How often should you be masturbating? We asked a sex expert
It’s a common activity that pretty much everybody does in their life at some point, but masturbating is still a taboo subject that most of us don’t feel comfortable talking about. We’ll chat about virtually everything else with our friends, but masturbating tends to be off-limits. Well, there are a lot of health benefits when it comes to masturbating, so make sure you’re not skipping out on the good stuff, because giving yourself orgasms is just as important as eating your vegetables and exercising.
Relationship expert, founder of Good Clean Love, and author of forthcoming book SEX THAT WORKS: An Intimate Guide to Awakening Your Erotic Life, Wendy Strgar, confirms to HelloGiggles that nobody should miss out on masturbating. “Self-pleasuring is essential to moving towards a healthy relationship with pleasure itself,” Strgar says. “In fact, sex educators call masturbation the cornerstone of all other sexual acts.”
But you might wondering what a healthy amount of masturbating is.
It’s a fair question, especially because it wasn’t exactly a topic we learned about in school. We see all sorts of characters in TV shows and in the movies who have their own personal ways of navigating the masturbation turf, but we shouldn’t necessarily take these as blueprints for ourselves. So, in honor of International Masturbation Month (otherwise known as Masturbation May), we asked Strgar to give us a tangible answer. Her response was pretty simple.
"How much is too much when it comes to masturbation is a personal choice," Strgar tells HG.
However, there is such thing as masturbating too often. “We don’t want to masturbate so much that we become dependent on it and unresponsive in our paired sexual relationships,” Strgar advises.
If you start to lose sensitivity in other sexual situations and you end up only responding to your solo sessions, you might be masturbating too often. Although pleasuring yourself has a lot of benefits, it’s important not to let it negatively affect the rest of your sex life. Similarly, you don’t want to arrive to the point where you rely on masturbation when you’re feeling emotionally insecure or unable to connect with someone.
Don’t let this scare you off from masturbating on the regular, though. You can certainly find a healthy balance. Besides, Strgar insists masturbating can do wonders for your sex life with a partner.
"As you become more comfortable with exploring your own body and knowing the kinds of touch that make you light up, you become a more interesting and articulate lover," Strgar tells HG.
You’ll sharpen your own sexual response and become more confident in asking for what you want from your S.O. Additionally, Strgar says that “meeting our sexual inhibitions privately is a good way to begin to overcome them,” so even if you’re a little shy in the bedroom, masturbating could do you a lot of good.
Find the amount of masturbating that works best for you, and get into a healthy rhythm. Flying solo can build a strong foundation to a sustainable, enjoyable sex life.