Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

by Emily Nagoski

Think about what your body recognizes as the behaviors that save you from lions. When you’re being chased by a lion, what do you do? You run. So when you’re stressed out by your job (or by your sex life), what do you do? You run . . . or walk, or get on the elliptical machine or go out dancing or even just dance around your bedroom. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, “Exercise is good for stress,” that is for realsie real.7 Here are some other things that science says can genuinely help us not only “feel better” but actually facilitate the completion of the stress response cycle: sleep; affection (more on that in the next section); any form of meditation, including mindfulness, yoga, tai chi, body scans, etc. (more on that in chapter 9); and allowing yourself a good old cry or primal scream—though you have to be careful with this one. Sometimes people just wallow in their stress when they cry, rather than allowing the tears to wash away the stress. If you’ve ever locked yourself in your room and sobbed for ten minutes, and then at the end heaved a great big sigh and felt tremendously relieved, you’ve felt how it can move you from “I am at risk” to “I am safe.” Art, used in the same way, can help. When mental health professionals suggest journaling or other expressive self-care, they don’t mean that the construction of sentences or ...