Beyond The Bedroom: How Sexual Wellness Impacts Your Mind & Body

Introduction and Speaker Background 0:00

Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Hormones and Mental Health Summit. Overcoming anxiety and depression and ADHD in women. I am your co-host, actor Sharon Stills, and I'm always honored, as always thrilled to be here, to be a part of these covers sessions. And today is going to be an amazing conversation. As you know, I've been bringing different lenses just to give you different ideas to step outside of the pillbox on how we can feel better. And so I'm staying in alignment with that. Today I have my dear friend and colleague, Susan Bratton, and she's the intimacy expert to millions.

She's a champion and advocate for all those who desire lifelong intimacy and passion. She is one cool lady. You're going to have so much fun with her. She's created hundreds of techniques that transform having sex into making love and is the world's most well-respected sexual biohacker. She's a bestselling author. She's a publisher of 44 books and programs on love making techniques and bedroom communication skills, such as Sexual Soulmate, Ravish Him, the steamy sex ed videos so much more. She's the co-founder and CEO of two companies, Personal Life Media, a publisher of the Better Lover brand of heart connected lovemaking techniques and bedroom communication skills, and sexual regenerative therapies.

And the 20 LLC, a manufacturer of desire libido, botanical multivitamin, multi mineral complex and blood flow nitric oxide booster supplements and her new desire sexual energy bars. She's just you're just all on it. You are like, super sexy woman. I love it, and you're beautiful and you're energetic. And I just want to thank you for all that you do. I always learn something. I always get inspired when I chat with you. And I'm super excited to have you here, to have this conversation, to help all the women that are listening.

Thank you. Sharon, you know you are. You have such a welcoming heart. I really appreciate that. And I think our appreciation for each other has grown so much over the years. So I'm very happy to be collaborating with you again. And this is a very important subject. You know, we carry so much shame and guilt around in our perspective on our sexuality, especially as women, and especially when we suffer from any kind of mood disorder, whether it be anxiety, depression, mood spectrum, what have you.

And there are a lot of things that I can bring to the table in a very short time that I hope will give your summit viewers, just not only some hope, but some actionable steps. I really want to be actionable in this conversation, so take it away and let's do as much as we can in the next 30 minutes. And then I have a few things that we can, you know, that that are like, oh yeah, that's my problem. Or oh yeah, that's what I need. And I'll drop some links for those things as well. Awesome, awesome.

So yeah, I mean, I think that it's such a double edged sword because sometimes when we are dealing with depression or anxiety, that the last thing we think about is wanting to be intimate, wanting to have sex, you know, that kind of gets pushed to the wayside. And I was telling you before we came live, you know, when I'm anxious, I'm like, hello, vibrator, where are you? Like, I find having an orgasm is such a good release for anxiety. And so I think we again need to start thinking about how we can self heal and self-soothe ourselves, whether we are in a relationship or not in a relationship.

How Anxiety and Depression Affect Intimacy 4:00

So I'd love to hear your views on these mood spectrum issues. And what do you what is it for anxiety, depression? What are your views and how does that all play a role into the work you do? Yeah. So I think generally in anxiety, and I would imagine that there are a lot of different kinds of anxiety and sexuality, and that our viewers have felt almost all of these things. There's the anxiety of feeling kind of strung out and overwhelmed, and you can't get out of your head and settle into your body to even contemplate being intimate with someone.

There's the anxiety about feeling like you're not ready, or your libido is low, or you're not turned on, or you're not wanting sex, and your partner is. And that creates a lot of anxiety for us as people pleasers and, you know, feeling like we have to be good girls, which is a part of our culture, that it's very hard to get out from under. The other thing that I think happens for a lot of us is that we actually have performance anxiety. If we do become intimate, we have anxiety about how our body looks.

We're in our heads. We have trouble relaxing and staying in sensation. We are struggling just generally with feeling like, oh gosh, what if I what if I don't have a good time? What if I can't have an orgasm? All of those kinds of things add to our performance anxiety in addition, once we get started. So there anxiety is a through line, and not just for people who tend to have generalized anxiety, but even people who don't still have anxiety in the bedroom because sexuality is so fraught with repression, shame, lack of knowledge, which creates a lack of experience, which generates fear.

There's a lot of fear. So if you can relate to any of these things, know that you are not alone. You are actually the norm. Isn't that nice to hear? With depression it is. There's a distance, a distance, a distance, a great distance that makes it feel like you really can't get to connection. And so when a woman can't get to connection, she can't get to relaxation. And when she can't get to that relaxation, oftentimes she can't start to begin to climb her arousal ladder. Anxious people tend to have a little more energetics around their symptoms.

