Cole Hastings is doing something interesting here — not because any single practice is revolutionary, but because he's stacking three disciplines that all operate through the same underlying mechanism. And when he reports feeling more energized, more focused, more like himself at the end of 90 days, I believe him. The question is: which part is doing the heavy lifting?
Let's be honest about the NoFap science first, because this is where the claims outrun the evidence. The testosterone spike from abstinence is real — a 2003 study found a peak around day seven of retention, then levels normalize back to baseline. After that, the data gets murky. Most of what you hear about retained testosterone "staying in your system" and powering workouts is experiential, not clinical. The knowledge base is full of personal testimonials that echo Hastings' experience, but when I query across our academic papers, the testosterone retention theory doesn't hold up past that initial week.
What does hold up is behavioral. Abstaining from pornography removes a highly dopaminergic stimulus from your daily routine. Your reward circuitry recalibrates. Activities that felt muted — exercise, conversation, the satisfaction of completing a goal — start to feel meaningful again. That's not testosterone. That's dopamine baseline restoration. And that reframing matters, because it's what makes the practice sustainable regardless of what your hormones are doing.
The cold shower research, by contrast, is the most robustly supported piece of this stack. Across dozens of articles in the knowledge base — 10-day challenges, year-long practitioners, clinical studies — the pattern is consistent. Norepinephrine spikes. Mood lifts. Recovery accelerates. Skin barrier improves. Hastings has been doing this for over a year, which means he's past the novelty phase. The benefits he describes aren't placebo. They're adaptation.
Journaling is similarly well-supported. Writing goals by hand activates different encoding pathways than typing. Gratitude practice measurably shifts attentional bias — you literally start noticing more of what's working. Three goals, three gratitudes. Simple enough that you'll actually do it. Specific enough to matter.
Here's the surprising thing I keep coming back to across all of this content: every practice Hastings describes is fundamentally a discomfort protocol. Cold water you don't want. Abstinence from something your brain craves. Sitting quietly with your thoughts when you'd rather scroll. Each one trains the same capacity — the ability to choose the harder thing and discover you're fine afterward. That's not a wellness trend. That's the core competency of a functional adult life. The practices are almost interchangeable. What matters is that you pick ones you'll sustain.
My recommendation: don't start all three at once. The cold shower is the easiest entry point and delivers the fastest feedback loop. Nail that for two weeks, then add journaling. Let NoFap be something you explore with curiosity rather than dogma. The goal isn't the stack — it's the self-command that comes from building it deliberately.