The Less You Notice, The More You Bed: A Curious and Clumsy Study on Mood Swings, Mindfulness, and the Numbers Game

Monday, February 10, 2025.

Let’s start with the obvious: life is a chaotic mess.

Some people manage the chaos by meditating.

Others do it by impulse-buying decorative candles.

And some, according to a new study published in Sexes, do it by having more sexual partners.

That’s right.

Researchers have taken a long, hard look at how women navigate rapid emotional highs and lows and whether their tendency to observe their own thoughts (or not) influences their romantic statistics.

The findings?

If you tend to oscillate between euphoria and despair faster than a stock market crash, and if you don’t really notice your thoughts much, you might just have more sex partners.

The Science Behind the Sheets

The study in question recruited 469 women, most of them young, white, and likely tired of being asked when they’re getting married. These women answered an online survey measuring three key ingredients of modern existential dread:

• Affective lability – a fancy term for mood swings so abrupt they could give you whiplash.

• Boredom Proneness – the extent to which one finds life excruciatingly dull and seeks stimulation, sometimes in ill-advised places.

• Mindfulness – the ability to notice thoughts without immediately reacting to them, something that sounds great in theory but is rarely practiced when scrolling through Twitter.

• Participants also disclosed how many sexual partners they’d had in the past year, which is always a fun conversation starter.

The Hypothesis: Does Mindfulness Curb Impulsivity?

Researchers expected to find that mindfulness and boredom proneness would act as cosmic referees, keeping impulsive behavior (like casual sex) in check. This, however, did not happen. The universe, as usual, had other plans.

Instead, what they found was more specific: Women who reported rapid emotional shifts between depression and elation had more sexual partners if they were not in the habit of noticing their thoughts.

In simpler terms: If you’re an emotional rollercoaster and you also aren’t paying attention to the control panel, you may find yourself waking up in someone else’s bed more often.

Why Might This Be?

The researchers offered a few theories.

Maybe it’s not boredom that leads to impulsive sex, but rather sensation-seeking– the craving for novelty and excitement. (Think skydiving, but for your love life.)

Maybe some people engage in risky sex in a way that isn’t captured by just counting partners. Maybe future studies should examine out-of-control sexual behavior more directly instead of reducing human intimacy to a numerical headcount.

They also acknowledged the usual scientific caveats: The sample was mostly young and white, which means the results might not translate to the entire human population.

Also, this study only looked at women, so who knows what’s going on with the men?

And, crucially, the study was cross-sectional, meaning it took a snapshot in time rather than tracking long-term patterns.

In other words, we don’t know whether low mindfulness causes people to seek out more partners, or whether having a robust roster of romantic conquests simply makes it harder to focus on inner thoughts. But, boy wasn’t this so fun to ask a bunch of young white girls sex questions without catching a knee in your scrotum?

Final Thoughts: Should We Be Worried?

It depends. If rapid mood swings and impulsive behavior lead to decisions one later regrets, that’s worth examining.

But if folks are simply out there living their best lives, and not cheating on unsuspecting partners, who am I, as a therapist, to judge?

The researchers suggest that mindfulness-based interventions might help manage emotional volatility, and while that sounds perfectly reasonable, so does the possibility that some otherwise unattached folks just like sex.

Who are we to judge? Some research has a whiff of misogny. So does this poorly designed study.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Lorenzi, C. A., de Jong, D. C., & Faulkenberry, R. S. (2024). The roles of affective lability, boredom, and mindfulness in predicting number of sex partners within women. Sexes.