According to JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association), 43% of American women suffer from some form of Female Sexual Dysfunction" -- often placing the blame on themselves for their inability to reach orgasm. Stop blaming yourself. If you are alone, masturbation will help you find what feels right for you. If you have a partner, talk to them openly and honestly. Often the clitoris or the cervix is under stimulated during sexual intercourse, which is how many women have an orgasm. If you have orgasms from your clitoris being stimulated, tell your partner this. (Or, whatever else works for you).

Orgasms: Relieve tension. A faster heart beat; the increased blood flow and muscular tautness associated with sexual pleasure all come to a relaxing conclusion with an orgasm, and in the process relieve tensions pent up in your nervous system.

Orgasms: Help you sleep better. While an orgasm is followed in the male by a quick drop in blood pressure and sudden relaxation, the effect on women is more progressive, but no less important. Orgasms act as a natural tranquilizer by their wonderful release of endorphins; hence calmness.

Orgasms: Calm your cravings for junk food, sugar, and sometimes for cigarettes. Sexual stimulation activates the production of phenetylamine, a kind of natural amphetamine that regulates your appetite. So, before you pig-out, maybe go to your room (alone or with a friend.)

Orgasms: Burn calories.

Orgasms: Can work as natural pain management.

If you ever noticed forgetting about a headache or menstrual cramps while masturbating or having sex, its not simply a psychological phenomenon. Endorphins, (natural compounds produced in the brain, similar to morphine) are released by your body during sex and can increase your tolerance to pain by as much as 70% during orgasm. This will vary from person to person of course.

A word of caution, if you are in the hospital, forget trying this for pain management due to the lack of privacy, Ill never forget walking in on a patient and her lover. (I did knock on the door before I entered).

Enjoy!

Amy Otis

The founder & President of Cool Nurse, is a registered nurse, a writer and an educator. She has devoted her life as an RN to the welfare of teenagers. Her roles as an RN have included working with teenagers in women's health clinics since she was a college student herself in Boston in the late 1970s.

She has taught AIDS patients how to live with HIV without transmitting their disease. Amy's work with adolescents in a psychiatric-drug rehabilitation facility as a Nurse Manager gave her an even better understanding of the adolescent mind and its potential. She taught CPR and First Aid for the American Red Cross prior to becoming ill with a chronic illness in 1995.

She is a member of Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing. The ?Cool Nurse? concept came to her and some friends when they saw a way to help her educate today's teenagers via the Internet due to her physical limitations.