The Neuroscience of Pleasure & Happiness with Dr. Nan Wise
In this episode of The Better Sex Podcast, I speak with the brilliant Neuroscientist, Best-Selling Author, Sex Therapist, & Licensed Psychotherapist Dr. Nan Wise. During this conversation, we dive into the fascinating and transformative topic of "The Neuroscience of Pleasure and Happiness," uncovering how our brains are beautifully designed for connection, joy, and emotional well-being.
Along the way, Dr. Wise shares her inspiring journey from therapist to scientist, sparked by her deep curiosity about the powerful impact of pleasure on mental and emotional health. We also explore essential topics like overcoming sexual anxiety, fostering deeper, more authentic relationships, and navigating the challenges of our tech-driven world.
Packed with wisdom and insight, this episode gives you some practical takeaways, including powerful exercises like "sensate focus" to reconnect with your body and mindfulness techniques to nurture more fulfilling, joyful connections in your life.
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Author: Why Good Sex Matters: Understanding The Neuroscience of Pleasure for a Smarter, Happier, and More Purpose-Filled Life
Website: https://askdoctornan.com
Instatgram @AskDoctorNan
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In our commitment accessibility, help make this podcast more accessible to those who are hearing impaired or those who like to read rather than listen to podcasts. The transcription is far from perfect, and in some cases quite amusing. As we grow edited transcripts are on the list in the meantime please enjoy.
Ah, so good. All right, on that note, welcome to the Better Sex Podcast. My name is Deborah Cat and I am your shameless host. This is the Better Sex Podcast where we have unfiltered conversations about sex and relationships. These conversations are frank and explicit and may not be appropriate for all audiences. So please listen with care. I truly believe that a sexy world helps to create a happier and a safer world. If you want to do your part to create a safe and sexy world, please hit like subscribe and leave a comment wherever you get your podcasts.
Deborah [00:01:09]:
Today we are going to dive into the world of my guest, Dr. Nan Weiss. She is a licensed psychotherapist, cognitive neuroscientist, certified sex therapist, board certified clinical hypnotherapist, and a certified relationship specialist with over three decades of experience. She's also the author of why Good Sex Understanding the Neuroscience of Pleasure for a Smarter, happier and More Purpose filled Life. I love that. So I'm, I'm really delighted that you're here with me today, Nan, and I'd love to know a little bit about your story. Like, how did you get here? Why. Why sex in the brain?
Dr. Nan Wise [00:02:01]:
Well, my journey. I've always been interested in sex and I've always been interested in the brain. And my journey has been really a personal and professional one because as a young adult at the age of about 21, I had horrible panic attacks. And this was actually, actually while I was working at a psychiatric hospital. So I opened my book talking about this panic attack and how I just thought my life was over and I was broken and I would never get to be or do what I wanted to be and do. And it turned out that it sent me on a journey. So I was very interested in learning everything that I could about how to regulate the brain mind, how to deal with having skills and tools and becoming a therapist and then adding to my tool belt more and more to be able to understand how the brain mind works so we could work it better. And suffice it to say, Deborah, it works pretty good.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:03:17]:
And that the tools and skills that, I mean it sent me to, you know, I did back in the day, you know, psychodynamic psychotherapy, which was a very slow game, you know, lying on the couch talking about my relationship with this therapist. And then I ended up going to the Mind Body Institute at Harvard Medical School school to do some work. And then I studied mindfulness and some trainings with John Kabitzin, who brought meditation to the medical community. I wanted tools and I wanted skills. And at the end of the day, what I found was working with the breath and the body through yoga made such a difference in my ability to not have those panic attacks. And I'll tell you what my credibility story is. I used to have terrible performance anxiety. I could be anxious about, you know, like knowing I'd have to do like public speaking.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:04:19]:
I could have performance anxiety in a room by myself when I even thought about it. From my learning about how the brain, mind, body works and how to work it better, developing tools that I write about in my book understanding the core emotional systems, the embodied emotional instincts and how that was driving a lot of what was going on for me, I could impact my nervous system. And by the time I had my book launch, which was when New York shut down that week for Covid, I was on the Today show and I wasn't even nervous. So I sat there and talked to Maria Shriver and Dr. Jessica shepherd, who by the way, just launched a fabulous book yesterday, Generation M or everything you need to know about menopause. Fantastic book. Any of your listeners who are interested in menopause perimenopause, go get her book, Jessica Shepherd's book, Generation in. So to make a long story short, I got a chance to go back to grad school when I was 50 after my kids left to study the brain because we didn't have back when I was in the first round of grad school, we didn't have non invasive measures to study the brain, we didn't have fmri.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:05:48]:
So I ended up doing brain research on sexual response, genital stimulation, imaging, orgasm, and you know, like just living my life bigger than I could have ever imagined even before my anxiety attack.
