Why Does Stress Affect Sexual Desire? The Flooded Mountain Range
I work with many couples puzzled by changes in their sex lives. Sometimes they are not dramatic shifts like affairs or mismatched libidos. Sometimes, couples just experience confusing, slow declines in erotic connection. Couples now stick to routines, partners question why former turn-ons stopped working, and love remains, but desire fades, even when nothing seems wrong.
These problems are often the same, just seen from different angles. One image helps couples understand them all: stress and sexual arousal are the common thread.
Imagining Your Turn-Ons as a Mountain Range
Imagine your turns on as a mountain range. Every peak represents something that can create desire, increase arousal: a particular kind of touch, a feeling of connection between the couple, a context that feels safe and playful, a fantasy, the way your partner looks at you across a table. Some peaks are tall; they turn you on a lot. Others are more modest; they might warm you up, but only sometimes, or you need multiple of these turn-ons to get there. Together, these peaks form the full mountain range of your erotic life.
Two important principles to keep in mind about this mountain range:
- Each mountain range is unique. Your partner’s mountain peaks are different from yours.
- Even your own range of turn-ons shifts over your life and with your environment.
The Flood: What Stress Does to Your Erotic Landscape
When stressors like work pressure, financial worry, parenting exhaustion, or unresolved conflicts build up, it is like a flood rising over that mountain range. The water doesn’t necessarily cover desire completely, though it can. What it reliably does is cover the shorter peaks. Subtle turn-ons like being at ease, that shirt that makes your partner’s eye color stand out, or maybe a little weekend afternoon boredom can get submerged under stress. For some, only the tallest peaks (that is, your most powerful, most robust turn-ons) or the easiest peaks (that is, the way you always do it) remain accessible. For others, if the foothills are submerged, there’s no way to reach the higher peaks; the gap is too great.
This is the mechanism behind the connection between stress and sexual arousal that researchers have been documenting for decades. Bancroft, Graham, Janssen, and Sanders (2009) described sexual response as a dynamic balance between excitation and inhibition, and relationship distress, unresolved conflict, and chronic stress are among the most potent inhibitory forces in that system. In this analogy, the mountain and the flood. In her book Come as You Are (2021), Emily Nagoski popularized another analogy of the gas pedal and the brake to describe the excitation and inhibition systems.
Why Do We Always Have Sex the Same Way?
This is a common bedroom challenge among long-term couples. It’s usually framed as a complaint, “We’ve gotten into a rut,” or “We used to be more adventurous,” or “I feel like we’ve lost something.”
In the context of the mountain range and flood analogy, what’s usually happening is simpler than a fundamental change in sexuality. The flood has risen high enough that only the easiest peaks remain accessible. As a result, you use the pleasure pathways that still stand above water—the familiar scripts, positions, and ways of initiating that stress hasn’t submerged.
Understanding this reframes the problem in a hopeful way. The variety isn’t gone. It’s submerged. And what is submerged can, in principle, be uncovered.
Why Did That Thing That Used to Turn Me On Stop Working?
Clients sometimes come to me worried about this one specifically. When a behavior, a context, a dynamic that was once a reliable part of their erotic life has quietly stopped working, they get scared. They want to know if this signals a permanent loss of something in their erotic landscape. Or they are afraid it is a sign that they and their partner have grown apart in some fundamental way.
Often, the relevant erotic peak was never the tallest in the range. It was a mid-range peak. It worked well when the flood was low, but now it sits underwater as life has gotten harder, or the relationship has accumulated more unresolved hurts over time. It hasn’t disappeared. It has just become temporarily inaccessible.
Brotto and Basson (2014) found that relationship quality and emotional closeness were significant moderators of sexual desire and response. That is, the quality of the relationship is narrowing what is available sexually. The effect of stress is real; you are not crazy.
How Do We Get Back What We Lost Sexually?
The connection between stress and sexual arousal means there are two ways to restore access to more of the sexual mountain range: lower the stress flood, or make the remaining pleasure peaks more accessible. I’ll describe both in the next two sections. However, for many couples, this is actually the wrong question. The metaphor makes this clear: if a major flood is covering mountain peaks, the landscape has probably permanently changed. The goal is not to regain what you had erotically, but to work with the new landscape to experience as much as it has to offer today. There may be new unmapped peaks out there to discover, and that’s exciting.
How Does Lowering Stress Improve Sex?
Lowering the flood usually means addressing what is raising it. Eliminate stress and sexual arousal can emerge. In couples therapy, this might mean any of the following, or a combination of them:
- Working through the layers of unresolved conflict.
- Replacing conflict-induced emotional distance with connection.
- Refreshing emotional resources to replace exhaustion.
- Educating the couple about real sex instead of pornography or erotica created fantasies about how sex flows.
- Helping the couple approach the challenge of the flood so they can climb the mountains as a team, rather than criticizing and blaming each other.
- Creating an intimacy plan that works with the ecology of your weekly or monthly floods of stress. That way, you’re not trying to climb any peaks when the stress is highest.
For individuals (often as a supplement to couples), therapy might include:
- Anxiety reduction tools
- Embodiment tools. Pleasure is a physical experience. When you focus on the past, the future, or your partner’s experience rather than your own, you won’t notice your own pleasure. Sex therapy teaches ways to stay aware of your body’s sensations. That’s why Sensate Focus is a basic sex therapy tool (Weiner, 2002).
- Helping the client identify what preparations they need for mountain climbing. For example, some people need a shower and an hour of relaxation to let the flood waters recede before they try mountain climbing.
How Does Communicating More Improve Sex?
To make pleasure peaks more accessible, focus on creating direct paths to eroticism. It’s like paving a mountain path. It is hard at first, but lasting. Here are some examples:
- Sharing desires (things you actually want to do) or fantasies (mental images, scripts, or places your mind goes but which you may not want to enact) with your partner outside of the bedroom on a day when you’re not going to have sex. This makes it easier to say, “Hey, could we try that thing I mentioned a couple of weeks ago?”
- Treat sex and intimacy as skills to practice. When trying new things (like toys, words, or positions), it feels awkward at first. Set clear practice times and separate them from “game time” to lower pressure and expand your lovemaking repertoire.
When you know the role of stress in sexual arousal, it becomes clear why lowering stress maximizes pleasure. Communicating with your partner maps out these capacities, helping you discover how to touch and be touched to create pleasure. This helps you rediscover or even improve upon your past sexual experiences.
If you’d like to work with a licensed psychologist who understands the connection between stress and sexual arousal (and can teach it to your partner), I invite you to contact me.
References
Bancroft, J., Graham, C. A., Janssen, E., & Sanders, S. A. (2009). The Dual Control Model: Current status and future directions. Journal of Sex Research, 46(2–3), 121–142. doi: 10.1080/00224490902747222
Brotto L.A., & Basson R. (2014). Group mindfulness-based therapy significantly improves sexual desire in women. Behavior Research and Therapy, 57, 43-54. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2014.04.001. Epub 2014 Apr 18. PMID: 24814472.
Nagoski, E. (2021). Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Weiner, L. (2022). Sensate focus touch in sexual health and sex therapy: A critical literature review. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 19(2), S152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2022.03.350