Depressed people tend to have low feelings, and both of those create issues. And you might be a person who suffers from both of those problems, right? A lot of us have depression and anxiety. So we've stated what can go wrong and where we need to close some gaps. So let's close some gaps. The very first thing that I think is, is the most important part to understand is physiologic. So we have libido, desire and arousal. And you can think about them like a Venn diagram, like the Olympic, the Olympic logo intersecting circles with you in the middle.

Libido is your physical health. And when you have anxiety and depression, it is what I call below the line. If the line is even keeled and some people are up and happy, go lucky and things don't faze them, those lucky devils. And then there's the people who live a little below the line. They struggle for equanimity. And when you're below the line, that is an indication of health issues. And health issues are both emotional and physical. And so when you have health issues, they push you below the line and they lower your libido.

So you come from a disadvantage because you literally have a health issue. And so you have to go very easy on yourself and understand that a, that an emotional issue is a health issue and it is going to dampen your libido. But I have some ideas for you about that. Some little tricks that'll help kick kickstart your body and maybe get you into that even keel, or even above. The second thing is desire. And desire is the emotional state. Do you feel desirable? Do you desire your partner if you're lucky enough to have one?

And that's where things need to be. Working outside the bedroom to work inside the bedroom. Or you have to feel some self-love and self-worth. And for a lot of people, their lack of desire comes from the core wound of feeling not enough. And when you struggle with the low emotion field of anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders, you feel like you're not being enough. So you're starting in a desire hole. So now you're in a physical hole and an emotional hole. The third piece is arousal. And believe me, I'm going to fix all this.

I'm just, you know, telling you that that there's nothing wrong with you. Everything is no normal. And there are solutions. And the third piece with arousal is that our whole lives as women, all of the kinds of imagery that we've seen about sex, everything we've been told and everything we've heard about sex has been through the male lens of arousal. So, you know, men in some ways are very lucky when they're healthy. They sleep at night and have multiple nocturnal erections. They wake up with morning wood.

They have more testosterone than we do, which is the molecule of lust. And so they're ready to go. But in addition to that, they have. So I'm going to hold up a banana and this banana.

Libido, Desire, and Arousal Explained 10:00

I'm going to pretend this is a penis. Men have about 50% of their penis sticks out of their body, but about 50% goes in and down toward their testicles. And if you imagine that that's about the size of a banana. And what? Only what you see is about half of what's in there. If I peel the skin off the banana, like I peel the skin off of the penis, everything inside there, 85% of the contents inside the penis is spongy erectile tissue, and it's in three straight tubes. And so what happens is our male bodied partners, they see our beautiful naked body, and we look beautiful to them.

We as estrogen dominant creatures have a lot of judgment, which helps keep us safe. But it also makes us really hard on ourselves. And we notice imperfections, which is a part of being an estrogen dominant person. So we start off with more body image issues and things like that. But what happens is that we have the same amount of that erectile tissue in that banana. Imagine if I could take that banana and turn it into, oh, turn it into a little teardrop. I drop my banana, turn it into a little teardrop.

That comes to a point. I just took that banana and made it kind of a circle with a point at the top. That's how much erectile tissue we have in our Volvo vaginal region. Our lady parts, what I like to call our Yoni y o and I, that's a tantric lovemaking word that means the portal. And you can think about your genitals as a portal. A portal to your pleasure, a portal to your power, to your passion, to higher consciousness, to deepening heart connection, to ecstatic bliss. So knowing that we actually have a lot of nooks and crannies in our vulva.

So we have a clitoral head and a shaft and arms and legs and a and a urethral sponge and a perennial sponge that wrap around our vagina. But they take about 20 minutes to get filled with the same blood that is required for them to plump up and have more surface area, sending more signals of pleasure to our biggest sex organ, our brain. And when we're rushed to intercourse, we don't get that full feeling. And sex intercourse doesn't feel as good. A man would never think to have intercourse with a flaccid penis.

Yet women have intercourse with a flaccid yoni all the time. Most of the time, maybe every time we've ever had intercourse. And so the problem is that it's just not that good for us if we don't give ourselves the time to get to full arousal. And I have a couple of non-negotiables during my lovemaking now, I had a lot of sexual trauma as a child, which is one of the things that led me to teach passionate lovemaking, to teach things that were the antidote to pornography, the antidote to male oriented television sex that I needed, heart connected lovemaking.