Deborah [00:06:07]:
Wow, I love that. So I am going to have to ask more about your research and what that looked like and super curious about that. And I also really just want to presence the idea that anxiety, we have anxiety in all sorts of places in our lives from as you were talking about with public speaking, sexual anxiety, relational anxiety, and just anxiety around daily living. And I'm curious if you could speak to that a little bit.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:06:46]:
Well, we're wired for anxiety. There are seven core emotional systems that we can equip with. All mammals are wired this way. Okay. So these are instincts that are wired into Us for survival. And anxiety actually is when the fear system. I'll introduce the seven different systems. So we have a little bit of like a background because this is really the big I think reveal in my book is that psychology hasn't gotten around to really incorporating these findings.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:07:22]:
They're relatively recent. And it's a game changer because at the bottom of the brain we're pretty much the same as all of our four leggeds. At the top of the brain we're very different. So the seeking system is powered by dopamine. That system is works with all the other systems to get us motivated to explore, to meet our needs. Guess what hijacks the seeking system, Our devices. These devices that we're on all the time divides our attention and hobbles the brain's ability to respond, respond effectively and actually has contributed to the big, I would say epidemics that we have of anxiety. Anxiety now is an epidemic.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:08:17]:
Even before COVID it was going badly. Even without election anxiety, it was going badly. So the seeking system powered by dopamine gives us our exuberance and, and really is designed to help us go out and meet our needs, our needs for connection. We have the care system powered by our internal opiates or opioids. That's where we really need to focus on having good connections because that's what satisfies us. That's real life connections, not faux social. Faux, faux faux social connections aren't satisfying to the brain mind system. It's not like real life connection.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:09:06]:
So we have the care system, if it's working well, gives us the feeling of well being. Some people have challenges based on sometimes genetics in combination with early childhood traumas that affects the ability of the, of the care system to give people good feelings like well being and can be the basis of mental illness and challenges like that. So we have the care system which is an affiliative system. We have something called play, the play system which is designed all young mammals and other animals learn with and through play, including humans. All right, so the play system gives us a sense of social joy. And if we're an adult and we have access to the seeking system and the care system and the play system with the side order of the less system, we're going to be having a good time. So the less circuitry is responsible for our urge to merge. Now these are actual circuits that they discovered in the brain.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:10:23]:
If you electrically stimulate them or chemically stimulate, you get those behaviors, you get the. And they accidentally have stumbled upon those circuits in humans during Brain surgery for like epilepsy. We're wired that way. Okay, now let's get on to the defensive systems because we talked about anxiety, right? The fear system. It's important that we have appropriate levels of fear because you need to fear that which is not good for you. You need to fear things that are dangerous for you. Babies are actually even born with. You don't have to teach them to fear pain.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:11:07]:
If something's painful, they will hear it. It's wired in. You don't have to teach them to not climb over a drop. Kids at a certain age know instinctively not to climb over a drop. You know, like when it's a steep drop. We're wired for fear. Now, some of us get a little bit too much fear conditioning. When you grow up with having a rough time in childhood or having a rough time in life in general, but formative times are in childhood.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:11:45]:
Having a very active fear system because you didn't feel safe as a kid redisposes you to anxiety. And what anxiety is, is a. Fear is usually a specific thing. Anxiety is just like that fear, that feeling like you're anticipating something bad happening. So the fear is more of something that's, you know, you're afraid of snakes, you're afraid of, you know, going out into, you know, a place where there's a lot of traffic. Those are fears. But anxiety is when that fear system is so tweaked, so excitable that you're going to end up having that fear system stay on, never shuts off. And it keeps you in that fear, fear loop.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:12:38]:
So the other defenses include rage. We need to appropriately defend ourselves against boundary violations, territorial things. When people step on our toes, the anger system is there. He calls it rage. Dr. Panksepp to mapped out the systems that's there for protection. There's some people through childhood experiences maybe with a little genetic predisposition towards being hot headed, they're going to end up being, you know, hot tempered people. And they're just, they're always angry, right? Or they get angry very easily.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:13:21]:
The last of the defensive systems, one of my favorite is panic, Grief, sadness. It has three different terms to it because it encompasses when we feel a threat to our relationships, when we feel a threat to our resources. That's the substrate of heartbreak or panic attacks even. That could be the basis of panic attacks. When that system is triggered, we're going to feel a lot of emotional pain. So when you think about attachment stalls, which you've probably talked about before on the podcast, I would Imagine what you can think about it. The biological substrates of the attachment system is the care system and the panic grief system. It's called, called the care panic grief continuum.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:14:17]:
