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, everybody. Welcome back to the lounge. In this particular episode, we're gonna go through a wide variety of causes and solutions from a physical standpoint, from a holistic standpoint of what you can do to support your libido, your sex drive, your love life, and more.
So we wanna remember that from a standpoint of root causes as far as what is actually causing the low libido. We wanna consider things like adrenal imbalances, like sex hormone imbalances, we wanna consider cardiovascular imbalances, and neurological imbalances. So, this is a little bit oversimplified but if we are really breaking things down to four top physical root causes that are actually impacting low libido, these are the top four.
Now, when we are thinking about physical causes of low libido, you might also be thinking of things like stress and sleep. Stress and sleep absolutely are really important to talk about and the adrenals are two lovely glands that sit on top of the kidneys, help us make stress hormones, help us make hormones for energy, help us post menopause, to make sex hormones even, so they do amazing and wonderful things.
And one of the things that can happen is the adrenals can actually secrete high levels of cortisol at night. A lot of people have heard of cortisol, it's a stress hormone but it's also an energy hormone, we need it. And at night if it if we have too much of this cortisol we can get really wired. We don't sleep as well because we're really wired. So from that standpoint, we are also talking about things like sleep and your stress levels. Right? Because that's all wrapped up into the adrenals.
So I wanna go through these four categories, what you can do, how to help your adrenals. I wanna make sure to let you know that I have an amazing libido quiz I have developed and in this quiz, if you take this quiz, it's super cool because it's going to tell you which one of these four categories based upon your answers are the is the most likely top root cause for the uniqueness of you.
So really, really cool quiz that I worked with a developer to help build out the intricacy and the details on. So super exciting there. Now we're gonna go through these four categories, and I also wanna talk a little bit about some lifestyle things. Right? Because what we choose to do on a day to day basis also will impact our libido. So lifestyle wise, I did mention sleep.
So one of the things we wanna do, we can definitely do work on our adrenals and our stress and everything to support sleep, But one of the things that I've seen that impacts sleep the most is the blue spectrum of light. Blue spectrum of light, which is in our common white light bulbs that we have all around our house, those actually suppress the production of melatonin, our sleep hormone.
And when I have clients wear sleep tracking devices to track how long they're actually sleeping, how deep they actually sleep, not just the amount of hours they've spent in bed, but actually that length and the depth. The number one thing I see come up most consistently as causing a problem with sleep is a lot of this blue light before bed. So, we can do things like buying blue blocker glasses. You can get them online for fairly cheap. They're usually like an an amber or a red color.
Wear them at night. What I do with my house is I have different bulbs. I have certain bulbs and lights around the house that are actually red. And so after a certain time of day, then my white lights go off, my red lights go on, and so I'm not getting that blue light infiltrating my eyes. Now if you live with people that don't like this, then the solution is to wear blue blocker glasses. You can put blue blocking programs on computers and phones so that you're really minimizing this exposure.
It can do amazing stuff for sleep, and guess what? When you're rested, your libido goes up. Another basic thing before we get into the four categories I talked about is food. So it's a common thing that comes up around what is the food I want to eat, what is the best food for me, right?
So I talk about this in another episode so I don't wanna go crazy deep into this, but just to make sure that we're covering the basis from holistic health is remember that, you know, a lot of these aphrodisiac foods like oysters, for example, are aphrodisiac because they have a certain nutrient in them. Like, oysters have a lot of zinc. Zinc is needed to make testosterone. So that's one of the thoughts between oysters as an aphrodisiac.
But from the standpoint of how many people actually eat oysters and immediately have the zinc convert into testosterone and immediately feel like they're ready for sexy time, it doesn't work that way. Right? So it takes longer for the body to take that zinc to get it down that pathway. If you need zinc for something else in your body, it might not even be used to make testosterone.
So the way I really look at aphrodisiac foods is more around eating a clean diet, eating organic and grass fed as much as possible, staying away from things that inflame you. So it's a really wonderful thing to try a diet like paleo diet for example. See how you feel on that, add foods in, take foods out, Pay attention to your symptoms.
