Life
How Lack Of Sleep Can Sabotage Your Sex Life
Picture it: hair everywhere, mouth open, snoring, drooling on your pillow. That image might not seem sexy, but good sleep essential to a healthy sex life. It's hard to please without your Zs (sorry, I couldn't help myself). Sleep feels lazy. It feels like a useless, disposable act that we can skip whenever we want to squeeze in some extra life, and ironically, we give up some of our good sleep for good sex.
But skipping sleep or poor sleep has a detrimental affect on your sex life, according to the National Sleep Foundation. You need sleep to reduce stress, heal your body and keep your hormone levels in check. But since the world is a mostly wonderful place, one of the best solutions to poor sleep is more sex, according to Sleep.org. Sex releases chemicals that relax you and make you sleep more soundly. So basically, sleep is like sex's wing man, but sex absolutely returns the favor. Except you need sleep for good sex, but you don't necessarily need sex for good sleep. Sex just helps.
Aside from just messing with your body's chemical messengers, there are a whole host of other ways in which a lack of sleep messes with your sex life.
1. It Makes You Too Tired For Sex
I mean, it makes sense that if you aren't sleeping right, you're not going to have the energy you need to get through your day, let alone make your partner's night. You might think this isn't too big of a deal, as you can just cowboy up and get it done, but I promise, there will come a time when you don't have it in you. Because you need sleep.
2. It Makes You Too Grumpy For Sex
Lack of sleep makes you irritable and moody. When you're irritable and moody, you're probably not going to be in the mood to get down. In fact, you might not even be in the mood to be around your partner. This creates distance, which, in turn, creates an even bigger sexual chasm. It's a vicious cycle.
3. You Miss Out On Post-Sex Sleep
If you're too tired for sex, you're missing out on some of the best sleep of your life. I know, it's a tangled web. But sex helps you sleep, according to Sleep.org. It causes increases in oxytocin, which helps you relax. It also increases estrogen which makes you sleep deeper.
4. It Throws Off Your Hormone Balance
Sleep is essential to the hormones that play a role in sexual desire, according to the Institute for Optimum Nutrition. This is especially true of testosterone in men but it also affects women. Lack of sleep also negatively impact hormonal processes that keep you in good health, such as your blood sugar, your thyroid levels, and your stress hormones.
5. It Alienates Your Partner
If you have a live-in or stay-over partner, and you're snoring or tossing and turning all night, you're now disrupting their sleep as well. If they tough it out, they experience the stress, fatigue, moodiness and loss of desire that poor sleep brings, according to WebMD. Your partner might even feel like he or she has to sleep in another room or on the couch. Hard to have sex when one partner sleeps in another bedroom.
6. It Can Cause Depression
Lack of sleep is linked to depression. In fact, people with insomnia are five times more likely to be depressed, according to WebMD. Depression causes you to lose interest in things you once enjoyed. It also saps your energy and kills your sex drive. The medications often prescribed to treat depression can also lower sexual desire and sexual function.
When it all comes down to it, you need good sleep more than anything else to keep your sex game on point. When you start losing sleep, it's one of the first things to go.
Want more of Bustle's Sex and Relationships coverage? Check out our new podcast,I Want It That Way, which delves into the difficult and downright dirty parts of a relationship, and find more on our Soundcloud page.