So there's some people who are just very anxiously attached, right? They're very worried about their relationships. There's some people who are so anxious about relationships they won't even have them. So these are instinct systems, instinctual emotions that are embodied in or us to the point when these activations happen, you can't think yourself necessarily out of a panic attack. You know, we all know what we should do, right? Drink less alcohol, be nicer to our partners, exercise more. The smart mind, the very top of the mind knows what to do. But because the emotional instincts that live in the oldest part of our brains infuses the whole brain mind and is also very affected by our conditioning and experiences that we sometimes like. Cognitive behavior therapy is not enough. So anxiety is when people are conditioned to have a lot of fear.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:15:28]:
And so the fear system goes on and stays on to their detriment, right?
Deborah [00:15:36]:
Absolutely. And you know, you said earlier something about appropriate fear, an appropriate fear level. And so I'm imagining that that's something that. Well, actually, I'm just going to invite you to, well, things that you should.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:15:54]:
Be afraid of, right? You should be mindful about going into a lion's den at the zoo. That's an appropriate fear, not climbing over the fence. And there are people who have brain damage, by the way, to some of these centers that are involved in the emotional systems that when they have damage to that area, they lose their fear and they do really dumb things because they're no longer afraid. So having appropriate level, for example, you have a big work presentation coming up. Having a little fear about you better do the work is going to be better than having no fear or, you know, no kind of worry about it. Too much fear is immobilizing. In that instance, an appropriate level fear would be, hey, I got to get that work done, right?
Deborah [00:16:52]:
So what you're saying is that an appropriate level of fear is going to motivate you or me to make sure that I'm prepared to, you know, and.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:17:04]:
To protect yourself in situations you don't want to walk in a very dangerous place in the middle of the night with a $5,000 in your purse, waving it over your head, you know, you don't want to play with loaded guns. It's fear that's based in reality, that's adaptive is what I mean by appropriate.
Deborah [00:17:31]:
Okay, great, thank you. And so then going Back to anxiety. I'm curious because it's, as you said, such an epidemic. Do you have some suggestions or techniques that can support. Support coming back to self and reducing the level of anxiety?
Dr. Nan Wise [00:17:57]:
The most important thing you can do is to will actually you can change your physiology out of the fear system when you're not needing the fear system by changing how you breathe. So what you want to do is to signal to your body that you're safe. And how do you do that? It's very, very simple, Deborah. Long, smooth inhale. And then if you extend the exhalation a little bit longer than the inhale, your body activates what's called the vagal break, which will slow your heart down and shift you from fight or flight, which is where the fear system lives, into more of that restorative, what's called the parasympathetic tone. So something as simple as, and this is actually a lot of what I think changed my physiology was I learned how to calm my body and to use my mind, for example, to remind myself in the moment that I am safe. So if you take a long smooth inhale and then a longer smooth exhalation and some research has shown that self touch can help a lot. So if you put your hand on your heart and the other hand on your belly and you as you're breathing, you, you lengthen your exhalation and you remind yourself in this moment that you're safe, which in fact you are if you're just sitting here breathing.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:19:44]:
And all of the big trauma experts, the people who are at the forefront of the field of trauma, talk about changing the nervous system out of the flight or fight, where you're remembering what is trauma, but remembering old scary events in your body, even if you're not thinking about them in your mind, it takes you out of presence. The other thing I would tell people is get off your devices. The way that we're on our devices is causing divided attention and something called continuous partial attention, which causes anxiety. We're waiting for the notification and things just are always kind of looming for us. So limit your time on the computer, limit your time on your phone. I'm not saying don't go on your phone, but what you want to do when people are on their phones, there's something called screen apnea. When people are answering emails or on the phone on social media, they're not breathing properly. They've studied this.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:20:59]:
So what you want to do is disconnect your nervous system. Less is more. Don't overwhelm yourself with all of what comes on, you know, social media does not make people feel better. Being constantly bombarded with all of the, you know, doom and gloom and all of this emergency stuff is actually taking us out of connection with ourselves and the people in the room. So if you go out, you see people in restaurants, they're on their phones, their kids are on their tablets. This is creating harm in the development of children's brains and their skill sets. And this is also eroding the benefits of real connection and attunement with, with each other, with our kids, with our families, with our partners, with our friends. Get off your devices, seriously limit the time you go on them and then hang out, get connected with yourself and actually hang out with other people.
