Good Sex is Relaxing

(But you probably knew that, right?)

I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the Wall Street Journal article I mentioned in a recent post. “The Joy of Researching the Health Benefits of Sex,” (a play on the famous book, The Joy of Sex) talks about what researchers are finding about the physiology of sex and the health benefits that may come along with it—a topic I’m always interested in exploring.

Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a urologist and director of sexual medicine at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego, says some benefits are obvious even without scientific evidence. “When you have good sex, there’s a relaxation response and a satiation response… you lie there and life is great.”

That’s the result of hormones and neurotransmitters that rise and fall during sexual activity, especially dopamine and oxytocin, which we’ve discussed before. That nice relaxed feeling is what sometimes causes people to fall asleep right afterwards. In fact, in a 2006 survey of 10,000 British men, 48 percent admitted to having fallen asleep during sex!

Not that we want to encourage that, but it’s comforting to know there’s a physiological reason for it.

Another researcher, Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of the West of Scotland, says all this relaxation can be very helpful in reducing stress in both men and women. In one study, he had people keep diaries of their sexual activities for two weeks, then took their blood pressure while performing a stress-inducing activity such as adding numbers rapidly in their heads. Those who had had intercourse during the fortnight had smaller blood pressure spikes more quickly than those who had no sex at all.

While you’ve probably experienced a peaceful feeling immediately following sex, you may not have been aware that its benefits were so long lasting.

Researchers have also studied sex and its relationship to cancer: Can frequent sex lower the risks of some types of cancer? Although there is evidence that does point to that, most researchers say there are too many other variables in the studies to draw any certain scientific conclusions about it.

The real lesson, says Dr. Erick Janssen, a senior scientist at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, is how sex can contribute to our overall well-being. “If you’re having sex in a frequency and in a way that is compatible with who you are, then that’s healthy.”

I couldn’t agree more. How about you?