this for awhile longer.
Thanks for the advice..

 

No, it is an assumption, based on Western habits in recent times. There are tribes in the world that have little to no contact with the West that do not masturbate, do not have a word, symbol or gesture for it and laugh when it is shown them.

 

The Western assumption that '95% of boys and men masturbate at some point in their lives and the other 5% are liars', is clearly not based on the experience of males globally. This confirms my gut instinct that masturbation is unnecessary and artificial. It is more the product of a sexualised AND stressful society. Later in this same article it is noted that monkeys have been observed masturbating in captivity but not in the wild. I will quote an excerpt of a fascinating editorial, but you can read the whole article here: http://yourbrainonporn.com/weird-masturbation-habits

...In 2010, Cambridge University's Behavioural and Brain Sciences published a review: "The Weirdest People In The World?" Its authors pointed out that scientists routinely make broad claims about human behaviour, using samples drawn almost entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic - WEIRD - societies. Fully 96% of the subjects whose behaviour has been reported in top psychological journals were drawn from only 12% of the world's population. For practical reasons, the subjects most often recruited are Western university students, who are immersed in radically atypical circumstances compared with the rest of the species. So, "It should not be surprising that their psychological world is unusual as well."

As members of WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations for generalizing about humans, the review's authors caution that, "We need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity." With this perspective in mind, let's reconsider what we think we know about our intense and frequent masturbation habits. Anthropologists Hewlett and Hewlett point out that, The Euro-American human sexuality literature gives the impression that male and female masturbation are common if not human universal, in part, due to a reliance on several systematic and detailed studies conducted in WEIRD nation states. One human sexuality college textbook states that, "masturbation is a very common practice among adolescents, and that the vast majority of people masturbate at some time in their lives."

Hewlett with Aka people: However, as the Hewlett's document in their 2010 study, Western sexual patterns, including our frequent masturbation, are unusual by cross-cultural standards. The Hewlett's arrived at this conclusion in part by studying the sexual behaviour of two central African cultures. They were astonished to learn that neither the Aka nor the Ngandu were aware of masturbation:

They laughed as we tried to explain and describe the sexual activities. We thought that maybe they were shy or embarrassed individuals, but this would have been uncharacteristic of the Aka we had known so long. It was difficult to explain self-stimulation to the Aka. They found it unusual and said it may happen far away in Congo, but they did not know it. A specific word did not exist for it. We asked men, in particular, about masturbating before they were married or during the post-partum sex taboo and all indicated this did not occur. Masturbation also appears to be rare in other forest areas. We asked Robert Bailey about his experiences of trying to collect semen for fertility studies from Lese men in the Ituri forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He indicated it was very difficult to explain to men how to self-stimulate to obtain semen samples. He said that despite explicit and lengthy instructions three of four semen specimens came to him mixed with vaginal secretions. In view of cross-cultural standards, the Hewett's caution that college-textbook representations of human sexuality probably reflect the interests and priorities of middle-class Euro-American WEIRD cultural models rather than those of humanity.

If it's prudent to be cautious in generalizing about the practice of masturbation itself, perhaps we should be even more cautious in insisting that masturbation to any intensity of stimulation and with any ejaculation frequency is normal. It may be common for the sub-population of the WEIRD to masturbate with increasing frequency under the influence of today's ever novel and hyper-stimulating Internet porn. Yet such frequent masturbation appears to be exceptional in the larger context of human behaviour...

 

it depends on your goal, if your not inclinded to reach for porn when you m, go ahead and just m.