In this solo episode of the Unmasked Minds podcast, psychologist Sarah Wills ("Sarah the Psych") tackles the common issue of low libido and sexual difficulty that many middle‑aged millennial women experience in their relationships. Building on the previous two episodes of the couples series (team‑building and conflict management), she explains that hormonal changes—especially perimenopause—can lower sex drive, cause vaginal dryness, and make sex painful, and she urges listeners to seek medical assessment. She then shifts to the impact of chronic stress and a constantly activated fight‑or‑flight nervous system, describing how the body prioritises survival functions over the reproductive system, leading to suppressed libido. Sarah links modern psychological threats (fear of failure, unworthiness, etc.) to a perpetual stress state that exhausts energy needed for intimacy. Practical advice follows: get hormonal checks, address chronic stress through nervous‑system regulation, and have vulnerable, specific conversations with partners about needs, household support, and self‑care. She illustrates how small routine changes—like establishing kids’ bedtime routines, sharing chores, and prioritising personal grooming—can create a sense of safety that re‑engages the sexual system. Listener questions are answered, normalising perimenopausal libido loss and the “ick” feeling, and emphasizing that low desire is not a lack of love but a physiological response to an unsafe or overstressed environment. The episode concludes with a call to break shame, communicate clearly, and implement concrete lifestyle adjustments to restore intimacy.
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Hello, welcome to Unmasked Minds, the podcast with me. I'm Sarah the Psych on Instagram. I am a psychologist in real life, and I work predominantly with middle-aged millennial women as we navigate this next chapter of our lives and everything that goes with it. I like to think of it more as a friendly conversation where we're on the same side and we're just unpacking all of this stuff, and I just happen to have some useful information because I'm a psychologist. So let's get into it. We've just done part 1 and part 2 of the couple series. Number 1 was about getting back on the same team, getting back on the same page, getting back to a place of feeling safe with our partner and being able to then have vulnerable and difficult conversations. Part 2, which I think was episode 11, was then about conflict, managing conflict and communication in relationships. And we really touched on the Gottman Four Horsemen, noticing what comes out when we are in these situations, when we're feeling like things aren't going our way, when we're feeling triggered. You know, is it criticism, contempt, emptiness, or stonewalling. After that, I'm going to talk about the next most requested thing, which is sex. Let's talk about sex, baby. Let's talk about you and me. Come on, did any other ADHDers do that, or was that just me? Okay, so sex in relationships. It is such a common thing for millennial women to come to me and say My partner wants more sex than me, and it is a huge problem in our relationship. He wants more, I don't. We go to bed at night, I feel the wandering hand coming over, and oh, my body reacts and I don't want it. So I pretend to be asleep, or I say I've got a headache, and this is a pattern. And then I say, oh, why does this matter to you? And they say, because I don't want to be like this. I love my partner, and intimacy is, or at least used to be, important to me. And I can see how it's making them feel, and I don't like that. But I just don't understand why I have zero sex drive with someone who potentially I used to have a great sex drive with. Why am I not feeling connected or compatible or wanting to have sex? And we're gonna unpack that today. I guess the first thing to mention when it comes to women in sort of their 30s, 40s, 50s, and we're talking about sex and the reproductive system, we need to acknowledge the role of hormones. We need to introduce perimenopause, and I'm not going to go into that. I have a whole episode on perimenopause, but one of the biggest symptoms, or most reported symptoms people discuss or notice in perimenopause, is their sex drive. And not only their sex drive, but the physical changes in their body. A lot of women report low libido, but also dryness, pain during sex, all kinds of different physical responses that then make us want to avoid sex. Of course we're not going to want it if it hurts, right? So I guess my first thing I want to note is if you're in that age bracket and you're struggling and you're noticing those areas is get yourself checked out by a GP or a women's health specialist, because as we notice changes in our hormones, it is only natural. Like, when I first learned this only recently, I was like, of course, right? You know, sex drive and all of that is linked to our need for reproduction and survival, and once that's done, our body sort of goes, we don't really need that system, and doesn't necessarily prioritize its maintenance. So to speak. So that is one thing to get checked out. The next thing I talk about with