Does Sex Deplete Our Mental Energy? (Dopamine 1)
- Hermes Solenzol
- Oct 3, 2025
- 8 min read
Framing the question of the effect of pleasure on dopamine and motivation
The claim that sex depletes mental energy
These days, there is a lot of negative talk about porn, masturbation, sex and pleasure.
Two claims are made regarding these things:
That they are addictive.
That they sap the energy that we need to function in our lives.
I rebutted the first claim in a previous article, Dopamine: Why Heroin Is Addictive But Porn Is Not (in Medium, in Substack, in Sex, Science & Spirit). It is part of a wider debate (Olsen, 2011; Potenza, 2014; Hynes et al., 2021; Fournier et al., 2023; Zeng et al., 2023) on whether some behaviors — masturbation, sex, eating tasty food, gambling, video gaming, using social media, exercise and work — are as addictive as drugs like opioids, cocaine, amphetamines, nicotine and alcohol. In my article, I argued that, although some behaviors can become compulsive, this is physiologically different from the effects of addictive drugs.
The second claim is more subtle. It is promoted by some modern fads like NoFap, which demonizes masturbation, and ‘dopamine fasting’, which proposes abstaining from pleasure to increase mental energy. This is rationalized by saying that sex and pleasure release too much dopamine in our brain, depleting it. Since dopamine is what motivate us to do hard stuff, like studying, working or doing sports, pleasure makes us weak. Hence, if we abstain from pleasure, mostly by not masturbating, we become more energetic and powerful — we have more mental energy.
An in-depth look at the neuroscience of dopamine revels that this claim, like the first one, is wrong. However, explaining this in detail is not easy. What I first intended to be a single article has become too long, so I decided to turn it into a series of articles, which may eventually grow into a book. You can get a preview of this content in my interview on The Nicolas Procel Podcast.
I am a neuroscientist and a UCLA professor (now retired). For 40 years, I did basic research on neurotransmitters, opioids and pain neurophysiology. I have published 65 scientific papers. My lab was supported for 20 years by several research grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Veterans Administration.
Is there such a thing as mental energy?
The term mental energy sounds a bit woo-woo. It evokes images of the Jedi of the Star Wars movies throwing things around with the mystical power of their minds. It is nothing new, however. As we will see, this idea goes way back in a lot of mystical traditions.
Nevertheless, we all have the intuition that there is something we could call mental energy.
Some days we feel invigorated, able to focus on an arduous mental task or to do strenuous exercise. We are bursting with energy. Other days, in contrast, we feel depleted. We procrastinate, get easily distracted, are unable to focus, and even a small amount of exercise exhausts us.
The same happens when we compare one person with another. Some people are strong, optimistic, resilient, healthy and productive, while others are weak, depressed, fragile, sick and lazy.
Some of that has to do with health. A body in poor health is unable to do strenuous activity. Science has shown that depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and a variety of other mental problems are diseases of the brain, no different from the ones of the body. Most mental problems of them can be treated with medication and therapy. Just as we do not despise people for being sick, nobody should be blamed or shamed for having mental disorders. Still, we all feel responsible for improving our mental health, just like we take care of our physical health with a healthy lifestyle. Shouldn’t we deprive ourselves of pleasure, then, if that improves our mental health?
We could define mental energy as our ability to sustain effort, maintain focus, stay on task, generate motivation, be resilient to drawbacks and generate positive emotions like joy, confidence, curiosity, interest, awe, love and compassion.
Lack of mental energy is when we feel weak, distracted, unable to focus, unmotivated, easily frustrated and entangled in negative emotions like anger, fear, sadness, shame, indignation and envy.
Therefore, I think that is legitimate to use the term mental energy as a concept encompassing these things.
Mental energy is not physical energy
However, it is important to clarify that mental energy is different from the concept of energy in physics.
The bridge between these two ideas could be the metabolic energy that keeps us alive. Metabolic energy is physical energy contained in the chemical bonds of glucose, the molecule that shuttles energy through the body, and ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the energy coin inside the cells.
However, unless we are starving, there seems to be little correlation between metabolic energy and mental energy. People can be well-fed and physically healthy and still have low mental energy. Conversely, some people who are sick, starved, or have been tortured display tremendous amounts of mental energy.
Mental energy, then, is entirely different from physical energy. No matter how much mental energy you have, you won’t be able to throw things around like Star Wars Jedis using the Force.
Is it possible to increase our mental energy?
We know that there are things we can do to improve our mental health: eating healthy food, getting enough exercise and sleep, abstaining from smoking, drinking alcohol and eating sugar. These things do increase our mental energy. Hence, for many people, it makes sense that abstaining from sex, or from socially condemned forms of sex like masturbation and porn, can also lead to a healthier life.
However, is this true? Science has shown that sex is healthy, for both men and women (Komisaruk et al., 2006). And that includes masturbation.
Mental energy in mystical traditions
The ideas of managing our mental energy, and that sex depletes it, are rooted in the mystical traditions of many religions.
Christianity and Islam have strict commandments regarding sex. However, this is done to obey God, not to gain mental energy or achieve religious experiences. Still, these may come as side-effects of celibacy.
