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 another episode of The Lounge. I am your host libido expert and board certified sexologist, doctor Diane. In this particular episode, I want to talk about a question that I get asked a lot in the sexual health space, which is what is my opinion of the number one reason for low libido or a low sex drive?
And this is probably also the most difficult question I get asked because one of the things that I have really learned in fifteen years of practicing medicine is that when it comes to chronic situations, I've never seen one root cause. So when we're talking about chronically low sex drive, there's probably not gonna be just one cause. So what is the number one cause? Well, it's it's a confusing thing. Right?
Because there's part of me that really wants to answer this with the most obvious thing, hormones, because we do know that hormones are so important for a healthy sex drive. I have a girlfriend that just got put on hormones, and she keeps texting me and telling me how much fun she's having with her hormones because of everything that she has no noticed change.
And she's single and still has noticed that her sex drive has gone through the roof just with some very low dose hormone replacement therapy. So there's absolutely a huge, huge things to say for hormones and the aging process of hormones. But I don't wanna leave it there so I have a lot more to say, but I do wanna say a little bit about hormones and the aging process because we do know that hormonal production for women as well as men drops with age. Right? It does decline with age.
We see that men go through andropause. It says women go through menopause. And what do we do about that? Well, it's interesting that some studies have shown that we actually decrease the the metabolism of testosterone as we age. The testosterone will stay in our blood longer. So as it's decreasing as we age, as the amount is decreasing, it tends to stay in the body longer.
Now the decrease is due to the leydig cells of the testes not producing the same amount in men as well as the ovaries and the adrenal glands in women not producing as much in women. And so when this happens, one of the most important things to understand is that one thing that slows down or, I should say, speeds up the aging and the drop in testosterone in particular is oxidative stress.
So research and studies have shown that when the body has higher amounts of oxidative stress, that that testosterone drop can happen faster. Now studies have been done more on men for this than women. However, I suspect that it's very similar for women because when it comes to oxidative stress, that's a mechanism that affects both females and males in many ways. So so what is oxidative stress? Right?
You might be wondering, like, well, I've heard this term or maybe you haven't, but what the easiest way that I have found to explain oxidative stress is it's a chain reaction in our body. So are the molecules in our body all want to have certain number of electrons, right, certain number of of molecules attached to them. That makes them very stable. Well, in an oxidative stress situation, we have unstable molecules in the body that starts stealing electrons off of other molecules.
And when that happens, when a molecule loses an electron and gets stolen, then another they will try to steal from another. So all of these cells and all of these energetic functions in the body that are trying to be stable so that the cell can work to its ultimate capacity are now not able to work to their ultimate capacity because they're trying to get their stability back. So their focus changes from from something like producing testosterone to making itself stable as a cell.
So oxidative stress are these chain like reactions that create that type of instability in the body, and a free radical is basically something that creates that that chain. Now if you've heard of an antioxidant, antioxidants are things that can stop that chain reaction, that can donate electrons without hurting itself and put an end to that stealing process in the body.
So that's the easiest way I found to really explain that, and we see that that oxidative mechanism in research can really impact the testosterone levels and get that decline of testosterone to happen at an earlier age. This is one of so many reasons to take antioxidants. This is one of so many reasons to avoid things in your diet that have been shown to cause oxidative stress such as the industrial seed oils like safflower and sunflower and peanut and canola and soy. Get those things out.
They cause a lot of oxidative stress in the body and can lead to these chain like reactions I'm I'm talking about that could potentially then impact a earlier testosterone drop in humans as as we age. So, yes, like the story I told you about my friend, like, testosterone and estrogen are essential for, you know, for libido.
But then there's the other side of things that a lot of people make their way into my world when they have been working with a great doctor for years and they're on HRT and a lot of their symptoms are getting better, but yet the libido is not there. Right?
And this is actually very, very common, which is why I have a hard time saying that testosterone is or that that hormones are, like, number one thing because so while they're so essential, there's also so many times that they get fixed and the libido doesn't turn back on. So I wanna remind you guys before I go on that here coming up in just a couple weeks, the February, I have my four day to better sex jump start. So it's four days.
We have a a deep dive into what you need to do to start having better sex, better intimacy, and getting back into novelty and play and pleasure and feeling good and orgasms and connection and love and partnership and all those juicy, yummy things, that is coming up at the February. And right now, I am giving it away as my gift to you guys for free. So this is part of my, you know, New Year, new Pleasure You type of, offering for you guys. So make sure you sign up for that.
