The Libido Landscape: What do Statistics Say? - podcast episode cover

The Libido Landscape: What do Statistics Say?

Jan 11, 202420 minEp. 22
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Episode description

Did you know that the highest percentage of couples experimenting with anal play starts in your 40s? How about the stark drop from 72% (below the age of 60) to 57% (after the age of 60) when it comes to having an active sex life? In today’s episode, we offer you more interesting statistics as we put our nerd's glasses on and dive deep into research findings on low libido and the different factors that contribute to it. We’ll explore the ebb and flow of desire through the years, perimenopause, anal sex, emotional safety, and hacking your libido to want sex.

Transcript

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 libido lounge. And on this episode, I really wanna talk about what is normal, and I really wanna talk about what is normal as far as libido and the aging process.

So one of the things that's super important to to take note of is that it is normal to have ebbs and flows of libido over the years. Right? It is normal to have periods where you might experience higher libido or lower libido. And some of the most interesting changes for women may be during the onset of menopause because of the huge amount of hormonal changes. Now men also have andropause, so we do see changes in testosterone and the male hormonal makeup. So there is some changes that we see.

There are some changes that we see in libido for men, but I wanna start with some of the statistics I see in research. I'm a data girl, and so I love seeing what we see from a research perspective around what is normal, what is in, you know, from a research perspective.

So I'm gonna start with a what was kind of an interesting statistic for me, which was when people are most interested in trying new types of things and in trying things, for example, like anal play for the first time, the highest rate of trying new things actually occurred during the forties, And this was when we see research on when people are most active, when people are exploring most with vaginal sex, with anal sex, with oral sex, that the highest

amount of anal sex in heterosexual couples was in the forties of when this became something that they were interested in. So I find that to be really, really useful information from the standpoint of what I talk about at other points on this particular podcast of the concept of novelty, of the concept of inspiring dopamine, and having new things that are actually engaging us to come back, to try new things with our partner, to keep the passion alive.

And some of this, I think, as we begin to get more comfortable in our bodies, as we age a little more, sometimes that's where I think some of the sexual exploration becomes a lot more interesting. Another useful data point is that seventy two percent of individuals below 60 were sexually active, while fifty seven above 60 were active. So what we're actually seeing a lot of people are talking a lot about how sexual desire declines so much with age, and there is a change. Right?

We see this in data now. We also see statistics such as STI rates in nursing homes being really high, and more than fifty percent of people above the age of 60 are being sexually active. And what we also see is that usually the reason for decline in women is because of lack of interest. But we also see for men that usually the reason for decline in interest is due to health related conditions.

So it's very, very unusual, only six point seven percent of men actually report that they stop being sexually active because of lack of interest. It's almost always gonna be due to health issues or another thing. So the reason this is important, right, is in long term relational health. Right? If we see this discrepancy between, okay, a masculine libido, a feminine libido, and we see this discrepancy, we can see the impact on relationship.

We can see the impact on providing that care and support. You know, oftentimes as women it's really important for us in relationships to feel emotionally safe. And in myself, in the women I work with, in the women I talk to, a very, very common thread is that if we are feeling emotionally unsafe in just about any way, and it can be for something as simple as a tone a partner used with us that morning. Right? If we're feeling emotionally unsafe, it's very hard for us to sexually respond.

And, you know, in men on the other hand, their their true need from a sexual standpoint is very, very different. Like, men are so they think about sex and and when we see research on this, men think about sex dozens of times a day. Women oftentimes two or three. Right? So we hue see this huge discrepancy.

And what I've seen in men I've talked to is when sex is on the mind a lot and when they can have that need fulfilled, then all of a sudden they're able to focus, provide, show up in different ways.

So it goes to show that when we're having this, like, lack of interest versus still a strong interest, that there is room to grow, there's room to improve, there's room to work on this as a couple to find how we can really improve the juju of anybody who has lost it, especially in relationship with that discrepancy of a partner.

So other thing that we see is for women, women that that have worked or that continue to work as they age or continue to do something that gives them a purpose in life, oftentimes have a higher libido.

So this one's really interesting for for me personally just because I think it's a very interesting component to say, okay, the more we are actually showing up to our life, the more as we age, we are actually still continuing to have a purpose and a passion and something that fills us up, it is super notable that that actually will translate into having a higher sex drive.

So one simple thing that we wanna consider about as we age in order to keep our sex life healthy, in order to keep our relationships healthy, is to continue to find ways to have purpose in life. And, you know, that could be through work and doing monetary things, but it could be through a lot of other things. But as we age, what are we doing to stay engaged? What are we doing to still learn? What are we doing to still feel like our life has meaning and value and purpose?

