Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

by Emily Nagoski

Context can cause sensations that are typically perceived as painful, like spanking or whipping, to be erotic. Sexual “submission” requires relaxing into trust—turning off the offs—and allowing your partner to take control.

When I say that perception of sensation is context dependent, this is the deepest sense in which I mean it. I mean that evolutionarily old parts of your brain (your “monkey brain”) can respond in opposite ways, approach or avoidance, depending on the circumstances in which they are functioning.14 In a safe, comfortable environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate approach, curiosity, desire. And in a stressful, dangerous environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate avoidance, anxiety, dread.

“Context changes how your brain responds to sex” doesn’t just mean “Set the mood,” like with candles, corsets, and a locked bedroom door. It also means that when you’re in a great sex-positive context, almost everything can activate your curious “What’s this?” desirous approach to sex. And when you’re in a not-so-great context—either external circumstances or internal brain state—it doesn’t matter how sexy your partner is, how much you love them, or how fancy your underwear is, almost nothing will activate that curious, appreciative, desirous experience.

When I say “One Ring” for the rest of the book, I mean this cluster of liking, wanting, and learning, where all your emotional responses—sex, stress, love, disgust, etc.—compete and interact and influence each other.

Liking is perhaps the closest to what we generally think of as “reward.” The liking mechanism is the “Yes!” or “No!” in your brain—it assesses the “hedonic impact” of a stimulus: Does it feel good? How good? Does it feel bad? How bad?

Learning is the process of linking what’s happening now with what should come next.

This is implicit learning—a different experience from explicit learning. Explicit learning is how you memorize a poem with spaced repetition and conscious effort. Implicit learning is (in part) the learning system linking stimuli across time and space.

Wanting—more technically known as “incentive salience”—is the generic accelerator of the emotional brain. It fuels the desire to move toward something or away from it. When wanting is activated with the stress response mechanism, we search for safety. When wanting is activated with the attachment mechanism (see the next chapter), we seek affection. And of course when wanting is activated with our sexual accelerator, we pursue sexual stimulation.

The sequence works this way: Something sex-related happens, and your brain goes, “Hey, that’s sex-related.” That’s learning. And if the context is right, your brain also goes, “Hey, that’s nice!” That’s liking. And if the stimulus is nice enough, your brain goes, “Ooh, go get more of that!” That’s wanting.

focusing the One Ring on sexual pleasure, and releasing it from all other motivations, is the path to ecstatic orgasms.

And all three are context dependent: If your wanting, liking, and learning substrates are busy coping with stress or attachment issues (which are the topic of the next chapter), then sex-related stimuli may not be perceived as sexy at all.

As we saw with the rats who had Iggy Pop blasted at them, when your stress levels are high, practically anything will cause your wanting to activate in an avoidant, “What the hell is that?” mode. But if you’re in a sex-positive context, almost anything can activate wanting in curious, “What’s this?” mode.

Exactly what context a woman experiences as sex positive varies both from woman to woman and also across a woman’s life span, but generally it’s a context that’s low stress high affection explicitly erotic

The research subjects were not aware of having seen the images, yet their emotional brains responded.

anyone who finds sex unfun or whose desire diminishes may be tempted to conclude they’re broken or they don’t like sex… when really all they need is a better context.

In the right context, sexual behavior is arguably the most pleasurable experience a human can have. It can bond us with our partners, flood us with happy chemicals, satisfy deep biological urges, and transport us to spiritual heights. In the wrong context, though, it can literally feel like death. Depending on the context, sex can vary almost infinitely, from delicious to disgusting, from playful to painful—and because of the dual control mechanism, sometimes it’s two conflicting things at the same time.

And the very best context of all, she thought, was when she felt pursued. The extended courtship that characterized the earliest part of her relationship with Henry might have been specifically organized around the contextual factors that maximized her wanting for sex. She and Henry talked about it, and they decided to try an experiment: He would create entire evenings where he courted Camilla, wooed her, and—eventually—won her. And they learned something from this that surprised them both: It wasn’t the pursuing. It was the waiting that turned her on.

When he kissed her, she tried to deepen the kiss, but again he slowed her down. “I’m chasing you, remember?” he said. “I can’t chase you if you’re moving toward me.” This was the lightbulb moment. Camilla recognized that what she really needed was time for her liking to grow and expand until finally it activated her wanting. They had been working with the hypothesis that it was feeling pursued that made her feel desire, but it turned out the real trick was not the experience of being chased but the amount of accelerator activation that comes with going slowly, delaying gratification.

Your brain’s perception of a sensation is context dependent. Like tickling: If your partner tickles you when you’re already feeling turned on, it can be fun. But if they tickle you when you’re angry, it’s just irritating. Same sensation, different context—therefore different perception.

When you’re stressed out, your brain interprets just about everything as a potential threat. When you’re turned on, your brain could interpret just about anything as sex-related. Because: context!

Wanting, liking, and learning are separate functions in your brain. You can want without liking (craving), anticipate without wanti...

For most people, the best context for sex is low stress + highly affectionate + explicitly erotic. Think through your contex...

Identify five things you and/or your partner could do if you decided to work toward creating more frequent and easier access to the contexts that improve your sexual functioning.

Now select the two or three that feel like the right combination of impact, ease, and immediacy, and list all the things that would have to happen in order for this change to occur. Be as CONCRETE AND SPECIFIC as you can. These should be ACTIONS rather than abstractions or ideas or attitudes. Ask yourself, “If we decide to create this change, what goes on our to-do list?”

Finally, select just one change that you will actually implement. Choose a start date together that feels like good timing. Ideally this will be within the next month. Make your plan. AND DO IT!

it’s not just the sexual aspects of a context that influence whether you get turned on. It’s all the other emotional aspects, including your preexisting emotional state.

