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How Mindfulness Can Lead to Better Sex
Especially for women
At the turn of the 21st century, sex in America changed forever — for men, anyway. It was 1998 and a little blue pill that promised to end the vexing problem of sexual dysfunction for millions of men hit the market. It lived up to the hype, too. In the twenty years since then, Viagra, and 25 similar drugs, have entered the bedrooms of millions of men, and prescriptions for the pills have continued to skyrocket. In 2017, erectile dysfunction drugs brought in around $4.82 billion globally, a sum that is expected to reach $7 billion by 2024.
But what about women? Flibanserin, also known as Addyi, the one medication currently on the market to address female sexual dysfunction (FSD) has seen lackluster results and sales have not taken off. In the three clinical trials evaluated by the FDA for approval of the drug, just 10% of participants reported that their problems were “much improved” or “very much improved.” What’s more, the list of side effects is long, including dizziness, nausea, hypotension, and more.
That doesn’t mean there are no options for women with low libido, however. A new, non-pharmacological treatment for FSD has sprung up in recent years and it is showing encouraging results: mindfulness.
“We live in a hyper, multitasking society, and therefore we get very good at being at multiple places at once — and that applies to sex as well,” says Lori Brotto, PhD, a clinical psychologist, sex researcher, and the author of Better Sex Through Mindfulness: How Women Can Cultivate Desire. “Sexual mindfulness simply encourages people to show up when they are engaging in sexual activity.”
Brotto began researching female sexuality around the time Viagra hit the U.S. market. That year, a study was released reporting that 43% of women experienced sexual difficulties compared to 31% of men, and yet very little was being done to address this chasm. At the same time, Brotto was introduced to mindfulness as a way to treat borderline personality disorder, a condition characterized in part as a detachment from the self.
“It struck me that there were actually a lot of similarities between the individuals with borderline and women I was seeing with sexual concerns,” she says. “Mainly, it was this feeling of…