If you feel bloated in your tummy, if you feel inflamed in your joints, if you feel foggy in your head, if you feel a little fatigued, probably not the right diet. But the more you can put the foods in that your body really wants, that's when we can see the subsequent joy and the subsequent improvement in your libido. So the idea with diet is really getting inflammation out and keeping the foods that actually work for the uniqueness of you in. I should also mention fish oil or cod liver oil.
So many people are eating the wrong fats and we really need proper fats for good hormone production. So we also need for anti inflammatory purposes, for brain health, for cognition, so many different things. So, most people are not eating salmon or sardines, these cold water type of fish with lots of those good omega threes in them. Most people are not eating those every day. Right?
We don't live Most people that are watching or listening to this are probably not in Asia where it's a lot more common for fish to be in the diet as compared to Western countries. So, for most people, they're very very deficient in this anti inflammatory nutrient which is essential for a good libido. So, definitely get your fish oils in. Okay. Now, to move into our four categories, adrenals, neurological, sex hormones, and cardiovascular.
So adrenal wise, we wanna consider stress manipulation techniques, stress resiliency techniques. And I say the words resiliency and manipulation because I think it's really annoying in some ways to say, like, okay. We'll just go reduce your stress. Like, there are external factors that sometimes we can control. Right? Say you have a boss that's mean and yelling at you. K? You can look for another job. You know, it might be a while before you find one. Right?
It might be a while before you find, like, the right one, the one that pays that you know, what you're worth and all those things. So what are you gonna do in the mid meantime? Like there's these external factors. Right? But there's these internal ways of trying to manage stress because as humans, sometimes we can't change all our stressors. And there is gonna be stressors that are gonna be way harder to mitigate and manage than others, but this is a practice.
And stress reduction techniques are really techniques that are designed to support your nervous system. And this is why I love oxytocin so much because when it comes to reducing stress, the idea of cuddling is just so amazing.
I even talked to one of my girlfriends recently, and we were talking about just once a week, girls night, like, when our brains are tired from long workdays, getting together, and putting on a movie, and curling up with the dogs, and just having like a big cuddle puddle in the middle of, you know, of the living room, and, you know, completely platonic. Right? This platonic intimacy that is really about supporting each other and supporting the oxytocin.
So it doesn't have to be cuddle puddle with your girlfriends. If you have girlfriends you can do that with, I I highly recommend it. But if you don't, cuddle your dog, cuddle your partner, cuddle, you know, anybody that will, you know, let you and you feel appropriate with because that's a really, really great way.
I mean, I'm being like silly and playful here because that's my personality, but in the grand scheme of this, this is a really easy, natural way to improve your oxytocin, and when you improve your oxytocin, you lower your stress, you help your libido, you support your adrenals and your love life.
So and I say this because when we're doing work on the adrenal glands, we're doing work to support the adrenal glands, to support the stress, to help, like, to give certain herbs, like, kava works really well to lower stress. We can do herbs to make the adrenal glands function better, like rhodiola and ginseng. Ashwagandha works really well. And so some of these herbs can really reset the stress response and the brain connection to the adrenal glands. So they can be wonderful.
And if we are continually come like, coming against stress and we don't have a way of combating it and helping our body switch out of it fast, we're things are just not gonna work as well as if we're doing both at the same time. We're giving the body the nutrition and the herbs to repair, but we're also giving the body the oxytocin. And if you don't like the cuddle idea, remember, you can always do self pleasure. That sort of thing is another great way.
Like, even, you know, just even, like, stroking your own arms. Right? Even, like, rubbing your own face. So you can get oxytocin from all of those things. So we are not at the mercy of other people to give ourselves oxytocin, but it does take some awareness and effort. So that's the adrenal system.
Now cardiovascular so I talk in some of my earlier work around the importance of cardiovascular health and that we need to have proper blood flow to the tissues of the vulva, of the vagina, of the clitoris, of all of the erotic tissue throughout the genitalia. We need to have great blood flow for lubrication, for this turn on feeling to happen and that blood flow oftentimes, especially as we age slows down. So we can do things.
You can get a, calcium score, you can do a CIMT which is where they do an ultrasound of your artery to check your blood vessels. You can do things like order an ApoB. ApoB is a blood marker that has it is a cholesterol marker but it's been shown to actually really be fairly close to correlating with what's happening plaque on the arteries.
