.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
Masturbation is the act of stimulating your genitals, not always to orgasm, but often leading to it. In the past, religious and cultural sayings often demonized masturbation and would attribute consequences to the act, such as premature aging, spontaneous blindness, genital numbness, and many other unscientific issues.
Is masturbation good for your health? Yes! Scientifically and psychologically, masturbation is very good for your mental health, physical health, and sexual health. This blog post will delve into the many health benefits of masturbation.
1. Help You Overcome Performance Anxiety
Masturbation can help you train your mind and body to overcome performance anxiety. Performance anxiety is a feeling of nervousness or pressure to ‘perform’ before or during sex. When you begin to feel stress while erect, your stress hormones narrow the blood vessels, interfering with the blood flow needed to maintain your erection. This is extremely common and there are some treatments you can access yourself such as exercises, therapy, and even masturbation.
A healthy dose of masturbation can be used as a tool to treat both erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation.
2. Know Your Arousal and Control When You Orgasm
Masturbating can help you get to know your arousal scale. This means noticing the subtle changes in how turned on or sensitive your genitals are. You might have very specific feelings right before you orgasms, noting these sensations can help you train the body to control that sensation's direction. Whether it is edging yourself and coming back down to a lower arousal state, or allowing yourself to finish. You can be the one in control.
3. Prepare You For Partnered Sex and Boost Confidence
Masturbation can help you explore sensations that you enjoy, which will help you communicate with your partner in bed. The added bonus? Exploring different types of touch will prepare you for the different sensations of partnered sex.
Exposure to different stimuli during partnered sex can sometimes surprise you. You may ejaculate sooner than planned or you may find it harder to reach orgasm. Changing up how you masturbate with different speeds, grip, and pressure can help you prepare for these new and fun sensations!
By taking the time to masturbate, women can begin to learn about their own bodies and how their arousal works. This exploration can increase the likelihood of reaching orgasm. Anorgasmia (the inability to orgasm) is one of the most common sexual issues that face women today, party because female sexual pleasure has been historically under-researched and generally misunderstood.
4. Drive up your Sexual Desire
Engaging in erotic activities alone can increase your desire for partnered intimacy. These activities differ, as stated above but wanting to experience physical intimacy with a partner sometimes needs a little push. If you don’t feel turned on very often, you might want to try some solo play to remind your body how good it feels to receive pleasure. It’s ok if it feels a bit strange at first, just relax and enjoy! Then bring that new energy to the bedroom with your partner.
5. Bye-Bye Stress, Hello Pleasure!
Masturbation can be a stress reliever, which in turn makes sleep easier. Reducing stress is incredibly beneficial to overall health, your body and mind will thank you!
Studies show that sex and regular sexual activity is great for your health, and reduces cardiovascular risk! What a great reason to get frisky, alone and with a partner. Managing stress can be a challenge, but you can check this one off your list.
6. The potential for overuse / But What If It Backfires?
Like anything in the world, there are potential downsides to masturbation. Anyone has the risk of developing habits that are unhealthy. For example, some men over 25, especially those who struggle with consistent erections, should consider reducing the frequency of masturbation. If you masturbate to orgasm more than twice a day and experience erection issues, consider changing this pattern. Instead, try once every 48-72 hours, this will help your erection be more reliable and intensify your orgasms.
Porn is also easy to overindulge in, and it makes fun and novel sex acts feel boring. Try minimizing your porn use to 30 minutes a week, and see how it affects your arousal.
If you aren’t having any erection or desire issues with your masturbation or porn habits, don’t worry about it. Change is only necessary when you start to feel less enjoyment in your sex life.
For women, science says there is no way that masturbation can negatively affect your sex drive. Just remember to vary the sensations, touch, and pressure, you use. For example, if you often use a certain setting on your vibrator, try other settings out or try a different toy entirely. Variety in solo masturbation is important and will help you reach orgasm more consistently during partnered sex (which is statistically harder for a person with a vulva to do during heterosexual sex).
Want to try out some new things in bed? Check out our exercises in the Lover app!