Five Ways To Use Sex to Boost Your Energy, Creativity, and Clarity

Sexploration is an alternative route to greater health and longevity

Many people feel drained after sex, with young couples using up 85kCal of energy. In addition, studies have shown that people experience psychological symptoms like irritability after sex, while others experience a depression known as post-coital dysphoria too. Given these facts, the idea that sex could increase your energy, creativity and clarity may at first seem strange. Yet like many other human experiences (e.g. sad songs that make you happy), sex is a paradox all unto itself. Understanding the psychological opportunities sex offers may help you shine an even brighter light on its benefits. Also, sex offers an opportunity to connect with abstract ideas that may be difficult to grasp. Below are five ideas that sex can help to illuminate.

Inspiration: Whether it involves working out, getting up to go to work, cooking, or doing something creative, inspiration can be an invaluable aid to getting things done. Although the term itself is nebulous, as I point out I my book, “Tinker Dabble Doodle Try”, researchers have determined that inspiration has an architecture. And the first step to activating it is to be exposed to something beautiful.

Action: Sex offers you the opportunity for inspiration when you are engaged in it with someone you love or admire. Either they are overtly beautiful, or you find something about them beautiful. If you are feeling uninspired, consider having sex and focus on what you find beautiful about your partner to beckon your inspiration.

Openness to experience (OTE): There are five major personality characteristics that have been studied, and one of them is openness to experience. This term is exactly what it implies — the attitude of being curious, interested, and engaged in something new. And it comes about when you stimulate your brain’s unfocus network.

Many people settle for the comfort of having sex with someone familiar, yet they might consider being more open within that relationship. OTE increases creativity, promotes upward mobility at your job, decreases bias, and even prolongs survival in men and women.

Action: Change up your sexual routines. It’s not just about sexual positions or sex toys, but also the context in which you have sex (bedroom vs. dining room vs. a night away). Sex allows you the opportunity to be open in private too, thereby giving you adequate practice for the rest of life.

Hobbies: Hobbies have been shown to increase success amongst scientists, especially if they relate to the primary work. Also, engaging in a hobby for one hour a day can prevent dementia. Hobbies can also lower your blood pressure and waist circumference too.

Action: Either you can make sex your hobby, or you can incorporate sex with a hobby. Perhaps you can start by playing chess in the nude, cook (safely!) in the nude together, or lay out an entire stamp collection on the body of your partner. This kind of playfulness can increase laughter, and this can be good for your overall health too.

Tinkering: When we think of tinkering, we think of someone with a car fidgeting with the electrical system or engine. But sex also offers many opportunities to tinker too.

Sex doesn’t have to be perfect all the time. Sometimes, people try, and either they feel too clumsy, or they can’t arouse their partner sufficiently. But the goal doesn’t always have to be orgasm. Sometimes a tinkering attitude is just what you need.

Adjust the positions in which you have sex without the help of an instruction booklet. Change what you are stimulating. Bring in toys. Enact scenarios. Whatever new thing you try, think of it as an exploration. Success is not the goal — discovery is! Being curious helps you learn more about the other person, and it can help you live longer too.

Action: Set aside one night per week for pure curiosity without the goal of orgasm. Explore your partner’s body with different body parts. For example, massages with the forearm feel quite different from massages with the hands. Make “discovery” an attitude for all sex — recognize that the surface area of the body is large, and that there is a lot to discover if you really apply yourself to it.

Surrender: You can’t usually think yourself to an orgasm. You have to let go. Being taken over by the heat of the moment is something to allow, but often, people get stuck in their thoughts and are unable to let go.

Action: Use imagery to allow yourself to float into the sexual experience. Either think of yourself floating in a pool, or use breathing out as a way of guiding your mind toward surrender. If you’re stuck in your thoughts, consider writing them out with lipstick on your partner’s body.

Sex offers many amazing opportunities to activate the brain’s unfocus circuit. In so doing, it will re-energize your brain, make you more creative, and your thinking will be clearer too. You can discuss these things with your partner while lying on a beach chair, or surprise your partner with your ingenuity.

Either way, these activities all involve some measure of risk, but it is important that you recognize that these risks can lead to great fulfillment in many dimensions of your life.

To learn more about unfocus techniques, get a copy of “Tinker Dabble Doodle Try: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind” (Ballantine Books, 2017)

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