Deborah [00:22:08]:
So question about hanging out with other people. So I think I read somewhere that like even just being in the same room with someone, like you don't necessarily even have to necessarily be in conversation, but just being in the same room with someone allows for our nervous systems to co regulate. Is that, is that accurate?
Dr. Nan Wise [00:22:34]:
There's some truth to that, but I think if you are actually in the room with the person and you're paying attention to each other, I think that co regulation becomes more entrainment. So what we want to do is we want to pay good attention to ourselves and each other. And actually what we do then is we affect each other's nervous systems. When one person gets upset in a partnership, when there's somebody you care about, your nervous system is going to get tweaked. So being proximal to people can have a beneficial effect. If people are calm, pay good attention to each other is going to have even better effects. You know, eye contact, you know, when you're first like kind of infatuated with somebody in the throes of new relationship energy, there's all that eye gazing. And also for parents, when you have a baby or small a child, you do a lot of eye gazing.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:23:43]:
I have an 8 month old granddaughter that's living with us now with her parents. And when I hold her, she's always looking in my eyes. Because the connection between the eyes and the emotional centers, the prefrontal cortex, is the way that kids learn to regulate with and through attention from parents. So eye contact is very important for human beings. I'm talking about eye contact now. You and I on zoom are actually looking at each other and I imagine are getting a lot of the same benefits if then, if we were in person. But most people are spending their time texting, they're not even listening to each other.
Deborah [00:24:35]:
I just want to say so as a. One of the things I do is I run an event called Tantra Speed Day. And when during the pandemic, we had to take it online. And one of the stations that we have is an eye gazing station. And what was fascinating, it was really so first of all, it was really fascinating how much connection could be, can be created even remotely. But what was really fascinating was how, how much one can get out of eye gazing, as you said, remotely. Because it is that thing of like we're putting our attention on each other and we're putting our attention. As we put our attention on each other, we're noticing whether we, you know, cognitively or subcognitively, we're noticing all the movements of the face, of the body, of the breath, and our bodies start to.
Deborah [00:25:40]:
Is that co regulation or.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:25:43]:
Yeah, that's a great way to call it. What we're doing is we're attuning, attuning and we're creating rapport. And that happens instinctively and naturally when people are looking at each other and paying good attention. The power of paying good attention, it's like it's the best drug in the world. That's really what we need, is good attention.
Deborah [00:26:12]:
Yes.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:26:14]:
What's happening is that people are trying to conduct relationships by texting. They don't go on zoom, they don't listen to each other. Even being on the phone would be great because when you listen to somebody's voice, there's a lot of cues in their voice because you don't get a lot of cues in texting. You can't hear somebody. You can't pick up all of the information that you can when you're listening to somebody. And there's actually a branch of the vagus nerve that's called the social vagus within, through listening to each other can down regulate the activation of those flight or fight mechanisms and calm and help us co regulate.
Deborah [00:27:07]:
Thank you. So I have a couple of questions. Go figure. One of them is. So a lot of the clients that I work with have sexual anxiety and that could be performance anxiety, which causes all sorts of interesting things. You know, it cause, it can cause desire discrepancies, it can cause physical issues around, you know, erectile issues. I've also noticed that it. In some of my female clients, there's a tightness and there's an inability to relax.