women who are feeling disconnected from either themselves or their partner intimately, I like to talk about stress, right? One thing we know is that women in their 30s and 40s are often in our society living highly stressful lives, whether that's because it's stressful managing kids or multiple children or neurodiverse children, whether it's because we're balancing work and being a mom, whether it's just the social expectations on women these days to do absolutely everything for everybody, whether it's because you had childhood trauma or trauma throughout your life and it's unprocessed and it's starting to just feel fucking heavy. All of these things contribute to impacting our nervous system. Okay, now if we live in a chronic state of stress, a chronic state of fight or flight mode. That is a problem. Our fight or flight or survival system in our body exists to keep us safe. It exists so that if we are in danger, we have the ability to switch on a certain part of our brain so that we can survive that danger. Now, this is primitive, right? All animals have this, the basic fight or flight survival response. You know, if I was a cave person 200,000 years ago and I walked outside my cave and a lion who was clearly hungry came up to me, I want my fight or flight response. I want the amygdala in the back of my brain to kick on. I want my thoughts to start racing. I want the blood to start pumping through my body. I want my breathing to get faster so that I can oxygenate the parts of my body that are going to be needed to either run really fast away from this lion, or to fight. So to flight or to fight this lion. So we do what we know, and everybody is pretty familiar with this. When we're in fight or flight response, we get this huge— these huge physiological shifts in our body. We get cortisol and adrenaline just pumped through our system. It's like this super drug, you know, like how there's stories of women lifting cars off their children and that type of thing when they're in fight or flight, because it's like superhuman power that we get because it just gets delivered to us so quickly. We get the heart racing, we get the heat, right? Because our system is working so hard. And then the idea is that we have all of this energy and adrenaline and fast thinking and oxygen so that we can get away from the lion. And it's not really supposed to be a long-term thing. We get away from the lion and it takes a lot longer for us to regulate once we get away from the lion, to calm down and for our body to feel safe again. Now, we still want that response in modern-day society. I still want— if I'm walking down the road and a car or a truck starts coming toward me and clearly its brakes have failed and it's hurtling towards me and my children, I want my fight or flight mode. I truly do. I want that to kick in. I want that energy. I want that adrenaline. I want that quick thinking so that I can get myself and my children to safety. Avoid, run away from the, the truck, hide from the truck, whatever you've got to do. I want to be able to get safe. And I'm okay with lying on the side of the road for a good couple of hours after that going, holy shit, we made it. So the problem is, when our brains and bodies were created, it was created for survival, right? For those predators coming at us. We have that system to survive those short bursts of threat. But in modern-day society, the threats that we have trained our brain to respond to are not lions and tigers chasing us. They're not cars coming toward us every single day. They are more psychological threats that we've been conditioned to fear. You know, some of the basic ones that I work with, with most women, are, you know, fear of failure, fear of unworthiness, Fear of letting people down, fear of not being enough. All of those fears exist within modern society, and depending on your upbringing will sort of dictate or play a huge role in how, how big that is for you. But if you have a nervous system that responds to those fears like you're being chased by a lion, then we're gonna start to have a real problem because we are going to be in this chronic state of stress, right? The chronic— I'm being chased by a lion every day. I'm gonna be chased by a lion every time my kids ask for something, every time I can't do something, right? And so our bodies are in this constant state of fight or flight, and often we end up just there all the time, and we start to call that anxiety, right? Just this constant elevation of our nervous system. Now, I could talk for a whole episode on why that is not good physically and mentally for the body, but today I want to talk about sex. When you are in this constant state of fight or flight, it is exhausting and it takes a lot of energy. And so our body will prioritize the systems that are helpful in keeping us alive, that are helpful in helping us run from the lion. So like our lungs and our heart pumping, the production of all the things that we need will get prioritized over systems like the digestive system. Have you ever noticed when you're feeling really scared about something, really nervous, that you get interruptions to your digestive system? Whether it's as simple as