Hub: female libidoFemale libido: what it is, the norm, why it drops, how to get it back

What is libido in simple words

Libido, in simple words, is sexual desire: interest in sex, thoughts about it and the readiness to respond when intimacy becomes possible. In women it can be spontaneous or responsive, and both versions are healthy.

The word is Latin and means “desire, longing”. Freud brought it into psychology, and for a long time it meant something like general life energy. Today’s sexologists understand it more simply and more concretely: libido is sexual desire, something that can be described, measured with a questionnaire and discussed in a consultation.

Spontaneous desire arrives on its own: you are riding the metro and suddenly think about sex. Responsive desire wakes up in reply to a kiss, a scent, a touch, and until that moment it seems not to exist. In 2000 the Canadian sexologist Rosemary Basson described how, for many women in long relationships, the second kind becomes the main one. I write about it in detail in my piece on responsive desire.

Libido is often confused with its neighbours. That is where half of the fears people bring to me come from.

Concept	What it is	What it looks like in life
Libido	Desire, interest in intimacy	You want sex, or you want to keep going once it has started
Arousal	The body’s response: blood flow, lubrication, sensitivity	Lubrication can appear without desire, and the other way round
Orgasm	The peak of arousal and release	Desire can be strong with no orgasm; these are different problems
Asexuality	A stable absence of sexual attraction to people	A person can love, cuddle, live as a couple and not want sex
Frigidity	An outdated word, no longer used in diagnoses	Today we speak of desire or arousal dysfunction

If you feel desire at least sometimes, and sex at least sometimes brings you pleasure, I forbid you to call yourself frigid.

What level of libido is considered normal

There is no norm for frequency: neither “three times a week” nor “once a month” is written down anywhere as a standard. Low desire becomes a diagnosis only if it troubles the woman herself.

Both classifications work this way. ICD-11 has hypoactive sexual desire dysfunction, and the American DSM-5 has female sexual interest/arousal disorder. In both, the mandatory condition is marked distress because of low desire. If there is little sex and you are at peace with that, there is no problem.

The numbers show this well. In the American PRESIDE study (Shifren and colleagues, 2008) around 43% of women reported some sexual difficulty, but only about 12% were distressed by it. The most frequent complaint was precisely low desire.

Here is another study I love to retell. In 2016 Amy Muise and her colleagues looked at data from 30,645 people: life satisfaction rose with sexual frequency up to roughly once a week, and after that it stopped rising. As you can see, even once a week already affects how happy people feel. You can have more, but do not assume that more sex means more happiness: at least, the researchers found no such relationship.

In my consultations I see that people’s sexual appetite differs by nature. Some want it almost every day, for others once a month is enough, and both are healthy. The trouble starts when two people with different appetites live together and each takes themselves as the norm.

But there is one situation I do not file under “individual differences”: you used to want it, now you don’t, and that makes you unhappy. That is not character and not age. It is what women come to me with most often, and it is something that comes back. How exactly, I will tell you below.

What female libido depends on

Desire depends on the balance of two systems in the brain: one responds to sexual signals, the other puts on the brakes when there is danger, anxiety or shame around. This dual control model was described by John Bancroft and Erik Janssen of the Kinsey Institute in 2000.

The easiest way to picture it is an accelerator and a brake pedal. One woman has a sensitive accelerator: a glance is enough. Another has a sensitive brake: one thought of the unwashed dishes or of the child awake behind the wall, and everything switches off. Weak desire more often means the brake is pressed too hard. The accelerator is usually fine.

Many things press on the brake:

• the body: lack of sleep, pain during sex, chronic illness, some medications;
• the head: anxiety, depression, shame about your body, beliefs from childhood like “good girls don’t want that”;
• the habit of watching yourself from the outside during sex, known as spectatoring: “how do I look, can he see my belly”;
• the relationship: resentment, fights, the feeling that you carry everything alone;
• the setting: no door that closes, no time, not a single minute when you are not a mother or an employee.

Anxiety and arousal do not get along in the same head. That is why the advice “just relax” is useless.

Releasing the brake is exactly what my work is. Look at the list above: the brake is pressed from three sides at once, the body, the head and your state. If you remove only one, say, catch up on sleep, the effect lasts a couple of weeks. That is why in my practicum I work on all three at the same time: with the body through the trainers from PionBox and breathing, with the head on live Zoom calls and in my game about the body, sex and relationships, with your state through meditations and practices. Afterwards my students write the same thing: “desire woke up, I want it more often, I initiate it myself”. I describe the three levels in detail in my article “Formula of Female Power”.