Deborah [00:27:53]:
And I'm wondering if you could talk about some of the, some of these things.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:28:01]:
So the problems that you're describing, the anxiety that gets attached to people's sexuality is so common, is so, so common. And I think the number one thing is our minds get in the way. So for example, our minds are either worrying about we're not for women in particular, our bodies are not okay, we're not attractive enough, we're not aroused enough, we're not going to have an orgasm. There's a whole litany of the mind's intrusions. For men, it's often performance anxiety, bad erections, they're going to come too quickly, they're not going to come at all. You know, whatever it is. The performance anxiety is when people are too much in their heads and they're not on the sensation. So years and years ago, the first sex therapist, Masters and Johnson, they did basically, they created sex therapy and they did a technique that they taught people called sensate focus.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:29:19]:
And what they taught people is rather than rushing to try and have sex, that they took their time with these exercises to get back in touch with touch so that they and they could prescribe it in different ways. And I've used various forms that I've added a whole bunch of bells and whistles to help people navigate out of that performance anxiety to be more present. So the ability to be letting the mind do what the mind does, oh, there goes my mind worrying, there goes my mind having anxiety about performance. There goes my mind, whatever my mind is doing, Full permission for the mind to be doing what it's doing and come back into the breath and come back to the sensations. And the more that we can train ourselves, let the mind do what it's doing and bring the attention back on sensations from the body. The body will then respond. So it's really about making that shift from the being too much in our heads. Getting more connected with the sensation body channel and just welcoming the sensations rather than chasing them.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:30:42]:
So, you know, penises sometimes get hard and then they get soft and then they got hard again. It's not unusual during the course of any kind of sexual escapade for the penises turgidity to wax and wane. Right. If we allow, we don't make it all about the penis being hard. You know, if we get back into what is good sex, Deborah it's connection. It's connection with ourselves, its connection with each other. And the number one sex problem is people have a hard time talking about sex. So instead of creating a connection, talking about their fears, their dreams, their anxieties, their what they want, what they don't want, instead of feeling free to connect on that Level with the partner, they white knuckle it and they just kind of go into the experience without even really understanding what the partner wants, not even voicing what you would like.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:31:50]:
And they expect that somehow things are going to go somehow perfectly. And you know that that's Hollywood, that's not real life. You know, like sometimes Hollywood, you know, movies where people are, you know, you know, it's like it's swept off their feet. Nobody talks about safe sex or contraception or anything. And they have mad, passionate love with simultaneous orgasms. You know, in real life, sex is about being connected. It's about being curious and playful, caring and you know, if you can approach your sex life like that, where it's less performative and it's less about how you're supposed to look or what's supposed to be or what's supposed to happen and you kind of feel free to communicate more openly with your partner, you're going to end up having a better time and it, and you'll end up feeling more connected with yourself and each other.
Deborah [00:32:52]:
And I'm imagining that's going to bring a lot more pleasure to the, to the experience.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:32:58]:
And that's really what it's about. It's not about orgasms, is not about performance, about finding the pleasure.
Deborah [00:33:07]:
So I'm going to go back to your title of your book for just a moment. Speaking of pleasure, how does pleasure make us smarter?
Dr. Nan Wise [00:33:18]:
Well, let me talk about that. Pleasure is actually wired into the brain as a learning signal. Pleasure and pain function in the brain and for us as learning signals. So things that feel good, that are good for us, hopefully we'll approach and learn about and kind of consume and you know, connect with things that hurt us, that feel better, bad for us, we'll avoid. So when we think about pleasure, we don't realize that pleasure is not a luxury. It's a necessity for a well functioning emotional brain. When people can't experience everyday pleasure, it's actually a condition called anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. Their brains are not working properly.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:34:11]:
So ultimately what we want to do is focus on pleasures that feel good and are good for us. That will make us smarter because we'll function better. And if we avoid pleasures that feel good and aren't good for us, like I give an example all the time about Doritos. Ah, Doritos. If you eat them, they taste good, right? And you can eat a bag of Doritos and it tastes good, good, but it's not good for you. And most likely after you eat The Doritos. You may even want more because it's not really satisfying. And it's what we call, I would call like those faux pleasures.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:34:57]:
They are designed to feel good, but they're not satisfying, they're not healthy and they're not satisfying. Social media is the same thing. You get all those likes and then you have more followers and people make comments. You can feel good, but you're not really having the kind of connections that sustain you that will give you feelings of satisfaction. People just crave more and more social media, more and more Internet. They stay on and it's not satisfying. If it were satisfying, we'd be on for half an hour, then we'd be off of it. Right? So it's like sex between consenting people can be that healthy hedonism.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:35:46]:
Pleasures that feel good, that are good for us. When we are effective, we're able to be smarter. We're able to, you know, for, for a, for smarter, happier, more purposeful life. When we're. To the extent that we are effective in how we navigate the world, we're going to have more joy because we're going to be able to actually it was the philosopher Spinoza said something to the effect that to the extent an organism is effective, it is joyful. So being effective in our. How we eat, what we eat, how we move our bodies, that we move our bodies, how we connect with other people, that what we will end up with is a well balanced emotional system that will head us to learn things that feel good and are good for us. Healthy, healthy habits as opposed to the not so healthy habits that many of us develop as a substitute for satisfying pleasures.