And when we do that, we see that that can translate down into our sexuality. And this is interesting to me too from the standpoint of how many people that I talk to are really frustrated with their purpose in life. Maybe they're working in for a company they feel is not in alignment with their values, right? They feel like there's not a lot of purpose in their work.

I do wonder, in having these kind of conversations, I do wonder how much that could even trickle down into something like sex drive. Right? Because we see that as people are engaged in As they age, we see that as they're engaged in purpose driven behavior, sex life stays high. So what about before we become elderly? You know, what about everybody in midlife? What about everybody that is really in these careers that they just feel are draining them and aren't providing any value?

And I know I've seen this in my own personal life too that if I go through a period where I just feel, like, frustrated with certain things and I feel like I'm doing work that, you know, isn't serving people the way I want it to serve people and, you know, if I just get lost as a business owner in the the things that need to be tasking done to do the business versus actually doing the work that feels like the most purpose driven work, which is where I try

to spend most of my time, that makes a big difference in my libido. The more I can stay involved in the work like this, in really educating people and supporting people and helping people and lifting people up, there's a direct link between that and my libido. It's just it's very, very, very clear. So another thing that we see is that when people are interviewed as far as how often they want to experience sex, most people are interested in sex.

52% of people that were interviewed are in interested in sex at least weekly and so and many times daily. So only forty percent of those fifty percent actually experience it at that frequency. So we're saying half the population reports wanting to engage in sex on a weekly or daily perspective. Right? There's still that other fifty percent that is is a low libido scenario that could probably benefit from improving their libido.

But the interesting thing is how many people are actually saying this would be valuable to me, but they are not, you know, experiencing sex at that frequency. So, you know, to me, this still brings back to this point that I talk about throughout this channel, my work, of the importance of self pleasure, which is obviously a very controversial topic.

But I think a self pleasure component of things is extremely useful to consider because here's here's we have forty percent of people saying they are actually sexually satisfied, that they are having their sexual needs met. And then we see all the research supporting healthy sex life with other things I talk about such as lowering cortisol, improving sleep, supporting pelvic health. Right? The the muscles of the pelvic floor really are like any other muscles in our body.

We lose them, or we start we use them, or we lose them. Right? So that's really important to understand as we are dissecting this component of the importance of frequency. It's like if if there's not a partner or an interested partner, we can actually take care of some of that sexual need. They you know, ourselves.

So another thing that we see sometimes is that with age and the aging process, almost a hundred percent of men and women in some of these studies report that after the age of 60, it takes longer to get aroused. Orgasm has also been shown to decrease some as far as the quality. So what does this mean? Well, this means that we need more foreplay. Right? It's interesting that as we age, one of the things that typically happens is there's less work and more time.

So there should be, hopefully, more time to actually engage with longer foreplay. So if it takes longer to be aroused, orgasm quality also is down in part likely due to a change in blood flow to the erectile tissue. Right? So some of the ways we work on this is, one, take more time, go slow, more foreplay. Right? So that's one thing.

This is also where using sexual massagers and various vibrators can be brought into the bedroom as a way of stimulating the erectile tissue, and this is true for both women and for men. There's things like vibrating cock rings. There's these little bullets that are super wonderful and easy to place on the erectile tissue both of females and of males, and that can be another way of bringing more blood flow, bringing more stimulation to the tissues. That's certainly another thing to consider.

And as we bring more blood flow to the tissue, that can also help with orgasm as well. So like I said, the number one reason that men tend to stop having sex is because of health issues or because there's not a partner available. But from a standpoint of where their actually drive goes down, it's usually not from a standpoint of just being not interested. That is very, very much less uncommon for men versus women.

The top reason why women tend to stop having sex are things like shame, guilt, conflicts, depression. Right? So there's a lot of emotional things that go in, and and this is where some of the emotional safety components that I talk about in in a lot of my works as well as shame and guilt are so, so, so important. Right? So shame and guilt can sometimes be useful emotions when we have done things that are wrong. Right?

So if we say something to somebody and we realize we said something in a way that actually hurt them, we feel ashamed of what they of what we said. That is an example where something like shame can provide value because it has an emotional response that is telling us that, oh, what we did is something that doesn't feel good. We should remember to approach conversations in a way that is more respectful to another individual. Right?

So that's how emotions that are quote unquote negative can actually provide value by giving us information. However, there's two problems with emotions like shame and guilt. And one is once we've learned the lesson so say in this example where, say, we use language and we're talking to another person, they got really hurt and we feel ashamed about it. Right? In this example, there's a couple things that that can go wrong. One is, okay, we got the lesson. Now we've learned it.

