It’s hard to argue with the idea that a satisfactory sex life is fundamentally good for you!
Numerous studies of how it improves a person’s physical health and emotional wellbeing have shown two important things. Firstly, there is no “expiry date” on our sex lives. The need, desire and reward for active and fulfilling sexual activity don’t have a shelf life that should lead you to abandon it as you age. Secondly, there is actually a lot of evidence that keeping sexually active reaps benefits for your overall well being as you grow older. To put it in the most elementary terms, sex can help you live a longer, happier and more rewarding life, and the more you do it, the better the dividends.
Regardless of a person’s age, the main benefits of an active sex life include:
- Burn extra calories – sex is a form of exercise, and it gets your heart pumping and pushes up your blood flow. Sure, it’s not like spending an hour at the gym, but it beats spending the same amount of time on the couch in front of the TV (and it’s way more fun.)
- Live longer – the New England Research Institute conducted a study titled “Sexual Activity, Erectile Dysfunction, and Incident Cardiovascular Events”. Its results suggested that regular sexual activity may reduce heart disease risk, and that a low frequency of sexual activity may actually predict cardio vascular disease.
- Avoid certain cancers – studies in Australia and the US have shown that the more frequently a man ejaculates between the ages of 20 and 50, the lower the likelihood of developing prostate cancer. And this is not a male-only thing. Some studies have shown that women who have vaginal intercourse frequently have a lower risk of developing breast cancer than the average.
The rewards keep rolling in
And there are benefits on top of the ones that extend throughout a person’s life, that relate to the quality of life as you grow older. The main findings of research so far have been:
- Keeping up healthy sexual activity as you grow older may help keep your brain more healthy and maintain the primary cognitive (thinking) skills known as executive function, as well as memory skills such as word recall. Based on surveys of nearly seven thousand adults between the ages of 50 and 89, and adjusting for other external factors like education, wealth, levels of exercise and any other quality of life that might explain any link between sexual activity levels and brain function, there were clear links between older men’s sexual activity levels and how well they did on both word-recall and cognitive tests.
- Regular sexual activity boosts self-esteem and improves one’s mental health and ability to communicate. There’s even a psychological term – alexithymia – that describes an inability to understand and express emotions and people who are more sexually active are less likely to suffer from this.
How you can help the process along
Hormones are the key to sexual activity throughout a person’s life, with testosterone playing a central role both in sexual performance and in raising libido. Having low levels of testosterone can cause low libido and it may lead to erectile dysfunction (ED). On its own, erectile dysfunction can destroy a man’s sex life and so prevent the realization of all of the good side effects we have identified.
The link between libido and testosterone levels is not absolute. Some men can maintain high libido and a strong sex drive even with low levels of testosterone, and the opposite may also be true, where men may feel that they don’t have much of a sex drive even thought they have normal levels of testosterone.
If testosterone levels are very low, most men will experience a decline in libido. Other things can also affect the levels of sex drive, like stress levels, lack of sleep, over indulgence in alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and recreational drugs. Psychological factors like depression can also lower a person’s libido and desire for sex.
A man’s testosterone level usually begins to slowly decline as he passes through the peak years of sexual activity levels, from generally around the fourth decade of life. In general, the levels fall off by around ten to fifteen percent per decade after the thirties. Increasing the level of testosterone through simple cream medications like AndroForte can restore testosterone levels and help you to keep the ball rolling, with happy and healthy sex and all the general health benefits you will harvest from that.