Som Suggestive words may stimulate your body, racy pictures may awaken your mind, videos may raise your libido-but sex addiction is not a disease or disorder. People with raw sexual or carnal desires were counted as sexually addicted in the past, which limited their social life. Some even confessed their addiction to sex caused them to be ostricized. But now, scientists have found out, it is not an addiction; addiction to sex may be a totally made up concept. The hyper-active libido was mislabeled a disease or disorder.

The study says, sex addiction does not exist. According to reports by NBC and CBS, the study involved 52 volunteers – 39 men and 13 women – who all admitted to being hypersexual. While these participants were exposed to a series of erotic images, their brain activity was monitored by scientist and senior author Nicole Prause and her team of researchers. They were asked to look at sexual images to evoke pleasant and unpleasant feelings – a test used in similar studies when monitoring how drug addicts’ brains respond to images of drugs.

“If they indeed suffer from hypersexuality, or sexual addiction, their brain response to visual sexual stimuli could be expected to be higher, in much the same way that the brains of cocaine addicts have been shown to react to images of the drug in other studies,” stated a UCLA press release.

The study amply shows that “Hypersexuality” is not a real neurological disorder; it’s a case of heightened sexual desire. And people trapped in such temptations, tend to participate in sexual acts more frequently; they just love sex, often carrying it to extremes which affects their normal lives.

Scientists found that the brain responses from ‘sex addicts’ were related only to their level of sexual desire, not to the severity of their ‘condition’.

Study author Nicole Prause, of the University of California, Los Angeles, told Popsci: ‘Hypersexuality does not appear to explain brain differences in sexual response any more than just having a high libido.’ She added that this ‘suggests that hypersexuality explains nothing in particular about brain responses to erotica’. Interestingly, these so called addicted people love to read erotic novels or online books on erotica. So, we can say, not only pictures or videos, but paper and ink are crazier enough to stimulate its readers. ‘The Fifty Shades of Grey’ proved the success of erotica over other novels. So, there is always a ‘Christian Grey’ in the core of every person’s heart, some cultivate it, some don’t.’

Many celebrities – including Russell Brand, Kanye West, and Tiger Woods – have claimed to suffer from the addiction and even used it as an excuse for infidelity. In reality, it is a lame excuse. The disorder has no difinitive relationship with addiction.

“If you think sexual problems are an addiction, we would have expected to see an enhanced response maybe to those sexual images. If you think it’s a problem with impulsivity, we would have expected to see decreased responses to those sexual images. The fact that we didn’t see any of those relationships suggests that there’s not great support for looking at these sexual behaviors as an addiction,” explained Prause.

According to Prause, the symptoms of hypersexuality, such as irresistible sexual urges and copious amounts of sexual activity, may be caused by a high libido, and not an actual disorder. So, sex addiction should not be called an addiction anymore.

“Potentially, this is an important finding,” Prause said in the press release. “It is the first time scientists have studied the brain responses specifically of people who identify themselves as having hypersexual problems.”

But Prause clarified that they are not discouraging affected people seeking mental help from consultants or physicians. They just determined that it’s not a disease like obesity. It’s some kind of temptation. And people are always capable of giving it up like drug addiction. In fact, it’s less dangerous than drug addiction.

In the USA, 16 million people are reportedly suffering from this affliction. Despite these numbers, the American Psychiatric Association excluded sex addition as a disorder in DSM-5, the newly updated edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and considered to be psychiatry’s bible of mental health.

So, sex, no matter how exciting it sounds, never creates addiction or disorder. People love to mask their guilty pleasure in the name of sex addiction. Now, it’s proven that the deeds of Tiger Woods, had nothing to do with addiction. You may be addicted to cocaine but not sex. Blame it on research, the truth is finally out. The stimuli to the libido must have other reasons than addiction.

Written by: Jayeeta Shamsul

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