So total cholesterol for example does not give us the same amount of information about plaque on the arteries as the particular as the particular Marco Apo b. So you can do some of that and when that happens, when you test this, then if you need more more support, you can do certain things to support cholesterol like red yeast rice and CoQ ten and natto e. And my favorite easy peasy blood flow nutrient is Citrulline. Citrulline helps those blood vessels dilate. It's super easy to take.
A lot of people do really well on about three grams a day, and you basically take citrulline. It sends all of this this blood. It opens and dilates the blood flow and the tissues get more blood. Right? And so, this can be a very, very, very wonderful and useful treatment. You might feel yourself get a little turned on by this. You might feel that there's more heat and more moisture in your genital area. So it's super, super, super lovely. Now beyond that, we wanna talk about your nervous system.
And this is another area, like, I talk about in so much of my work, this vicious cycle. Right? How do we get the nerves calm? How do we get the you back into your body when we're, you know, oftentimes overworked and overwhelmed? So oxytocin, again, does an amazing job for regulating the nervous system. And we can also think about herbs like California poppy, like kava. These are herbs that are very, very calming to the nervous system. Valerian is another one. Kava, I really love.
Like, kava, I can actually feel in my body when I take it. It's very noticeable to me how much I can feel the relaxation. GABA is another one.
So, again, this is like I'm I'm dumping a lot of this particular episode is a little bit heady from a medical perspective, but the reason for this is is I I In addition to all the things we talk about around novelty and do's and don'ts and sexiness and being your own body and desire and all of these things, we also wanna make sure that we're always rooted in as well what's going on physically for us. Right?
And so these sorts of things that I'm talking about today can really impact our physical body. And so the final one on top of the nervous system that I haven't met mentioned is sex hormones. So I talk in earlier podcasts about hormones, about some of the research on hormones, so we don't need to redo all of that conversation.
You can go back and listen to episodes like, for example, episode 30 or I'm sorry, episode 24 where we talk a lot about the various types of estrogen and some of the research on and addressing some of the concerns that people have. But we do wanna make sure that you you consider the hormonal component as com as part of this. So we definitely recommend going back and listening to that episode.
So, you know, from a standpoint then of everything we're looking at then we're considering, for example, cardiovascular, neurological, inflammation, adrenals, sex hormones, sleep, diet. We wanna also consider movement. Right? It is said, but some people say that sitting is the new smoking, that, you know, how smoking years ago was, like, so popular and then eventually it finally caught up to people, like, okay, we should not be smoking. This is not health like, this is not healthy.
And so sitting is that weight too. So I have my desk on hydraulics, so I sit and stand throughout the day. If you're not doing that yet, I would definitely recommend that. And one of the reasons is, you know, we're connecting things like sitting and movement to libido, we're connecting like sex doesn't feel good if there's pain or discomfort, and we're gonna talk about pelvic pain, that sort of thing later on.
So there are those types of pains, but there's also just like the pain of like my neck, my back, my hips, or like a limited number of positions and movements that we can get into. All of these different things can impact sex. Like, you know, having sex when when one person when you're in shape is a very different experience than having sex if you're not in shape. Right? The body doesn't move in the same way. There's not that same level of stamina. You can't hold positions as long.
So the idea too with with getting away from too much sitting and how that relates to libido is in many ways related to the enjoyment in the bedroom. Like, you know, if my neck hurts because I pulled something at the gym, I'm not going to be interested in a lot of different positions and depending upon the pain, I might not be interested in sex at all. Right?
So that's why we wanna really consider what are we doing lifestyle wise to keep our body moving, to continue to stand as much as possible, and to get out of this sitting as the new smoking thing. So remember, you can listen to this episode again because I just threw out a ton of information really quickly. So remember, you can go back, listen to this again, go check out that libido quiz.
Once you do that libido quiz, it's gonna pop up with information on the top likely most physical root cause for you, so I think that'll really help you. And that's it for this episode. So this is doctor Diane signing off, reminding you to always stay classy, sexy, and a little badass y. 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 as how to work with me at mylibidodoc.com.