Now we're gonna do better in the future. Right? So we wanna really do in that situation is learn how to not allow that shame to continue to self perpetuate, where it becomes almost this rumination where we're going over and over and over in our head. Oh my gosh. I should not have done this. Oh my gosh. I should have not have done this, etcetera, etcetera. And when that happens, we're essentially creating stress on our body. We're doing a lot of damage to ourselves emotionally.

Those those sorts of things are not very valuable. Right? So shame from that standpoint is, like, get the information and then let it go. The other component that is very related to this topic of sex is shame related to sex, and this can be coming from all sorts of things. Right? This could be coming from upbringing, religious, cultural reasons. This could be as simple as shame. Maybe that maybe we have shame that our libido is not working.

Maybe there's shame that we're not able to provide for our partner, for our husband, for our spouse in a way that we want from a sexual perspective because we don't have a libido and maybe there's shame around that. Right? So that's this is the kind of shame that, you know, while it can be information, oftentimes can be very detrimental to the libido because then we start associating these bad, kinda bad feelings with the level of of exploring more deeply.

So in a lot of my work, one of the things I do is talk about hack your mind. And hacking the mind is really based upon finding some of these subconscious triggers, these subconscious things, and sometimes these are related to shame and guilt that are preventing us from, say, having a healthier relationship with our partner, a healthier relationship with ourself, and a happier libido.

So a simple action step for this is really to do one of my favorite hack your mind exercises, and this is where what you do is you start with essentially a day, and your goal this day is to just write down any sort of time you have anything that comes up across your mind that feels like a negative thought. Right? And so and we we can even make this more specific with sex. Right?

So it's like we could do an exercise where we do something like, when I think about sex or I think about my libido or I think about having sex with my husband, my spouse, my partner, the first word that comes to my mind is right?

The second word that comes to my mind is the third word that comes to my mind is and you wanna ask yourself the idea of this sort of hack your mind exercises to ask yourself a few different times throughout the day because what you're looking for is sometimes we're we're triggered by different environmental factors and that can actually influence the answers. But essentially what we're looking for to discover is how do you actually innately feel about sex?

How do you innately feel about sex with your partner? That's gonna give you a lot of insight as to emotions and subconscious motivations. You know, the first thing that comes to, you know, your mind when you think of sex is, oh, I'm too tired. Right? Well, we know then that the number one issue, probably one of the top issues you need to solve for your libido is going and figuring out why are you so tired. Right? Is it adrenals? Is it thyroid? Is it something else?

So I wanna make sure that everybody is aware that I do have a libido quiz. It's just libidoquiz.com. I'll make sure that's in the show notes for you guys. And, essentially, the idea, I had a a developer help me with this quiz. It's a really cool quiz, and the idea with it is with what I've seen is to ask questions and you answer things, and then it's gonna spit out of all the different root causes of libido what are the top root causes.

And so fatigue you're getting fatigue in this particular answer, then that might lead us down to a path that's more adrenal or thyroid related, but, you know, take the quiz to find out. But the idea, again, with the hack your mind is to do this work and then have a sense. Like, it might be, like, something very, quote, unquote, simple, like something in the physical, like, I'm too tired. Or it might be, doesn't feel safe. Not interested. I'm not attracted to my partner anymore.

Like, whatever it is, it's useful to know what's at the bottom of it because then you can begin to dissect it. Right? Then you can begin to have those hard conversations with yourself, those hard conversations with your partner to actually begin to figure out what is at the bottom of this. But in conclusion for this episode, I really want you guys to take away a few different things. That one, normal for libido is really all across the board.

I feel like from a standpoint of what a healthy libido does for balancing the body, it's really useful that people can engage sexually with their self or a partner at least once a week. There's so many hormones and so many things that get balanced that we're gonna talk about in other episodes that are really important from a libido standpoint. So, you know, I I think more could be, and I do see more being even better, but at least once a week can be a really solid baseline.

And I typically see that once a week is something that even a busy working couple with kids and lots going on can manage. So we wanna get that takeaway point. And the other takeaway point with this is that libido does not have to completely go away with age. Yes. It changes for many people, but many people still have vibrant sex lives up till close to the day they pass. Right? So this is very common to have healthy sex lives.

And in some some cases menopause for women can be a time where the libido flourishes the most because all of a sudden there's no taking hormones or birth control or worrying about any of that, and all of a sudden there's almost just this freedom. And oftentimes, while testosterone does fall at menopause, which we're gonna talk about some of the hormone issues in a future episode here.

But in as far as as hormones do fall with menopause, the relationship of testosterone, testosterone actually has more of an impact post menopause and testosterone is a huge libido driver. So we can definitely continue to increase our sex life and improve our sex life with age. It does not have to mean that everything falls apart, that this is not an important thing. It can actually be some of the best sex of our lives as we continue to age. So that's it for this episode.

As a reminder, stay sexy, stay classy, and always remember to be 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.

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