A podcast to educate and equip women with the information and confidence they need to express, experience and enjoy their sexuality. Cindy Scharkey RN, BSN, brings her 35+ years of experience as a healthcare professional to open the doors to healthy conversations about sex. This is a community where you can listen and learn to give yourself permission for pleasure. Visit www.cindyscharkey.com for educational blogs and newsletter.
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Have you ever been having sex and suddenly your arousal just disappears? From this episode you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how arousal and desire really work, as well as factors that influence it. You’ll also learn three things research shows that long-term couples can do to experience sexual satisfaction as desire changes over time.
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Hello everyone and welcome to Permission for Pleasure. I'm Cindy Sharkey, your host. In this episode, I'm talking about sexual arousal and desire. You'll hear answers to frequently asked questions like, why do I lose my arousal in the middle of sex? And does losing my arousal in the middle of sex mean I'm no longer attracted to or desire my partner? Also, what's the single factor that most impacts sexual arousal in the research across populations? I'm glad you're here, friends. And if you're new to the show, another episode about your brain, arousal and desire is episode 28 called Sex on the Brain. I'll link to that quickie in the show notes, as well as my book, Permission for Pleasure, where I talk extensively about this topic and give you prompts and exercises to investigate your own arousal and desire. Okay, and before we jump in, friends, if you're a regular listener of the podcast, I want to ask you to please do something for me. That is to rate the show on your listening platform. Why do I ask you to do this? Because newer listeners, they sometimes judge shows and give them a try based on ratings and reviews, especially those are new to me. If they're new to me in my content, so please take just one moment to rate the show. It could be your rating that helps someone else join us here in our listening community. Thanks so much for doing that. Now buckle up and let's jump in. Here's a few things I really want you to know about sexual arousal and desire. First, desire is your motivation to want to have sex, and arousal is your physiological response. Arousal is an emotional state, not a simple reflex that either fires or doesn't fire. And in this arousal state, it is shaped by the balance between what's activating your system and what's suppressing it. I'm talking about the dual control model here from Janssen and Baincroft's research, that two-part system, your sexual excitement or your accelerator, and your sexual inhibition or your break. Both of these are always on. They're like two competing systems. And your sexual experiences depend on which one of these is winning, so to speak, the accelerator or the break. Here's an example. Just kind of a silly example, okay, but it'll make sense. You're out to dinner with family, and your husband puts a hand on your thigh under the table, leans over, whispers in your ear how hot you look, you might notice a warmth of arousal, a spark of desire. But the time and the place isn't appropriate to start making out at the table with your family, right? That is your inhibition or break, winning in the situation. Now, if you're out to dinner with your partner and the same scenario happens, perhaps all the stars are aligned, and as you feel that warmth of arousal and spark of desire, you say, Hey, let's get out of here now. That's your excitement system winning and your accelerator pressing down. Sort of silly examples, but I want it to make sense. There is a balance between these two competing systems. Additionally, we each have our own pattern or patterns of whether you find arousal comes easily or requires very specific conditions. This is a normal way to be, either easily or requiring specific conditions. This two-part system is constantly scanning and assessing things. Things like, is this context safe? Am I present here in the moment? Is my body under other demands right now? Are there physical, emotional, social threats, so to speak, that need more of my attention? This is what's happening. Your arousal will depend on the answer to these questions. So it isn't just do I find my partner sexy or do I want sex? It also comes into play all of these other things that your two-part system is scanning and assessing. Does that make sense? To answer the question about loss of arousal during sex, from the research, we see that loss of arousal during sex is almost never about lack of attraction or desire. What it is about is your nervous system, and that your nervous system has decided something else needs more attention in the moment. So if you're aroused and then you lose the arousal during sex, most likely the context changed. That would be a time to ask questions like, are you feeling self-conscious? Are you experiencing performance anxiety? Do you have sensory input that's disruptive? Like the baby cried out, or the dog barked, or your phone lit up? Are your body's other demands taking over? I have to pee, or I have to fart, or this position is too uncomfortable and my knee can't take it. Losing arousal during sex doesn't mean you aren't attracted to your partner. Neither does it mean you're rejecting them. The answer here is how can you solve the context together in those moments? Maybe that's taking a break. Perhaps it's changing positions. Maybe