No More Intrusive Thoughts: 4 Ways To Hack Your Brain For Better Sex

If you Google "how to have better sex," you'll get articles suggesting that you buy lingerie, make a sexy playlist, and eat chocolate-covered strawberries in bed (side note: clearly the author of that one has never actually eaten chocolate-covered strawberries, because they are a mess).

Let me just tell you now: None of that is going to solve your problem.

That's because your experience of sex—like your experience of the rest of the world—starts in your brain. If you have anxieties and insecurities around your body, your partner, or sex in general, you can't solve them from the outside in. Lingerie, music, and chocolate are all fun, but none of them is any match for the distracting soundtrack in your brain that is ruining your bedroom vibes.

The good news is that you can improve your sex life, dramatically, and pretty quickly too—and you don't have to spend a dime. Too many women just check out from sex because they don't know how to get their insecure brains under control—but everyone deserves great sex, and you can use your thoughts to get there.

As a curvy woman myself, I used to agonize about the first time I got naked with new partners because I was so convinced that I had somehow completely disguised my horrific body in clothing and that they would be shocked when they saw me naked. I remember the day I realized that as a woman dating in my 30s, the men I was dating all had access to internet porn and, if they were into curvy women, had surely been seeking out photos and videos of naked curvy women for years before I came along. If they were into me, they were into curves—and they wanted to see mine naked!

For many people, this one manifests less as the thought "their pleasure is more important than mine" (in fact, they would strongly disagree with that as an abstract premise!) and more as a habit of worrying about whether your partner is satisfied and often an intense discomfort with receiving pleasure while not also giving it. It's no wonder, because women are socialized to believe that their value is based on providing sexual pleasure to other people, particularly to men. For many women, this is most acute when receiving oral sex without reciprocating.

So if you find that you are uncomfortable with a session where you have an orgasm and your partner doesn't—but you feel fine when it's the other way around—then you've got some thoughts about this that are worth investigating!

So many people are uncomfortable talking about sex under any circumstances, much less asking for what they want when the moment arrives. That means so many people have less-than-satisfying sex because they feel too awkward, uncomfortable, or anxious to give direction to their partners.

Here's the real talk: I'm not going to tell you to wait until you feel perfectly comfortable before you share what you like in bed. Because that day may never come. A whole host of social and family programming makes most people feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, and even ashamed when they try to articulate what they like or think they might like in bed. Plus if you're socialized as a woman, you're socialized to think you shouldn't enjoy sex that much—and if you're heterosexual, you're socialized to be very careful not to wound a male partner's pride.

Most of us think about a lack of desire for sex as being either (1) a problem caused by our bodies not wanting to have sex (because of hormones or fatigue or some other biological problem) or (2) a problem caused by someone else not making us want to have sex with them.

But here's the secret: Most of your desire for sex or desire to not have sex comes from your brain. It comes from how you are thinking about sex in general and how you are thinking about your partner in specific.

If you think of sex as an inconvenience or something that you're too tired to do, you're never going to be in the mood. Similarly, if you think about sex as an obligation or have thoughts that your partner will be upset or not love you if you don't have sex, you are also never going to feel very sexy about it. Society teaches women especially that their job is to have sex with men to keep them happy—so there can be a lot of anxiety around saying no.