As if stress and burnout don’t already take a toll on their own, they have wide-reaching impact – including on our sex lives.
Turns out that both impact sexual pleasure and our ability to experience it, according to findings published in September’s issue of the International Journal of Impotence Research.
The study looked at six months-worth of sex lives of 251 doctors in Greece (143 men and 108 women) in their early 30s – all with degrees of both stress and burnout (chronic exhaustion).
Researchers exampled how the subjects handled stress as well as the source of that stress, and came up with some interesting conclusions: While men seemed to be sexually affected by burnout, for women, bad sex was linked to job stress (looming deadlines or a bad boss).
Related: The real reason women quit their jobs.
Interestingly, the findings also suggest that those who had children seemed to suffer less, which the researchers suggest may be linked to greater feelings of intimacy that women experienced with their partners (note that other studies find having children negatively impacts relationship satisfaction).
Either way, the latest research is just one more reason to actively work on reducing stress.
