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HOW-TO · SHELF IV

How Much Is Normal? Thinking About Sex

  • Research
  • Experiential

Thinking about sex all day, in and out: is it healthy, and is it only you? What the research measures, and the better question to ask instead, step by step.

In brief

  • Typical figures are 10 to 19 sexual thoughts a day, with an enormous range.
  • What matters is not the amount but whether the thoughts are wanted, steerable, and leave your life intact.
  • If they bring distress or disruption, a professional can help without judgement.

This manual is general information based on the sources available to us. It is not medical advice and has not been reviewed by a clinician. For your own body, health or medicines, talk to a doctor.

This manual is general information based on published research and the sources available to us. It is not medical advice and has not yet been reviewed by a clinician. For questions about your own body, health, medicines, pregnancy or contraception, talk to a doctor or pharmacist.

How often people think about it

In a well-known study, university students carried a counter and clicked it every time a sexual thought came to them. The typical figure was about 19 a day for men and about 10 for women. The range was enormous, from one a day to several hundred. The same students thought about food and sleep about as often as about sex.

How much of the day it takes

Very little. Most sexual thoughts pass in a moment. As rough arithmetic, twenty thoughts of thirty seconds each add up to about ten minutes, around 1% of a waking day. In studies that ask people at random moments what they want right now, sexual desire comes up regularly, but less often than hunger, thirst or tiredness.

So "99% of my waking time", taken literally, is far outside the typical range. But the feeling of thinking about it "all the time" usually describes a background hum rather than a thought filling every minute, and a background hum is not a problem in itself.

Why it rises and falls

Age, hormones, where you are in your menstrual cycle, a new relationship, a long gap since sex, stress, boredom and loneliness all push it up or down. Near-constant preoccupation is common in the first months of falling for someone or during a sexual awakening, and it usually settles. People who are asexual have far fewer sexual thoughts, and that is normal too.

The question is not how much

Clinicians do not measure frequency. They look at these things:

  1. Wanted or intrusive? Pleasurable, chosen fantasy is different from thoughts that arrive against your will and upset you. Unwanted sexual thoughts that keep returning however you push them away can be a form of OCD, which responds well to treatment.
  2. Is it costing you something? Work, sleep, relationships, money, risky choices; acting on it when you had decided not to.
  3. Can you choose? Can you notice a thought and not act on it, or put it down when something else needs you?
  4. Does acting on it satisfy, or only repeat? Compulsive behaviour brings brief relief, then the urge again, often with little pleasure.
  5. What is it doing for you? Sexual thought sometimes does the work of soothing stress, loneliness or boredom. Once you see that, the need underneath can be met in other ways too.
  6. Is it sudden, and unlike your usual self? A sharp rise with little sleep, racing thoughts or unusual spending, or after starting a new medication, deserves a doctor.

Where the lines are

The World Health Organization's diagnostic manual (ICD-11) includes "compulsive sexual behaviour disorder". What defines it is not how often you think about sex, but a persistent failure to control intense sexual urges, continuing for months despite harm or little satisfaction, with marked distress or impairment in daily life. It states explicitly that distress arising only from moral or religious disapproval of your own sexual thoughts is not enough for the diagnosis.

The consensus

Sexual thoughts are an ordinary part of most people's inner lives. The amount varies hugely between people and across one person's life, and no percentage marks the line to abnormal. What matters is whether the thoughts feel like yours, whether you can steer them, and whether your life around them is in good shape. If it feels good and your life holds, it is probably a season. If it feels like something that has you rather than something you have, a psychiatrist, a psychosomatic clinic (心療内科) or a sex therapist can help without judgement.

Sources, and what kind of guide this is

  • Research Backed by clinical or laboratory studies, cited at the end.
  • Experiential Works for some people and not others; offered to try, never as a promise.
  1. Fisher, T. D., Moore, Z. T. & Pittenger, M.-J. (2012). Sex on the brain?: An examination of frequency of sexual cognitions as a function of gender, erotophilia, and social desirability. Journal of Sex Research, 49(1), 69–77.
  2. Hofmann, W., Vohs, K. D. & Baumeister, R. F. (2012). What people desire, feel conflicted about, and try to resist in everyday life. Psychological Science, 23(6), 582–588.
  3. World Health Organization. ICD-11, 6C72 Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder.
  4. Kraus, S. W., Krueger, R. B., Briken, P. et al. (2018). Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder in the ICD-11. World Psychiatry, 17(1), 109–110.

This manual is general information based on the sources available to us. It is not medical advice and has not been reviewed by a clinician. For your own body, health or medicines, talk to a doctor.

Concepts in this manual

Compulsive sexual behaviour disorderAsexuality

How these guides are madeGlossary of concepts

Read on

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  • Noticing at Forty What You Had No Word For at Sixteen

    The question that arrives is a category question — am I one, was I always — and category questions have been the wrong shape every time this library has met one. The longitudinal research found more than two thirds of women changing their stated identity across a decade, but the changes were between adjacent categories and averaged about a point on the scale. So the finding is not that women swing. It is that the boxes were drawn tighter than the thing they were drawn around, by other people, for other purposes.

  • 生理的に無理: When the Body Has Closed

    Low desire is an absence: you wait and nothing arrives. Aversion is a presence: something arrives, fast, before any thought, and it is an objection. Almost every resource treats the second as a severe case of the first, which is why the standard advice — schedule it, add novelty, do it anyway — reliably makes it worse. Adding stimulation to an absence sometimes helps. Adding stimulation to an alarm is turning up the volume.

  • The Erotic as Power, and What Audre Lorde Actually Said

    The self-help tradition treats erotic energy as a fuel to be redirected into achievement. Lorde, in 1978, argued something better: it is not a fuel but a measure. Fuel runs out. A measure changes what you are able to tolerate, and never gives it back.

  • Shame, and the Room You Have Never Been Allowed to Check

    Nobody has ever been argued out of shame, because the argument addresses the content and the content was never holding it up. Shame is a prediction about an audience — and Japanese has a sharper word for that audience than English does.

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