Libido is the desire to engage in sexual activity. Sexual desire may arise spontaneously or in response to a partner’s actions, images, or thoughts.
The intensity of desire depends on various factors, such as the quality of the marital relationship, physical health, psychological state, or life-related events (pregnancy, mourning, stress at work, etc.). Decreased sexual desire is part of the various sexual dysfunctions that men and women can experience at any point in their lives.
Decreased libido becomes problematic when it bothers a person or their partner and affects love relationships. However, this condition does not always affect the ability to have sex.
Reasons for decreased libido
Decreased sexual desire may have a physical cause such as:
- Sexual problems, such as pain during sex or inability to reach orgasm.
- Disease. Certain medical conditions can affect sexual desire, such as arthritis, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure (hypertension), depression, or neurological conditions.
- Drug side effects. Several drugs, such as antidepressants (eg, paroxetine, fuoxetine, Prozac), often reduce sexual desire. Other drugs for prostate problems, hair loss, or blood pressure may affect libido.
If you are on medication and are experiencing a decrease in sex drive, read about the side effects of your medication. - Surgery. Breast or genital surgery can affect self-esteem, sexual function, and sexual desire.
- Alcohol or drugs. Abuse of alcohol or certain drugs can affect libido.
- Fatigue. Excessive fatigue caused, for example, by caring for elderly parents or young children, can affect sexual desire.
Hormonal changes:
- Menopause. During the transition to menopause, women’s estrogen levels drop. This can cause vaginal dryness, so painful or uncomfortable sex can lead to avoidance. On the other hand, if the ovaries produce very little estrogen after menopause, they continue to produce relatively large amounts of androgens, which sometimes explains the appearance of facial hair at this age. However, this androgen level becomes lower than before menopause, which can lead to decreased sexual desire.
- Pregnancy and breastfeeding. Hormonal changes during pregnancy, as well as after childbirth and breastfeeding, can affect sexual desire. Not only hormones, but also fatigue, body changes and stress caused by the birth of a new baby can affect sexual desire.
- Prolactin. An abnormal increase in the level of prolactin (a hormone responsible, among other things, for the reduction and maintenance of lactation) blocks sexual desire in women.
- Low testosterone. In men, testosterone is produced in the testicles. This hormone is essential for maintaining bone density, fat distribution, muscle mass, red blood cell production, sperm production, and sexual desire. With age, testosterone gradually decreases (about 1% per year after 30 years). Sometimes testosterone can decrease very much with age (age-related androgen deficiency). A decrease in testosterone can also be caused by a disease (for example, hypogonadism).
- Contraceptive pills. Birth control pills typically result in a decrease in libido in 20-40% of women because they reduce the amount of testosterone circulating in the blood of women.
Decreased sexual desire may have a psychological cause, such as:
- Childhood sexual abuse
- Depression.
- Severe financial or job-related stress
- Low self-esteem.
- Conflicted love relationships (lack of communication, unresolved conflicts, infidelity, lack of trust in a partner).
How to increase libido in women
Sexologist Ekaterina Alskaya comments:
Libido is sexual drive and desire. Let’s distinguish between these two concepts.
Desire is the desire to satisfy one’s need in the sexual sphere, to get relaxation and calm down. Here people can enter into intimate relationships even with a stranger or masturbate.
Attraction is a craving for a certain person, the need to merge with a loved one through the body.
And if most likely there are no problems with libido when falling in love (hormones control the entire system), then we are talking about sexual desire. It is with desire that the cycle of sexual response begins, which leads to orgasm and a sense of satisfaction with sexual activity in general. Want or don’t want? – that is the question, and not to be or not to be … And if you still “do not want”, then catch a series of tips that will help you rise (into the heavens of sensuality) or fall (into carnal pleasures)
Sexual interest
Artificially bring it to life. Read erotic novels, watch movies about love, look at porn and in your thoughts transfer to yourself. Become the heroine of these stories. Feel how the vibes of sexuality are born inside, longing for strong and strong, male hands
Play
Bring a spark of seduction into your life. You have already learned to be in the center of the sex scenes. It’s time to train “on the cats.” Start looking at men not as two-legged men in trousers, but as people whose puzzle, according to nature, converges into a hot and pleasant theme of love. Look at your husband/men and play the scenes from point number 1 with them in your mind. And do not forget to relax your face, smiling mysteriously like Mona Lisa. Catch the oncoming surge and assert your irresistibility
Increase the level of pleasure in your life
Dopamine – causes euphoria, a surge of energy, a desire to do stupid things. Serotonin – the hormone of happiness increases sociability and talkativeness, love, bright colors, falling in love. Think about what brings you true pleasure in life and start doing it right now. Spring is in the yard, wake up!
Relationship expert, integrative psychologist, master hypnotherapist Lilia Levitskaya comments:
For women who are healthy enough, without personality disorders and strong neurotic scenarios in history, it is very important that the needs are met:
- feeling loved so that a man demonstrates love for a woman in the way that this woman understands. For some, these are flowers, and for some, tea with bagels)
- a sense of physical and emotional security, a sense of trust in this particular man. It is important to open up.
- feeling like the only one for this man.
