Welcome to the libido lounge where we focus on all things love, lust, and libido. We believe that fabulous sex is important to health as exercise and good food. Hey. I'm doctor Diane, your libido doc. And in this conversation, we're gonna be talking about overwhelm and your libido and how you can combat overwhelm to increase your libido and actually use sexuality to help manage stress and help your relationships and your life.
If you are like most women, you've had times during sexual experiences where your mind wanders. Maybe all of a sudden you're having sex and you start thinking about the groceries or the kids and you're doing the list and you're not present in the moment. This is always a shocking thing for men to find out that this happens to women, but it is a very normal thing to have happen for women.
I really, really love the work of Allison Armstrong because she does a lot of relationship coaching and talks about the differences between estrogen on the brain and testosterone on the brain. And this is gonna be related to our conversation of overwhelm, of libido, of how to use libido to really help your stress, to balance your hormones, to balance your blood sugar. Right?
There's so many fundamental things that can happen from a healthy sex life, but how do you get there when there's a list and there's a million things to do and sometimes what can happen to women? And this is perfectly normal to have happen. It's not what we want. Right?
But it's very, very common to have this whole thing happen where you're in the middle of a sex act and all of a sudden your brain is 20 miles away from what's happening and you're thinking, wow, I forgot to put that thing on my grocery list or crap, I didn't turn the laundry over, or whatever it is. Right? So what Allison talks about in her work that I really love, she has a book called The Queen's Code, highly recommend her work.
And one of the things she mentions is what estrogen does for the female brain is it makes the brain very diffusely aware. The idea of this is from like hunter gatherer days when women's brains as the gatherer were really attuned to finding the berries. Which berries are poisonous? When are they ripe? Where are the predators? Where are my children? All these different things that really allowed the woman's brain to develop in a way where it's not as easy to focus as the masculine brain.
And so sometimes this can you know, this concept of, like, women thinking about and doing a list when you're having sex with them, for the masculine, this can basically sometimes feel like, oh my gosh. This is really intense. But this is good to know because what we wanna do is we wanna learn that these are the these are the natural tendencies of the female brain, and we wanna learn how to harness and how to bring the focus back to the present moment.
And we can't do that if we don't actually take a moment to admit that sometimes this can happen. So I find that sexuality is oftentimes a almost like a meditative type of act. For anybody that meditates, one thing that's often talked about is when somebody is practicing meditation, the concept with it is the mind wanders and you catch the mind wandering and you bring it back to the present moment. So meditation is not really saying the mind never wanders. Right?
It's saying that when the mind does wander, you notice it and bring it back. So we can apply that same concept sexually. And when it really comes down to the enjoyment of the pleasure, to doing all of the things we're gonna talk about in this episode, we're gonna talk about how, with sex, we can essentially balance our hormones. We can with sex we can essentially balance our hormones. We can balance our stress hormone. Right?
Our stress hormone cortisol has a really bad reputation on the internet for being the cause of belly fat, and cortisol can do that. Cortisol is also necessary for life. We would literally die if we did not have cortisol.
So we want the right amount of this stress hormone and oftentimes when you're overwhelmed and you have a bazillion things on your plate, what tends to happen is cortisol is either really too high or it's extremely low and you're tired, but if cortisol's low, then what tends to happen is your adrenaline is surging, So it's giving you that boost to get through the day even though you're regulating hormone cortisol's low.
So the point is we have this huge hormonal dysregulation that happens with health, with stress, with overwhelm, all of these stress hormones that are out of balance, that makes it even harder to focus. Right? Because we're all over the place thinking about the list and and trying to get things done. And guess what? Sex, touch, pleasure, orgasm, oxytocin that's being released, all has the ability to help balance these stress hormones.
So from a standpoint of having a healthy stress hormone level, right, not too much, not too little, that sweet spot's always what we want, having the right amount of these stress hormones, which can help with weight maintenance and weight loss, right, if cortisol's in a really healthy amount, that can help promote weight loss. And so one of the ways that really is wonderful for balancing these hormones is orgasm, is touch, is pleasure.
This is one of the reasons why I talk about in my work how sex and a healthy sex drive really should be a foundation of health from a standpoint of similar to exercise and good food. Right? We really want that healthy sexuality present and that that is a, say, component of our daily and regular life. And we want this because it helps to balance so many things in the body. So that kinda brings me back to the original point. Right?
So in bed, find yourself not present, you're doing this less, and all of a sudden, what do you do? How do you get yourself out of it? So just like how people call meditation a practice, in many ways sexuality is a practice too. Right? So we don't go to the gym one time and all of a sudden it's like, wow, we have, like, the best muscles and we can run a marathon. Right? We practice, we train, we go, we put attention to it. Right?
Whatever you put attention to will grow and improve and change provided that you're learning what needs to be learned in any situation. And if you're finding that sexuality and with in your sexual expression is if you're finding that you're not very motivated to have sex, if you find that it's not really giving you anything, if you feel really, like, disenchanted of, like, no. I'm just I don't need to I I'm too busy. Right?
My guess is that you are not yet finding the ability to utilize your sexuality in a way to heal you and in a way to really promote balance of hormones to bring you into the present and to establish these connections. So just like going to the gym, this is a practice. You know, sex is really a practice. And so just like with meditation where if you find yourself meditating, you know, whether you meditate or not, the concept still applies, You find yourself even in conversation. Right?
Here's another example where you're talking to a friend or you're talking to a partner or your kids, and you're like, what was I talking about again? I'm sure some of you guys have had that happen. Well, the mind sometimes is so aware of all the external environment that it can be hard to focus. So you realize in those moments, in this example, well, my mind sorry, friends. My mind was thinking about how I haven't fed the dog or whatnot.