a nervous poo or a nervous wee or a nervous vomit before you, um, go out and public speak, or, you know, for someone living in a more chronic state of stress or anxiety, it's, you know, a lot of people do notice IBS symptoms and things like that, real disruption in our digestive system. A lot of things like insulin resistance, a lot of holding more body weight than usual because our metabolism is on-off. Do I, you know, do I need that today? What's going on? So that is one system that we really start to notice huge impacts on when we're in a chronic state of stress or anxiety. The other system is the reproductive system. Now, I'm not here to talk about the research on fertility or anything like that, but I will point out there is a lot going on in that space. What I want to do is really simplify it down to the point that says if you are in an unsafe environment, or if your brain or body perceives you to be in an unsafe environment, then that is going to impact your libido. Because essentially, if we are living in an unsafe environment, then doesn't really make sense that we would reproduce in this environment, that it would not feel safe, let alone taking a break for half an hour or 5 minutes, however long that act now takes depending how long you've been with your partner, right? Um, I should delete that. I'm probably not going to, but I should. If you let your guard down and be intimate with your partner, then essentially if there's a lion around the corner, you're putting yourself at risk, right? So really starting to recognize that our sex drive and our libido and all of that is affected by how safe we feel in our environment, you know. So if there's a lot of stress going on at work or you're not managing the stress in your day-to-day life with the kids, then it's going to feel like you're taking that out on your husband. Because as soon as he or she, um, reaches over— your partner, I should say— as soon as your partner wants to be intimate with you, it is the last thing your body has energy for. And I've just seen a huge shift sometimes in clients when I talk about that. You know, it's not necessarily because you don't love your partner anymore. It's not necessarily because you don't value intimacy, but It could be because of the constant stress and pressure in your life, your body has just turned that system off. Yeah, and it's just not responding the way you would like it to. So in saying that, of course there's things we can do about that, you know. Of course we can go and work on your hormones. Of course we can work on the stress and anxiety in your life. Now sometimes it's about just communicating that and saying, hey, I just want you to know at this. I see it. I know it's a problem. I'm laying there with my eyes closed feeling terrible for this. I want that too, but I can't fake it. My body isn't producing all of the things that make that feel safe and enjoyable for me right now. So we've got to do different work. Maybe the work is on removing and changing the stressors in your life? Is it really worth it in our relationship that we're stressing and putting all this energy into all these other areas, and our intimacy and connection is suffering as a result of it? Sometimes it's about having really vulnerable conversations as to why you're feeling disconnected with your partner and why something that is happening in the relationship is causing you to go into fight or flight mode and therefore not want to be intimate with your partner. So let me explain that one, right? So what I see a lot of is, as we are in this stage, we've got young kids, we're doing our roles, we are like ships in the night. Um, from the woman's perspective, she might be starting to feel underappreciated, unseen. She might be starting to not feel attractive, to feel loved and connected with her partner. Yeah, and women will need connection generally on a different level to men. That is just bio— biologically true. So, you know, I have a lot of women come and say he just wants to have sex, and for me that has to start with cuddles on the lounge. It has to start with the dishwasher being emptied when I ask for it to be emptied. Because all of those things are the things that are causing me to feel stressed, that are making me pull back from him, that are triggering these feelings within me that are making it unsafe to be intimate. So if I actually read some of the questions that came through, I'll read two of them. One was, we used to be so good in bed. Perimenopause has destroyed my libido. What the actual fuck? I hope I've addressed that in really normalizing that that is a thing., and that is not your fault. But with the right support, you can see significant changes in that area. So I do have a whole nother episode on perimenopause, but if you can look at understanding that and supporting yourself as your hormones reduce, then that can be really useful for you, you know, and even communicating that to our partner. It is not that I'm finding you less desirable. I used to love being intimate with you and I want to be back there. I just— my body's not responding, so help me to navigate that. That can be a really powerful conversation. Another question or