Will caffeine give me more intense orgasms?

The internet is rife with sex misinformation – and our F***ing Nonsense series is here to bring you the real facts. First up: can coffee help you cum?

By Beth Ashley29 Feb 2024

3 mins read time

Psst! Heard the rumour that caffeine can intensify your orgasms, help you last longer in bed, and increase your sexual desire? Well, it’s out there – there are multiple reports on the claim from magazines and thousands of views about the supposed sippable sex hack on TikTok.

As part of our new F***ing Nonsense series, we’re calling out the sex content on your social media newsfeeds that can often be rife with misinformation, and giving you the sex re-education you actually deserve. A fun Sex Ed class, if you will.

First up, we’re starting with the viral sex and caffeine myth. Which – we’ll tell you now, isn’t actually true. An oat latte won’t transform your sex life, sorry. Yet both TikTok and Instagram seem filled with videos claiming that drinking coffee can strengthen your orgasms, make you last longer in bed, or increase your sexual desire in general. While that might not quite be factually correct, there is more to this story.

The caffeine orgasm trend first took off when a TikToker told their followers that coffee intensifies your orgasms by a whopping 50 per cent. It wasn’t long before other users began making their own posts about it, telling their audiences they’d given it a go and found benefits from making orgasms stronger, lasting longer in bed and just generally making sex ‘better’. And very quickly, it was all over our newsfeeds.

But this isn’t a real statistic. It’s easy to see how this link has been made, since caffeine is known for making you alert, helping you stay awake for longer and completing more tasks. Yet there’s no actual scientific evidence out there that says caffeine helps with sex at all.

Some magazines misreported this claim after it blew up on TikTok, claiming that there was evidence to support it, but this wasn’t quite correct. What likely happened was that they were thinking of one coffee and sex study performed on rats.

In the study, some rats were given caffeine, and they engaged in a lot more sex than the other rats. But this study didn’t test orgasm intensity specifically, nor did it explore whether caffeine had an effect on how long you last in bed, nor your sexual desire levels. And as we’re not rats, the findings of this study don’t really apply to us anyway.

Some people have said they personally have better sex when they’ve drank coffee, but this is a purely anecdotal experience. And experts point out this could be due to other factors. For example, lots of people experience stress relief from drinking coffee. This is because caffeine is known to inhibit receptors in the brain for the chemical adenosine according to another study (also performed on mice – poor guys!). The researchers found that these receptors also control the negative effects of chronic stress and that stress-induced behaviour can be reversed by blocking those receptors.

So, coffee could make your brain quieter and reduce your stress levels. And that might, in turn, help you to have better sex. (The real sex tip to take from these studies, then: you have better sex when you're calm, compared with when you’re anxious.)

It makes sense that a lot of us would jump at the chance at such a simple fix to sex problems such as lacklustre orgasm experiences, not lasting in bed or low sexual desire. After all, one study found that only 16 to 17% of 18-25-year-olds are satisfied with their sex lives.

But chugging a cappuccino and hoping for the best won’t help you to become happier with your sex life. The most effective way to experience more pleasure, more intense orgasms – or whatever your specific sexual goals look like – is to figure out what makes you tick. That can be done by exploring your body and engaging in some experimentation, both by yourself and with your partner, if you have one.

It’s also worth noting that there is no ‘correct’ amount of time to last in bed, caffeinated or not. Understanding what you and your partner both desire, and working to achieve that satisfaction together is far more important than winning an imaginary race.

Of course, if you enjoy a good cup of coffee before sex and find that it helps you get in the mood, that’s amazing. No one is going to stop you. But it’s important to note that this isn't a scientifically-backed solution to your sex problems, and it won’t work for everyone.