Are you having problems with the sexual aspect of your relationship with your spouse? Do you need some tips and tricks on how to increase your libido?
As men age, their testosterone levels decline. Since everyone is different, some men’s testosterone levels decline faster than others.
This can lead to a decreased sex drive. Decreased libido can lead to tension and conflicts in a relationship and lower your self-esteem.
If you think it’s too late, don’t fret. We’ve got 10 hacks on how to increase sex drive in men over 40.
In this post, we’ll give you a variety of things that you can do to help increase your sex drive. Keep reading to learn how to increase male libido.
1. Eating Right
Diet has a big impact on your life. It affects your weight, energy levels, and libido. If you eat right, you’re improving all these things and more.
You may wonder, how does eating right affect your libido? Certain foods can decrease blood circulation and affect heart health. Cardiovascular disease caused by eating certain foods also impacts your physical sexual functioning.
You want to add libido-boosting foods to your diet. Eat fruits like black raspberries, broccoli, and avocados. Opt for foods that are rich in zinc, which boosts testosterone, like oysters and pumpkin seeds.
Start avoiding greasy or fried foods and refined carbohydrates like pasta. Beets boost your estrogen levels while cheese can mess with natural hormone production, so avoid them. You also want to limit how much coffee and alcohol you drink in a day.
Excessive weight and following a poor diet are major factors that decrease sex drive in men. On top of that, you have to deal with other consequences of being overweight or obese too. Did you know that people with obesity pay $1,429 more for medical costs than people with normal weight?
When you eat nutritious foods, you’re setting yourself up for a better lifestyle.
2. Exercise Often
Working out or exercising boosts testosterone levels. However, certain exercises increase testosterone more than others. As you know, increased testosterone levels can result in increased libido as well.
Some of the best testosterone-boosting exercises include resistance training. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) also does a lot to help men boost libido. Note that cardio is easy to do daily, but it offers no impact on your T levels.
Some examples of resistance training include weightlifting. Studies also prove that resistance exercises help increase short-term and long-term testosterone levels.
HIIT boosts testosterone in men but not in women. It’s also more effective than simpler exercise routines, especially simple running. It can be even more effective if you take DHEA supplements with HIIT.
Regular exercise has many more benefits for your body and brain. Studies say that it slows aging, prevents depression, and lowers the risk of dementia. It also reduces inflammation, cancer, diabetes, and many other diseases or disorders.
3. Quit Smoking
Tobacco has serious and direct negative effects on the male sex drive, among other things. Men who smoke experience a significant decrease in sexual desire and satisfaction. Even men in their 20s and 30s can feel this side effect.
Nicotine inhibits your body’s physiological sexual responses. This is because it causes a hormonal imbalance. When your hormones are all out of order, you feel a decrease in sexual desire.
Nicotine from smoking can even cause impotence. Remember that your penis is a circulatory organ. It needs blood flowing through it to maintain an erection.
Smoking damages the arteries that affect blood flow to your penis. Other than that, smoking can cause smooth muscle damage inside the penis. This can cause erectile dysfunction (ED).
Smoking will kill your sex drive long before it can kill you. The solution is to quit smoking the healthy way, especially if you’re a heavy smoker. Start by smoking less, and soon, you’ll be in the clear.
4. Consume Herbal Remedies and Supplements
If you want to learn how to increase sex drive in men over 40 the natural way, try herbal remedies. Herbal remedies like maca, Ginkgo Biloba, and ginseng are some of the most effective ones. More common herbs that help increase blood flow include garlic and basil. Note that you must check these remedies for their quality and safety first.
If you don’t like taking herbal remedies, you can also use the best male enhancement pills instead. Certain male supplements can help enhance your sex drive and increase testosterone levels. Try a male booster like Viril-X for a product that has natural herbal extracts.
5. Rest and Get Enough Sleep
Lack of sleep has a huge negative effect on your body. First, short sleep cycles decrease testosterone production. Second, it can cause you to feel too tired that you won’t want to have sex even though you need to.
Notice that you don’t sleep the same way in your 40s as you did in your 20s or 30s. This is because sleep starts to become unreliable and more difficult to get with age. You may feel exhausted when you go to bed, but you’ll still find it hard to fall asleep. Sometimes, you may have trouble going back to deep sleep once you wake up in the middle of the night.
If you want to learn how to increase libido, men, fix your sleep routine first. Do your best to stick to a solid sleeping schedule. Go to sleep at the same time each night and wake up at the same time in the morning.
Make your bedroom feel more like a cave. Keep it dark, quiet, and cool. If you can’t go back to sleep after peeing in the middle of the night, avoid drinking liquids 3 hours before bedtime.