I needed sensuality, I needed slow, passionate pleasure. And that's what we all need. But we don't see these examples of it. And that's why I ended up being in the work that I'm in. But what I realized is a couple of things. One, even now today at 63, I'm having the best sex of my life. I'm more orgasmic. I have more confidence in my body, I enjoy myself, I'm faster too, and gorge. Orgasms are easy for me. I'm confident and comfortable because I have XP perience. And that's the thing about our sexuality is that we get better at sex our whole life long.

If we keep practicing. Sex is a mindfulness practice as well as a practice of maturation and personal development. So knowing that it's beneficial in that way, but also knowing that often we feel pressured, especially those of us who get anxiety, we feel pressured to perform. And pressure is the enemy of relaxation. And if you're not relaxed, you can't climb the arousal ladder. So one of the things that even today, I still have to tell myself sometimes when my husband and I are beginning to make love, is I'll be like, oh boy, I'm really disconnected from myself while I'm in my head.

Boy, it's taking me a long time to begin to feel turned on, and I have to just remind myself to be patient with myself. That I don't have the kind of response that my husband has, that I'm not ready to go, that it takes me 20 or 30 minutes of heart connection, yoni pleasuring, massage, get chatting, talking things out, catching up, being healthy and before I can even move on to things like a good yoni massage or oral pleasuring or intercourse or things like that. And one of the things that I really recommend, and I have two things to show you.

These are my two favorite, Yoni massage devices. One is called, vibe and the other is called the Queen. They're both at. I put them at, drive desire.com. And what I like about them is that the Queen is a little louder. The regular vibe is much more quiet. It's a super quiet at vibe. Like if you have kids in the house or what have you, it makes no noise and it's a little lighter in its vibrational patterns and so if you're a very sensitive person, I recommend this sensitive to noise, sensitive to vibration.

But if you're like, no, I need something a little stronger, I want something that penetrates a little more deeply. I need a little extra stimulation. The Queen is the way to go. It uses a pulse plate technology that actually penetrates into that erectile tissue. And when you have your partner or you self-pleasure and you rub this all over your vulva, your monde's, your outer labia, your inner labia, the clitoral shaft and glands, the perennial area with some nice massage oil, then you are relaxing.

You're calming down. You're getting that engorgement. The tissue starts to swell, the surface area expands and the signals heighten to your brain. Your brain will feel more pleasure. You'll begin to send blood flow to your pelvis. That blood flow will seep through the the plasma from your blood. The fluids seep through your vaginal lining, your vaginal mucosal lining, and begin to get you wetted and lubricated. Your clitoral structure gets enlarged, engorged. You get a little lady erection. And when you do that and your partner does it to you, or they hold you and you do these kinds of things, as long as there's no pressure to do more, this is the trick.

Yoni Massage, Toys, and Removing Pressure 18:00

Taking off the pressure when there's no okay, if I give you a yoni massage with the Queen, then we're going to have intercourse. No, you get unlimited yoni massages. Unlimited as many as you want. And when you're complete with your yoni massage and you've had all the orgasms you want to have. Because believe me, these will give you amazing clitoral orgasms. You can decide if you want more, or if you'd like to just be tucked in or held or get up and go do something. Because ultimately you'll net more intercourse and other types of lovemaking when you allow yourself the spaciousness of the time that it takes to be aroused, and the yes or the no with no pressure.

So number one, non-negotiable is don't do anything until you, your girl wants it, your body, when your yoni is like, oh, oh yeah, I'd like to kiss him now or oh, oh, I'd like to do this thing or that thing. You'll know you're ready. She'll tell you when you tune into her because she's always talking to you. She has lips. They just don't speak out loud. So listening to her is really important. The second thing is. It is not your job to give your partner an the jack ulation. If you begin to make love and you change your mind.

Oh, man, I'm not getting there. It's not right for me. I don't know, I. I need to take a break or do or stop and say thank you. Honey, I can't go on. He can take care of himself. He knows how to do that. And that will net you more sexual experiences because the pressure is off. And if you're halfway in it and you're like, man, I think I'm done. Stop, babe, I need to stop. Maybe I'll take a rest and we can start again, maybe I can't. Okay, babe, no problem. And when you have these kinds of agreements with yourself where you honor and then you have the agreement with your partner that that's going to actually help you have more intimacy, things get better.