Why libido drops in women

Most often libido drops because of fatigue, pain, conflict and big life changes: childbirth, moving house, losing a job. Hormones and medications matter too, but less often than people think.

Here is what I hear most often in my consultations, roughly in this order. One cause is almost never the only one: I look at the body, the mind and the state you live in, all at once.

Chronic fatigue. When you sleep five hours a night, the body chooses sleep. That is sensible of it. Still, having no energy and having no “I want” of your own are not the same thing: the holiday ends, and the “must, must, must” way of living stays.

Sex without pleasure. If for years intimacy was “so he would leave me alone”, the brain files it as a duty. Nobody feels desire for a duty. This turns around when the body starts getting what it needs: after working with the pelvic floor muscles my students have brighter sensations and more lubrication, and sex turns from a duty into something they want.

Pain and dryness. A body that expects pain defends itself, and it is impossible to want pain. The first thing I teach in these cases is not to clench but to relax: without that, no technique works.

Six more causes: resentment, childbirth, pills, depression, pregnancy, alcohol (expand)

Resentment and an unequal load. It is hard to want a person you have been angry with since the morning. Saying “I don’t want this” and “I need it like this” is something we learn on the Zoom calls, it is one of the most frequent topics.

Childbirth and breastfeeding. Sleep is broken, the body is different, the hormones have been rearranged, and for a while desire naturally recedes into the background.

Pills. SSRI antidepressants noticeably lower desire in some people. With combined oral contraceptives the picture is more mixed: in the 2013 review by Pastor, Holla and Chmel (36 studies, 8,422 women) desire did not change for the majority, rose for some, and fell for a minority.

Depression. Interest in everything disappears, sex included.

Pregnancy. In the first trimester desire fades for many because of nausea and fatigue, in the second it often comes back, in the third the belly and anxiety about the birth get in the way. All of this is expected.

Alcohol and antibiotics. A glass of wine takes the edge off, but regular drinking dulls both desire and sensitivity. Antibiotics do not act on libido directly, but they are often followed by thrush, and then sex becomes unpleasant.

A separate case is when desire is absent only towards one person, while fantasies and interest in sex in general are alive. This drop in desire for a specific partner is common, and then the work needs to be done on the relationship. This is exactly why my practicum “Orgasm. Everything you need to know” has a separate lesson, “I don’t want my man”, with a forgiveness practice and five practices for strengthening the relationship (the practicum is in Russian and Ukrainian).

Recognised yourself in two or three points at once? That is how it goes: the causes come in a tangle, and that is exactly why “fixing one” does not help. The good news: I know how to untangle every one of these points, and I have been doing it with women for more than ten years.

Elevated and high libido in women

High libido means many thoughts about sex and a frequent wish for intimacy, and in itself it is not an illness. The warning sign appears when desire starts to run you.

Elevated libido usually comes in a wave: a new infatuation, a holiday, the first months after a hard period, and for many women the middle of the cycle. It passes on its own and needs nothing.

Three situations deserve attention. First: sex has become a way to quiet anxiety or loneliness, and shame follows afterwards. Second: you are risking your health, money or relationships and cannot stop. ICD-11 has a separate diagnosis for this, compulsive sexual behaviour disorder. Third: a sharp, unfamiliar change together with insomnia, a flood of ideas and spending. That is a reason to see a psychiatrist, because this is sometimes how bipolar disorder begins.

If you simply want sex more than your partner does, that is a matter of agreements within the couple, not something you take to a doctor.

Libido in women after 40, 50 and 60

With age libido usually does not disappear but changes: there is less spontaneous desire, which means context, rest and touch matter more. The myths about a “peak at 35” and a “decline after 40” are not supported by data.

People often talk about a sexual peak at 30–35. The basis for this idea is weak: a 2010 hypothesis by Easton and colleagues that is still disputed. Testosterone levels in women decline gradually from the early twenties; there is no surge at 40, and the 2019 international consensus on testosterone notes the same.

