Sex and Stress: The stress response and low sex drive relationship
Part 2 of 4: The stress response and low sex drive. I’m Erinn, your Philadelphia sex therapist and couples therapist, here to help you lower stress and increase sex drive. If you haven’t already, check out Part I- The Stress Response: Is it causing your low sex drive?
When you think of general stress, what comes to mind?
Work stress? Overwhelmed at your job and not feeling supported? Relationship stress? Lack of interest in sex? Feeling unmotivated and having difficulty completing tasks? Lying awake at night thinking about all the things you have to do tomorrow and how you’re going to do them well, now that you’re short on sleep too? Are you stressed just reading this??
First, a little background on the stress response and low sex drive
We experience stress all the time. Some is helpful, some not so much. In our modern world, you’re an outlier if you’re not experiencing some type of significant stress at any given time.
And if unhelpful stress is left unchecked, that stress can start to cause low libido.
We tend to talk about the impact of stress emotionally, like “I feel stressed today.” We use it to describe feeling overwhelmed, frantic, disorganized, etc. In doing so, we overlook the physical impact of stress. But this is so important because stress is a physical response! And so is your sexual response. So, it makes sense that one would affect the other, right?
What does the physical stress response look like?
Stress is a physiological survival response. It activates our sympathetic nervous system and the fight/flight/freeze response. Way back in the day when we lived in nature with our tribe we had to worry a lot about survival. At any moment a lion could wander into camp, jeopardizing our safety and survival. If that happened, we needed to fight the lion off, try to outrun it, or freeze and hope it didn’t see us and continued on its way. The activation of our stress response in this situation was helpful because it communicated an immediate threat that we needed to react to in order to survive. For more info on the physical stress response, check out Part I- The Stress Response: Is it causing your low sex drive?
The good news about your stress response?
With modern-day housing, lions don’t typically wander into your living room. And this response is still helpful with clear threats to survival. If a car veers off the road and is barreling down the sidewalk at you, you just react and jump out of the way, you don’t stop and think over options first.
The bad news about your stress response (and that low sex drive)?
Most modern-day threats are not as clear-cut and time-limited. Think about those examples above like work stress, relationship issues, depression, anxiety, etc. If you’re really stressed at work, it’s not as easy to handle as the lion: You can’t fight because you might want to keep that job. You can’t just run because the stressor is still there every day. And you can’t freeze because you have a job to do. But some extent of this stress response is happening in your body anyway because this work stressor is a threat to your well-being. And your body is feeling the impact of that every day.
It’s no wonder you're feeling a lack of interest in sex. You’re experiencing low libido because your body is simply trying to survive.
The stress response can cause low sex drive
Sex itself can turn into a stressor if it’s not going the way you want it to, especially when you notice you're experiencing low libido. Worried about your desire because you don’t want sex very often? Self-conscious about the noises you make during sex, or do you not make enough noise? Worried about how you look naked or in different positions? Are you taking too long or not long enough or orgasm? Are you worried because you’re not orgasming at all? This is all stress and is being interpreted as a threat. Now that your body senses a threat it’s going into survival mode, which means no more sexy time. And once you have a couple of stressful or unenjoyable sexual experiences, a vicious cycle of negative feedback can start. You may come to expect sex will be stressful or not pleasurable. This makes it even harder to be present and enjoy sex. Now it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And stress is one of the main killers of sexual response, therefore contributing to your low libido and lack of interest in sex.
Basically, stress = no sex drive or fun. Consider this example of a series of unfortunate sexy events:
Lately, you’ve noticed low libido because you haven’t been feeling as much desire. It’s come up with your partner, and you want to want sex, but it just hasn’t been happening. Has something changed in your relationship, causing you to feel this way? Are you not as attracted to your partner? Is something wrong with you physically? Now your stress response is activated. As soon as these worries start, your sympathetic nervous system ramps up and releases stress hormones (think adrenaline) to help in that lion attack. This is the opposite of what you need for a fun, sexy time. Even worse, this stress has started to grow. Suddenly, you’re stressing about it while lying in bed and can’t sleep (adrenaline does that). Now you’re tired and cranky and can’t communicate as well. This causes you to be less patient and more irritable, so now you’re fighting with your partner more. So and so forth. Now it really is a threat to your relationship, which activates even more stress, making sex even less of a realistic possibility.
So what can you do to calm your stress response and increase sex drive?
The first step is recognizing the threats/stressors and paying attention to the messages your body is giving you.
Cueing into these can help give you an idea of what’s causing the stress and how it’s manifesting so you can address it.
Pay attention to where you feel stress, like really feel it, in your body.
This can be things like muscle tension, racing heart, dry mouth, lack of appetite, and headaches. Address these physical symptoms through physical means. Do some light stretching/massage to relax tense muscles, do some breathing to calm your heart rate, drink some water, etc.
Pay attention to the environments and people you’re around when you feel your stress response coming online.
This will give you info about what’s causing the stress. This will help you see what external factors are causing a low sex drive and getting in the way of a positive sexual response. That way, you can start to shift those, opening you up to have more energy to focus on the fun, sexy parts.
Be honest with yourself about what you need to manage stress and increase sex drive.
If you keep ending up in the same stressful environments and not really addressing this, you’ll keep getting the same results. Consider what realistic changes would help decrease your stress level. Consider what you’d need to feel more comfortable, content, and relaxed during sex. You deserve to let your sexual response shine and increase sex drive, but in order to do that, you have to address what’s standing in your way. And that’s the stress.
Take some of the pressure off sex and your low sex drive.
The more pressure you put on yourself to perform, look, and sound a certain way or have sex at a certain frequency, the more elusive it may feel. And that’s because pressure = stress. Take some time to get back to basics with what you enjoy about your body, your partner’s, sex, etc. Try to look at sex through a curious, fun, exploratory lens. This will help you increase libido and get back to having more fun during sex.
Talk with a Sex Therapist in Philadelphia, PA
It can be helpful to get an outside perspective when making sense of your stressors because they can be very ingrained or hard to identify. A sex therapist can help you see how seemingly unrelated stressors, like work, are having a big impact on your sex life. Sex therapy can help you explore new ways to manage your stress so your body can be more relaxed, present, and has more energy for the fun stuff- sex!
I hope this helps you have a better idea of how your stressors are impacting your sex life. If you’re still stressed and are interested in learning more about what could help click here and we can set up a 15 min phone chat. I’d be happy to learn more about your individual stress response and help you figure out how to choose the best sex therapist. If you’re interested in shifting how your stress is affecting your sex drive through individual sex therapy in Philadelphia or couples therapy in Philadelphia, you can read more about how I can help with both by clicking their links.
My specialties include low desire, differential desires, low sex drive, communication, managing sexual stress and pressure, and increasing connection.
