The first and most significant step towards attaining good sexual health is to follow a healthy lifestyle. Sexual health is as important as physical and mental health. Regular workouts, maintaining a healthy body weight and a well-balanced diet are indispensable for nurturing a healthy lifestyle. These would ensure that you can enjoy beautiful and fulfilling moments with your partner. Here are a few practical tips for men to ensure sexual health and well-being.
Regular exercising
Exercising regularly improves the quality of the blood vessels that are important to perform sexual activities. You could engage in 150 minutes of moderate exercises or 75 minutes of high-intensity workouts in a week. Physical activities like running, swimming or cycling would improve the body’s stamina, fitness and blood circulation too.
Healthy diet
A wholesome and well-balanced diet that includes fruits, vegetables, grains, lean protein and healthy fats is excellent for maintaining sexual health. It is better to avoid processed food, sugary treats and unhealthy fats as these may affect your sexual well-being. Eating a well-balanced diet while reducing the consumption of processed food and sugar is important.
Sleep
7 – 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep ensures both physical as well as mental health including sexual well-being. Make sure that you are getting enough sleep at night to balance the hormones and for overall health.
Stress Management
Severe stress would surely affect your sexual desires and performance. You could practice breathing exercises like deep breaths, meditation or yoga to effectively reduce stress. It is important to make conscious efforts to relax as stress and anxiety may not be great for your physical, mental, emotional and sexual health.
Regular health checkups
Consult a doctor at proper intervals to ‘keep an eye’ on health conditions or lifestyle diseases like diabetes or hypertension that may affect your sexual health. Obesity, unhealthy eating habits, lack of exercise, poor sleep patterns, dehydration, overconsumption of caffeine and alcohol and unhealthy sexual practices are some of the main factors that reduce sexual drive in men.
Note the following tips to improve your sexual as well as emotional relationships:
1) Open communication and emotional bond
2) Communicating openly with your partner about your desires, preferences and even concerns would improve sexual satisfaction while reducing anxiety.
Honesty
Honest and open conversations with your partner about your sexual needs, desires and anxiety would help you try new positions and activities while creating a safe environment to enjoy them.
Emotional bond
Creating an emotional bond with your partner would help strengthen your relationship and make the sexual act more enjoyable and intimate. Time and effort are required to nurture an emotional relationship. Emotional bonding would create mutual trust and understanding. Moreover, it influences your partner’s sexual drive and intimacy.
Gain Control
Instead of worrying about your performance, focus on the sensations. Your partner’s physical reaction and communication would surely make you creative. Practising sensate focus exercises would help enhance intimacy and sexual pleasure between partners while keeping away performance anxiety.
Foreplay
The physical and intimate acts of foreplay would lead to sexual arousal and satisfying sexual acts. Foreplay is important for improving sexual pleasure, intimacy and desires of both partners. These acts make the partners long for intense sexual activities and enhance pleasure. Foreplay plays a significant role in improving the emotional and physical bond between the partners. Moreover, it results in sexual arousal and improves lubrication which may lead to a satisfying sexual act. Besides, foreplay allows the partners to understand each other’s desires, set boundaries, reduce stress and anxiety and most importantly focus on that special moment.
Partners could try sensory massages, kissing, cuddling or stimulating each other’s erogenous zones during foreplay. Proper communication between partners, focusing on each other’s physical and sensual reactions and giving importance to mutual pleasure could be helpful. The happy hormones get stimulated only when partners are patient and take ample time to enjoy the foreplay acts. So, foreplay is something that shouldn’t be avoided as it ensures sexual health and pleasure.
As each individual or couple is unique, it is not necessary that what works for one person should work for the other. So, approaching sexual health with an open mind is important. Try focusing on the sensations and communications that you experience during the sexual act. Moreover, the partners need to enjoy the moment and consciously stay away from distracting thoughts.
(The writer is a child and adolescent relationship counsellor)