Watching From the Ceiling During Sex. Why Your Nervous System Stopped Sending the Signal

Nearly half of all midlife women are experiencing poor sexual wellbeing. That is not a rumor, that is a 2025 finding published in The Lancet — the largest study of its kind on female sexual function in women ages 40 to 69. And the thing that predicted the most distress was not low desire or impaired arousal. It was how women felt about themselves inside their own bodies. This episode is for every woman who has ever been in the middle of sex and felt absolutely nothing, then quietly wondered if something had gone terribly wrong with her.

Nothing has gone wrong. But something has gone quiet. Separate research published in late 2024 in Brain Sciences found that the variable most predictive of orgasm frequency and satisfaction in women was not hormones, not relationship quality, and not frequency of sex. It was interoceptive awareness — the capacity to notice and trust bodily sensation from the inside. When that internal signal goes dark, pleasure has nowhere to land. And for women who have spent years caregiving, overfunctioning, and running on adrenaline, that signal going dark is not a disorder. It is a nervous system adaptation that makes complete biological sense.

In this episode, Dr. Juls walks you through the new science of interoception and desire, explains why the sacral center in chakra psychology closes under chronic stress, and leads you through a slow touch self-attunement practice designed to begin restoring the connection between your skin and your awareness. This is not about fixing anything. This is about rebuilding access — to sensation, to aliveness, to the internal signal that desire requires in order to return.

Your body has not given up on pleasure. It has simply been waiting for conditions safe enough to feel it again. That is what this episode creates — the beginning of those conditions. Grab your earbuds, find a quiet moment, and come back to yourself.

What if the reason you've gone from feeling young, passionate, and desirable to feeling disconnected, broken, and like you're living with a roommate instead of a husband…has nothing to do with your age or your hormones?

What if it comes down to a hidden cycle no one talks about - one that keeps women after 50 stuck, waiting for a desire that never seems to return?

That's exactly why I created The Desire Reset Guide.

It's for women after 50, and it reveals the real reason you feel broken - plus 3 simple practices you do over 3 days to finally reconnect with your pleasure, your desire, and your partner. 👉 juliemerrimanphd.com/desire

Have you quietly wondered if you're broken…you're not. The science says so. Listen to Episode 29: Your Body Isn't Broken, The Truth About Desire After 50. 

New episodes Wednesdays & Fridays, 5am CST

This podcast is for women after 50 navigating low desire, sexual disconnection, and body changes who want nervous-system-informed insight into libido, aliveness, intimacy, and embodied pleasure so they can move from tamed to alive and unapologetically hungry.

 No part of this content may be used for AI or machine learning training.