comment I've got here is, how do I deal with the fact that I'm getting the ick when my husband tries to be intimate with me? And I think to answer that one, we've really talked about recognizing that the ick could be coming for a number of reasons. Maybe just so much stress that that system in our body is not thriving at the moment, and so we need to work at how How do we get ourselves feeling safer, get our nervous system thriving a lot more so there's a chance that that system comes back online? Secondly, what are those discussions that need to be had in the relationship? Going back to the episode just before this, what are the difficult conversations that need to be had about your needs? Are you asking for your needs to be met? Are you being clear? You know, if your libido does exist and and it is able to be turned on, but it's just not doing it for you when he rolls over in the middle of the night and does a boob grab. Are you communicating that? Are you saying, darling, I do really want to be intimate with you, but for me it starts hours earlier? For me, I need you to be helping out and getting the kids to bed so I'm not just fucking exhausted when you come for a boob grab, you know? Are you advocating for yourself and your needs so that intimacy is accessible? For you. Now, I'm not sure if I've done this topic justice. I just know that there's quite a few things that I talk about regularly with clients. I certainly know for my husband and I, we go through phases where intimacy is not as great, you know, in the scheme of things. We would say we have quite a healthy and regular sexual and intimate relationship, but we certainly go through phases where it gets a bit bit boring. You know, I know I recently said to Rob, you know, we're having sex about once a week, and I know it's good and I'm grateful for it. You know, it does provide connection, but it's getting a bit boring. It's getting a bit predictable. And when you go for that rollover, or when I do this, you know, I just— I'd like it to feel different. Because even just the fact that it's being a bit boring and predictable is meaning I don't feel like it as much. Now, there's no shame in saying that because we're both just really busy and we do our thing, and you get into, you know, that works. That works for both of So let's just do that. Let's not have to think about it. But, you know, we also then made a commitment. Yeah, you know what? We both feel like this and neither of us was saying anything. So what can we do to change that? And changing it wasn't, well, let's just introduce something spicy into the bedroom. It was more about what needs to happen earlier in the night or in the morning. A big one was getting the kids out of our bed because that really messes with the ability to be spontaneous. So in order to improve our sex life, we focused on the kids' bedtime routine. And I know it doesn't sound sexy, but when my husband was coming in and truly helping to get the kids to bed and then they weren't in our bed, I'll tell you what, my body was responding to that, you know. So it feels like such a serious topic, and I think it's one that due to shame or just not having the skills to talk about, we don't talk about it with our partner. We don't say, this is how I'm feeling, because often it is met with defensiveness. You know, we've been in stages where I've said, hey, I'm like, I'm finding it a little bit boring and repetitive. And this is no shame on my husband, you know. I don't want to share too much that feels too personal, but this is just, this is regular stuff that happens in marriages, right? You're doing something and it's working for a while and it's not working for a while. Often when someone says that to the partner, they get defensive, you know. Well, you're not doing this, you're not initiating sex. Like, come on, who hasn't had that conversation? I want you to initiate it more. Well, I'm not going to initiate it more. And we get in this defensive back and forth, right? If we actually listen and set a safe place for our partners to listen to us and hear us, we can have some really great conversations about it. And often your partner just needs to hear that I'm not okay with this either, that I would like more intimacy, but it's not as simple as just doing the deed for me. This is what I need to see to be there, and I need you to step in and support me on some of these things. You know, it might be so much as I need a little bit more self-care. I'm just feeling really uncomfortable in my body at the moment. And so what I need is for you to support me to move my body, go to the gym, go to Pilates, maybe get my nails done, maybe get some waxing or whatever, and then I would start to feel supported. And that is going to sort of unlock things to feel safer for me to be more intimate. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this one. Potentially a bit risky talking about sex and sharing some personal stories on here, but hey, that's what I do. And I know some of you really, really enjoy when it's real and relatable like that. So let me know what your thoughts are as we start to wrap up this couple series on Unmasked Minds, the Thank you for listening.
