Despite my acute shyness, I consider myself a good public and group speaker. I often get asked for tips on how to speak more effectively or how to prevent debilitating pre-speak nervousness. Well, I think I can throw all that old advice away and provide one simple tip. Forget pretending you are talking to one person or concentrating on a single point in the audience because having sex is apparently the best way to calm your nerves shortly before giving a speech or presentation to a large group according to Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, UK.

Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, UK, compared the impact of different sexual activities on blood pressure when a person later experiences acute stress. For a fortnight, 24 women and 22 men kept diaries of how often they engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI), masturbation or partnered sexual activity excluding intercourse. After, the volunteers underwent a stress test involving public speaking and mental arithmetic out loud.

Volunteers who’d had PVI but none of the other kinds of sex were least stressed, and their blood pressure returned to normal faster than those who’d only masturbated or had non-coital sex. Those who abstained had the highest blood-pressure response to stress.

So if you want to kick ass at your next big corporate meeting, make sure it’s penetrative sex - the magic vanishes if you pursue other forms of sexual gratification.

I do have some problems with the testing methodology (more than just not participating as a test subject) but I thought it was interesting news anyway.

(via The New Scientist)