At some point in your 30s & 40s your hormones will start to fluctuate more than usual – and this can leave you with a low libido.
Fluctuating & falling hormones = low libido
Estrogen (Oestrogen) keeps the delicate tissues of your vulva and vagina lubricated, the correct pH, healthy & free from inflammation & other pesky symptoms.
When levels are low this can cause vaginal dryness and soreness which can make sexual intimacy painful – which is a total turnoff for ourselves.
Testosterone influences your level of interest in sex, and the amount of pleasure you feel from it, it regulates seratonin which boosts mood, and it stimulates the release of dopamine responsible for your feelings of pleasure.
When levels are low, you can feel flat, low energy, and not really up for anything.
The good news is you can even safely & effectively supplement testosterone & estrogen if you’re in perimenopause.
FACTOR in your hormones as a potential cause of low libido, and demand that your wellness team do, too!
You can also coach yourself through low libido and what it means for you, perhaps even boost your sex drive, by identifying how it makes you feel, and how you’d rather feel instead. That’s where sexual wellness coach Julie Merrill comes in!
In this episode we talk about:
- the impact low libido can have on not just your sex life, but your WHOLE life
- the role of the brain as the largest sex organ
- how to get your body working with your brain to boost your libido
Julie Merrill coaches women who experience low libido, anxiety and guilt around sex and helps them develop the connection they seek with themselves and their partner. Together through coaching they explore current beliefs, ideas and expectations around sex and she helps them define what sexual wellness means for them, so they can create the sex life they want!
You can contact Julie & book a free discovery consultation at https://juliemerrillcoaching.com/contact
You can watch the full episode on youtube.
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Full Transcript:
– We think libido just happens to us, but we create it in our brain. Because if a woman is saying, oh, sex is just too much work, then she’s gonna create so much evidence of how it is work. Now in this episode, we talk about the impact that low libido can have on not just your sex life, but your whole life, and the role of your brain as the largest sex organ in your body, as well as how to get your body working with your brain to boost your libido and maybe even supercharge it. Now, timestamps are in the description below so that you can jump to the part that feels relevant for you. Enjoy. So Julie, you coach women on their sexual wellness. So what kind of impact do you see that low libido has on the self, on life in general and broader relationships?
– When women have low libido, they tend to think a lot of things about themselves, about their relationship, about their body. They’re thinking that something’s wrong with them. They’re thinking that, I guess this is just how life is going to be, that there’s nothing that they can do about it. And that impacts everywhere where they show up in their lives with their families, with their partners at work, and when they believe that something’s wrong with them, how are they showing up in every other area? Probably not as well as if they think, okay, this is interesting. This is happening. What can I do to make this different? What can I do to help myself increase my libido, increase my happiness in any area of life? I think it just, it kind of is this overshadow of what could be happening for their, their life. As a woman, there’s a lot of social pressure to be very sexual and sexually active and very kind of capable and confident in the bedroom as well, which, which probably makes matters worse in terms of the pressure you put on yourself and questioning why, where your libido went, why you don’t have a libido and, and feeling like you must be not normal. And you know, the ripple effect and the, the extra drama that creates around that. But I know you’re a fan as well of Emily Nagosky’s book “Come As You Are”. And there were two or three sentences in her book that really jumped out at me as being fascinating, and I instantly wanted to know more. So she says that genital response happens between our legs, but arousal happens between our ears. And that arousal is not about your genitals, it’s about your brain. And then when I look at your website and it says, you know, letters right across the middle, your brain is your largest sex organ. I’m thinking, oh my goodness, I need to know more about that. So tell us about the role of the brain in sex and libido. The role of the brain is paramount. It is the thing, because what we’re thinking about libido, what we’re thinking about sex, what we’re thinking about our bodies affects how we’re feeling. And if we are feeling certain ways, then we’re gonna do certain things because our, our feelings really drive what we do. And then from those actions that we’re taking from this place of, oh, something’s wrong with me, then we create all these things that we really don’t want in our lives. Like some women, they come to me and they’re, they’re thinking, okay, this is just how it’s gonna be from now on. This is low libido. I guess this is life. This is just what I have to deal with. Others think I’m broken. Something’s wrong with me. Others think: there’s nothing I can do. Well, those thoughts create feelings of apathy, of shame, of being discouraged. And when they are feeling those things, maybe they’re gonna avoid