Transcript

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In this episode, we're talking about something that happens to more women over 50 than anyone is willing to admit out loud. You're in the middle of sex and you feel absolutely, completely nothing. And I want you to know today that it is not the death of your desire, and it's not about hormones. Stay with me. Sexy After 50. Improve sex and intimacy by healing your nervous system so you finally feel turned on and confident. We're waking up but never left. Desire and fire. I'm Dr. Jules. Let's get to it. Okay, so here's three reasons to hang with me to the end of this episode. One, I've got a landmark 2025 study that just told us nearly half of all midlife women have poor sexual well-being. And the data points to something much deeper than hormones. Two, you're going to learn what your body's interceptive system is, which you already know if you listen to the podcast, but and why it goes offline and why rebuilding it is actually a path back to sensation. And three, you're going to do a slow touch practice with me today that is going to begin rewiring your body's relationship with pleasure right now in this episode. Okay, girl. It's a lot, right? I mean, aging is not for sissies. It's a great, and what an honor that we get to do it. But let's start this podcast with the data because it matters. So in 2025, Menache University published what is believed to be the largest study of its kind on sexual well-being in midlife women. And it was published in The Lancet. Nearly 5,500 women aged 40 to 69 were included. And here is what they found. Almost 50% of women in midlife had poor sexual well-being, including a doubling of the likelihood of desire and arousal dysfunction in early paramenopause women compared to pre-menopause women. Let that sit for a minute. Half, half of all midlife women. And here is what I want to draw your attention to. Because this is the part that nobody's talking about. Although low desire and arousal were the most prevalent sexual difficulties, participants with poor sexual self-image had the greatest likelihood of having associated distress. Right? Right? And how mean are we to ourselves about our bodies? See, girl, it was not the hormones causing most the pain. It was how these women felt about themselves in their bodies. That is a nervous system conversation. That is a somatic conversation. That is exactly what we do here. And then there is a separate body of research published in December 2024 in the Journal of Brain Sciences out of the University of Essex. That stopped me, girl, I mean it stopped me in my tracks. Researchers studied how different dimensions of what is called introspective awareness, we talk about that a lot here. As you remember, it's your body's ability to sense its own internal experience. This predicted orgasm frequency and satisfaction in women. They found that the ability to notice bodily sensations predicted orgasm frequency across both solitary and partnered interactions. And that, what they called body trusting, predicted orgasm. Satisfaction across both contexts, body trusting. I say it all the time. Desire is an inside job. It's great when we can couple it, but it starts inside. Think what we tell ourselves about our body, especially as it ages. We just need to be in love with our body because it's moving us around, it's getting us through this life. But I want to read the research back slowly because it's important. The ability to notice, the capacity to trust your own body. They're not talking about hormone levels, they're not talking about frequency of sex, they're not talking about not being with the right partner or not in the right position. The variable that research has showed us that predicted if a woman experienced pleasure and satisfaction was her relationship with her own internal sensations. That's everything. That is the whole conversation. So let's talk about what interception actually is, because it is one of those words that sound very clinical, and it is actually very human. Interception is your body's capacity to sense itself from the inside. The awareness of your heartbeat, the tightness of your chest, the warmth of your belly, the flutter of excitement, or the hollow feeling of dread. It is the internal sensory system that tells you what you're experiencing, not what you're thinking, not what you're supposed to feel, but what is actually happening inside of you. And here is what happens to women who have spent years, sometimes decades, in survival mode. Caregiving, overfunctioning, managing everyone else's emotions, running on adrenaline and obligation. That internal system gets quieter and quieter. Not because something is wrong with you, because your nervous system made a very intelligent adaptation. When you are busy, when you're especially that busy taking care of the external world, the body stops broadcasting internal signals as loudly. Because it has to. There is no bandwidth. And then you get into bed with your partner, or you try to access desire, and you reach inside for something, and there's just silence. This is not estrogen. This is a woman who has lost the signal to herself. In chakra psychology, which y'all know I use as somatic regulatory map, mapping rather, than a strictly spiritual framework. This is what is happening in the sacral center, this, our lower belly, which we know governs sensuality, emotional flow, creative energy, the capacity to receive and to feel. But the sacral does not exist in isolation. It is downstream from the root, which governs safety. When the root is in chronic activation, when your nervous system is perpetually scanning for threat or managing stress, the sacral center closes. Not permanently, not because your desire is gone, but because your body is allocating resources to survival instead of pleasure. Which is not a failure. It's physiology, plain and simple. But there's more. Research on what is called sexual non-concordance in women, the phenomenon where your body can show signs of physical arousal while your subjective experience is flat, tells us something very profound. Women who reported a greater awareness of comfortable, uncomfortable, and neutral body sensations showed a greater agreement between genital and subjective sexual arousal. In other words, the bridge between your body's arousal response and your felt experience of that arousal is interceptive awareness. It is your body trust. It is you and your ability to trust your body. And when that trust is gone, you can be physically present in intimacy while feeling emotionally and sensorally absent. This is research-based. This is why you can be in the middle of sex and feel like you're watching from the ceiling. Sweetness, you're not broken. You're disconnected. And that is a very different problem with a very different solution. I want to stay in with chakra psychology for a hot minute, because that framework is helpful. And I think it gives us language that neuroscience sometimes can't. Most women I work with have very developed upper chakras, throat, communication, articulation, managing the narrative. Although I don't know it's clear enough for authenticity, another story, another day, solar plexus, our upper belly, um, responsibility, structure, getting things done. Even the heart, care and empathy, emotional attunement to everyone around them. You've spent years pouring out energy into all the others around you in those centers, probably a bit off balance, but not as much as your sacral. Because the sacral, the sacral has been on low power