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

by Emily Nagoski

Her “triphasic” model of the sexual response cycle begins with desire, which she conceptualized as “interest in” or “appetite for” sex, much like hunger or thirst. The second phase is arousal, which combines excitement and plateau into one phase, and the third phase is orgasm.

Context is made of two things: the circumstances of the present moment—whom you’re with, where you are, whether the situation is novel or familiar, risky or

safe, etc.—and your brain state in the present moment—whether you’re relaxed or stressed, trusting or not, loving or not, right now, in this moment.

This may be the most important consequence of understanding the way context influences how your brain processes sexually relevant stimuli: When sex doesn’t feel great, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. Maybe there’s been a change in your external circumstances or your other motivational systems (like stress) that’s influencing your sexual response. Which means that you can create positive change without changing you.

The key to managing stress effectively is to make efforts to complete the cycle—unlock from freeze, escape the predator, kill the enemy, rejoice.

Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state.

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.

Emotions are like tunnels: You have to walk all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end.

And women will not be fully, blissfully satisfied with their sex lives until they are fully, blissfully satisfied with their own bodies.

three questions to ask yourself when you’re experiencing frustrations around sexual desire:17 • Is this the right goal for me? • Am I putting in the right kind of effort, as well as the right amount? • Am I realistic in my expectation about how effortful this goal should be?

How you feel about your sexuality is more important than your sexuality itself.

Meta-emotions are how you feel about how you feel,

For many of us, the goal states we have in mind—such as spontaneous desire or orgasm with intercourse—are not goals we have chosen consciously for ourselves.

Becoming aware of your scripts is the first step to changing your meta-emotions.

The technical term for this process of organizing your experience according to a preexisting template is “probabilistic generative model.” It means that information—anything you see, hear, smell, touch, or taste—goes first to your emotional brain, where prior learning (possibly about lemons or little rat jackets, possibly about body image or sexual disgust) plus your present brain state (stress, love, self-criticism, disgust, etc.) combine to shape the initial decisions your brain makes about whether to move toward or away from that information.

The first step in changing your meta-emotions is recognizing the difference between the goal state dictated by the script and what you’re actually experiencing.

So dig this: Research participants who were less affected by their symptoms did not experience lower frequency or severity of symptoms, nor were they more aware of their internal state—the “observe” factor. Nope. The people who were less impacted by their symptoms were those who were more nonjudging! In other words, it isn’t the symptoms that predict how much anxiety disrupts a person’s life, it’s how a person feels about those symptoms. It’s not how you feel—it’s not even being aware of how you feel. It’s how you feel about how you feel. And people who feel nonjudging about their feelings do better.

The point of feeling a feeling you can’t do anything about is to let it discharge, complete the cycle, so that it can end.