{"id":26673,"date":"2019-11-20T13:36:05","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T12:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lelo.com\/blog\/?p=26673"},"modified":"2024-09-25T19:54:45","modified_gmt":"2024-09-25T17:54:45","slug":"casual-sex-and-poor-mental-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lelo.com\/blog\/casual-sex-and-poor-mental-health\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there a Link Between Casual Sex and Poor Mental Health?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Casual sex already has a bad reputation. But could it be directly linked to depression and anxiety? It\u2019s something a lot of young people worry about, and it\u2019s a scary thought that something as good as sex might cause psychological problems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Academics, health professionals, and the media alike have all expressed concerns that hooking up leads to depression, anxiety, or low self-esteem. Many studies over the past decade have tried to answer this question, but the results have been very mixed. In 2014, a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior<\/a> suggested that it\u2019s not so much whether you have casual sex that impacts your mental health, it\u2019s why you do it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Having been in the adult industry for nearly 20 years now, I believe that highly sexually active people do indeed seem to over-index on mental health issues. The sex toy testing community, for example, appears to have a lot of crossover with the mental health and wellbeing community. But it\u2019s not that simple.<\/span><\/p>\n

The methodology used in the studies of casual sex is often dubious. It tends to go like this: take one group who regularly have casual sex and compare them to a second group who have never had casual sex<\/strong>. <\/span><\/p>\n

There are now about 20 of these studies and the results are just all over the place, and quite often directly contradict each other. Sometimes the casual sex group has higher depression or lower self-esteem than the no-casual sex group, other times the hookup group has lower depression and higher self-esteem, and very often there are no differences between the two groups. It\u2019s all very confusing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such conflicting test results often mean that the relationship between the things you\u2019re studying (in this case, casual sex and mental wellbeing) is more complicated than it seems. It\u2019s very likely that the power of casual sex to cause psychological harm varies from person to person, and are dependant on individual and social factors.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then of course, there\u2019s the issue of motivation. What drives us to have casual sex? Research shows that when we do something for the \u201cright\u201d reasons our wellbeing benefits. If we do something for the \u201cwrong\u201d reason, our wellbeing suffers. In the context of casual sex, we can consider the \u201cright\u201d decisions to be \u201cautonomous:\u201d they positively reflect our core values, and \u201cwrong\u201d reasons are \u201cnon-autonomous\u201d in that they\u2019re more about reward and avoiding punishment.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some autonomous reasons for casual sex include:<\/span><\/p>\n