You don't wanna miss out. There is a coupon code as well to bring it down to $0, so make sure you copy that coupon code as well. All of that's gonna be in your show notes for you, but I do really encourage you to show up. It's four days. There'll be live calls with me every day, a ton of prerecorded videos and material for you as well. And that's our goal is to really jump start your libido and jump start your sex life in just four days. So, make sure you sign up for that.
Okay. So on to the next portion of this. Right? On to the the the topic of, well, what then if it's not just hormones, what is what are the the top reasons for a low libido? So like I said, like, bringing this to one answer is very difficult for me just because I just don't see medicine that way. And I think there is it's gonna depend upon the individual, but I can come up with beyond hormones.
I can come up with three that I would say put at the top of the tier, but there's so many other things here. And we're gonna cover all of these and more and what to do about them in that jump start as well, in that four day jump start. So one, I would say is priority.
And when I talk to other sexologists about this, priority is the one that seems to be most agreed upon at least in the people I have talked to across the board around sex and around libido is that so much of the time, it doesn't become a priority. Right? It's like this afterthought, and we try to fit it in at 10:30 at night when we're exhausted. Right? We try to fit it in.
Maybe when there's kids banging on their door, you're thinking about work, and it's just there's just, like, hardly any time or energy to put into pleasure. So one I would say is, like, is that priority, right, of actually making this a huge priority in your life is pretty essential. Secondly, I would say is the the component of safety. And safety, I mean, like, obviously, physical safety. Right?
We all obviously have to feel physically safe around our partner, or there's a whole another problem there. But I'm also talking about emotional safety.
And emotional safety can be things that are, like if you're feeling emotionally unsafe, it could be, like, big things like a lot of outburst and a lot of yelling and fighting and those types of things can definitely lead to emotional unsafety, but it can be as simple as just not feeling safe to bring up the conversation of, like, sex or of what you want and how to talk about that.
That's one of the reasons I'm doing this work is because I'm what I'm working to do is to create a space where this taboo topic becomes less taboo, and we can talk about it in a kind, respectful, loving, transparent way.
Because it's also interesting that I've seen studies that have shown that when it comes to sex, like, even intimacy, even if, like, everything else with intimacy and connection is going really well in partnership, that when it comes to sex, that it's actually the conversation around sex has been shown to be a direct threat to one's, like, identity and ego. And what winds up happening is because it's almost like this this primal survival type of thing. Right?
And so there's this primal survival impulse to be a good lover, and that's there in part because there's this primal impulse to procreate. Right? And so it's why when people are having challenges here, it can just feel so debilitating because there is this primal egoic, like, self preservation thing to to procreation and to sex.
And so met much of the time when it comes to con conversation around sex, it can be very, very hard for people's egos to not get hurt or for people not to react in a defensive way because it's it actually can trigger their the primalness of who we are as human beings.
And so when that happens, one of the problems with that is there can be this emotional and safety around sex because sometimes it can be as simple as like, oh, I wanna tell my partner to touch me a little bit differently or to do this a little differently. But if there was a reactivity from the partner when something was attempted because the partner is trying to protect who they are as a person, protect their ego, which is very normal, not helpful. Right?
But a normal thing to happen in many scenarios, we gotta work with that and make it the new normal in the relationship not to have that reactivity. But when that happens, then it can create this emotional feeling of not being safe and especially not being safe with sex. And there's a trickle down effect, of course, that can happen with that because as soon as we become emotionally unsafe, well, then what winds up happening?
Then we don't feel safe to talk to our partner about our experience, about how to bring more novelty and about how to bring more pleasure and about how to slow down around how to bring, more foreplay in. Like, all of that kinda goes off the table because we don't feel safe. Or it could be something else like maybe you vented about your day. One partner vented about their day, and the other partner maybe didn't respond very well.
Now if you have watched any of my videos on the sex types, and if not, I definitely recommend going back through some of the videos earlier this month. We talked about them a little bit. If you watch any of the videos on the sex types, one of the sex types that I talk about is the emotive sex type. Now that person is so stimulated by by by their emotional body and sex.
So if anything is going on from, say, earlier that day, earlier that week, earlier that month, that has not been resolved within partnership, that person that is the emotive emotive type is probably going to be very shut down, and they won't have access to that because, emotionally, there's this level of not feeling safe. So safety is a huge component of this as well.
