Let’s admit it, we all have a favorite way to pleasure ourselves. Yours is probably efficient and hasn’t changed a lot in the past years unless you recently bought an exciting toy and are now enjoying the honeymoon phase with your brand-new friends.
That being said, there are some benefits to change the way you go to town, and maybe you could consider mixing it up a little bit.
This has to do with the plasticity of the brain. See, we used to think that your adult brain and it’s physical structure is “fixed” and that the sweet spot for learning anything new is during childhood and infancy when the brain is still pretty flexible.
We now know for a fact that neuroplasticity is something you can work with your whole life and one of my favorite examples is a study by neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Harvard Medical School.
The members of a group were instructed to learn and practice a piano exercise. They practiced for two hours every day for five days.
What the scientists found was that the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements expanded to surrounding areas.
If you don’t like the science, just remember that the more you do something, the more your brain adjusts to that activity.
How does it apply to my me-time you ask? Well, let’s say you have this way to get off that works for you. You don’t really think about it but you find yourself using it more and more, as it is reliable and, you know, pleasurable.
If you don’t mix it up, your brain will reinforce the patterns and resources allocated to that specific set of stimulation, making it more difficult to orgasm using another technique or let’s say, with a partner.
There is still no formal studies on the elusive “vibrator addiction” or death grip syndrome” that some proficient masturbators report on areas of the internet like Reddit or 4chan because there are usually several different and unique realities hiding behind those blanket “diagnoses” but something tells me there might be a very real and direct link between feeling incapable to climax with a partner and neuroplasticity as we just discussed it.
And the good news is: you can also use neuroplasticity to your advantage.
In fact, Sheri Winston is even using that to teach her readers to have all kinds of orgasms, from nipple stimulation to giving a blowjob, mixing that way you already know how to orgasm from with the one you want to learn to orgasm with over and over again until “Voilà”!
It might feel like homework to you, but I am not in any way advocating that you make your personal fun-time a burden.
Just give yourself opportunities to mix and match stimulations, add a little bit of this, try a little bit of that, and keep an open mind. You might surprise yourself and you know, maybe actually make it even more fun.