mode for longer than we can remember. Because the sacral is a center of receiving, of pleasure, of being rather than doing. And women are not culturally rewarded for these things. We're rewarded for output, productivity, being needed. The sacral is the part of you that wants to linger, that wants to be touched slowly, that wants to feel without immediately managing the feeling. And when your sacral is depleted, intimacy can feel like another obligation. Your body is there, but your inner experience has stepped out. You go through the motions, you wonder why it feels like nothing, you assume something must be broken inside of you. Sweet soul, nothing is broken. The sacral center has closed down because it was never given permission to stay open. And here's the somatic truth about sensation. Sensation does not return through intensity, effort, pushing, struggling. It returns through slowness, through safety, through deliberately, gently asking the body to become present again. Which brings us to the practice I created for you today. But before we get to that practice, I want to take you to a quick commercial break because I have been getting a lot of messages lately from women who say, I hear you, I understand the framework, and I want to go deeper. I want someone to actually walk me through this. And if that's you, I want you to know that something is coming this August that I am really honestly excited about. I call it Alive, and it's 28 days to rebuild your capacity for pleasure, presence, and desire. Not a quick fix, not a symptom checklist, a real structured journey back into that gorgeous body of yours. With somatic practices, nervous system tools, and support. I meet with you weekly. I'll share more details soon, but for now, just keep that in the back of in your back pocket. Alive August. More to come. Okay, back to you. Let's do this practice. So I want you to set everything else down for the next few minutes. If you're driving, save this, come back to it where you can when you can. If you're folding laundry, stop for a minute. This practice requires your full, unhurried attention. This is called slow touch self-attunment. And the purpose is not relaxation. The purpose is reestablishing the signal between your skin and your awareness. You are practicing being felt by yourself. Begin by finding a comfortable position, whatever that might be for you, and take one slow breath in through your nose and let it fall out through your mouth without control. Just release. Let that jaw release as well. Now bring one hand to the top of your opposite forearm and rest it there without movement. Just feel the weight of your own hand on your bare skin. I want you to notice the temperature. Notice if your skin feels tight or soft, do not judge it. Just notice it. And now very slowly, and girl, I mean slowly, begin to draw your hand down your forearm towards your wrist. The pace I want is half of what feels natural. Slow enough that you can actually track the sensation. Slow enough that your nervous system has time to register. This is touch. This is mine. This is safe. When you reach your wrist, pause. Take a breath, then slowly move back up to the elbow. Notice what you feel. Some of you are going to feel warmth. Some of you will feel a kind of buzzing or tingling. Some of you will feel very little at first. And I want to say something directly to you. That is information, not failure. This is your body telling you how long it has been since you gave it this kind of attention. Keep going anyway. Do this on the other arm. Then if you feel comfortable, place a hand on your heart, one on your lower belly. Do not move them, just rest them there. Feel the weight. Feel the rise and fall of your own breath. Feel your heartbeat if you can. And ask yourself quietly, without needing an answer, what would it feel like to receive? Stay there for ten more seconds. Breathe. That's it. That's the practice. That is where it starts. Not with a partner, not naked. Well, you can be naked, but not in the bedroom, not during sex. It starts with your own hands on your own skin, teaching your own nervous system that sensation is safe, that being felt is allowed, and that pleasure does not have to be earned. Okay, so if numbness is a nervous system adaptation, what reverses it? Well, the research is actually very consistent on this, even when the clinical world is not fully listening yet. Sensation returns through slow, repeated, low stakes contact with your own body. Touch that is not goal-oriented, touch that is not asking for anything. This is the science behind Francis McLones and his colleagues. This is what they've been, their research has been mapping for years. And it's the research on the C tactile afferents, which are specialized nerve fibers in our skin that respond specifically to slow, gentle stroking. These fibers do not transmit pain or pressure. They transmit effective touch. They communicate safety and belonging directly to the nervous system. And what do most women in midlife never experience? Slow, gentle touch that is not in service of someone else's pleasure or comfort. Touch that is simply for the sake of being felt. The practice I just led you through activates those fibers, and repeated practice over time quite literally begins to change how much of your internal sensory, that internal sensory world you have access to. More interceptive awareness means more capacity to notice what your body is actually experiencing. More noticing means more connection to sensation. And girl, more connection to sensation means desire has somewhere to land. Some magic. This is how our nervous systems work. And it does not happen in one practice, it happens in 1020, in the daily unglamorous act of showing up for yourself. The way you have shown up for everyone else for 30 years. Your body has not turned against you. It's been waiting for you, girl. It's been waiting, begging for you. Okay, we're gonna land the plane. Here's what I want you to walk away with today. Nearly half of women in midlife are experiencing poor sexual well-being. The research is finally catching up to what women have been living for years. And the dominant explanation? Oh, it's just hormones. Don't get me wrong, you need your hormones. I love mine. But that's not the whole picture. That's incomplete. The missing variable is body trust. Body trust. The capacity to feel yourself from the inside. The capacity is called intrusion, and it is not fixed at any age. It can be rebuilt. It is rebuilt through slow, intentional, non-goal-oriented contact with your own body, through practice, through permission, through the radical act of treating your own sensation as worth attending to. Creativity, receiving. And it is downstream from safety. Before you can expect the sacral to open, your nervous system needs to believe it is allowed to. That is the work. And it is work that returns everything. Desire, aliveness, intimacy, the felt sense of being home in your own body. Girl, all you have to do is start with your own hands, slow, present, yours. You're not disappearing. You are here, bigger and better than ever. I will see you on Friday. They told you the fire dies at 50. They lie. Tap the show notes to download, reignite your fire and desire. Your free 72-hour erotic reboot. Unlock the arousal pathway buried in your nervous system. Reclaim the raw hunger you were taught to suppress. And rewire your body to crave pleasure again. Not because you're broken, but because you're ready to burn. Move from invisible to incredible. I'm Dr. Jules Keep Burning.