#337 3 Things High-Achievers With Low Libido Are Craving That’s Blocking Pleasure (Pt1)

I have worked with thousands of women over the last 11 years in the realm of sexual health, women's health, and hormones. And what underlies it all is pleasure. This idea of fulfillment, of having, of fullness. I want to decode for you the top three things I have found most women crave or want more of in the bedroom.

We know that sexless marriages are on the rise. We know that more women are staying single than ever. The thing is, we just don't know how to do it anymore. We don't know how to relate anymore. We don't know how to fight. We don't know how to fuck. We don't know how to repair.

You're here because you're the high achiever, the overgiver, and you're extraordinary. But along the way, we got taught that if we overgive, if we just say the right thing, if we do more, it's going to pay off. Just like in our careers, if we work hard and don't give up, it's going to work. They're going to finally see. But that's not actually how it works. Resentment builds, and dysfunction builds.

Your high achiever identity, the person who gets things done, the reliable one, that is running in the bedroom too. We don't go from high achiever to receiver just because we walk into the bedroom. That same operating system, the fast, efficient, controlling outcomes, runs your sex life too. High-achieving women stuck in sympathetic overdrive, cortisol-driven, task-oriented, checking off the to-do list- that penetrating, doing energy- it's turning off our desire. It's shutting down our pleasure centers.

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It's Not A Libido Problem, It's A Speed Problem

You're finishing sex like you're wrapping up a meeting with your team. We're checking boxes, getting things done, moving on. It's not a libido problem; it's a speed problem. What high achievers need more of in the bedroom, in intimacy, even in dating, is slowness, and this is hard for us.

I wrote about this in The Pink Canary. Cortisol is the desire killer. Stress is the biggest brake on your libido that there is. The higher cortisol levels are significantly associated with lower sexual desire in women. We can't be putting out fires, in fight-or-flight mode, and open to receiving. We know this from the dual control model, Janssen and Bancroft.

High achievers especially are hypervigilant because of childhood, because we learned we had to control our environment to stay safe. Our brakes are more sensitive. That mental load, that performance pressure, the body judgment of ourselves, we're on these spirals. But our nerve endings don't break. Our clitoris doesn't stop working because we didn't make it to the gym. It's just society telling us that if we don't look a certain way, we don't deserve pleasure. It's not true.

Most of us, when we are dysregulated, have responsive desire. The pleasure centers in our brain are off. We need the context to be specifically sexual to get in the mood. That's why just because you're not into it doesn't mean you shouldn't start, because arousal happens in the context, when we have responsive desire, not the other way around.

Studies show mindfulness during sex leads to improved arousal, orgasm consistency, and sexual satisfaction. Slowing down gives your body time to achieve significant arousal, in our brains, not just our genitals. Especially for high achievers, it needs time to come online.

Why High Achievers Can't Slow Down

The real reason high-achieving women can't slow down is not that you don't want to. It's that slowing down feels like losing control, and control is how you learned to stay safe. In your career, fast is powerful. Fast is valuable. You love those pats on the head, our praise kink. Our nervous system has been trained to equate speed with worth.

Sitting and doing nothing feels like vulnerability. You're not a receiver; you're in high-achieving mode. Vulnerability has never been rewarded in your world. In fact, it's probably been punished. So our bodies resist slowness, even when that's what we're craving.

Slowness Is The First Act Of Receiving

Slowness is not passive, not weakness. It's presence. Being present with the sensation, your full body, your full attention, not an agenda. Slowing down is the first condition for responsive desire to activate. Often what's in between a high achiever's low libido and their arousal is time to do nothing. Time to take a bath, have a massage, sit in silence. Then the pleasure centers in your brain start to light up. You're shifting into parasympathetic, out of doing and into feeling, out of high achieving and into receiving.

You can't receive at speed, not deeply. We also need our partners to slow down with us, to stay present, to not be rushing to the end. When your partner gives you the space and the time, and tells you they aren't going anywhere, that changes everything.

How To Create Slowness

Set the timer on your phone for 11 minutes. If you're burnt out, if you are overwhelmed, 11 minutes a day, do nothing. Not scrolling, not watching Netflix. Just sit. Maybe you start with five.

Another way is skin-to-skin contact with no goal. We're setting boundaries ahead of time, removing the performance pressure, just connecting skin to skin. That is so therapeutic. It's going to turn on your pleasure centers.

If this landed for you, book a Pleasure Path assessment. We're gonna find out where you are on this journey and what your next steps are to healing.

And if you want more of this, come find me on Substack. That's where I go deeper than I can anywhere else.

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And if you want to go deeper into super traits, over-functioning, and building a pleasure-centered relationship and life, the Pleasure-Centered Society on Substack is where that work lives. JOIN HERE

If you want to understand the specific dynamic you're in before going deeper, the Pleasure Path Assessment is a private one-on-one deep dive. Book HERE