Being in Your Body: How Mindfulness Can Cultivate Higher Sexual Arousal
Most times when people come for help with a sexual problem, they don't feel any sense of control over that problem.
In sex therapy, we spend a lot of time helping you to understand not only how the problem developed, but also building a sense of self efficacy or belief that you have control and can direct your attention and the way that your body and nervous system functions during sexual intimacy. The body's central nervous system and the mind's attention and thought processes can be trained through a series of directed and targeted practices.
Mindfulness in Sex Therapy
When you think about making love or pleasuring yourself or someone else, this can be a form of mindfulness.
From the earliest days of sex therapists trying to help patients with problems with sexual functioning — such as difficulty maintaining and erection or pain during sex — the use of mindfulness was used in exercises like sensate focus. Although sensate focus was developed by a team of researchers (William Masters and Virginia Johnson) in the 1970s before mindfulness as we know it today became a mainstay in popular culture, these early pioneers were in fact doing mindfulness-based interventions to help their clients overcome sexual functioning problems.
Contemporary sex researchers have identified the specific components of mindfulness that improve sexual functioning. This is incredibly helpful because these components can be taught and woven into your “hands-on” at-home sex therapy interventions to improve sexual functioning.
How Can We Use Mindfulness in Sex Therapy?
One of the core principles of mindfulness is attention.
Mindfulness practice asks you to focus your attention on the breath, body sensations, emotions, thoughts, or whatever you are noticing. Research has shown that women’s sexual response is affected by the focus of attention.
There are two types of sexual response:
your subjective feeling of being turned on, and
your body’s physiological sexual arousal.
In other words, sexual response can occur subjectively through your inner world or what you feel about what you experience, and through genital arousal or the physiological aspects of arousal.
What's interesting is that research has shown that when women were asked to focus on, or attend to, the arousal of another person in an erotic video, they were found to have feelings of subjective arousal but not genital arousal. For these women, they felt turned on, but their bodies didn’t get physically aroused.
In contrast, women who were asked to focus on or attend to their own body sensations and genital arousal while viewing the same erotic video had both genital and subjective arousal. For these women, when they were asked to focus on their own body sensations, they had feelings of being turned on and their bodies were more physically aroused.
This is one illustration of the distinction in how we focus our attention and what impacts both subjective and genital arousal.
The take-home message is that it's important to focus on your own body sensations. What you attend to can increase or decrease both genital and subjective arousal. When you focus on your own body and how is it responding during a sexual experience, you will have higher levels of sexual arousal.
Learn Mindfulness Skills for Sexual Health
In sex therapy, we work with individuals and couples to educate them not only on how sexual arousal and response works, but to teach them mindfulness skills in the context of sex therapy.
Stay tuned for the launch of our online course in January 2023 that will teach you many more aspects of how mindfulness and sexual functioning work together to provide more fulfilling sexual experiences. Sign up for our newsletter to be one of the first to hear when it’s available!