Getting it on on the regular appears to be a massive safeguard against the blues — and scientists say they've calculated the exact number of times per year you should be doing it.
In a new paper published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, sexual health researchers looked at healthcare records for nearly 15,000 people and found that having sex at least a few times per month was associated with a lower risk of depression.
Using the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's massive health and nutrition survey, a trio of urologists hailing from China's Shenzen and Shantou compiled a representative sample of nearly 15,000 Americans aged 20-59 and tracked their healthcare outcomes between the years 2005 and 2016.
With the help of statistical models, the Chinese doctors pinpointed the range of sexual activity frequency associated with maximum mental health benefits: 52 to 103 times per year, or one to two times per week.
When breaking it down between frequent (at least once a week), semi-frequent (more than once a month but less than weekly) and infrequent (less than monthly), the results were stark: the frequent activity group was 24 percent less likely to show symptoms of depression, and the semi-frequent cohort was 23 percent less likely to have depression.
What's more: that "saturation effect," as the paper calls it, was found across racial, ethnic, age, and socioeconomic demographics — though younger folks and those without insurance were less likely to be depressed with frequent or semi-frequent sex than their older and insured counterparts.
These findings, while fascinating, aren't without limitation. The sexual activity aspect of the questionnaire in the CDC database, for instance, was self-reported — which means that people could have inflated or deflated their actual numbers.
Beyond the numbers game, the well-known relationship between depression and lowered libido and sense of self-worth makes disentangling the two impossible. Were the infrequent sex-havers not getting down because they were depressed, or did not having sex make them depressed? That sort of question cannot, intrinsically, be answered by a records analysis like this one.
Still, the association is intriguing — even if frequent sex remains aspirational for the depressed homies out there.
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