Around menopause, desire is affected most by indirect things: hot flushes and night-time waking, dryness of the mucosa that has made sex unpleasant, changes in the body and in how you see yourself. Each of these can be treated separately. Which hormones are actually linked to desire and which tests make sense, I go through in my article on which hormone is responsible for desire.

After 60 many women calmly carry on with their sex life. There may be less desire, but more freedom: no contraception, the children have grown up, there is no need to hurry.

How to get your libido back: where to start

Libido can be brought back if you find what is pressing on it and remove it. Pushing yourself by force is useless. There is no universal pill, but there is a clear order of steps.

1. Remember when the desire left and what was happening then: childbirth, a new job, pills, infidelity, illness. Often the answer is already visible here.
2. Rule out the physical. Pain, dryness, a disrupted cycle, constant fatigue are reasons to see a doctor first.
3. Count your sleep. On its own it will not bring desire back, but without it the other steps will not work.
4. Stop agreeing to sex you do not want. It sounds paradoxical, but this is exactly how the body stops expecting something unpleasant.
5. Try starting with touch without the goal of getting to sex, and see whether desire wakes up along the way. For responsive desire this is a path that works.
6. Talk to your partner about what you like. The list of what is missing can wait.

Here is what it looks like in real life. One of my students came with leaking when she ran and with no desire at all. After a week of practice she wrote: “I was running for the bus, and when I got there I realised I was dry. That was the second change, the one I had waited for the longest. And the first: I started wanting sex”.

Each step on its own gives a short-lived effect, because desire does not live in one place. That is why I work on three levels at once, body, mind and state: the result lasts only when all three have been worked on, not just one.

Here is what it looks like in the “Healthy and Desired” practicum. You receive PionBox with trainers from me, and the body starts working from day one: five minutes in the evening with a trainer, five minutes of breathing in the morning. I check your technique from your video report, thirty seconds is enough for me to praise or correct you. Once a week there is a live Zoom call with me, where we take apart shame, control and “I’m not allowed”. Plus meditations and practices, so that you wake up with the energy to want, not wrung out.

I have put together a detailed plan without pills on my page about how to increase libido. If you would like to understand where you are first, take the short libido test: it does not make a diagnosis, but it helps put the problem into words.

I am asked about the intimate muscles all the time. Pelvic floor muscle training improves sensitivity, helps with incontinence and, through that, brings desire back: more blood flow to the clitoris and vagina, more lubrication and sensation, less fear of leaking and less shame. There is little direct research on desire, but I have thousands of students who report the same effect. I go through what the research actually shows in my piece on Kegel exercises and desire. I teach body practices and intimate gymnastics in my practicum “Healthy and Desired” (the practicum is in Russian and Ukrainian), and I give the trainers to every student as a gift.

Pills, vitamins and herbs for libido

A female “Viagra” that switches desire on at the push of a button does not exist, and I am sure it will not be invented: a woman’s desire depends on too many things at once. Most of what pharmacies sell as a libido remedy is dietary supplements with no proven effect.

In the USA two prescription drugs are approved for women with low desire, flibanserin and bremelanotide. In Europe neither of them is registered, and the effect in trials was modest. What is on pharmacy shelves, what the labels say and how a medicine differs from a supplement, I go through on my page about medications for libido.

With vitamins the story is similar. There is no vitamin responsible for desire. But if you have anaemia, vitamin D deficiency or thyroid problems, you will be tired, and a tired woman does not want sex. So blood tests from your GP are a sensible first step, and a handful of random supplements is not.

Maca, saffron, ginseng, oysters, chocolate: there are reviews on them, and the conclusions are more restrained than the adverts. You can read about each product in detail in my piece on aphrodisiacs for women.

Don’t put it off

If you are reading this and recognising yourself, don’t put it off. It will not sort itself out, I have seen that in hundreds of thousands of my followers. The brake presses harder and harder, sex “out of duty” sets in, and the distance in the couple grows. In a year the same task will cost more: in energy and in the relationship. Start today, you did not read all the way to the end for nothing.

You have two paths.

1. Figure it out on your own: catch up on sleep, buy lingerie, read one more article and wait (you have probably already done that…).
2. Figure it out with me. You can come to a free consultation: I or my team will help you find what is holding back desire in your particular case. Knowing the cause and knowing what exactly you should do are different things. And if you already know you want to work with the body, the head and your state all at once, come to me to the practicum “Healthy and Desired” (the practicum is in Russian and Ukrainian).