One of the most obvious benefits of sex is its ability to inhibit and relieve pain.  Sex helps generate the hormone oxytocin, which in turn releases endorphins, which perform a similar function to morphine!  This means having sex is kind of like grabbing a generic valium off the shelf.  The more sex you have, the more oxytocin is generated, culminating in an orgasm, which makes you pretty much oblivious to any pain you felt previously.

What this means, however, is that you’ve got to make it worth her while.  Most women need an orgasm to enjoy to full pain relieving benefits of sex.  Not that it’ll take much convincing.

Sex is also great for reducing stress.  If you’ve had a stressful day (or week, or month), nothing melts away all that pent up frustration like a solid orgasm.  The post-coital wave of relaxation that comes over you is also proven to help you fall asleep, and stay asleep – a good way to treat insomnia!

Probably the best argument you can use on a spouse who’s weight conscious (and who isn’t, these days?) is that fact that sex is a proven weight loss technique.  A half hour session in the sack three times a week can burn up to 500 calories!  And if you add one more time over the weekend where you get a little more athletic and go a little longer, your sex life could add up to a solid 750 calories burned a week.  That’s almost 40,000 calories burned a year, before you even touch the treadmill!

In contrast, neither just insomnia with a normal sleep duration of more than six hours nor a short sleep duration without insomnia was associated with a significant risk for hypertension. So this means that there is an additive or synergistic effect on hypertension risk when insomnia occurs in combination with a short sleep duration.  We do need to note that that many times, the amount that we feel we slept is different from the actual amount that we have slept, so in order to know, you’d need to go to a sleep doctor for assessment.  The study was cross-sectional so it did not allow for causality to be determined, but the authors note that large amounts of clinical and research data indicate that it is most likely that insomnia leads to hypertension and not the other way around.

Previous reports have shown that insomnia with short sleep duration is associated with hypersecretion of cortisol, increased catecholaminergic activity, increased heart rate and 24-hour metabolic rate, and impaired heart rate variability which may all lead to hypertension and other cardiovascular events.  Bottom line is that the study urges people with insomnia to seek evaluation and treatment from their medical provider.  And those of you with just insomnia and normal sleep—you may have a lower risk for physical problems but you’re still are at risk for depression what causes depression treatments and may suffer from the behavioral effects of insomnia—so you too should see your doctor!