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This mental exercise doesn't just help with stress — it could also spice up your sex life

Julia Roberts meditating eat pray love
Meditating can be an essential and healthy part of a person's life. Columbia Pictures

  • A study published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy asked 450 women about their experiences with meditation, libido, awareness of bodily sensations, health, and mood.
  • Many who meditated regularly had higher scores for sexual function and desire.
  • "Improvements in mood associated with meditation may contribute to the women's better sexual functioning."
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once tried to meditate and three minutes in I had to give up because my mind would not stop chattering. That experience didn't exactly make me jump to try it again, in spite of everything I'd heard about the benefits of a calm mind and deeper inner-understanding. But after finding out about new research that meditation can lead to better sex for women, I'm starting to rethink my stance on meditation — and you should, too.

If you're already gung-ho about meditation, this research is further proof your practice pays off, and might be a way to finally convince your friends to do it, too. The study, published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, asked 450 women between the ages of 17 and 70 about their experiences with meditation, libido, awareness of bodily sensations, health, and mood. Of those the 193 who meditated regularly had higher scores for sexual function and desire, regardless of exactly how long they meditated.

Lori A. Brotto, professor at the University of British Columbia and author of the study, talked to PsyPost about how meditation can pay off for women in bed. "In particular, our findings show that women with meditation experience have higher scores related to arousal, lubrication, orgasm, and desire than women with no meditation experience." She explained that the benefits could be linked to meditation's effect on mood. "Furthermore, mood was found to be a significant predictor of both improved sexual function and sexual desire in women who meditate, meaning that it seemed that improvements in mood associated with meditation may contribute to the women's better sexual functioning," she said.

Translation: Meditation chills you the hell out, makes you feel perkier, and definitely makes you want to bone more — and makes the boning better when it happens (via you getting wetter, orgasming more, and having a higher lust factor).

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Though the correlation is strong, Brotto points out that since the study was cross-intersectional, the question remains: Does meditation truly cause sex to be better, or do people who have good sex happen to be likelier to meditate? Either way, whether the chicken or the egg comes first — or, in this case, meditation or better sexual functioning — it's been proven that the act of meditation improves overall well-being by imparting a sense of calm and fighting stress and anxiety. And hey, when did stress and anxiety ever help your sex life?

We say, it may be best to conduct your own scientific research to find out whether this correlation between meditation and great sex is real. Sounds like a fun experiment to us.

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This story was originally published by Stylecaster.

Read the original article on StyleCaster. Copyright 2018.
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