Meditation has seemingly countless benefits. It can help preserve gray matter in your brain, reduce your stress levels, and even cure your tendencies to overthink.
What can’t meditation do?
Maybe best of all, a study published in Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, points to meditation as a way for women to enhance their sex lives.
Researchers Lori A. Brotto and Iulia Dascalu from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of British Columbia interviewed 451 female participants ranging from 19 to 70 years old and found that those who said they’d meditated before reported better sexual function than those who did not meditate.
“It has been well established in the scientific literature that mindfulness meditation is applicable to women’s sexual health,” said Lori A. Brotto in an interview with Psypost. Arousal, orgasm, and even personal lubrication seemed to improve as well.
The study is interesting, but not perfect.
Researchers believe that they might be onto something with this study, though it seemed to create as many questions as it did answers. The study was not designed to conclude how long or how frequently a woman should meditate in order to receive these perceived benefits, for example. It also did not examine different types of meditation, choosing to look at the practice of meditation more broadly.
“Our study explored associations between meditation and various aspects of sexual function, but was cross-sectional in nature,” Brotto said. “This means that it is not possible to determine the direction of causation, or in other words, did their long-term meditation lead to their improved sexual function, or are individuals with better sexual functioning more likely to meditate?”
Even so, the study points to meditation being an effective way to enhance overall sexual performance and enjoyment.
This finding could give hope to women who experience sexual dysfunction as a result of hormonal imbalances or conditions like diabetes.
But what about men?
Would meditation help with sexual dysfunction in males?
The study’s authors noted that they did not have enough pilot data or clinical experience to speculate about how meditation would impact the sexual performance of men, but meditation probably wouldn’t hurt. The study seems to suggest that women experienced improved sexual performance due to the mind-clearing effects of meditation. The same may be true for men, though not confirmed by this study.
