In this podcast episode, Sarah Liz King addresses a listener’s question about low libido even after recovering their period from hypothalamic amenorrhea. She explains that hormones, medication, stress, and fatigue can all impact libido. Sarah discusses the concept of desire and suggests creating awareness and curiosity about increasing desire. She advises against comparing one’s libido to others and instead focusing on what feels fulfilling. Sarah encourages listeners to prioritise self-care and explore ways to cultivate responsive desire.
Episode Transcript
Sarah Liz King (00:00:02) – Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Holistic Health Radio. I’m your host, Sarah Liz King. I’m an exercise physiologist and health coach, empowering you to find your healthy balance with food, fitness and your body Through my 1 to 1 and group coaching programs, both myself and my team help women regain their periods, find food freedom, and have a healthier relationship with exercise, all while gaining body confidence. Now, today I’m doing a listener Q&A. So these are going to be nice, short, short episodes that are going to answer your questions. So you’ll see me put a question, a question box up on my Instagram from time to time. It’ll link you to a little form to leave all of your burning questions about recovery and beyond. And today’s is all about libido. So the specific listener question for today is I’ve recovered my period. I’ve had it for six months, but my libido is still really, really low. Why is this happening? What have I done wrong and how do I improve it? So first things first.
Sarah Liz King (00:01:09) – Let’s kind of define what libido is. So libido is essentially your sex drive, or we can kind of term it your desire, your urge to have sex, essentially. And I’m going to include the link to an episode that I’ve done with the wonderful Georgia Grace who works as a sex coach. She everything I’ve learned about sex is a lot of it is from Georgia. She is a wealth of information. And we recorded an episode together back in 2020 all about reconnecting with your own pleasure. So. If you are wanting a little bit more of an extensive episode on this topic, definitely click the episode link in the show notes and go back and listen to the podcast with Georgia. She’s just such a wealth of information. But back to answering this question Why is my libido low? Now I’m going to use desire more throughout this episode than libido. So our desire for sex can change for a multitude of different reasons. Hormones can be one. So when you have low estrogen or low sex hormones, it can affect your desire for sex.
Sarah Liz King (00:02:28) – Other things that can impact it are things like medication. But we also have to look at your desire in the context of your life. We know things like feeling really stressed and feeling really, really tired can impact your desire for wanting to have sex. The other thing to keep in mind is desire. Also runs on a spectrum and kind of how we feel the urge to have sex can either be from spontaneous desire, so that sudden kind of like urge to just have sex that feels like it comes out of nowhere and it can also be responsive desire. So what are the things that I can do that bring desire front of mind that increase my urge or desire for wanting of sex? Now I feel like a lot of people think that they recovered their period and then all of a sudden they should have so much spontaneous desire. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. Whether that can be that you’re really, really stressed in life, you’re very busy. Maybe you’ve been in kind of like a longer term relationship and you love your partner, but that kind of spark and spontaneity that you used to have just isn’t there.
Sarah Liz King (00:03:44) – That’s where responsive desire can really come into play. And oftentimes when we have. A low libido. There’s nothing wrong with us. There’s not something wrong with you. It’s not like a health condition. You’re not going to die if you don’t have sex. But it can really affect our relationships and our connection with ourselves and our body. And it’s nice to kind of work on it so that it feels like a fulfilling kind of sex life for you. So one of the things that Georgia often talks about is if you’ve had any struggles with your body or you feel like your desire for sex is low, it starts with creating like a non-judgmental awareness and curiosity about how we increase this desire and bring sex front of mind more often. So if you feel like you have a low libido, that would be my homework for you. How can you bring sex front of mind more often? So how can we work on this responsive desire rather than just kind of waiting for the spontaneous desire to show up? Because it might not.
Sarah Liz King (00:04:55) – So that can be things like more self pleasure. It could also be like having like a sexy, you know, text back and forth with your partner. It might be listening to something erotic or reading a book. It could be deciding that you and your partner like watch some ethical porn or something that you both are like really interested in and knowing what a good sex life looks like for you. I think a lot of times we often get caught up in, you know, how much other people around us seem to be having sex. And in comparison, we feel like maybe there’s something with our libido and that we should be having more and more sex. But it’s more about what is fulfilling for you, what feels like a good quality amount rather than just focusing on the quantity. So in short, there’s nothing wrong with having a low libido, but if it is impacting your relationships, your own well-being, and how fulfilled you feel in your sexual in your sex life, then it’s worth looking into, right? Don’t just assume that it’s only because of lower lower hormone levels.
Sarah Liz King (00:06:07) – It might be, but it might also be the case that it is other things going on in your life. So think about it in the context of your life. Are you really busy? Are you taking care of yourself? If you’ve minimized your own self-care, the last thing that might be on your mind is having sex with your partner because you’re like, I’m exhausted from doing all the housework and taking care of the kids and all of that kind of thing. So it can be when you start prioritizing yourself again that that desire increases. It could also be how much is on your plate. We know a lot of the kin keeping and the housework often goes towards the females in relationships. And sometimes we know through research that having some of that taken off our plates where there’s a more even distribution of all of those domestic chores, that again, research shows that more women feel that their desire increases. And then last but not least, how can you bring sex front of mind more often and really engage in pleasure in a really fulfilling way for you so that you can start to cultivate more of that responsive desire? So I hope that gives you a little bit of an answer on the fact that, yes, hormones do come into play when we’re talking about libido and desire, but the story doesn’t end there.
Sarah Liz King (00:07:26) – So there’s a few little tips. There’s some homework to go and think about. There’s another link to the episode that I’ve done with Georgia Grace and I hope you found these. Q&A is really helpful. Again, look out for the question box. If you want your question answered on the podcast and I will be back next week with another fresh new episode or Q&A that you can wrap your ears around.
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