Your sex drive, also called libido is one of the best markers of overall health.

As we age, and as our health deteriorates, a flattened sex drive is one of the first signs. This can then create a cascade where you’re less motivated to train hard, eat healthy, and generally succeed, which further decreases your drive.

Whether you want to increase your sex drive as an assessment of overall health, or because you’re trying to step up your game in the bedroom, here are ten interventions you can consider.

Some of these are the tried and true basics. As we get lower on the list, though, we’ll get into more experimental options that can help you in the short term.

1) Improve Your Sleep Habits

If you want to feel better, look better, or do just about anything well, don’t skimp out on sleep.

The whole “4am wake up” culture is stupid. It doesn’t make you tough. In fact, on a physiological level, it does the opposite. Those who are sleep-deprived tend to be fatter, worse at their jobs, have less sex, and suffer from low sex drive.

We have written several articles on how to improve your sleep. A great place to start is this article on 5 ways to fall asleep faster.

2) Lift Heavy Weights

Another tried and true method to increase testosterone, and therefore increase libido is to consistently train major muscle groups.

What’s more important is to do so consistently, but over the course of a training week, you should aim to do some kind of compound squat, deadlift, push, and pull movement every week.

For more ideas to optimize your training to suit your health and performance, read from our catalog of articles on training.

3) Manage Stress

When our nervous system is in a sympathetic “fight or flight” state, we divert fewer resources to recovery, and naturally, to sex and reproduction.

On a more practical level, if we’re stressed out, we’re much less like to even want to have sex.

Imagine a world where you don’t want sex? Well, that’s the world tons of Americans live in, because they’re overworked and tired from their jobs.

If you know what you need to do to limit stress, then do what works for you. Here are two more specific tips on how to manage stress to invigorate your sex life.

4) Have a Work Curfew

In our remote-work world, so many of us don’t have clear distinctions between our work and our personal life. This means work can often bleed into the rest of our lives, and we work late into the evening.

This is disastrous for a host of reasons, including our sex drive. Simply, if we’re staring at our computer, we won’t even want to have sex.

But we can prevent it by instituting rules for ourselves. As a simple rule to start off, avoid work two hours before bed. This will also help your sleep.

5) Add a Deep Breathing or Meditation Practice

Look, I know you’ve been told to meditate about a thousand times. A simpler way to think about meditation is to isolate one component of it that in a vacuum has lots of benefits: deep breathing.

When we take a deep breath, it activates our parasympathetic, “rest-and-digest” autonomic nervous system. It literally helps us relax and relieve stress.

You can aim for just 3-5 deep breaths once a day to start, and see how you feel.

6) Eat Foods High in Zinc

Foods high in zinc, like oysters, are known as aphrodisiacs. Zinc can improve testosterone, sexual performance, as was studied in mice, and yes, libido.

Here is a list of zinc-abundant foods from the NIH. If you don’t include some of these foods in your diet, then you may want to look into a zinc supplement.

Okay, now it’s time for the strategies that you maybe haven’t heard of.

7) Limit Alcohol

Because alcohol is so commonplace in our culture, it’s easy to forget that it’s poisonous. At high enough doses in a short period of time, alcohol will kill.

And at low enough doses consistently, it can lead to alcohol dependence or alcoholism.

With regards to libido specifically, studies on both men and women have shown a decrease in sex drive with regular alcohol consumption.

Does this mean you should never drink? No, it does not. However, a good rule of thumb is to have 4 or fewer drinks per month.

This is somewhat arbitrary. But it still allows you one night of a lot of fun, or several nights of fun but not too much fun. Yet it also keeps your alcohol intake to a minimum.

8) Try Kratom for Short-Term Libido Boosts

Now, kratom comes with risks, which we cover in-depth in this article on the different strains of kratom.

Specifically when it comes to libido long-term use has reported a decrease in libido. The strongest case for this comes from this 2021 case study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

However, there are countless anecdotal reports suggesting that kratom in the short-term increases libido and prevents premature ejaculation.

We’re going to have a whole article on this later, but if you have the basics down and you’re looking for an extra libido boost, kratom could be an interesting option.

9) Use a Tongkat Ali Supplement

Tongkat Ali has interesting research to increase testosterone, but much more ample research to increase libido. It comes from a plant named eurycoma longifolia, or LongJack (yes, that’s actually the name.)

It’s also relatively inexpensive, and you can get it easily as a single ingredient product.

10) Improve Your Sexual Confidence

Lastly, we can neglect the mental side of libido. If you’re confident, and you feel good about your potential to perform in bed, you’re much more likely to want to have sex.

Of course, I could talk about confidence here and other options, but instead I will refer you to a few books that I think can give you confidence in the bedroom.

She Comes First

Yes, this is an entire book about how to give women head. It’s a gem. Just buy it.

The Multi-Orgasmic Man

Based on the title, you can also guess the premise of the book. However, regardless of how far you take it, it will help you learn to control your ejaculation and subsequently be more confident in bed.

Because sex drive is so multivariable, there are countless methods to improve your sex drive. There are physical and hormonal elements, but our mental and emotional states also play a huge role in it.

The most important piece to keep in mind is that healthy habits often lead to a healthy sex drive. If you’re training hard, eating right, and sleeping right, that’s the foundation.