You’ve heard “gooning” used for one kind of marathon session: hours of edging and porn that tip over into a trance, a checked-out, euphoric headspace where thinking mostly stops. The folk instruction for getting there is more. More porn, more hours, more intensity, until the screen does the work and you just ride it.
The trance doesn’t come off the screen. Sexual tension produces it: wanting that has run far ahead of what your body has been handed, and the distance between the two widens the longer you hold it open, not the longer you watch. Gooning is what sustained sexual tension feels like from the inside, and a man who understands the mechanism can walk into that headspace in a session he plans, with no three-hour trail of tabs behind it.
More Porn Is the Popular Fix, and It Backfires
Ask anyone chasing this state how to get there and you’ll hear one instruction: escalate. Switch to something harder, stack hour on hour, and eventually your body checks out and the trance takes over by itself. Content gets treated as the engine, and session length as proof it’s running.
Run the practice that way long enough and the same content stops landing. A 2025 survey of a thousand American adults, average age 39, found that about a quarter had gooned, close to half of the men in it, and that the men who do it average about twice a week. One in ten spend roughly 78 hours a year on it. Thirteen percent report struggling to stop once they start, and 9% report desensitization: needing more each time to reach the same effect.
A separate brain-imaging study of 64 men found that heavier porn use tracked with a weaker reward-circuit response to sexual images, the pattern you would expect when it takes more each time to get the same charge. Kühn and Gallinat’s finding is correlational: heavy users had a weaker response, consistent with tolerance, though it doesn’t prove porn use caused the difference. Either way the marathon version fights its own tail, because every escalation raises the bar the next session has to clear.
I ran this on myself for months in 2023, one variable at a time, in short dated entries. Porn used to lift arousal to a working level did no harm. Leaving it running past that point, reaching for a new clip every time intensity dipped, was what killed the session. On 13 May I wrote that I’d struggled to reach the state despite doing what had worked the time before, and that I thought the problem was focusing too much on porn and too little on my own sensations. Five weeks later the working version was written down: use porn to get to about an 8, drop it, work the tension slowly and harder, bring porn back only once pressure had already built.
Whether a planned session can produce the trance with no porn at all goes past what I tested cleanly. My notes hold sessions both ways, and dropping porn changed nothing on its own; the PC-muscle work is what moved the result.
Treating stimulation as the engine burns out the one system that was supplying the trance for free.
The Trance Is Sexual Tension, Held and Cycled
Your body tracks two quantities while you’re aroused: how high the wanting in your head has gone, and how far your physical response has ramped. Usually they climb in step. The trance arrives when the two come apart and you hold them apart through an evening of small climbs.
The book calls that gap sexual tension. Whether what forums name the “goon state” and what I name Arousal State are one thing is a link I’m drawing, and no study has tested it; I built the framework out of my own sessions years before I heard the word gooning applied to any of it.
The formal version treats the state as a running total. Whatever tension is left in you when a session ends is what sets how deep it feels and how long it lasts, and that total doesn’t climb in a straight line: it rises, dips as your body physically ramps and eases back, then rises again. The ebb and flow is normal.
Think of a dam wall with a single outlet in it. Your wanting is the river arriving upstream. The outlet is your PC muscle. Held wide, everything the river brings runs straight through. Clamped shut, nothing moves. Kept mostly closed and cracked by a fraction every few minutes, the water level behind the wall climbs for hours without spilling the first time the river runs high.
Which is why the trance deepens the further into a session you get, and why it needs less content to hold as the hours pass. Unfulfilled sexual tension keeps dopamine activity tied to anticipation and craving elevated, and the longer that stays unresolved, the more sensitive you get to sexual cues, including small ones a fresh session would barely register.
I’m applying that dopamine model, built to explain reward and craving in general, to something much narrower: rising sensitivity inside one long session. Berridge and Robinson measured neither. It also explains why the checked-out feeling arrives late in an evening and hardly ever early. Your own held tension is doing the work you were crediting to the content.
The practice is one muscle worked as a gate: mostly shut, cracked open by degrees, closed hard near the limit. Escalating content answers a gate problem by pouring more water into the river, and the river was never the shortage.
Running the Gooning Cycle, Step by Step
One thing has to be in place first: releasing the PC muscle at will, the reverse Kegel. It is the motion that lets urine start flowing, or gently speeds it up, and if you can’t find it yet, give it a week on its own before building a session around it. Porn stays optional the whole way through. It can start a session, and nothing below needs it to keep one going.
- Warm up without a target. Start stimulation, porn or not, and bring arousal up to a level you can sit at in comfort. Don’t chase a peak yet; just get the engine running.
- Stop feeding it new content. Once arousal is up, hold the stimulation where it stands: no new material, no jump in intensity. Your focus and your imagination carry the next stretch, and the screen stops carrying it.
- Relax through the first pelvic contraction. When you feel the involuntary squeeze building, consciously release your PC muscle. Don’t clench down, and don’t back the stimulation off either. Arousal will hold roughly where it is.
- Hold that level. Keep the muscle loose and stay with the sensation you already have. This is where tension accumulates, while nothing outside you changes at all.
- Open the gate slightly. Once holding stops producing any more build, give the PC muscle a small, measured squeeze, just enough to let arousal step up one notch. Then release, and hold the new level.
- Repeat the cycle. Hold, small squeeze, hold again, each hold outlasting the one before it. Time your holds; the number of minutes is your progress, not how extreme the material got.
- Choose your ending. Let the muscle go entirely at the peak for a full release, or taper the stimulation and ease the muscle back to neutral for a gradual stand-down.
This is the relax-at-the-edge move that a single climb toward the edge uses, run in repeating cycles across an evening, so the tension you built gets spent once, at the end.
What the First Cycle Feels Like
The first few holds feel like nothing is happening. You’ll want to reach for more stimulation while you sit there, and that pull is strong the first several times you try it. Duration builds before intensity does, so judge an early session by how long you kept the gate shut and not by how far arousal seemed to climb.
Holding one physical level forever can’t be done either, because the body drifts, which is why the procedure cycles at all.
Built this way, the practice still doesn’t fix everything the marathon version gets blamed for. Thirteen percent in that same survey already struggle to stop once they start, and 5% have considered professional help. Cycling the gate reduces the desensitization that feeds that spiral. It won’t undo a compulsive pattern that has already set in, a different problem from the one this technique addresses.
The letting-go-of-control feeling gooners describe is real, and nothing here argues it away. One thing stays under control the whole time, the PC muscle. Your thoughts, your focus and the noise you make are all allowed to go slack, which is a much narrower claim than nothing at all being controlled.
The first time you hold a cycle through the dip, without grabbing for something new, you’ll feel arousal step up while nothing outside you moved. That step is tension arriving, and after you’ve felt it once the escalation advice stops sounding like advice.
If you want the accounting underneath all of this, what raises wanting, where your body sends it, and why the two come apart, the free email series walks through it. It’s what explains how a twenty-minute session and a four-hour one can both work, or both fail, for the same reason.
Above is the cycle: build, release, hold, crack the gate, hold again. If the small squeeze is too faint to feel at first, there is a blunter two-phase version to learn on, and past that the full working-out of how far you crack that outlet and when, which decides both how long an evening runs and how hard its ending lands. Then there is what a body loaded like this does when the trigger is a woman walking past you in the street and no screen at all, and the whole thing goes off at once. My book works that out precisely, and reports the years of experiments the numbers came from.