it's turning on a sound machine or music, for example. So if you find yourself occasionally losing arousal during sex, think about your context and what's going on. Now, if your loss of arousal is a consistent pattern, something else may be going on, whether in your body, in your relationship, there may be a hormonal issue, there may be a psychological issue, or something else. But here is what the research shows about this break and accelerator. Your break will override your accelerator most every time. Your stop overrides your go. So let's look a little bit more at what those breaks or stops can be. And the research describes two types of breaks. One is like a foot break, it's a hard stop due to risk or threat. Something doesn't feel right, perhaps fear or being interrupted or not feeling safe. In these situations, when the cause is resolved, the interruption is addressed, or you think a baby's crying or a child's crying, and so your antenna goes up, and then you realize no, all is quiet. Well, in those situations, right, when the cause is resolved, the arousal can often return. Now, the other kind of break is more like a hand break. This break is slightly engaged all the time. So you can be trying to push your accelerator and yet you're trying to override this brake that is always on. This could be a chronic inhibition that's humming in the background, and it's enough to interrupt the arousal process or pull you out of arousal altogether. Let's take performance anxiety, for example, because it's so very common, and it can show up here. Also, things like self-monitoring, spectatoring, worrying about pleasing a partner, not feeling the pleasure yourself, having a brain that is distracted really easily. This can show up as your body not responding with arousal, your mind drifting, or your feelings shifting. In my book, Permission for Pleasure, I offer these kinds of, well, they're sort of prompts and also exercises to help you figure out if you have a break quietly or loudly running in the background, as well as frequent footbreaks that women have described to me, those kinds of scenarios over and over again. And you might find that helpful if this is something you want to explore. The link for that is always in the show notes. I have found that when we ask questions of ourselves around what's pushing our break or breaks, we can really learn a lot about our own arousal and desire. And often we can come up with solutions or a plan or strategies to release the break or the breaks. But friends, we have to identify them first. We also want to think about our accelerator or what pushes the go on arousal for us. Ask yourself, is my accelerator highly sensitive? Is it in need of very specific conditions to activate? And if so, what are those conditions? Identifying those conditions is crucial to you being able to press down on your go or accelerator. This is just some little bite-sized education around arousal and desire. There's a lot more to this, but for this little quickie episode, I wanted to highlight those few things that I've mentioned so far. And also to address the other question that I posed at the top of the show that I get asked a lot, which is what is the factor that impacts sexual arousal the most across all populations? And you know what Professor Jansen's answer was from the research? Tiredness and not just a lack of energy, but fatigue. People are so fatigued. And fatigue directly affects the nervous system's capacity to move into a relaxed, open state. And here is the thing a relaxed, open state is what's required for arousal. So if you are exhausted, tired, fatigued, your nervous system, my friend, is going to prioritize survival and recovery, not desire. People seem to think that energy for sex comes from some separate energy tank. There is only one tank. One. So if that tank is empty, low, especially if that tank is chronically low, your nervous system will say no thank you to sex. Makes sense. I want to leave you with one last word on desire, especially for those in longer relationships. What the research shows is that sexual satisfaction is often high in long-term relationships when couples do these things. Number one, stop expecting sex to look like it did during relationship energy that was years and years ago. You know that new relationship energy. When we stop expecting sex to look a certain way or a way it did in the past, that goes a long way towards sexual satisfaction. The next one is understanding how responsive desire works and embracing it as you or your partners or both of your desire style. To review, in other episodes, you've heard about responsive desire, which means rather than experiencing or wanting sex out of the blue, you have to get your brain, body, imagination aroused, which creates desire. Responsive desire is a normal way to experience desire. Lastly, couples that say they experience high sexual satisfaction in long-term relationships also learn to be intentional about sex. It's a priority. They create environments and time for it. They don't wait for desire to tap them on the shoulder, they go after it. Those are your three tips for sexual satisfaction. And I'm going to wrap it up there, listeners. I will link to other episodes and blogs about desire and arousal in the show notes, as well as my book that offers a lot more depth of exploration into this topic as well. Remember to please rate the show on your platform. And as we go, let's think about our accelerator and our break and how we turn ourselves on and turn ourselves off. Until next time, friends, keep giving yourself all kinds of permission. Permission for pleasure.