You bring yourself back to that focus with your friend and you continue on. So this also applies in sexuality. Right?
So the big practice of is if you're in an intimate moment with your lover, then if your mind has wandered and you catch your mind wandering to the list, to the child, to whatever, you as soon as you catch your mind, the idea is, like, not to chase that thought, not to hyperfocus on that thought, to actually say and trust that what you're doing in that moment is so valuable and it's gonna help heal you and help bring more, compassion to your
life and help balance your hormones and help with a better connection with your partner that you wind up taking making the choice to say, hey. I'm gonna bring my mind back to the present moment, back to the pleasure. And one of the ways that oftentimes we can refocus our mind in these instances is by tuning into the senses. Right? So another thing we're gonna talk about in one of the later podcasts are five major sexual types. And one of the sexual types that we will talk about is the sensate.
The sensate is the person that is so into their environment being just right to add to the sexual experience. So there's these different sexual types that we'll talk about and that the uniqueness of these sexual types really is an important thing because that's how you show up as a lover in your life. That's what turns you on. Right?
So the sensate is a person that really wants that's really turned on by the setting, by the smells, by the music, by the touch of the fabrics and the sheets and the types of the oils being used. Right? So anybody can enjoy that, but if you are somebody that is like, Well, yeah, that's like a huge, huge, huge thing that really revs you up and turns you on, it's likely that you are a sensate sexual type. And so whether or not you're this particular type, there are pieces of this type in all of us.
And the sensate is so in tune with, like, the actual senses. Right? The the the five tactile senses, you know, the the sight and the sound and the touch. And one of the things that we know about these sorts of sensations is they're really, really good about bringing us back into the moment.
So if you're in an intimate moment and you find your mind wandering and doing a list, then it's lovely to say, you know, it's a part of way to bring yourself back to all of a sudden tune in on deeply feeling your lover's touch, right, on deeply feeling the skin, on on really breathing, taking a deep breath, and and taking in their scent, I'm really looking at their beautiful body and looking into their eyes and really taking on the visual appeal of what's happening.
Because if you're so focused and if you have your brain so focused on the senses, it snaps you out of the list. And why is this so valuable? This is so valuable because when we're in the present, we're able to actually get the healing that comes from our sex life. Right? And so what happens when we have a when we get ourselves out of out of overwhelm? Right?
When we get ourselves out of this rushing list making type of thing, there's so many different things that actually can improve in our body. So I mentioned that stress hormones get balanced. Right? So when you release oxytocin, the hormone that's released, not just at orgasm, it is released then, but it's also released when we are experiencing great pleasure. And so we get balance of our sex hormones. We get balance of our blood sugar.
We actually get balance of our brain hormones, so hormones like dopamine. Dopamine is this hormone that is so helpful for motivation, for reward, for happiness. Right? When our dopamine's balanced, we have motivation to show up in our lives, to do that extra thing for a friend, to do that extra thing in our business. And so we really can see that when we are when we are focused on this, when we are focused on this, our nervous system starts to relax.
When we actually bring ourselves back into this place where we're focused on the moment, all of a sudden we see that dopamine, you know, say kicking in our brain. So there's so many different benefits. The point of this is that there are so many different benefits that truly come into play when we're talking about our libido, when we're talking about our sexuality. So then it really brings up, like, well, okay. Where do we actually how do we actually motivate ourselves?
Because we have this natural ability inside of our body to heal. Right? And that's largely beyond procreation, when we're talking about truly the pleasure of sex, it actually provides healing signals to our body. And so many times we spend so much time on medications, on supplements, and all of these things have their place, and have their value, and have their purpose. And I'm not saying not to do those things.
But we have this innate ability within the context of our own sexuality to bring our whole body and our whole mind into balance, to form better connections. And what we see in research, what we see what I see clinically, what I see in myself, what I see in people that I coach, what I see in my friends that I talk about this stuff with obsessively is that when we are involved healthily, sexually, then we can really combat overwhelm that way.
That is one of the key things helping combat overwhelm and to get our brain into the present moment. And when we're in the present moment, like I said, it's we really can't feel overwhelmed. Overwhelm help happens when we're thinking about how many things we need to do and how are we gonna get them done by the end of the day and all of that, when we're actually into the moment that all you're doing in the moment is this one task or this one thing.
And and in this, you know, in this situation we're talking about, this one act one act, having sex. Right? When we're so into this moment and we're not thinking about five minutes from now, the deadline I have in an hour, what I need to do in three hours, and how am I gonna get dinner on the table, we're not thinking about all those things and we're only thinking about that moment, the brain goes on vacation. We get creative juices going.
So the point of this podcast really in part is to help with this thing that sometimes can happen where I see and I hear women that I work with say, like, well, I've just decided I'm not gonna, you know, worry about sex in my life. I just you know, it's not a priority.
And so if you're feeling that way and if your sex drive has fallen, part of this is is educating you to see and to show what this can provide and how this amazing gift that we're giving as humans, our sexuality, is actually a gift that is given to us for self healing. And if you're hearing this and you're like, wow, I don't have a partner, go back and listen to episode one.
Because what I talk about in episode one, one of the myths I dispel is about sexuality with, you know, with yourself without having a partner. And so I would encourage you if you're like, wow. You know, this is great. This is great, doctor Diane, but I don't have a partner. I guess I can't really do anything. Go back and listen to episode one because I'm gonna I dispelled that myth in there. So make sure you check that out. Alright, everybody. That's it for this particular episode.
This is Doctor. Diane. I'm reminding you to stay classy, be sexy. I'll see you in the next one. Thank you for listening to the libido lounge. Please don't keep me a secret. Please share this with your friends. You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, as well