Alcohol is called the social lubricant because it tends to disinhibit people and make it easier for them to talk to one another. It’s not an accident then that many people may use alcohol when they are chatting up someone who they are interested in sexually because they find that the alcohol can take the pressure off of the situation.
Alcohol makes it more difficult to reach orgasm and ejaculation.
The way that alcohol works in the body is by depression (or slowly shutting down) of your nervous system. If you are an anxious person, you may find that it seems to turn down the volume of an over-active and over-critical brain, making it easier to approach and interact with other people. The more you drink, however, the more your brain and nervous system are shut down. Eventually, you are not getting the same sensation from your nerve endings to your brain or the same messages from your brain back down to your body. This makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to reach orgasm and ejaculation during sex.
How does alcohol impair sex?
As you see, alcohol slows down the activity in the brain so that it can’t process or send out information as fast. This is why drinking slows down a person’s reaction time and why they shouldn’t drive or operate any heavy machinery or dangerous tools while drinking even more than a few drinks. Without those nerves firing the way they should, your brain can’t build up sufficient stimulation to send the body over the edge into orgasm. Although there are individual differences as to how much alcohol a person can tolerate before getting “drunk”, more than 1-2 drinks can already start to impair a person’s ability to reach orgasm.
Alcohol can mess up sex in other ways as well.
Not only does it delay orgasm, but alcohol can mess up sex in other ways too. Since the brain gets turned off more and more with increased levels of alcohol, the physical experience of sex is lessened because the nerves are dulled. This results in less intense feeling over the entire body, including the genitals. Alcohol also can severely impair one’s judgment so that it may lead a person to choose things they might not necessarily do, such as put themselves in danger by having more risky sexual behavior, like not using a condom for example. You have much less control over what happens to you when you drink alcohol because your brain cannot really weigh all the risks of a situation, and you cannot react as you normally would either.
Long-term effects of alcohol on sex
It’s not just the moment of sex that is negatively affected by alcohol, but it can hurt you in the long-term as well. Alcohol increases your blood sugar, your cortisol levels, and your estrogen levels as well. This will cause you to gain weight over time, damages your blood vessels causing premature heart disease and erectile difficulties, and put you at a higher risk for cancer, especially breast and prostate cancer. So you see that alcohol has some very negative effects for sex as well as your overall health. These are things that should be carefully considered, especially if you find that you rely on alcohol to take away your anxiety, if you are drinking daily, if you often have days that you have more than 2 drinks, or if you’re already having some sexual or medical side effects from drinking.