It’s no secret that great sex can boost your happiness. Better, sex can lead to more and better happiness. Our sexuality is part of who we are, it’s the core of our being. When you have a healthy, happy, satisfying sex life it releases tons of hormones in your body which are feel-good hormones, it makes you feel alive and vibrant and connected to your partner, grounded and all of the things that are connected to being happy.
Most couples, after a while, spend more time brushing their teeth than deeply kissing one another. And just even that — just taking five seconds to kiss — helps. Just complimenting your partner helps — verbalizing the things you appreciate them doing, not focusing on the negative, more the positive and just being more conscious of that extra step that you can take for your partner to make them feel good about themselves. Even just holding hands or touching one another or putting your arm around them and walking down the street — maintaining that bit of flirtation or intimate connection on a regular basis makes the physical connection between you, the spark, sort of lit. When you want to light the fire, it’s not so difficult.
More sex reportedly made couples slightly less happy, but not from having sex more often. The researchers report initiating sex without being asked is more satisfying.George Loewenstein, the study’s lead investigator and the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences says, “Perhaps couples changed the story they told themselves about why they were having sex, from an activity voluntarily engaged in to one that was part of a
research study.”
Loewenstein adds if they could do the study over again they would encourage activities that put couples in a sexy frame of mind rather than directing couples to just have more sex. Examples include hotel rooms, Egyptian cotton sheets or getting a baby sitter.
Tamar Krishnamurti, a research scientist in CMU’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy who helped design the study said the finding could help couples improve their sex life and their happiness levels. Giving your sex life and your happiness level a boost might be better accomplished by finding ways to make sex fun as opposed to just having more sex.
Sex and other pleasurable activities can reduce stress by inhibiting anxiety producing pathways in the brain. Researchers from University of Cincinnati say new studies provide a clearer understanding of why consuming “comfort food” is appealing during times of stress.
Yvonne Ulrich-Lai, PhD, research assistant professor, James Herman, PhD, director of the Laboratory of Stress Neurobiology and professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at UC, and colleagues conducted studies on rats, observing their response to the pleasures of tasty sweets and sex.
For the study, researchers gave the rodents a sugar solution twice a day for two weeks and then gauged their reaction to stress, physiologically and behaviorally. The rats given the solution had lower stress hormones and heart rates when they were restrained in ventilated tube, compared to the control group. Stress responses were lower in response to saccharin and from exposure to sexually responsive partners.
Food, sex and other pleasurable activities actually work to inhibit stress pathways in the brain that the scientists also say can last up to 7 days.
If you’re looking for a boost in happiness, having more sex may not be your best bet. New research suggests that upping the frequency of sex can make individuals less happy under some circumstances.
Researchers divided couples into two groups, asking one group to double how many times they had sex every week, while asking the control group to stay the course and have as much sex as they normally would. By the end of the three-month study, the people who increased their sexual forays were actually less happy than they were at the beginning of the study, the researchers found.
“The findings were a surprise and a disappointment,” said the study’s lead researcher, George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “We were expecting that the people who had more sex would enjoy it a lot and would be happier, and it would be good for the relationship.
“Instead, what we found was that the group who had more sex enjoyed it less, they wanted it less and they reported lower levels of happiness,” Loewenstein told Live Science.
However, the finding doesn’t necessarily mean that more sex makes people unhappy, he said. It could be that being ordered to have sex puts a damper on it.
“Whether you do something because you want to or because you are instructed to can have a huge impact on how much you enjoy it,” Loewenstein said. Countless studies show a link between sex and happiness. For instance, one analysis of 16,000 American adults found that people who had more sex had high levels of self-reported happiness. Another study found that people who have more active sex lives also reported having happier relationships.
But both of these studies are correlational; it’s not clear whether sex directly causes happiness, or whether other factors, such as health or personality, are at play.
The researchers of the new study attempted to determine a more direct connection between sexual frequency and happiness, they said.