Deborah [00:37:04]:
Thank you. I love that definition of the idea that the more that something is pleasurable, the more that we move forward towards it, that that can help us to make better choices and keeping an eye out for the faux pleasure, the, the Dorito, the Dorito factor and the regulation.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:37:29]:
So you know, like the way the brain, mind works is there's like basic things about approach and avoidance. That's like a basic behavioral thing. People learn what's safe to approach, what's better to avoid. Sometimes that maps out on to what's good for us to approach, sometimes not depending on circumstances and learning.
Deborah [00:37:53]:
I have a question about attraction and I'm not sure exactly what the question is, but like as you were talking about what's good for us and what's not good for us, I started thinking, you know, oftentimes clients that I work with, you know, they'll pretty much date the Same person over and over again, different hairstyle, you know, different. Different glasses. But it's the same person over and over again. And I'm wondering about that, that kind of attraction and what your thoughts are about that.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:38:35]:
Well, you know, there's a very interesting field within relationship therapy that talks about imago. Have you ever heard of imago? I have Harville Hendrickson, and I'm blocking on her name. She, his partner. You know, we tend to get attracted beyond just the physical stuff. It's also, you know, traits. People who are remind us like, of a template. So we tend to be attracted to partners who have some of the features of people that we have either. And usually it's a combination of both positive attributes from caregivers and also negative attributes.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:39:26]:
So it's kind of like we recognize that, you know, I grew up in a household. God bless my parents. They're both recently dead. High conflict. They fought every day. High conflict. So there was this sort of. For me, I had this message that love had a lot of conflict and a lot of pain because that's how I experienced.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:39:58]:
It was a lot of. A lot of drama there. I resisted that template, and I think I deliberately chose somebody who was not like that. So sometimes those decisions can inform us to avoid certain people in certain situations that are reminiscent, that remind us of these caregivers. And sometimes it's an unconscious attraction. Now, we know that there are certain things that weigh in on attraction that are kind of universal. Like, you know, we tend to like people who smell in a certain way because there's. There's something called the immunohistoric demine complex.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:40:57]:
You ever heard of that? That determines our kind of our immune cells. People who have similar immune sort of complexes, when we smell them, we're not going to like that. That's not going to be attractive. Because it's kind of wired into us evolutionarily to want to, like, pair with people that have different smells in that regard. That's just one thing. Women tend to like tall. Men, if you're talking about, you know, CIS heterosexual relationships. Men, if you're talking about similar heterosexual CIS thing like women that have a certain body shape, you know, the.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:41:43]:
The. The ratio of the hips to the waste and all of that. Those are unconscious, automatic attractants. But a lot of it has to do with these imprinting of people who are on some level going to remind us of people we have unfinished business with from childhood. Does that make sense?
Deborah [00:42:11]:
It does, it does. And I appreciate what you were saying earlier about when you chose your partner, you chose in opposition to what you'd grown up with.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:42:26]:
Because his parents had a completely different dynamic. So his parents never fought, ever. His father and mother were like so unified now. You know, that went almost the other way. Like they didn't, they didn't really push back on each other in ways that I think would have been helpful. They went the other extreme. There was absolutely no conflict in that relationship with my parents. All there was, was conflict.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:42:55]:
So. But I think I chose, I looked at that family and I said, I like that, I like that whole, you know, no drama thing. I'm not. And, and I actually think it worked out well for me. I mean, we had our own drama because every relationship does a lot of our own learning. But, you know, like, I was very conscious that I want a partner like that.
