How Masturbation Can Help Reduce Stress
Stress is, unfortunately, a part of everyday life for a lot of people. There are many ways you can help with this, but did you know that masturbation can also help with de-stressing? First, we’ll take a look at what might cause stress, then at how masturbation relieves stress, and finally why you should consider masturbating to relax.
Contents
What Causes Stress
Stress can be a normal part of everyday life. In fact, it can be useful as a motivator to aid in achieving goals by keeping you focused on certain responsibilities or tasks. That being said, stress, if not dealt with correctly, can become long-term and start seriously affecting your job, relationship, and general health. In fact, more than 70% of adults say they experience real physical and emotional symptoms from long term stress.
Common causes of stress include:
- Stresses at work such as long hours, added responsibility, poor management, loss of job.
- Stresses with relationships such as getting married or divorced, problems with family members or partners.
- Increase in financial obligations
- Moving to a new home, new area or new country
- Chronic illness or injury
- Stress from a traumatic event, such as theft, violence against you or a loved one
- Emotional problems such as depression, anxiety, grief.
This is of course just a small sample of common causes, as stress can arise from a variety of reasons with different triggers for different people. Ultimately, we suggest you look in to ways to alleviate your largest causes of stress in your life, as stress left unchecked may cause further problems as we mentioned above.
Caring for stress can come in many forms, such as help from medical professionals and therapists for problems that are too heavy to handle on your own, to more self-care methods to help you relax when you're on your own, such as meditation, exercise, and self-pleasure.
How Masturbation Relieves Stress
Masturbation can have many physical and psychological benefits to your body, mostly in the form of various ‘feel-good’ hormones being released as an effect of sexual activity. Achieving orgasm through masturbation can release endorphins, for example, which have pain-reducing properties. This can help you to naturally aid in pain relief through relaxing with some self-love.
Masturbation also releases dopamine, which is a natural hormone and neurotransmitter that helps to both boost your mood and makes you feel good in general. Oxytocin is also released during orgasm and is known as an anti-stress hormone that lowers cortisol levels. Cortisol is one of the main stress-causing hormones and is usually present in stressed individuals. As such, masturbating and climaxing can help to boost these chemicals, resulting in you relaxing and feeling less stressed.
Why you should Masturbate to Relax
In cases where you may feel yourself becoming overwhelmed and stressed, it might benefit you to take the time to add masturbation to your self-care routine. With the natural boost in healthy, ‘feel-good’ hormones that directly aid against the causes of stress and light physical pain, you may find that it may help you.
