Turns out that old adage that says men think about sex every seven seconds isn’t entirely true. In fact, it’s way less — and while men do have lusty thoughts more often than women, the overall difference between them isn’t as dramatic as you may think.

In a recent study, Terri Fisher, PhD, professor of psychology at The Ohio State University at Mansfield, asked a group of college students to track how often they thought about sex, food and sleep. Her findings showed the typical man racked up 19 sexual thoughts per day, while the typical woman reported having about 10 such daily musings.

”The more comfortable they were with their sexuality, the more likely they were to have sexual thoughts and record them,” Fisher said. “While men were thinking more about sex, they were also thinking more about food and sleep.”

Although some men had as many as 388 sexual thoughts per day, it’s still a far cry from the more than 8,000 times dictated by the every-seven-second urban myth. In fact, many women in the study thought about sex more often than their male counterparts.

Janet Hyde, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the study “goes a long way toward overturning the stereotype about men being hypersexual and women not being interested in sex.”

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