In Hinduism, practiced in the West as yoga, prana is a vital energy that circulates through channels called the nadis. Yoga breathing, or pranayama, regulates and balances prana, giving us more energy and mental stability. Yoga also teaches that sex wastes prana, making us weak. This is particularly true of ejaculation in men, while the effect of female orgasms on prana is much less clear.
Tantra is a mystical school common to Hinduism and Buddhism. Sexual Tantra is a series of practices in which sex is done without ejaculation (maithuna). This was imported in the West as coitus reservatus, sex without ejaculation in men or orgasm in women. Its modern adaptation is semen retention, an edging technique in which a man comes close to orgasm but does not ejaculate.
In Taoism and Traditional Chinese Medicine, vital energy is called qi. Just like prana, qi courses through channels called the meridians. Acupuncture is supposed to restore health by inserting needles at acupuncture points located along the meridians. Again, sex is supposed to waste qi. This idea was imported from Taoism into Zen Buddhism.
My personal experience with celibacy and mysticism
I grew up in Franco’s Spain being indoctrinated by the Catholic organization Opus Dei. Therefore, during my early teens I strictly abstained from masturbating. When I was 15, I had a religious crisis that led me to abandon Catholicism.
You would expect that this led me to start experimenting with masturbation but, instead, I was immediately attracted to yoga philosophy and its teaching of Brahmacharya: sexual abstinence to preserve my prana. Did this increase my mental energy? It’s true that I was a model student, getting top grades throughout high school and college. But I also had emotional problems. My sexual abstinence led to have a series of painful crushes that I didn’t know how to manage.
My sexual liberation came halfway through college, when I finally left aside yoga philosophy and I started dating and having sex. Masturbation became a daily practice. I felt happier, more emotionally balanced, and my grades didn’t suffer one bit. I have continued practicing yoga to this day, though, and I can attest that some forms of pranayama do increase my mental energy.
When I was 27 I started practicing Zen Buddhism. Unlike when I was immersed in yoga in my late teens, that didn’t keep me from masturbating and having sex. However, when I participated in long Zen retreats, called sesshins, I abstained from masturbation. We were asked to do so to increase the vital energy that we supposedly generated during meditation. It’s hard for me to separate the effects of this temporary celibacy from the effects of the long hours of meditation.
As you can see, I have plenty of experience with both celibacy and a free sexual lifestyle. I also have experience with different spiritual practices supposed to generate mental energy. Although all this was personally enriching, it’s hard to derive any objective knowledge from my subjective experiences. What I can do is to contrast my personal experience with scientific knowledge about the brain, and see if I can make any sense out of this.
There is no scientific basis for mystical energy
Science has found no evidence of the existence of prana, chi, the nadis or the meridians.
If you examine the areas of the body where the nadis or the meridians are supposed to be located, there is nothing there that resembles the descriptions found in religious textbooks. No scientific instrument has ever measured a form of energy in the body that could be prana or qi.
The only way science can interpret these concepts is as some form of representation of subjective experiences — what we feel when we experience our bodies from the inside. Or, to put it in scientific terms, prana and qi could be interoceptive feelings.
These feelings could be valuable as a guide to train us to feel if our body is in an unbalanced or a healthy state. This is how I interpret what I feel in my spiritual practice, which involves a fair amount of energy work.
However, this doesn’t answer the question of whether sex depletes our mental energy. As I discussed above, we all have the experience of ups and downs in our mental energy. So, although the explanations of the mystical traditions do not make sense, there could be another explanation based on brain physiology.
Dopamine seems to be a good candidate for such an explanation, since it is released by sex and other pleasurable stimuli and, at the same time, it is required for motivation and sustained effort. Hence, it makes sense that when pleasure depletes dopamine, we lose motivation and the mental energy required for effort.
But the brain doesn’t work that way. It’s much more complicate than that. However, this would require a long explanation backed by extensive scientific evidence, which I will provide in the next articles in this series.
References
Fournier L, Schimmenti A, Musetti A, Boursier V, Flayelle M, Cataldo I, Starcevic V, Billieux J (2023) Deconstructing the components model of addiction: an illustration through "addictive" use of social media. Addict Behav 143:107694.
Hynes TJ, Hrelja KM, Hathaway BA, Hounjet CD, Chernoff CS, Ebsary SA, Betts GD, Russell B, Ma L, Kaur S, Winstanley CA (2021) Dopamine neurons gate the intersection of cocaine use, decision making, and impulsivity. Addict Biol 26:e13022.
Komisaruk BR, Beyer C, Whipple B (2006) The science of orgasm. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Olsen CM (2011) Natural rewards, neuroplasticity, and non-drug addictions. Neuropharmacology 61:1109–1122.
Potenza MN (2014) Non-substance addictive behaviors in the context of DSM-5. Addict Behav 39:1–2.
Zeng X, Han X, Gao F, Sun Y, Yuan Z (2023) Abnormal structural alterations and disrupted functional connectivity in behavioral addiction: A meta-analysis of VBM and fMRI studies. J Behav Addict.