From a NY Post article:
Kit Maloney, the founder of O’actually, a feminist porn production company, said that “masturbation [and] orgasm is like meditation. It allows the space for the brain to quiet and that means you’ll be more focused and effective with your to-do list afterwards.”
Now you can obviously dismiss it as not the claim of scientist, and I can see that it would be rather impossible to come up with "placebo mastubration" for a double blind study, but anyhow, is there a kernel of truth in that statement that can be backed by some experiments?
In sports there used to a be "no sex before game day" rule, but from a recent review we learn that
Despite the major differences found in the recovery phase, where higher values of HR [heart rate] were found 2 h after sexual intercourse, no significant differences were found in workload achieved and in mental concentration of the athletes.
Nevertheless, the same review paper suggest a bit later (without a specific citation):
Especially from the psychological point of view, sex has a relaxing effect, which may help to relieve competition stress in endurance (marathon) or concentration (archery or pistol shooting) sports. Some coaches support the role of relaxation in improving coordination and peak athletic performance.
So again a claim of some potential mental improvement.
If we go as far as simply emotional improvement, I'm guessing there's some, and probably more from sex than from masturbation, simply because even interacting with a pet or animal can improve mood. I also found some anecdotal evidence in the opposite direction
He [a psychoanalyst] was puzzled about a 24-year-old man whom he viewed as psychiatrically healthy except for intense depression that lasted for several hours after sex. [...] Could it be that some patients have particularly strong rebound activity in the amygdala after orgasm that makes them feel bad?
So yeah, there's no limits to abnormal psychology. And this post-coital dysphoria can happen to women too.
But to refocus on my question:
- Are there experimentally demonstrated non-emotional mental improvements after sex/masturbatoin, like on focus, concentration, etc.?
- If nothing can be said about the above directly, I'd settle for some quantifiable evidence on mood improvement after sex and/or masturbation.