They recruited 128 healthy people between the ages of 35 and 65 who were in married heterosexual relationships. The participants completed a number of surveys on their personalities, emotions and libidos at the beginning and end of the study, as well as a daily survey to help the researchers monitor changes throughout the 90-day study. Contrary to Loewenstein’s expectations, the couples who were directed to have more sex reported lower levels of happiness by the study’s end. Still, sex is crucial to any healthy marriage, he said.
“A lot of people rate sex as the number one most pleasurable activity,” Loewenstein said. “It’s good for your health and it burns some calories.” The study was published online May 4 in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. study titled “The Relationship Between Sexual Quality of Life, Happiness, and Satisfaction with Life in Married Turkish Women” done by Tayfun Dogan, Nilufer Tugut and Zehra Golbasi concluded “Due to cultural taboos and myths about sexuality, both having and receiving pleasure from sexual intercourse present great difficulties for women. However, a high sexual quality of life can have a positive contribution towards happiness and satisfaction with life.Thus, it can be said that services focused on developing the sexual quality of life for women would consequently increase their happiness and satisfaction with life”.
Research shows that sex is better for your happiness than money.
That’s not to say that being financially poor but sexually active is the secret to a happy life. But despite common theory, more money doesn’t get you more sex, say “happiness economics” researchers.
After analyzing data on the self-reported levels of sexual activity and happiness of 16,000 people, Dartmouth College economist David Blachflower and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England report that sex “enters so strongly (and) positively in happiness equations” that they estimate increasing intercourse from once a month to once a week is equivalent to the amount of happiness generated by getting an additional $50,000 in income for the average American.
“The evidence we see is that money brings some amounts of happiness, but not as much as what economists might have thought,” says Blanchflower. “We had to look to psychologists and realize that other things really matter.”
Their paper, “Money, Sex, and Happiness: An Empirical Study,” recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, essentially puts an estimated dollar amount on the happiness level resulting from sex and its trappings.
Despite popular opinion, they find that having more money doesn’t mean you get more sex; there’s no difference between the frequency of sex and income level. But they do find sex seems to have a greater effect on happiness levels in highly educated — and presumingly wealthier — people than on those with lower educational status.
Overall, the happiest folks are those getting the most sex — married people, who report 30% more between-the-sheets action than single folks. In fact, the economists calculate that a lasting marriage equates to happiness generated by getting an extra $100,000 each year. Divorce, meanwhile, translates to a happiness depletion of $66,000 annually.
Whether that hefty happiness income boost is the result of marital bliss or more sex is up for debate. But their “econometric” calculations confirm what psychologists have long known: People who consider themselves happy are usually richer in sexual activity.
“Many studies confirm that people who are depressed have less sex,” says psychologist and sex therapist Robert Hatfield, PhD, of the University of Cincinnati and a spokesman for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. “Conversely, if you’re not depressed — ‘happy,’ as some might say — you’re more likely to have more frequent sex.”
Does sex lead to happiness, or are happy people just more likely to lead each other to the bedroom? That’s still under investigation, but there is evidence that psyche and sex feed off each other.
The key to a successful relationship is having sex just once a week: Doing it more frequently makes no difference to happiness levels is result od arecent study. The results come from surveys of more than 30,000 people over 40 years. There was no link between having sex more than once a week and higher happiness levels. Sex was more more strongly associated with happiness than money. But there were no differences in the findings based on gender or age.
In one study, researchers analysed survey responses about sexual frequency and general happiness from more than 25,000 Americans. This included 11,285 men and 14,225 women who took the General Social Survey from 1989 to 2012. The biennial survey, conducted by the University of Chicago, covers a wide range of sociological issues, including opinions about race relations, religion and sex. The researchers also conducted an online survey with 335 people – 138 men, 197 women – who were in long-term relationships and found similar results as the first study. These participants were additionally asked about their annual income. A third study analysed survey results collected at three time points over 14 years from more than 2,400 married couples in the US.
The above set of researches prove that apart from sex being a known source of pleasure it is embedded with the cause to provide happiness.
