Libido, sex drive, the urge to merge — whatever you may call it, one of the hardest nuts to crack in adult life is when your hunger for sex seems to decline or even vanish. It’s not something that only happens to middle-aged people. Losing your desire for sex is an equal-opportunity affliction that can strike as early as your 20s, regardless of sex, gender or orientation.
Before you see a medical doctor, you need to look into your heart and soul. The reality is that pills, treatments, and injections only go so far towards restoring libido. The vast majority of complaints about low libido, though, are not medical but emotional.
THE EMOTIONAL SIDE OF SEXUAL FUNCTION
After a certain age, and that age most often comes around 30-40, a lot of people start noticing a dip in their libido. Or they think they are noticing a dip in their libido. It’s good to check in with your M.D. to make sure there isn’t some real medical issue going on. But since I specialize in the science of orgasms, I know that more times than not, the problem is an emotional block. And when the problem is emotional, as it pretty routinely is, there is no quick fix, no pill that can untangle that tight knot. The good news, though, is that there are therapeutic processes that heal and restore function by helping you change some behaviors and re-orient your perspective in happier, healthier ways.
You see, by the time you reach middle-age, it’s not that you have run out of sexual steam. More often, it’s the truly common and exasperating realities of “adulting.” You may find yourself too tired from working or raising kids or both to want to do anything more than sleep when you hit the sheet. Or you’re over the newness of sex with your partner and maybe a little bored in bed. Or maybe a lot bored. Or you’ve had a lot of stress and disagreements with your partner and when you go to bed, you are bringing that baggage with you.
There’s an amusing story in the news today about how female dragonflies play dead, literally dropping from the sky to the ground, just to avoid sex with unwanted suitors. Must be because they don’t know how to fake headaches. Most women don’t have that problem. They blithely fake headaches, menstrual cramps, and fatigue to avoid sex.
When people say they “aren’t in the mood” what it really means is their deeper emotions are not in the right place for sex. And that means they are feeling some level of stress around sex and it’s blocking them from being open enough to enjoy intimacy. It isn’t as simple as “I don’t like that fly’s package” or “he buzzed too close,” or whatever a dragonfly is thinking. Sometimes, people evade sexual encounters with their partners because they don’t enjoy sex as much as they think they should. They think that other people are better in bed than they are and they get depressed or insecure. No matter if their partner thinks they’re sexy: once it’s lodged in their own minds that they are somehow inferior, the bottom can drop out of their libido. Insecurity is the number one culprit behind a lack of female libido, and it’s usually linked to how a woman feels about her body (especially her post-child-bearing body), her weight, and whether or not she sees herself as a sexy person.
Sometimes there are even bigger hang-ups and gripes that depress a human’s libido. They may feel ignored in their relationship or valued for the wrong reasons (their wallets or their bodies). Men can work themselves into a mess if they start feeling insecure about their performance or if they fear their partner sees them as a loser in life because they aren’t earning enough. It can make them too uptight to relax even during sex. They can get so internally angry and depressed they don’t want to touch or, just as bad, only want to touch during sex, without affection before or after. And then there is the natural instinct to dock someone a little pleasure that goes out of control in some couples. They begin to use sex as a way to manipulate and punish their partners. This is especially true in rocky marriages where people take adversarial positions with each other and carry anger and resentment day in and day out. Anyone who has been the subject of a partner using sex to punish them can feel permanently wounded. And as the heart goes, so too may go your sex drive.
I think every adult knows this inside: sex is a very emotional subject. Whether or not we are in touch with the emotions we have surrounding sexual issues and power issues in bed, those feelings buried inside us still shape our sexual desire. We may think we’ve done a spectacular job hiding them from everyone, but those feelings make themselves known when you are naked with someone else. If you have a penis, it may not perform the way you want it to if you’re stressing about whether you can please your partner or wondering why they won’t do the things you really like. If you have a vagina, it may dry up at the thought of having sex with a partner you don’t fully trust or who you think is judging you when you remove your clothes.
Being in the right state of mind is the only way you can keep a sex life alive for the long-term.
THREE STEPS TO TURN YOUR LIBIDO AROUND
CHOOSE SEX
One of the unspoken truths of long-term relationships is that, over time, people stop feeling like they’re getting the sex they really want out of their relationships. They want better orgasms or they want sexual stimulation their partner doesn’t want to give them, or they want to do it more often or they wish it lasted longer or felt more satisfying.
You can kill your own sex drive by repeatedly damaging it with negative experiences and emotions. For example, people who repeatedly have inorgasmic sex with their partner eventually sour to sex altogether. The disappointment, which they may not even admit to their partner for fear of hurting their feelings, may turn into a distaste for the act itself.
People who can’t live out any of their true needs in bed, whether that is getting the oral sex they want or the fetish they need go through a similar cycle. If it doesn’t drive them to cheat, as it often does, it may drive them to withdraw and build dependency on porn. Meanwhile, if you live someone who frequently turns you down for sex, the rejection can slowly grind away at your self-esteem until you don’t even want to try to have sex with your partner, relying on masturbation to keep you sane.
