One thing Dr. Britney Blair would like clinicians to integrate into their office visits with patients? Conversations about sex. According to Dr. Blair, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Lover, sex is linked to a decreased risk of anxiety, depression, and even chronic disease. Yet medical schools devote just 3 to 10 hours of sex education to their training on average. With 130 million people reporting they have a sexual complaint or problem, she says, there’s an open door to ask questions about a patient’s sex life amid other medical concerns when assessing their overall health.
Even during Covid — a “very unsexy time,” she adds, people “who were having sex regularly report overall higher quality of life and greater relationship satisfaction,” she says. “So, how do we solve the problem? First, we have to start the conversation.”
You can hear more from Dr. Blair’s talk from the DOC 2025 session, “Sex, Stress and Social Nutrition: Get Your Groove On,” in the video or read the lightly edited transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. Britney Blair
All right. Sex, drugs and rock and roll is a good one to follow. Lunch. So you’re not fading off. Hopefully. Hopefully this will be interesting. So during my first year of graduate school at Stanford, I happened to stumble, literally happened to stumble on a workshop about sexual health. It was an elected. It was not required. During this workshop, I learned that 1 in 2 women and 1 in 3 men have a sexual problem.
My mind was blown. 20% of couples are non sexual, and this is in the top three reasons that people split up. That afternoon I learned all about treatment and how effective it is and I was like, “What in the world are we doing? Why aren’t we starting this conversation? We need to do something about this.” I knew in that moment I had a kind of road to Damascus moment of, this is going to be my life’s work.
Then fast forward to year three of grad school. I was asked to take a rotation in a sleep clinic. And I thought, sleep. Don’t you just put your head on a pillow, close your eyes and go to sleep. Turns out millions and millions of millions of people, suffer greatly from sleep problems. So I was hooked.
Treatments also very effective. I spent way too many years of training, to get boarded in both sleep and sexual medicine. Which brings us to today. This is a lightning talk. So we’re just going to stick to sex. When I talk about sex, I’m going to talk a little bit about sexual frequency, but also sexual satisfaction.
We’re going to do a real cursory run through here. We are saturated and inundated with sex in our media. 85% of movies, 70% of TV shows. A recent study, asking adolescents about sexual content in social media, 50% of them said all of the social media that they consume contained sexual content. So it is everywhere, all the time, and yet it’s still considered a taboo topic. So I said 1 in 2 women and 1 in 3 men. That’s 130 million people in the United States that have a sexual complaint or a sexual problem. How often are we talking about that? Never. The reasons for this are varied. We don’t have time to get into it. But there are less than a thousand board certified sex therapist in this country.
In the US, less than 25% of therapists, including couples therapist, get any training in sexual health. Just astonishing. Physicians aren’t much better. The average medical school 3 to 10 hours of sex education. And that includes contraception, STIs and reproductive health, which is why we see only 2% of medical charts. Your primary care office has anything to do with sexual health.
For only 40% or less than 40% of people talk about sex with their partner. Which is a problem given that every relationship we can’t say a whole lot of every and all, in the world of research. But this I can say with definitive certainty, every relationship at some point is going to have to navigate desire discrepancy. This is where one partner has a higher sexual desire than the other partner. For some relationships, this is stable. Over time, these roles higher desire, lower desire, for other relationships, it can flip and flop depending on stress and kids and all the things that life throws at us. But every relationship has to navigate this at some point. If we’re not talking about it. This lack of communication comes at our peril, right? Top three reasons that people split up.
And oftentimes with partners, oftentimes with the higher the higher sex drive partner, they may feel kind of unwanted insecure rejected. And your lowered is our partner may feel nagged or put upon or like something’s inherently wrong with them. And it’s a very difficult thing to navigate in relationship if we’re not having any communication about it. So sex actually is linked to not only health, but living longer.
A fascinating study published in 2020 looking at adults aged 20 to 59, over 12,000 adults, they found that sex twice weekly reduced your mortality risk by half and cut cancer risk by 69%. I promise I did not make that start up. And now is to twice per week compared to folks having sex once per month or less.
Right. So this before you say, well, there’s more frequent sex group there gets healthier. This was after controlling for all the big things that we look at. So smoking, alcohol, nutrition, exercise, heart health BMI. Yeah. The findings were still interestingly those the lower sex frequency, lower sexual frequency was related to all cause cardiovascular disease and all cause mortality. So there’s something going on here. We also will live healthier. Sex has been linked to decreased risk of anxiety, depression, chronic disease. It improves our immune system. It’s a great form of exercise. So you live healthier. In a recent study looking at sexual activity during Covid, they found that folks who were sexually active, nobody was very sexually active during Covid.That was a very unsexy time. But those who were sexually active were less likely to experience depression, anxiety, and stress.
Folks who were having sex regularly report overall higher quality of life and greater relationship satisfaction. We see this again and again, across many different studies. In fact, over 80% of people report that sexual satisfaction is crucial to the maintenance of a relationship. And that’s men and women.
So how do we solve the problem? First, we have to start the conversation. So there’s a popular model called the Implicit model. And without going into too much detail about that, it’s been studied since the 70s. And basically what they found is 80% of people report an improvement just with permission, having a conversation, limited information and specific suggestions. Only about 15% of people need intensive therapy. So when I was first coming out of fellowship, with sleep, fellowship and giving talks on sleep and talking about how important sleep was, it felt like at the time we had this kind of cultural mindset of, I’ll sleep when I’m dead. And I used to tell people it’s going to happen sooner rather than later with that mindset.
I don’t know about you guys, but it does feel like after the last decade, there’s been a real shift. We’re really talking about sleep more, reprioritizing it more. And so my hope is that we start to prioritize this aspect of our health. We have a market size of 130 million people. And I really feel like I hope that this is the next kind of frontier.