Playing video games affects your sexual life

A recent study shows that men who play video games are less likely to suffer from premature ejaculation, but they also have a lower sex drive.


For the study, published online in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, the team surveyed 396 men, asking them questions about their erectile function as well as their gaming habits and general lifestyle choices.
The men were between the ages of 18 and 50.
The research hypothesized that producing large amounts of dopamine while playing video games may cause gamer guys to build a tolerance to the hormone, which may lead to less interest in sex.

“I think that video games might be similar to physical exercise in these regards: occasional use might have beneficial effects, but when some threshold between ‘occasional use’ and ‘chronic abuse’ is crossed, ill effects might occur,” the study’s lead researcher Dr. Andrea Sansone told Broadly.

“We are just scratching the surface of this new field of research: I hope that sooner or later we will be able to produce more solid results. In the meantime, I’ll keep playing!”, he added.


While the researchers could not deduce from this study alone the reason for the correlation between men’s gaming habits and their sex lives, the team speculated that reduction in sex drive in gamers may be related to over-stimulation of dopamine, a pleasure hormone released both when a man plays video games and when he has an orgasm.