And the next one that I would say that is just an important one to name as well is communication, which is connected to all of these. Right? So communication, obviously, if we're not gonna feel safe, then we're probably not gonna communicate very well. But a lot of communication has to be coming from putting you putting the partnerships back on, like, on the same team. Right? So putting partnership back on the same team where they have the same goal and they're working for the for the goal.
And that the idea is to get the ego out of the way to realize that the point of this is that we're on the same team, that nobody's doing anything wrong, that it's not about wrong versus right. It's about, hey. Things can change. Right? And and one of the things that happens is a lot of people don't realize is sexual needs change throughout life. So people that are interested in, you know, one thing in the beginning where this is the turn on, that might not be true for the whole life. Right?
Some people may way makeup will wake up and start doing anal sex, and they had never been interested in that. Some people might be interested in bringing in toys, and they have never been interested in that. There's so many different ways that we can have, like, even our touch and even positions that feel good can actually change throughout life. And so it's normal that we need to communicate because, commonly, we get stuck in our sexual scripts. Right?
Commonly, we get stuck in the script where we do if we're in long term partnership, it's like the same thing over and over and over. Well, without that communication to say, like, yeah. That thing was great, and and maybe you enjoyed it for years, you know, months, years, decades. And all of a sudden, it's just not working for you anymore. Well, you want to tell your partner that. Right? You want to tell your partner that.
And so that communication without that ego getting in the way and that healthy communication to say, okay. This is working. This is not. Let's try this. You know? And bringing all of that in is an essential thing. And and communication, like, both, you know, during as well as before.
So during is always a tricky thing as far as communication for some people because depending upon the partner, people might feel, like, disrupted or they might feel like it's, like, a shocking thing for them, but some level of communication can work very well. So, you know, finding a way to communicate like, okay. Slow down. Speed up. Right there. To the right. To the left. Let's change positions. Right?
So we wanna create that level of safety and really help to develop the type of communication where the other person doesn't feel that that that self protection feeling comes up when you guys are talking about sex.
And, like, anything, like, when it comes to communication around this, if you've never really been, like, a sex communicator, right, if you've this is something that you haven't talked to your partner about or maybe the conversation's been, you know, super superficial where it's just like, okay. Are we having sex tonight? Okay. Do you want sex? Let's go. Right? So sometimes that that's the level of conversation I hear.
But wherever you're at with it, one of the most important things to realize is that this is a in it's a skill, like anything else. And so first several times, if you haven't been talking about this, it might feel awkward. You know? It might not go perfectly. Like, give yourself permission to mess up the conversation. Like, it it it might not go perfectly, but the whole point is that you're bringing this back into conversation. You're practicing it.
And you're if it doesn't go well, you know, talking to your partner after and say, like, I really want to have these kind of conversations with you. It's really important. And I wanna have them in a way that you know how much I appreciate you and love you and value you and all that you provide for me, and I really wanna deepen our connection. And this is my point.
And how can I how can we have these conversations in a way that I can still communicate this in a way that, you know, it comes with the feeling of love and desire and all of those things? Right? So we can preframe that as well. So and I think the communication just needs to happen more and more because there is still this huge misunderstanding about females versus men. Right?
It's like it's like this whole thing of how fast the male erectile tissue gets engorged and how long it takes for the female erective to erectile tissue to get engorged. So so much of the time, there's, like, this pass that is taken from man to woman where, like, okay, man's turned on and he's hard, and he takes a pass of the woman, and the woman's like, woah. And it's because she needs twenty minutes for that blood to get to that erectile tissue.
So just like a fast pass, she's not gonna oftentimes be turned on at all. She could be. But much of the time when she's busy and overwhelmed, when the man's ready to go, the woman's like, needs twenty minutes of, like, slow touch and bringing her into her body and massage and soft touch over her vulva and her breasts and these sorts of things. So communication is essential because we're missing each other so much of the time. So I would say those are really beyond the hormones.
The top three, I would say at this point, is priority, safety, and communication. And then, of course, within that, there's so many nuances, and there's so many other things beyond these top three. So I hope this has been helpful for you. We're gonna go through all of this and more in my four day jump start. So make sure you sign up for that. It's coming up real fast. Again, get that discount code in the show notes. It is free this time around, but you do need that discount code.
So thanks for listening. Please do continue to send us all your questions, and I hope you have a very, very happy New Year this year. We're almost to the January now, but I hope it's been a great month for you guys. And my very best to you, reminding you to say stay sexy out there. See you soon. 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.