I’m 39 years old and still I feel like I just said two very bad words; sex and orgasm. I’m looking around for the blog police. I’m not sure why we are trained to ‘shhhhhhh’ about sex as young kids, but it certainly gets in the way of understanding sex in a healthy way.
I did not understand the benefit of orgasm until a much later age, and to me now it is just as important as balanced nutrition, clean water, sound sleep, and moderate exercise.
If you didn’t know already, orgasms have a variety of positive effects on our body:
- reduces tension
- releases endorphins
- increases pain tolerance
- increases serotonin levels
- phenetylamine (known to curb the appetite) increases
- releases oxytocin (a variety of benefits on brain and body)
- spikes levels of DHEA (again, variety of benefits)
So what does this have to do with ADHD? I actually would never have thought about it had I not spoken to Dr. Barbara A. Cohen, Ph.D. and ADHD expert. She explains it best in her segment from one of her books, Understanding Women With AD/HD:
“Sexuality is often confused and conflicted for contemporary women. Rather than feeling comfortable with their own natural sexuality, they are influenced by strong and often contradictory messages from the media and from society about female sexuality. If a woman today is also challenged by AD/HD, her sexual experience might be further complicated by patterns of inattentiveness, hyperfocusing, impulsivity, and/or hyperactivity.”
My guess is that it is the same with men and orgasm, although I plan to explore that further in future posts. When I found this out from Barbara, it made perfect sense to me and my own personal experience models it perfectly. On the one hand, I can experience multiple orgasms intensely and quickly (ability to hyperfocus), but on the other, it can sometimes take hours and hours (lack of attention) for me to get to a place nowhere near as good as the previously described.
Of course now that I am aware of it, it all makes perfect sense, but getting to the place of awareness was tricky. Society is not a place where talking about orgasms is as common as talking about our latest race time.