The key to managing stress (so that it doesn’t mess with your sex life) is not simply “relaxing” or “calming down.” It’s allowing the stress response cycle to complete. Allow it to discharge fully. Let your body move all the way from “I am at risk” to “I am safe.”

In the second part of this chapter, I’ll discuss love. Love, for our purposes, is attachment, the innate biological mechanism that bonds humans together. It underlies passion, romance, and the joy of finding a partner you can connect with. But it also underlies grief, jealousy, and heartbreak. Sometimes it’s joyful, like when you’re falling in love. Sometimes it’s agonizing, like when you’re breaking up. But always attachment pushes us from “I am broken” to “I am whole.”

The goal is to help you recognize how the stress response cycle and the attachment mechanism are integrated in your sexual responsiveness, and to offer strategies for allowing them to enhance sexual pleasure, as well as to provide options when they’re impairing pleasure. We can understand women’s sexual wellbeing only if we take context into account—and most of that context has nothing to do with sex itself. Which means we can improve our sexual wellbeing and expand our sexual pleasure without directly changing anything about our sex lives! What I’ve included in this chapter and the next are the contextual factors that research has shown are consistently associated with changes in women’s sexual wellbeing. Improve your context, and your sexual pleasure will expand all on its own.

And that is the complete stress response cycle, with beginning (“I’m at risk!”), middle (action), and end (“I’m safe!”).

And again, you can fight and die or you can fight and live; either way, you complete the stress response cycle by engaging in a behavior that eliminates the stressor and the stress.

If an animal survives such an intense threat to its life, then it does an extraordinary thing: It shakes. It trembles, paws vibrating in the air. It heaves a great big sigh. And then it gets up, shakes itself off, and trots away.

even in its smaller scale, that’s how the stress response cycle works, beginning, middle, and end, all innately built into the nervous system and fully functional—in the right context.

more than half of women report that stress, depression, and anxiety decrease their interest in sex; they also reduce sexual arousal and can interfere with orgasm.3 Chronic stress also disrupts or suppresses the menstrual cycle, decreases fertility and lactation, and increases miscarriage, as well as reducing genital response and increasing both distractibility and pain with sex.

stressed-out humans more readily interpret all stimuli as threats, just like the rats being blasted with bright lights and Iggy Pop. We also know that the brain can handle only a limited amount of information at a time; at its simplest, we can think of stress as information overload, so when there’s too much happening, the brain starts to triage, prioritizing, simplifying, and even plain old ignoring some things.

if you’re generally overwhelmed by twenty-first-century life, practically everything else takes priority over sex; as far as your brain is concerned everything is a charging lion. And if you’re being chased by a lion, is that a good time to have sex?

for most people, stress slams on the brakes, bottoming out sexual interest—except for the 10 to 20 percent or so of people like Olivia for whom stress activates the accelerator. (All the same parts, organized in different ways.) But even for those folks, stress blocks sexual pleasure (liking) even as it increases sexual interest (wanting). Stressed sex feels different from joyful sex—you know, because: context. To reduce the impact of stress on your sexual pleasure and interest, to have more joyful, pleasurable sex, manage your stress.

My technical description of Olivia’s out-of-control experience is “maladaptive behavior to manage negative affect”—which just means trying to cope with uncomfortable emotions (stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage) by doing things that carry a high risk of unwanted consequences. Compulsive sexual behavior is one example. Other examples include: using alcohol or other drugs in a risky way dysfunctional relationships—for instance, trying to deal with your own feelings by dealing with someone else’s escaping into distractions, like movie binge-watching when you have other things you need to be doing disordered eating—restricting, bingeing, or purging

Of course, many of these can be done in a healthy way. It’s when we do them instead of dealing with our Feels—that is, instead of completing the cycle—that they bring the potential for unwanted consequences. Some of those consequences are fairly benign… and some are could-kill-you-tonight dangerous. And they’re all intended to do one thing: manage the underlying feelings. We might do these things when we don’t know how to complete the cycle or when the feelings just hurt too much.

As she recovered from her eating disorder, she came to realize that her behavior wasn’t really about the shape of her body—“I needed something to blame for my anxiety, and cultural brainwashing made my body seem like a good target,” she said. Instead, her compulsive behavior was an attempt to deal with feelings that felt too big for her to handle.

If our stress is chronic and we don’t take deliberate steps to complete the cycle, all that activated stress just hangs out inside us, making us sick, tired, and unable to experience pleasure with sex (or with much of anything else).

our emotion-dismissing culture is uncomfortable with Feels. Our culture says that if the stressor isn’t right in front of us, then we have no reason to feel stressed and so we should just cut it out already. As a result, most people’s idea of “stress management” is either to eliminate all stressors or to “just relax,” as if stress can be turned off like a light switch.

Completing the cycle requires that, instead of hitting the brakes on our stress, we gently remove our foot from both the accelerator and the brakes and allow ourselves to coast to a stop.6 To do that, you create the right context and trust your body to do its thing.

Physical activity is the 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 later in the chapter); any form of meditation, including mindfulness, yoga, tai chi, body scans, etc.; 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.

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 the task of drawing is inherently therapeutic; rather, they’re encouraging you to find positive contexts to discharge your stress, through the creative process.

Whatever strategy you use, take deliberate steps to complete the cycle. Allow yourself to coast to the end without hitting the brakes. Emotions are tunnels: You have to walk all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end.

everyone needs at least one place in their life where they can just Have All the Feels without worrying about being judged or freaking people out. Find that place and those people.

Too often, we mistake dealing with the stressors for dealing with the stress.

Physical activity Sharing affection Primal scream or a good cry Progressive muscle relaxation or other sensorimotor meditation Body self-care, like grooming, massage, or doing your nails