New Year, New Toys - Why Sexual Play Is Good For Your Mental Health

Why sexual pleasure and play are important for your mental health

The beginning of a new year often starts with a renewed commitment to our physical, financial, and mental health. But with COVID still affecting our ability to regain normal and needed social interactions in 2022, the simple yet necessary acts of physical connection and touch, pleasure and play remain absent in everyday life.

Enter the opportunity for play with adult toys to allow us to create our own playful and pleasurable touch. Even better are online adult toy stores such as Sexyland in Australia, which offer a variety of adult toy options, delivered discreetly and safely to your front door.

“Touch is something people yearned for during lockdowns due to Covid, especially for those living on their own,” says clinical family therapist and senior social worker, Gretel O’Loughlin. “Learning to touch yourself in a pleasurable way is good for your own wellbeing, mental health, and self-love, but also in knowing how to guide a partner with the kind of touch you might want.”

Sexual drive and pleasure seem to be the nucleus of life, and its repression or deficiencies a way towards mental suffering. Sexuality, (understood as a drive and an inherent need for human beings), has unquestionably been part of the occupations and concerns of psychiatrists from the beginning of the century. Not in vain, psychoanalysts theorized about the importance of sexual repression as the origin of a great number of mental diseases.

That’s because endorphins and oxytocin are released during sexual pleasure, and these feel-good hormones activate pleasure centres in the brain, creating feelings of intimacy and relaxation to help stave off anxiety and depression.

Being playful in life allows us to find the child-like joy of allowing ourselves to be open and explore with the world around us with an open mind. Adult sex toys often give us permission to explore our own bodies with a similar open mind and awe in the privacy of our own homes.

“I have worked with many individuals over the years who have had difficulty with sexual expression or feeling safe and respected in their sexuality” continues O’Loughlin. “This has a significant impact on their sense of self and overall mental health and wellbeing.

“I also work with couples struggling in their relationships, and sometimes one of the contributing factors is they have lost the capacity to create space for desire and connection. Further to this, they have lost the playfulness and curiosity in one another over time.”

“Take the time to know your own body, what makes it tick, and the things that you absolutely love (and don’t) before you introduce play and even toys within a relationship.”

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