Can This Treatment Improve Your Sex Drive?

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Experiencing low sexual desire can be incredibly frustrating and overwhelming. It's the most commonly reported sexual dysfunction among women, with many expressing feelings of exhaustion, stress, or even indifference toward sex.

What's behind this prevalent issue? Are there any viable solutions?

The decrease in sex hormones during perimenopause, menopause, or after childbirth are frequently identified culprits. Recent research indicates that psychosocial factors such as stress and exhaustion often play a larger role. Many women feel overwhelmed by chronic stress stemming from the multitude of demands placed upon them, including managing a career, a family, and perhaps the responsibility of an aging parent.

Adding to this is the constant influx of picture-perfect mommy influencers flooding our social media feeds, which invites an irresistible urge to compare.

None of this is to imply that a consistently strong sex drive should be the defining factor of healthy sexuality. It's natural for desire to ebb and flow, and newer research on sexual response asserts that for women especially, desire is rarely a linear process.

Oftentimes, the subjective sense of feeling turned on arrives only after sexual activity has commenced and the body starts showing signs of sexual arousal. A woman who experiences desire only after she's in bed exploring the touch of her partner isn't "broken" or deficient. She's perfectly normal.

For a large number of women, however, stress can completely inhibit sexual interest and arousal no matter how hard she tries.

Masters and Johnson used the term 'spectatoring' to describe when, during sex, one adopts a third-party perspective, judging and criticizing oneself instead of being mentally present and attuned to the pleasurable sensations in one's body. Their research also found that women's brains are often flooded during sex with distracting thoughts ranging from self-criticism to worrying about that work presentation or your child's upcoming parent-teacher conference. Masters and Johnson also had a name for this: "non-erotic thoughts."

So, what's the solution to this all too common problem?

Therapies that calm one's internal mental state by shifting attention away from negative judgments and toward neutral observations focused on sensations in one's body in the present moment show exciting promise. For example, as outlined in her book Better Sex Through Mindfulness, sex researcher and therapist Lori Brotto has demonstrated how sexual mindfulness can lead to increased desire for, engagement in, and arousal toward sexual activity.

In a new study, Brotto and her colleagues examined whether an 8-week mindfulness program could decrease stress in women with sexual interest/arousal disorder (SIAD) and consequently improve their sexual desire and reduce their sexual distress.

The study placed 148 women into two different groups. The first group completed an 8-week intensive therapy based on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). The treatment included, among other things, meditation instructions that emphasized interoceptive awareness, metacognitive awareness, and equanimity, which the authors in this study defined as "bringing an equal interest to pleasant, unpleasant and neutral sensations, without reactivity or identification.”

Women met in groups of 8-10 and were guided by a practitioner through exercises such as meditation, body scans, breath awareness practice, mindfulness of thoughts, and mindful movement to meditation. Several mindfulness practices also instructed participants at home to touch their bodies either with their hands or with the help of a vibrator, sexual fantasy, or erotica.

In addition to mindfulness exercises, the sessions also provided participants with education about the sexual response cycle, the prevalence of sexual concerns, the causes and perpetuating factors of low desire, and the basic principles of CBT and Sensate Focus.

As a control, the authors assigned the second group of women to a similarly structured intervention, which offered just the educational material without mindfulness skills.

Overall, both the sexual mindfulness and sex education treatments led to decreased levels of perceived stress and lower cortisol levels. Still, the women in the mindfulness treatment group enjoyed significantly greater stress reduction overall.

Notably, in the mindfulness group, the reduction in perceived stress led directly to improved sexual desire and reduced sexual distress.

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These findings suggest that programs that guide women struggling with sexual distress through mindfulness exercises and coupling them with sexual educational materials can be largely beneficial.

In explaining the program's efficacy, the authors point to the importance of teaching women how to achieve equanimity. Equanimity refers to the nonjudgmental labeling and dismissal of negative or non-erotic thoughts and emotions during sex, such as the ones identified by Masters and Johnson, instead of resisting them.

In other words, sexual mindfulness is not a mechanism for teaching someone to "love their body" and "ignore the negative and focus on the positive." Instead, it's a therapy built upon traditional principles of mindfulness, where judgmental thoughts are replaced by directing attention back to the pleasurable experiences happening in one's body, as well as your partner's sexual cues. And when coupled with accurate information about desire and arousal, the effect can be transformative.