THE BEST STRATEGY is to CHOOSE SEX.
Sexually successful people share a key trait: they are able to put themselves in the mood. They learn how to relax, how to open up and become receptive, and how to stoke their erotic energy when THEY want to have sex. Think about porn stars. They can’t wait until they feel super-horny. When the director calls them, they have a job to do, and that means putting themselves in the mood by free choice. They know how to summon their own horniness. They don’t wait for the biochemistry to inform them. They own their own sexuality. You should too.
People who always wait to be in the mood will likely see their sexual activity decline over time. That’s because they are passively waiting for their bodies to tell THEM when to have sex. That may work for you at 18 or in your 20s but since adulthood brings so many fluctuations and declines in hormones, it’s not a sensible way for sexually fit adults to live. All adults can learn to make sex a choice, not an itch they suddenly need to scratch.
(I strongly recommend my Master Series in Erotic Awakening to learn how — I show you to open yourself up step by step towards driving your own desire instead of being driven. Once you master those skills, you can arouse yourself whenever you want.)
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Master Sessions in Erotic Awakening
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TREAT SEX AS A HEALTH REQUIREMENT
Because it is. Your brain and all the organs in your body are born with a hard-wired expectation that your sex system will not only work but work efficiently. Your brain knows sex is important. Your organs do too. All in all, an orgasmic sexual experience benefits every part of your body, from head to toe. It isn’t an added perk: it’s a requirement for genuine adult health.
If you compare people who have bad or non-existent sex lives with those who have active, happy ones, the latter group have a better chance of living longer, strong, and feeling personally satisfied in life. Without the boosts of the chemicals that we get from sex, we become more depressed, feel more isolated and cut off, and the less we want sex. There is no substitute for the internal full-body wash of beneficial chemicals that sex gives you. Sex is your body’s constantly renewable source of positive energy! Think of orgasm as a kind of super-multi-vitamin that pushes your body to achieve better health and a higher level of performance, inside and outside the bedroom.
There is no substitute for the internal full-body wash of beneficial chemicals that sex gives you. Sex is your body’s constantly renewable source of positive energy! Think of orgasm as a kind of super-multi-vitamin that pushes your body to achieve better health and a higher level of performance, inside and outside the bedroom.
Sex is also intertwined with human optimism and positive energy. Having sex makes us feel more optimistic about life. At the same time, you need a sense of optimism to have great sex — including the belief that sex will feel good, that you can be satisfied, that you are happy in your flesh. So the more you have sex, the more optimistic you become; and the more optimistic you become, the more sex you will want. It’s a beautiful system, wired into us by Mother Nature, and learning to work with it instead of sabotaging it with stress is the path to a long and happy life.
MAKE A SEX BUCKET LIST
Most commonly, relationships die a slow sexual death. It seldom happens overnight. It can start with thinking there is no time for sex or just accepting an inadequately joyous sex life because you don’t think you have any other choice. Little by little, you become less aware of your own sexual needs as everything else in life overtakes your natural urges.
The best way to keep your brain connected to your sexuality is to stay mindful of your innate sexual desires. .That means staying low-key aware of your sexual needs and keeping it on the back-burner of your brain. A great way to start this process is by creating a bucket list that you can keep modifying over time. It can become a secret life-project to keep yourself mindful that you are a sexual person and that you need and deserve to have orgasms on a regular, predictable basis
Here is in three easy steps is an exercise my clients have used with great success.
1 WHAT TO DO: Make a bucket list of sex acts or fantasies you want to live out before all is said and done. Since you’ll be keeping this document all to yourself, put it someplace where only you can find it, and start listing as many different things as you can think of. Put down fantasies you had in the past, any kinks or fetishes you’d love to explore, any sex acts you are curious about. Take your time with it, let yourself drift away on pleasant thought as you write it, and return to it as often as you like to get inspired.
2 HOW TO WORK IT: Your bucket list is a sexual to-do list. Your ultimate goal is to slowly be able to cross off the things you would love to see happen in your sex life. Don’t totally delete them — you want to see your own accomplishments, so put them at the bottom of the file under the heading “Achievements.”
Keep your bucket list CURRENT. Come back to it anytime there is something you’ve done or you’ve come up with a sexy new idea you want to live out.
3 LET IT EVOLVE WITH YOU: Most bucket lists are one time things, where you make a simple list and cross each entry off. Your sex bucket list, however, is a living document. It reflects your sexual self-awareness and charts your sexual needs and feelings in your own emotional growth. Return to the document as often as you want. Some things you thought would be sexy just a few months ago might look boring today. Or maybe there is something you want to add that didn’t make your list last time around? Make sure to update your bucket list at least 4 times a year for the first year or two. Your goal is not just to cross everything off your list but to help you stay deeply aware of what a truly sexy person you are and how much erotic potential you genuinely possess.
