The average person spends more than 20,000 minutes of their life kissing, and for a very good reason. Kissing has been shown to boost your immune system and reduce allergic responses in people with skin or nasal allergies. A kiss a day really can keep the doctor away.
Behold here are all the great reasons you should be kissing someone right now.
Kissing Increases Your Sex Drive
This one may seem obvious, testosterone—the hormone responsible for sex drive in both women and men—is released into saliva during prolonged kissing.
Kissing Reduce Your Blood Pressure
Kissing helps to dilate your blood vessels, which may help lower your blood pressure.
Kissing Relieve Cramps and Headaches
The blood-vessel-dilation effect described above also helps to relieve pain, particularly from a headache or menstrual cramps.
Kissing Fight Cavities
When you kiss, saliva production increases in your mouth, and this helps to wash away plaque on your teeth that may lead to cavities. That said, cavity-causing bacteria can also be transmitted via a kiss, especially if the person you're kissing has poor oral habits. It's even been shown that cavity-causing bacteria can spread from a mother's kiss to her baby.
Kissing Release Your Happy Hormones
Kissing prompts your brain to release a happy elixir of feel-good chemicals like serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin. This isn't only important for your happiness, it also may also help to strengthen your relationship.
Your lips are also densely packed with sensory neurons, which are stimulated by the touch of another's lips. This prompts the release of sebum, which is thought to play a role in bonding.
Kissing Helps Burn Calories
It's not going to replace your workout session… but a vigorous kiss may burn 8-16 calories. Not too shabby for a kiss.
Kissing Boost Your Self-Esteem
One study found that men who received a passionate kiss before they left for work earned more money. This suggests the kiss (and perhaps the happy home-life it suggests) makes people happier, boosts self-esteem and, ultimately, more productive at work.
Kissing Tone Your Facial Muscles
A vigorous kiss helps you shape up your neck and jawline by working out a number of facial muscles.
A Kiss Is Used To Check Out Your Partner's Compatibility
A kiss can be a powerful measure of your initial attraction to a person, so much so that the majority of men and women surveyed reported that a first kiss could be a turn-off. Women, in particular, place more importance on kissing as a "mate assessment device" and as a means of "initiating, maintaining, and monitoring the current status of their relationship with a long-term partner.
Kissing Can Help Delay Signs Of Aging
Another reason to kiss as much as possible: The increased blood flow to your face can stimulate collagen production and contribute to anti-aging. It also stimulates the production of collagen and elastin, which is the substance “that beautiful skin is made of.”
Kissing Can Help Lessen Allergic Reactions
Bet you never knew making out could help ease itchy symptoms that come with nasal or skin allergies.
Kissing Relieves Pain
Whether sex, kissing or even hugging, these forms of affection have primal, biological roots that impact our bodies, typically in a beneficial way, even in the modern-day. So grab your partner today, give him or her a smooch, and embrace this fact: kissing can provide for a longer, healthier and, most would agree more enjoyable life.
READ ALSO, What happens to your body when you’re in one of those long dry spells? Find out!
An arousing kissing technique everyone should know
To begin with, remember that the perception of sensation is context-dependent so that a sensation that's sexy in one context will be annoying or even painful in another. What qualifies as a sexy context varies from individual to individual and couple to couple, but in general they involve trust, respect, a fair degree of privacy, a lack of stress, depression, and anxiety, plus a sense that your partner desires you.
So step 1: create a sexy context, whatever that means for you and your partner.
Step 2: Soft and slow.
No, slower than that, and softer than that. Just barely touch your lips to whatever part of your partner you're kissing; kiss them more with your breath than with your lips.
Then bite that part. Not too gently.
Travel to a nearby spot and repeat, incorporating judicious use of the tongue (wet skin + breath = good) as desired.
The focused attention required is, in and of itself, good technique. What you do matters less than that you are paying attention to your partner and enjoying shared sensations.
Whatever you do, do not wipe your tongue like a paintbrush over your partner's gums, inner cheeks, or the roof of their mouth. Your tongue goes between their lips in pursuit of their teeth or their tongue and for nothing else.
And don't, for the love of mike, press your open mouth into theirs so that both of you bash your lips against your teeth. Pressure does not equal passion.
And finally, don't CHEW on your partner's lips. Nip and suck, absolutely. But gnawing on your partner like a dog on a bunny just does not cut it, friends.