Deborah [00:43:18]:
Yeah, I'm imagining that felt really good to your system, you know, being able to relax and being able to. And then, you know, one of the beauties of, of being in relationship is you learn how to repair. You learn how there are skills that, that we can learn around how to manage, you know, whether it's conflict or speaking our desires.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:43:43]:
Exactly. Plus, the other piece of imago is that we tend to pick people who are wounded, who will wound us in a way that we need to heal. Because what, what happens is we get attracted to people in some ways who are very different from us. So I'll give you an example. My husband used to literally go surfing in hurricanes as a, as a young person when I met him. Oh, there's a hurricane, I'm going out surfing. And I was so risk avoidant. Like I always had to color in the lines.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:44:23]:
He was risk, he was a risk taker and I was risking avoid. Now fast forward a little time. What attracted me to him eventually really repulsed me because when we're out on a family vacation and he wants to go hang gliding when we have little kids, I'm like, what are you nuts? So, but what that did for me was I learned to be more risk averse, risk taking. And he learned to have more common sense. So we, we balance, we learned how to grow ourselves so we were more in balance. And that's actually one of the nice things when I do couples therapy, which is the biggest part of my practice. And by the way, sex therapy is often couples therapy. A lot of what goes on underneath sex problems is a couple issue and a personal issue with the people are in the couples are having individual and couple issues.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:45:26]:
What drives most of the conflict in relationship are Core differences. And when we can learn, rather than make the partner wrong because they're different, when we can learn how to develop ourselves, how to not make them wrong because they're different and to develop ourselves to be more fully formed people, then we have a. Then we can learn the skills and tools to good relationship and we got a good chance of having a sustainable relationship.
Deborah [00:45:54]:
So I want to piggyback on that because generally speaking, one of the things I see a lot with couples is a desire discrepancy. And one of the things that I. You talk about people's desire set point and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and how when you've got the discrepancy, how, how you work with that.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:46:22]:
Well, it's very, very common that people are going to end up kind of. It's not even just about high versus low sex drive. It's also about our unique erotic fingerprint, meaning how we like to have sex, what we think of as sexual. And I'd like to just preface this by saying that there's also for women, it's not unusual in long term relationships to lose access to our spontaneous sex drive like when we're horny and we know it where for men, they tend to, and this is I'm talking about in general because there's always a lot of exceptions the rule. But men tend to think about sex and want more sex across cultures. This and this I write about my book how there are some differences in the developing brain embryologically where the male brain has more receptors for these sex hormone like substances, which literally means they have sex on the brain more than women. That doesn't mean women can't be outrageously horny. But what it means is that we need to understand that you don't even have to have spontaneous sexual desire to have a good sex life.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:47:43]:
There's also responsive or receptive sexual desire that once you kind of get into feeling deeply connected or you get out the vibrator or you get a little arousal going, then you have access to enjoying sex. What you were referring to is the idea that what people have, the baseline desire is the desire, the general level of desire people have before they go into a new relationship. When they go into a new relationship. It's very common due to the explosion of all the chemicals in the brain that people get very high levels of sexual desire for maybe 18 to 36 months if they get to see enough of each other. It can go on longer if they're, you know, not getting a Lot of contact. And then it's also natural for that, the attachment stuff to take over. And people are no longer having these high levels of sexual disorder. Desire especially, that can fall off for women.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:48:54]:
And what people are doing is they're comparing the sex drive they had at the very top of the curve. I call it the desire curve. When they're at the peak of new relationship energy, the honeymoon period, to after they've habituated to each other normally, and they go, oh no, I'm not love anymore. Oh no, something's wrong. They don't think to go back to what was your level of desire before you were in that relationship. And they're also not looking at that. They have different erotic fingerprints that the differences between the different types get masked when you're at that highest level of desire. So for example, a great example could be the soulful lover who needs all that, you know, like eye contact and touchy feely thing when they're paired with what I call the rough and tumble lover who's somebody who's not into the soulfulness.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:49:59]:
They're not, it's not sex unless the furniture gets moved. So when they're at the highest point of new relationship energy, it doesn't matter these days, differences. But after they go back into the baseline, after that, then those differences become more apparent. If you understand, some people are much more susceptible to the fall off of that from the desire curve. Some people get very panicky. I'm not love anymore if I've lost the desire or that hot and heavy, or you don't love me anymore. We're not love anymore. If I had a penny for every time somebody said I'm not love anymore, my head would be explode because I'd be so rich.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:50:48]:
People conflate or confuse new relationship energy, which is a chemical state to get your attention, to decide if you come to your senses, is that partner somebody who I want to bond with. And then you do the work of the bonding. But people make decisions on new relationship energy that they should never do, like leaving one relationship for another. And they also make decisions when that kind of. When that passion falls off that they shouldn't make. Like, oh, I'm not loving it.