any type of physical touch or anything with their partner or anyone else. They’re gonna, they’re, they’re gonna not talk about how they’re feeling. They’re gonna spend their time watching TV, scrolling on social media, eating. They’re not gonna reach out to anyone. They’re not gonna go look for, oh, maybe there’s some help out there. Maybe there’s a coach. Maybe there’s a physician or a practitioner who knows about low libido who could help me. And maybe they’ll just decide that maybe sex isn’t gonna be a big part of their lives now. And when they do those things, they become a person who allows their libido to redefine who they are as a woman, and they make it more difficult to increase it. So if we wanna pull back our power, like reclaim our power and actually maybe use the, our brain as a tool to reinvigorate our libido, maybe even supercharge it. Like how can we start to get our body working with our brain to get our libido back? You go in when you’re buying some clothes and you try things on and you wanna see how they fit and like, Hmm, how does this feel? Same thing with our thoughts. Like if we’re having these negative thoughts about, well, I’m broken, there’s nothing I can do that doesn’t feel very good, but what if we experiment with different thoughts? Like, okay, well I’m open to believing that maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe this is just something that I get to learn more about myself with having a low libido. What can I do to improve it? Maybe it’s, maybe I’m thinking that it is possible that I can figure out how to increase my libido. Or maybe there is help for me out there somewhere that creates a curiosity. Maybe we can learn more about our bodies we’re, our bodies are not like everyone else’s bodies. Each body is different. And what works for one woman isn’t gonna work for another woman. But really giving ourselves permission to figure out how our own libido works. So those kind of thoughts really open ourselves up to better feelings like self-compassion, curiosity, hopefulness optimism, and really feeling empowered that, oh, okay, here’s an opportunity for me to learn something about myself. What am I gonna do with that? What strikes me as important then, is first starting to notice the thoughts that you’re having in the first place that are kind of, I guess, running on autopilot really, but really having a ripple effect and defining how we feel and how we behave and, and the kind of impact it has on our life. So how do we first become aware of exactly what we’re thinking?
– Well, sometimes those cues of feelings of maybe depressive feelings or shame or discouragement, those are cues like, okay, why am I feeling this way? Be be really in tune with what you’re feeling. And when we notice those feelings, what are we thinking that create those feelings? Like there’s, if there’s nothing I can do and I feel discouraged just noticing the thoughts that are going through our brains, we have thousands and thousands of thoughts that go through our brains every day. Consciously and unconsciously. When we become aware of the thoughts, that’s when we have the power to change them. Negative feelings are a hot button. You kind of know when you’re anxious or depressed or worried or concerned, but that’s at one end of the spectrum. There might be some thoughts and feelings that are, you think are positive, but are actually having a negative ripple effect. How do you kind of extract those that may be having a negative impact on your life as well? That’s a great question. Can you gimme an example of like something like positive feelings or positive things that could be having a negative impact? Maybe something like, oh, I’ve got a low libido, but it doesn’t really matter because I’m done, I’m done with sex. Our relationship has passed that. Anyway, So what if that’s okay for that person though? Yeah, sometimes it’s okay to have low libido. What if that person is deciding that, okay, maybe she’s done with this part of her life? There’s always that option and we can honor that. And that is not a problem. But notice, okay, why do I not want this to be part of my life anymore? Am I thinking that it’s not possible? So I’m just kind of giving up or giving in, like we get to really decide what we want and if having a low libido and not having sex to be part of our life anymore is what we really want. And we really like our reasons for that, there’s no problem with that. But knowing that we get to choose, we don’t just fold to whatever is happening. Like, yeah, okay, this is gone, so therefore I’m just not gonna make it a big deal anymore. What if that’s not what we really want? So in a sense then the good thoughts create a sense of inner peace. Definitely, yeah. And when we feel that inner peace we get to, we, we are so much more empowered to make decisions from a clean place.
– I like what you said about being okay with your reasons. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
– Yeah. I mean, I have clients who have had severe pain with intercourse or with sex and, and they and their partners have decided, okay, we’ve gone to physicians, we’ve gone to physiotherapists. We have tried so many things in this still is a pain painful, physically a painful thing for the woman. And so they’ve just decided that it’s okay. It doesn’t have to be, it doesn’t have to look a certain way for them to still be intimate and to have sex in different ways. And so just know that it’s not all or nothing. There’s so much room in between to really help ourselves, just be really happy with where we are.
