Having an active and satisfactory level of intimacy in your life contributes to your overall health and well-being. Having a healthy relationship with your sexuality is a function of your subconscious mind. If you are unsatisfied and would like to better express yourself, hypnotherapy, therapeutic imagery and mind-body energy techniques like Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) are very effective modalities to help.
To stay young and healthy, how often is sex recommended?
A. Once a week
B. Twice a week
C. 10 times a month
D. 200 or more times a year (about 4 x week)
Dr. Mehmet Oz, co-author of the “You” series health guides for body mind and soul and Oprah’s go-to health guy, states that if you have 200 orgasms a year, you can reduce your physiologic age by six years.
Dr. Michael Roizen, author of RealAge — Are You as Young as You Can Be?, states that “Having sex at least twice a week can make your RealAge 1.6 years younger than if you had sex only once a week.” He defines ‘real age’ as “an estimation of your age in biologic terms, not chronologic years.”
Roizen believes that sex keeps us younger because it “decreases stress, relaxes us, enhances intimacy, and helps … personal relationships.”
Although no study has yet proven a cause-and-effect relationship between good sex and longevity, there seems to be a beneficial system at work here — a sort of virtuous cycle of sex and health reinforcing one another.
One of the first long term studies of aging begun at Duke University in the ’50s and reported in the December 1982 journal Gerontologist found that the frequency of sexual intercourse (for men) and the enjoyment of sex (for women) predicted longevity.
A study done in Wales, and published in the December 1997 British Medical Journal under the title, “Sex and Death: Are They Related?” found over ten years of follow up, that men who reported at least two orgasms a week at the time of the study had less than half the risk of dying from various causes than those who reported a lower frequency of orgasm.
Other studies have found that sexual dissatisfaction was a predictor of the onset of cardiovascular disease. A study published in the November-December 1976 journal Psychosomatic Medicine compared 100 women with heart disease (acute myocardial infarction) with a control group and found sexual dissatisfaction among 65% of the coronary patients but only 24% of the controls.
In a long-term study published as Secrets of the Superyoung, Dr. David Weeks, of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland, found that “the key ingredients for looking younger are staying active … and maintaining a good sex life.” In a study of 3,500 people, ages 30 to 101, Weeks found that “sex helps you look between four and seven years younger,” according to impartial ratings of the subjects’ photos. Dr. Weeks, a clinical neuropsychologist, attributed this to significant reductions in stress, greater contentment, and better sleep.