Deborah [00:51:22]:
I cannot tell you how happy I am to hear you say that because I've had this noticing in my own, you know, with clients that I've worked with that like 18 months, you know, is the. What I've generally seen. And I can't tell you how many people get engaged in the first 18 months. And, you know, it's, it's sort of like, no, you've got to go through at least.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:51:50]:
Yeah, yeah. You want to really see what's there that's not through the filter of the, your brain on chemicals, on endogenous natural chemicals that get released and the work of the bonding. It's okay to get engaged. It's even okay to get married, but that doesn't mean that you're off the hook when that energy starts to dissipate. And then I'm not love, it's bonding. You want to focus on being a good partner. You want to focus on nurturing love and nurture. Love is really a choice.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:52:27]:
The falling in love and all of that stuff, that's brain chemistry and that's that that like happens and that can hijack you. But the choice to be a loving partner, that's a choice. It's a skill set and a choice.
Deborah [00:52:42]:
Beautiful. So I can't believe how fast time has passed. I. I feel like there's. I didn't get to half my questions, but I do want to take a moment and just have you, you know, pause for a moment. And if there's one thing that you really want people to get out of our conversation, I'd love to know what that is. And while you're pondering that, I'm going to let people know how they can support the Better Sex podcast. Because, you know, sex is a complex issue and it can really make or break a relationship.
Deborah [00:53:15]:
And unfortunately, most of us don't grow up in an environment we're talking about sexism. Welcome. And so that's why I offer the Bedroom Breakthrough session, a personalized one on one experience where we can discover what's holding you back from sex and come up with some strategies to support better sex and satisfying relationships. Because let's face it, a podcast might not be enough, no matter how great it is. So please check out the Bedroom Breakthrough in the show notes and I can't wait to hear what you have to say because I love the look on your face.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:53:53]:
I think what people need to do is harness their attention and bring their attention to really paying attention, good attention attunement to themselves and good connection with the people who are important to them in their lives. It's all about connection.
Deborah [00:54:14]:
So good. Thank you. So how do people find you then?
Dr. Nan Wise [00:54:20]:
Go to my website, askdoctornan.com and the doctors spelled out with all the letters on my website. You can book a free chat with me if you want to. If you have questions about something, you can get a free chapter of my book. And if you buy a copy of my book, you get a free whole sex therapy session with me. Oh, awesome. So feel free. You can feel free to just leave me questions if you want on that place where you can ask questions or set up a time to talk to me.
Deborah [00:54:58]:
Beautiful. And your website is amazing. There's so much great information there. I love. You know, you've done lots of podcasts, you've been very generous with your time and your expertise and there's a whole section where you just answer people's questions in a really compassionate and thorough way. And I really enjoyed the book. I've learned a lot about it. So please check out the book.
Deborah [00:55:29]:
Check out Nan. I also know you're on Instagram and.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:55:35]:
I'm starting a talk show on Instagram.
Deborah [00:55:38]:
You are?
Dr. Nan Wise [00:55:39]:
I am. I'm in planning with a OB GYN who I adore and a relationship expert to host a live stream talk show that we'll invite different guests onto and all of that. That's always one on my own talk show. So why not? Like there's so many people I want to talk too about all sorts of really important topics to all about connection. So spend very little time on, be very intentional with your social media and screen time and you know, connect with yourself and be present to your partner and people in your life and you'll be get into your sensations. Get out of your head and get into your sensations and pay attention to your body because that's where all the core emotional information is. Thanks for having me.
Deborah [00:56:36]:
Oh my gosh. Thank you so much, Dr. Nan, for joining me and please follow her on social media. And if you want to bring more love and better sex to the world, please subscribe, like and comment. Comment on the Better Sex podcast and bye for now.
Dr. Nan Wise [00:56:56]:
Bye. Thank you so much.