Pillar 6 Sex

This is the final post (6 of 6) focused on exploring my 'six pillars of health'. 

Coming at longevity medicine without a mental model leads me to fall down a dizzying rabbit hole of options which are overwhelming and exhausting. Thus, I created a six pillar model of health that allows me to sort, triage, and critically assess all the information I obtain in my never ending journey to optimize health. 

My six pillars are Life Philosophy, Sleep, Exercise, Nutrition, Social, and Sex. Is there something sacred about these 6 pillars? No, these pillars were not divine revelation delivered to me on tablets of stone. However, I have found that designing specific and actionable interventions to improve health works well in the 6 pillar paradigm. It’s broad enough to cover the most important bases but not so broad as to be directionless and unhelpful; they are useful guide-rails that are not overly ridged. 

With that being said, let's take a look at our sixth pillar, 'Sex'.

I'm going to be honest. This is my favorite pillar of health. 

I find it to be the most interesting, the most variable between clients, and the least addressed pillar by both western and alternative medicine. Sex is so vitally important. Every human (born before 1978 when IVF was developed) is here because of sex, and we have deep evolutionary pressures that program our lives to be centered around sex. Our drive to procreate is on par in its primal origins to our drive for thirst, hunger, and avoiding painful stimuli. 

Sex is also perhaps the best barometer for metabolic health as well as social and mental health. It takes so much coordination of the other 5 pillars to be at the peak of your sex game. The sex organs have a ton of microvascular and nervous innervation, and it is exactly these vessels and nerves which suffer first to the ravages of diabetes and vascular disease. Exercise and Nutrition pillars are critical to managing these diseases. Psychogenic impotence from stress, low self esteem, and mental health issues is way more common than you would think. Getting someone to want to have sex with you requires baseline proficiencies in social health and life philosophy. And sleep is a dark horse factor that has come out of nowhere to have drastic effects on sexual health.

Whether you are sexually active or abstaining, whether you are desperately trying to have kids or avoiding having kids like the plague, whether you are looking for deep emotional intimacy or just trying to ‘have some loosey goosey fun’, you need to be actively thinking about and taking proactive actions to address your sexual health. Sex is a heavily socialized and somewhat taboo topic that creates layers of disconnection, confusion, shame, and distortion.

A holistic picture of health would be woefully inadequate if it did not specifically address this essential part of our being. 

To serve you best, I start talking about what the pillar of sex means to you and what it looks like in your overall picture of health from day 1.