Having More Sex Than Your Neighbor Makes You Happier
![Sex](https://d.medicaldaily.com/en/full/225847/sex.jpg?w=640&f=bc89c05743894a7de90f7ac7b84f4c49)
It's hard to deny the euphoria one can experience during sex, but is the feeling heightened when that person is under the impression their having more of it than their friends?
According to Tim Wadsworth, associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, the happiness we feel from sex can be manipulated by how our output compares to others, similar to income.
Wadsworth combed through data from the General Social Survey taken since 1972 that sort's participant's happiness levels into three categories: very happy, pretty happy and not to happy.
Happiness related to sex was added to the survey in 1989. Wadsworth's research gathered data from 15,386 respondents taken from 1993 to 2006.
Out of those who answered the survey, people who reported having no sex in the past year were 33 percent less happy than those who said they had sex a minimum of two or three times a month.
As the frequency rose so did the happiness levels after those who reported having weekly sex were 44 percent more happy and those who had sex two or three times a week were 55 percent more happy.
Wadsworth's also found that those who were having sex two or three times a month, but believed their peers were having more dropped their happiness levels by 14 percent.
"There's an overall increase in sense of well-being that comes with engaging in sex more frequently, but there's also this relative aspect to it," said Wadsworth. "Having more sex makes us happy, but thinking that we are having more sex than other people makes us even happier."
Using the same General Social Survey, researchers David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald studied the association of happiness, sex and income back in 2004. Their findings were published in the paper "Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study" as part of a National Bureau of Economic Research study.
Out of random sample of 16,000 American adults, Blanchflower and Oswald found that higher sexual frequency was strongly associated with happiness levels. They also noticed that income and number of partners had nothing to do with their happiness association. Their paper stated, "The happiness-maximizing number of sexual partners in the previous year is 1."