For a reasonably healthy woman, foreplay is very important so that her libido reaches a sufficient level. If a woman lives in a neurotic scenario where she acts either as a rescuer or as a victim, the triggers for her willingness to have sex will, on the contrary, be disturbing situations.
Anxiety can greatly increase libido, since sex in this case performs more of the role of “binding a partner to itself”, “manipulating a partner”, “getting proof of love and one’s own attractiveness”.
With personality disorders and psychopathologies, the picture is even more complex and it is important to analyze it individually.
How to increase libido in men
Sexologist Ekaterina Alskaya comments:
If you are a man and suddenly realize that lying on the couch with a can of beer in your hand or working until night has become more interesting than curling around women in the hope of her favorable “Yes”, know that this is a serious matter and requires immediate attention.
Required hormone testing
And make up if something went wrong
Check-up of the latest events
Let’s be positive and exclude the first item from your life. The doctor found nothing. Then check yourself for stress.
Did something happen recently that was a breaking point: up to this point everything was fine and suddenly now it has become bad. These can be problems at work, an inadvertently dropped partner’s word and complexes against this background, failure in bed – and then it’s better to cover everything up completely so as not to experience frustration.
Stress is trauma. And if the response did not properly occur, the body chooses the path – to freeze. You have become frozen. It is clear that in such a state there is no question of reproduction. Work through these cases with a therapist or close the gestalt yourself. After that, take a look around.
Look at your wife/women
Start complimenting them, create an emotional background for flirting. Your task is to receive smiles in return. Confirm that you are very attractive, women want to be near you. And one day some princess or a harlot will look at you so that the ice will melt from your body and your heart will rush to her. Falling in love will ignite attraction. And in such a drive, you will want to connect with her. Maybe not just once, but many, many times.
So many single women, don’t leave us alone, deleting ourselves from the list of Don Juans.
Psychologist, psychotherapist Kirill Filippov comments:
When we talk about a decrease in libido in men, we most likely mean a middle-aged man over 40 years old, usually 45-60 years old. This period is also called a mid-life crisis, and the truth is often we can find drastic changes in a man in his life, his mood and character.
If a man is in a stressful state for a long time, his work causes constant tension, then the body gradually begins to deplete and becomes not up to sexual relations.
A certain behavioral pattern also influences here, when a man is under stress after work, his sexual relations can acquire the function of relieving stress, which creates a certain association, in connection with which the value of sexual relations begins to fall, they cease to be a space for intimacy, and they become a lot of rudeness and harshness, due to this need to defuse anger. Well, the relationship as a whole begins to deteriorate.
If we return to the topic of the midlife crisis, we can find that, on the one hand, a man at this age is able to withstand less stress, often men at this age develop many chronic diseases, the body is depleted.
On the psychological side, in this crisis, a man begins to rethink his life and asks himself whether I have achieved what I planned in my life. This overestimation can often lead to sad conclusions, because in our youth we dream a lot, and our goals can be overestimated. Faced with an assessment of reality, a man can fall into a depressive state, and depression itself is often the cause of a drop in libido.
This condition is often also associated with a decrease in self-esteem, the lower the self-esteem, the lower the sexual desire. The main recommendations for increasing libido based on the above reasons are:
- Set realistic goals
- Reduce stress
- Go in for sports, especially in a sport where you can feel success, nothing is more libido-inducing than a sense of achievement
- See a therapist, you may need help treating depression
- Try to change your attitude towards sex, because it should be a form of expression of intimacy, and not just relaxation
Psychologist, hypnotherapist Dmitry Orlov comments:
The first thing I want to say is that I have not had a single case of a decrease in libido against the background of a calm, cloudless life. It is almost always accompanied by prolonged stress in relationships, failures in work – that is, some situations from which a man makes judgments like “I am a loser”, “I am a victim”, “I am somehow not like that.”
That is, a decrease in libido is directly related to a decrease in self-esteem. Case study: a young entrepreneur at the age of 33 faced not only a decrease in libido, but also partial erectile dysfunction. And this at 33! When a man’s body is full of testosterone. And this problem was preceded by the loss of business and financial failure.
It may seem that failure in a career should not be related to physiology, but in humans, and especially in men, physiology and success in life are directly related.
Accordingly, he no longer copulated with the females of the group. What is a man to do? Find your own “invisible glass”, your cognitive distortions, break erroneous logical connections like “I’m only worthy if I’m successful in business” or “If I failed here, then now I can hardly cope with anything else.”
The search for such unconscious errors is extremely difficult to carry out on your own, the general recommendation is to contact a specialist after all. To the young man I mentioned, libido and potency normal for his age returned after three months of personal work using the methods of KGT, Gestalt therapy and hypnoanalysis. All he needed to realize was that failure is normal.
After them, you need to draw conclusions and transform them into experience, and with this experience forward – to new achievements! According to statistics, every dollar millionaire, on average, went through bankruptcy three times. It is impossible not to mention the interpersonal reason for the decrease in libido. It happens that libido decreases only in relation to a specific person.
The reasons for this can be very different: a too toxic partner, the relationship was originally built on false values, feelings simply faded over time along with attraction. I usually recommend seeing a family counselor and trying to give the relationship a second chance. But if they have outlived their own, there is no need to torture yourself or your partner.
Even if your body tells you that “there is nothing to catch here,” it is worth hearing these signals.
