Is your sex drive unusually high, or something more?
Wanting sex often is not a symptom of anything, and the range across the population is enormous. What the clinical literature actually looks at is whether you still feel in control, what the behaviour is costing you, and whether sex has quietly become the thing you reach for when you feel bad. The HBI-19 asks about all three and nothing about how much. Answer it honestly and see where your responses land on the screening framework. This assessment on Find The Norm uses the HBI-19 instrument (Reid et al. 2011) and ICD-11 Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder criteria (6C72) to score your hypersexual behaviour pattern relative to clinical norms.
Rate each item on a 5-point scale: 1 = Never, 2 = Rarely, 3 = Occasionally, 4 = Often, 5 = Very often. Items 1 to 4 of 19.
Items 5 to 8 of 19.
Items 9 to 12 of 19.
Items 13 to 16 of 19.
Items 17 to 19 of 19.
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What is the difference between a high sex drive and hypersexuality?
Frequency is not the dividing line, and that is the single thing people get wrong about this. A high sex drive means wanting sex often and thinking about it often, which is ordinary and spread very widely across the population, as the masturbation frequency calculator shows on NSSHB data across age groups. The HBI-19 measures three other things instead. It asks whether you feel you have lost control of the behaviour, whether it is doing damage to your relationships or daily life, and whether sex has become the main way you handle bad feelings. Someone having a great deal of sex with a willing partner and feeling fine afterwards registers on none of them. Our should I break up quiz benchmarks your situation against relationship population data.
What is Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder (CSBD)?
CSBD entered the ICD-11, the World Health Organization's diagnostic manual, in 2018 under the code 6C72, classified as an impulse control disorder rather than an addiction. That wording was deliberate, because the addiction framing carries assumptions about tolerance and withdrawal the evidence does not support here. The criteria describe a persistent failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses that keeps producing the behaviour over an extended period, with marked distress or real impairment attached to it. American psychiatry went the other way, and the DSM-5 left the diagnosis out altogether. For a picture of ordinary sexual behaviour in the general population, the sex statistics reference page has the survey figures.
How accurate is the HBI-19?
High sensitivity, about 92%, at the recommended cutoff of 53, which comes from the validation work by Reid et al. (2011), while the specificity reported at that cutoff varies a good deal from one study to the next. The three-factor structure of Control, Consequences and Coping has replicated across multiple samples and cultures, which is more than a lot of screening instruments manage. What no questionnaire can do is see past a response bias, and shame pushes answers down while anxiety about your own behaviour pushes them up. A clinical evaluation is far more accurate than any of this. Our frequency calculator shows how you compare against the full data set.
Frequently asked questions
Prevalence studies find higher rates in men, though the gap is smaller than once thought: 10.3% of men and 7.0% of women in a 2016 US national sample (Dickenson et al., 2018). Women face heavier social stigma around sexual behaviour, which suppresses disclosure and help-seeking alike. Early research also leaned hard on male samples, and the assessment tools built out of those samples may simply miss the way compulsive sexual behaviour presents in women.
Cognitive behavioural therapy has the most evidence behind it, working on triggers, distorted thinking and better ways of coping. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has shown promise too. SSRIs or naltrexone reduce sexual preoccupation for some people. Group therapy and 12-step programmes add peer support on top. Most people who stay with structured treatment report real improvement within 12 to 24 months, which is a better outlook than the subject's reputation would lead you to expect.
Yes, and the association is well documented. Studies of men seeking treatment for hypersexual behaviour keep finding ADHD among them (Reid et al., 2011), probably because impulsivity and weak self-regulation sit underneath both. Treating the ADHD often brings the sexual symptoms down with it, which suggests that for some people the behaviour is part of the ADHD. The WHO ASRS-v1.1 screener is a validated first step if you suspect it.
Yes, which is exactly why frequency counts for so little here. Nothing in the HBI-19 asks how much sex you have, so two people with identical sex lives can land at opposite ends of the scale. The whole instrument turns on private experience, meaning whether you feel able to stop, what the behaviour is costing you and what you are using it for. Someone can look busy, cheerful and entirely fine while answering yes to all of that.
The DSM-5 working groups could not agree that the evidence supported a distinct disorder, with one strand of research arguing that a great deal of the distress people report about their sexual behaviour comes from moral conflict rather than from compulsivity. ICD-11 took the other view in 2018 and placed it among the impulse control disorders under 6C72, requiring a pattern over six months or more with marked distress or impairment across personal, family, social, educational or occupational life. Two manuals, the same behaviour, an open disagreement about where the line sits.
An outpatient sample of men, in Reid et al. (2011), and that shapes how the result should be read. The cutoff of 53 was set on people already seeking help, so it separates cases from non-cases inside a clinical population rather than across the general public. At that cutoff it catches about 92 people in 100 with a clinical pattern, though how many it correctly clears varies from study to study.
No, because the HBI-19 measures compulsive sexual behaviour broadly rather than pornography specifically. Several of its items do catch patterns relevant to problematic use, particularly the ones about loss of control and consequences. Pornography addiction as a term is contested in clinical science, and neither the DSM-5 nor the ICD-11 recognises it as a distinct diagnosis. Some researchers argue the distress people report comes more from moral incongruence than from any compulsive pattern. A therapist can tell those two apart, which no questionnaire can.
A result above the threshold is a prompt for a conversation, never a diagnosis. Plenty of people who score above the cutoff turn out not to meet full CSBD criteria on clinical evaluation, and plenty below it would still benefit from support because the distress is real regardless of where the number fell. What matters more than the score is whether your sexual behaviour is causing you genuine harm or misery. If it is, help works, whatever a screener says.
No. Everything is calculated in your browser, so your answers never reach a server, a database or a third party. We collect no personally identifiable information from the calculator at all. Downloading or sharing a result card is something you start, and your own device handles it. Privacy matters everywhere on this site, and it matters more on a page like this one.
- Reid RC et al. (2011). Reliability, Validity, and Psychometric Development of the Hypersexual Behavior Inventory in an Outpatient Sample of Men. Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, 18(1), 30-51. DOI: 10.1080/10720162.2011.555709
- Reid RC, Carpenter BN, Gilliland R, Karim R (2011). Problems of self-concept in a patient sample of hypersexual men with attention-deficit disorder. Journal of Addiction Medicine, 5(2), 134 to 140. DOI: 10.1097/ADM.0b013e3181e6ad32
- Kraus SW et al. (2018). Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder in the ICD-11. World Psychiatry, 17(1), 109-110. DOI: 10.1002/wps.20499
- Dickenson JA et al. (2018). Prevalence of Distress Associated With Difficulty Controlling Sexual Urges, Feelings, and Behaviors in the United States. JAMA Network Open, 1(7), e184468. DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.4468
- World Health Organization. (2018). ICD-11: Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder (6C72). https://icd.who.int/browse/2024-01/mms/en#1630268048