– So we had one woman in the body brain reset community who said that she experiences dryness at times lower libido. And she says in brackets, “boo, this upsets me the most” and that she’s worried about libido long term. How could you, how would you coach someone through this, this kind of experience and thinking,
– Well, and I think we throw around the word low libido, but do we really know what it means? So I just looked it up. It says, low libido is decreased or lower interest in sex. And of course this can be caused by hormonal fluctuations. Like vaginal dryness is a big deal. It’s very uncomfortable to have intercourse when you have a very dry vagina. So that’s a clue, like, okay, something isn’t quite working the way it used to. What can I do to help that pain go away? So my brain is not thinking, oh, sex equals pain. That’s a cue. The pain is a cue to you. The dryness is a cue. So like, okay, something is going on here a little bit. What can we do to help that feel better? But also our brain needs to be in this place where, okay, I can fix the dryness. I can figure out how I can make myself more lubricated, whether it’s hormones, whether it’s natural things, whether it’s different lubrications, but the brain is always gonna be part of this. So what are we gonna do with our brain when we have that dryness? And the brain is the part of the, the sexual part of a woman that helps us realize, okay, we can get what we want. And there are ways that we can fix this. Like we think libido just happens to us, but we create it in our brain. Because if a woman is saying, oh, sex is just too much work, then she’s gonna create so much evidence of how it is work for her. But if she’s thinking, if this is something for me, this is pleasure that I want to take part in, that’s gonna create some different turn ons for her.
– This show is sponsored by the body Brain Reset the 14-day micro course that helps you reset your body and brain and feel like yourself again without diets, detoxes, superfoods, and exercising. It puts women in their thirties and forties back in control of their body and life, so they can see that energized and motivated women in the mirror again, watch a free lesson at bodybraininreset.co/free I’ll see you over there.
– I can sense as well then that we have these layers of thoughts that kind of compound as well. Because you may have, for example, you said, you know, pain is acute. So these physical symptoms that women can start to experience more of in their thirties and forties, like thrush or candida, BV and UTIs and just general sort of like irritation and inflammation and dryness. So there’s that sort of physical element and then that, that how they feel about that, but also how it changes their experience of sex being very sort of unpleasant or painful. And then also those additional, that additional layer of thoughts where, oh, this isn’t really fun. This feels like work. This feels like an obligation, a duty, and a chore. So how do we start to sort of untangle all those different thoughts?
– Right. Well, addressing the pain first, the physical pain. When our body has sex and it’s in pain, our brain is going to say, okay, having sex equals pain. It’s gonna not want to have sex because it doesn’t wanna put our body into that situation where we feel pain. So that’s something that’s really important to, to really figure out because we’re not gonna wanna have sex. Our body, our brain is actually very protective. It has that primitive side where it’s like, oh, I wanna protect you from any kind of pain or discomfort, and that’s what it’s supposed to do. But then this adult part of our brain, it’s like, okay, we have pain. Maybe we can do something to figure out how to make that pain go away. Because sex doesn’t need to be painful. We can help it. So it’s not painful. So that’s just one layer. ’cause so many women do have pain that’s a cue that something is going on. Maybe they do have the candida, maybe they do have the urinary tract infections. Let’s get that under control first. So there’s, there’s almost like layers of, of, of actions to take really like identifying these cues, the the negative feelings and maybe the physical feelings and sensations. And then sort of maybe the first step is sort of saying, well, what can I do about them? So, and if it’s a case of going to your doctor, going to see a women’s health physiotherapist, seeing a sexual wellness coach or any kind of coach, talking to your girlfriends, researching online and getting really practical about it.
– And so then as you start to deal with these different layers of thoughts, how do you really start to refine how the thought processes itself in, in, in your life to yield a certain result?
– Right? And this all takes time and effort and some skill. So in coaching, I use a method called The Model where we have a circumstance. So in this case it’s low libido, and we really kind of diagram or map out what the women are thinking about having low libido. It’s such a pain, I just wish I didn’t have to deal with this, like all the thoughts that we’ve talked about. And then we, we discover, okay, what does this thought do? How does it make you feel? And from that feeling, what do you do? And then what results are you creating because of all the things that you’re doing? Because earlier we talked about, okay, they’re scrolling on social media, they’re avoiding their partner, they’re not looking for help outside of themselves. So they’re making it more difficult to increase their libido by avoiding all of it, by not doing anything. But if we have this circumstance of low libido and the woman is open to thinking something different about it, like, okay, it’s, it’s possible that I can figure this out, then they might feel curious or hopeful, which leads them to do some research on the internet to find and listen to podcasts or to talk to different physicians or practitioners or even to their friends, to know that they’re not alone. It helps them to be proactive when they’re curious that they can decide, okay, I don’t have to believe this way. I can believe that I can solve this for myself. And when they allow that discomfort of just seeing what’s going on in their brain, it empowers them to create a completely different experience. Like they make it easier to take charge of their sex life and empower themselves. They make it easier to solve the problems, but it, it, it’s not like something that we can solve just in five minutes, but practicing this awareness is key.