6. Relax More, Reduce Your Stress Levels
Stress from work, the home, or other relationships also has serious effects on your sex drive. Indeed, some men like to relieve their stress by having sex. However, you may find it difficult to do this if you can’t amp yourself up to have sex.
Remember that psychological factors also affect your sexual desire. If you feel stressed out from your responsibilities, you may find it difficult to get an erection. Chronic stress can result in reduced libido, impotence, or ED.
Take part in activities that help you de-stress. Take long walks, play golf, or go fishing. Take some time off work if it’s the main stressor.
Address your stress and try to reduce it. Learn to accept that your sex drive will fluctuate. This is normal, and your partner needs to understand that this is okay.
7. Ease Your Bedroom Anxieties
Stress from outside the bedroom isn’t the only thing that’s affecting your performance in bed. Your pleasure and libido are also affected by sex anxieties. Age isn’t the problem here; rather, it is your state of mind and/or hormonal imbalance.
You may have self-esteem issues. You may feel stressed about orgasming. You may feel guilt or shame because your needs or actions oppose your religious beliefs or cultural norms.
Some men have experienced trauma. These don’t have to be from past sexual experiences. These can be memories from a bad relationship, sexual assault, or thoughtless comments from past partners.
A solution to this is to get counseling. Below, we’ll talk more about this. You can also get a doctor to help you treat hormonal imbalance.
8. Improve Your Relationship
Couples in their 40s often have had years or decades of being together. This is a good thing if you’ve had a healthy and loving relationship. However, even that won’t stop a man’s sex drive from declining.
If you’ve been with your partner for a long and comfortable time, you may experience a lull in sexual desire. This stems from the fading of the initial excitement of being together. Age is also a factor, as we’ve mentioned above.
Some relationships don’t do well, and the two people begin losing their intimacy. This can explain why you don’t feel the same excitement in bed when you’re with your partner. It also explains why you may begin to feel that spark fade and get bored with your partner.
The solution is to reignite that spark between the two of you. Start dating each other again as you did at the beginning of your relationship. Set date nights when you can bond with each other again.
Try to impress the other person in new or forgotten ways. Do activities together that don’t involve sex or being in the home together. Focus on spending quality time with each other.
Practicing open communication is the most important act. Reassure each other that you’re still in the same boat. Open and honest communication also offers a kind of intimacy for both of you that no other activity offers.
9. Limit Your Coffee and Alcohol Intake
Overconsumption of alcohol and coffee affect your sex drive. We already mentioned this above. Yet, alcohol and coffee are two things that many people aren’t willing to let go of.
Let’s first talk about alcohol overconsumption. Look back to how much you drink in a day. If you drink more than three or more alcoholic drinks a day, reconsider your drinking habits.
Having a little can increase your sex drive. However, you’ll want to limit yourself to two or fewer alcoholic beverages per day. Otherwise, you risk long-term health deterioration.
If you can take it, try to do an “alcohol fast”. Taking some time off of the bottle can help increase your testosterone. With that said, let’s move on to coffee overconsumption. Before we continue, note that there aren’t many studies on the effects of coffee and sex drive in men.
In the US, 63% of adults enjoy at least a cup of coffee every day. It helps get you out of your early morning lethargy and into work mode. However, like everything else, too much coffee is bad for you.
Some doctors say that caffeine stimulates blood flow to the genitals. However, drinking 5 or 10 cups a day won’t do much to help. Two cups of coffee are enough to be effective, and anything more becomes harmful to your sex drive.
10. Get in Touch With a Therapist
Finally, you have the choice of hiring a therapist to help you through this time of your life. This may not feel like a hack for increasing sex drive. However, once you connect with and open up to a therapist, you may start wondering why you didn’t do this first.
The problem may not only involve your testosterone. It isn’t always only physical conditions like diabetes as well. There may also be some psychological aspects that are keeping your sex drive low.
Trust in counseling and get yourself a therapist. You can opt for a general therapist or a sex therapist. Either one can help you through negative emotions about sex and self-esteem.
They can also help you address other causes of having a low libido. Depression and anxiety are two major factors that affect a man’s sex drive. Depression causes a lack of pleasure and a negative increase in emotional sensitivity.
It’ll help if you’ll be open to relationship counseling as well. It’ll help work through some factors that affect your sexual desire. For example, a therapist can show you how to work on your relationship and offer each other good, healthy sex.
Now You Know How to Increase Sex Drive in Men Over 40
For some of these hacks, you’ll have to do some level of lifestyle change. As a tip, one way to make these changes permanent is to develop habits. Instead of looking at your goals, focus on your habits, and they will lead you to your goals in time.
Now you know how to increase sex drive in men over 40! We hope these hacks help you find satisfaction in your life and your relationships again. If you enjoyed reading these hacks on how to increase sex drive in men, check out our other guides for more content.
