It is easy to get caught up with the idea of being a part of a couple, especially in the month of February. Every time you turn your head, there is some advertisement about expressing your love for others through the purchase of miscellaneous goodies, yet do you ever stop to wonder how you show love to yourself? The purpose of this entry is to highlight the importance of being sexually aware of yourself before becoming intimate with anybody else. If you don’t even know what you like, how are you supposed to communicate that to a partner?

Huffington Post recently released a list of 13 Reasons Every Woman Should Masturbate Regularly. After reading the list I was prompted to create a survey. In order to gauge how a random sampling of individuals felt about the topic, my various questions included ones that asked about the frequency and importance of self-stimulation as well as a few inquiring about age, sexual orientation, gender identity, privacy and self-image. I shared the link to my survey on various social network sites such as Facebook and Tumblr. I didn’t receive quite as many responses as I hoped for, but ended up with thirteen individuals total who started and completed the survey. Since the majority of participants were friends; this is an unscientific survey. The participants were random and anonymous, but the majority were people I have access to through those sites.

Before we get into the results, first things first, why is self-stimulation so important? One of the most obvious answers is that it can positively influence your mood. Now this isn’t just some claim without any support, happiness is associated with the release of particular endorphins in your brain. The endorphins epinephrine and dopamine are released during the process and these can serve as natural mood-boosters. Aside from increased happiness from dopamine and epinephrine, another endorphin released during masturbation can help with insomnia. Arousal is what releases the first two endorphins into your system, but following “The Big O”, oxytocin endorphins are released, which cause a calming effect that often helps lull individuals to sleep.

With all these positive biological advantages to self-stimulation, why wouldn’t you do it? Here is where we get to the results of my survey.

One of the questions prompted participants to pick a color on a stop light. The question started “The topic of masturbation…” the red light’s option was “makes me uncomfortable”, the yellow light option was “isn’t something I think about” and the green light option was “doesn’t bother me.” The majority of individuals, 67 percent, selected the yellow light option. Just from this result, I can infer, at least amongst the random group of people who took my survey, that even if the topic of masturbation doesn’t make them uncomfortable, it still isn’t something commonly considered.

Another question was created to determine how individuals felt about the following: self-image, sex life, and amount of self-stimulation. They could choose from the following options dissatisfied: content and satisfied. With sex life, the results were all over the place. Only 16 percent of participants chose dissatisfied and the remaining 84 percent were split up between content and satisfied.

I found the results from the remaining categories to be the most interesting. With the amount of self-love category, 23 percent answered satisfied, 77 percent answered content and nobody chose dissatisfied. The lack of people dissatisfied plays back into the inference from the stop light question. If masturbation isn’t something people think about, of course they aren’t going to be upset with the amount, or lack thereof.

The results for self-image were completely flip flopped; no one chose satisfied, 23 percent chose content and the remainder of people chose dissatisfied. I believe this plays a part in why people may be hesitant to engage in self-stimulation. Often relationships serve as a kind of verification of one’s worth, if someone has low self-esteem, hearing positive things from another individual can help counter act the negative thoughts they have. However, as I mentioned in the introduction, how can you be expected to communicate what you like to your partner, if you don’t even know? Self-exploration can also lead to a higher admiration for yourself. Take some time to really get to know your body, and appreciate every inch of it.

Here are the results from one more question. When I inquired about stress levels, the results were unsettling. No one answered they were never or rarely stressed. There was 23 percent that claimed to be neutral when it came to the subject of stress. 62 percent answered that they are fairly stressed and the remaining 15 percent picked frequently stressed. These are incredibly high stress levels. Life can be stressful, that is an undeniable fact, but if you have the ability to reduce the amount of stress in your life while simultaneously working on body acceptance and getting a good night’s sleep, why not?

The topic of masturbation has often been religiously demonized and has been a societal taboo for far too long. There is nothing wrong with finding out what your body likes. Every individual is unique and so is everyone’s own idea of a “self-stimulation session”. Even if the results from my findings don’t do anything to convince you, take some extra time out of your day to fully appreciate yourself, a little bit of self love can go a long way.