– And so if we then kind of shift into a more sort of like positive, maybe like visionary model for libido, and we actually want to create or boost our libido or supercharge it, how would we go from thinking, oh, my libido is low. This really upsets me to feeling, you know, what are the thoughts and feelings that could feel more empowering to, to actually boost libido?
– Yeah, it’s almost like I am learning how to use my brain to help me feel more turned on or more sexual or just really cultivating thoughts and realizing, okay, my brain has a lot to do with this. It’s just not my body and how it shows up. We get to create a context for ourselves of what it looks like to, to make it easier for ourselves to have a higher libido, to have a higher sex drive, to enjoy sex more. And it might look a little different now than it did before, but that’s okay. It’s just different. There’s nothing wrong. And so using this idea of, okay, my thoughts do create my feelings, which drive my actions and create my results, playing around with these thoughts, like we try on different shirts to see which one feels good, which one we wanna, you know, buy and wear, what are the thoughts that we wanna keep with us that help us to heal ourselves?
– Only 15% of the women, women just randomly feel aroused turned on, you know, just throughout the day walking down the street, you know, only 15% of women have that sort of spontaneous arousal. A lot more men have that kind of arousal. And I think that kind of awareness of, you know, men just, you know, feeling horny throughout the day, randomly when they wake up. And this, that, and the other is kind of projected onto what women should be like as well at, which makes us kind of feel like we’re broken if we don’t feel that way. But, you know, more women have a more like a responsive arousal, which, you know, feeling aroused when sexy things are happening. I think that probably something that’s really important in terms of, you know, the, the, the bigger picture of sexual wellness is also learning the actual facts about the female body and female wellness and the nature of sexuality that is relevant and applicable to our bodies and not just ideas thrown around in popular culture.
– I agree 100%. I think the moment I learned that only 15% of women can even orgasm with penetration or do not have the spontaneous arousal, I was like, oh, I’m not broken. Like the 85% of us who experience arousal, not spontaneously, but responsibly, that’s okay. We are normal. And just knowing that we are normal, that we are not men, that we do not have that spontaneous desire like them, it’s okay. I like to equate or use this example of men are like the microwaves and women are like the crock pots, the slow cookers. They both have great uses and they both have like things that simmer sometimes taste better than things that are just zapped in a microwave. And what a gift that is
– For someone who’s feeling broken for, for whom that that thought really resonates right. Now. Would you share with us a couple of thoughts that will sort of move them forward into a more either neutral or, or positive place from I am broken
– And sometimes we, we stay in that place of, I’m broken for so long, we’re not sure how to get out of it, but even what I call bridge thoughts, like I’m learning that I’m not broken or I’m open to believing that I can help myself heal from this. It’s that there is nothing wrong with me. I can allow myself to just be me. And those feel so much better than “I’m broken”.
– Yeah. And they are such lovely thought starters. You could, you could go, you, you could go so far with all of them. I’m open to believing … It is just so, so, so it’s infinite, it’s wonderful. It’s possible that I can allow myself to… already just the start of that sentence is more empowering than “I am definitively ‘something'”. Right. Exactly. There’s a possibility that I’m open to believing. I love that. So Julie, you’ve been, you, you’ve been through a lot as a woman. You’ve had five kids, you’ve been married for a really long time. What, what, what, what do you wish you knew back in your thirties and forties about sexual wellness as a woman?
– Well, I wish I would’ve known more about my body, which, you know, the research about women has just started in the early two thousands. So it is relatively new. And I wish I would’ve known more about my normal-ness. I wish that I could have realized that sex is for me, it’s not just a duty or it’s not just something that I do for my husband, but it’s something that I do for me. I wish that I would’ve known that there is help out there in many forms. I wish I would’ve known that I wasn’t alone. I think it was something that, you know, in the nineties and two thousands, even mid two thousands before 2020, it’s like, it’s not okay to talk about this. It was more taboo. But I wish I would’ve known that I do have power here, that my thoughts do help create feelings and that I could change my thoughts. I didn’t know that I could choose my thoughts or change them and in turn, change my whole life.
– I, I wish we could all, we could just pull the wisdom from our future self into our bodies right now. And I think the next best thing is to hear from women slightly ahead of us in the future and, and, and really absorb the wisdom they have to share. So thank you so much. Oh, how do people get in… How do people get in touch with you and find out more about the sexual wellness coaching that you offer?
– Yeah, definitely my website, JulieMerrillCoaching.com or on Instagram @JulieMerrillCoaching