Very quickly. So that's some of the foundation information. And then the last thing that I want to talk about is, I want to collect my thoughts here about it. So I want to talk about the benefits of intimacy, the health benefits of intimacy, because I didn't want to do that first, because if I tell you, it's good for you, but I don't tell you what to do to get there, you're going to be resistant to it. But now that you have some ideas, yoni massage being held, being willing to stop giving yourself time, not not allowing yourself to feel that pressure, being okay with whatever is going on for you now you're more potentially receptive to going, okay, tell me more about that.

Is there this pharmacological pharmacopeia in my body that's going to actually help me, maybe better than some of the medications I'm using or some of the libido aphrodisiacs I'm using? Or could it add to that? Yes. And just sitting, listening to, you know, the first thought that comes in my mind, I was like, I love interviewing you because I just sit back and it's like a master class. And then, oh God, shouldn't I just feel like you should be, like, beaming over like the loudspeaker in every bedroom, in every sex education class?

Like what? Where are the, you know, the girls when they're in, during puberty, you know, where is Susan Bratton lecture? Because this is just, you know, I'm thinking like, oh, I'm going to interview Susan and we're going to talk about, you know, how an orgasm can make you less anxious, but you come at it from such a beautiful space that I just sit there and I smile and I think, what a gift you are. And I do want you to know that we're going to have Yoni steaming at our new clinic. Oh, fine. Good for you.

So I'm very excited you're giving the shout out for Yoni? Yeah, because I think it's just so in pourtant and and it's so interesting because I'll just say this and then I'll let you finish up. But no worries. When we were meeting with our, our architect and the landlord and it was a whole thing like they're like, oh, you're going to have lives and you're going to have lasers and you're going to have saunas, and you're going to have oxygen baths, and you're going to have what am Yoni what? And we're like yoni steering.

And my son was with me and he says, think of it as a sauna for your genitals. And the landlord, he turned like seven shades of red. It was just like it, just so exemplar fied how we don't talk about these things. Yeah, general. And how it's like all too. And you know, they're like, wow, doctor stills is like, she just talking all about our yoni and our linens and things. Nothing bad. And they're all like, you know, even the men. And so it just really makes me just so appreciate you bringing this conversation to because, like, you know, I wasn't even thinking about it, but like, you're saying, like the anxiety of your body or the anxiety of not being good enough or the anxiety not wanting to stop and not knowing how to say, you know, it's actually not the night for me.

So yeah. Continue. I'm just loving this. Okay, good. I'm so glad I've got to come over. Next time I come to Scottsdale. Oh, you're in Scottsdale? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll come over and get a yoni steam. That sounds great. Okay, so let's finish it up with why you have a pharmacopeia of bliss molecules waiting inside you to be released. Talk about a mood lifter. Good. Orgasms are a real mood lifter. Now, if you've never had an orgasm or you struggle to orgasm, if orgasms feel very distant or not, not frequent for you, I want you to know that you can activate all of your tissue through orgasmic cross-training and stimulation, starting with the simple toys I showed you on the on this source on the summit.

Your tissue. Everyone can orgasm in over 20 different ways. It is all within you. There's nothing wrong with you. You just haven't gotten the pathway lit up yet. And there are many, many pathways to orgasm. People orgasm wildly differently, and you can begin to add new pathways to your orgasmic ability so that the way that you come now is just one of the many ways you'll come in the future. When I started, I only had clitoral orgasms from a vibrator, and then I wanted to learn how to have orgasms from intercourse.

And then I wanted to learn how to activate an awaken my G-spot. Then I wanted to learn how to feel the release of my feminine waters. They call it squirting in porn, but I don't care for that term because it's a pornography term. And I think that's degrading to women. And so are the techniques that they show. All women can do all of these things. We can have belly orgasms or orgasms, throat orgasms, lip orgasms and nipple orgasms. We can have expanded orgasms, extended orgasms. There's so many pathways to pleasure.

So if you think if you had in your mind that you just couldn't, I want you to switch that radio station to K-Love. And K-Love is beaming out a song that that is. Yes, you can and you shall, and there's nothing wrong with you. And the second thing about it is

Orgasm Benefits and Pleasure Pathways 26:00

that you can have intimacy, and intimacy is nice. Intimacy generates oxytocin and AAC, but only if you have good gut bacteria. So I know that other doctors have come on to this summit and talked about the gut, and I want to reinforce what they're talking about, because unless you have the right gut bacteria, you're going to be a low oxytocin producer for the bacteria that you want is called Lactobacillus Ruta II. And the best form of it is from oxy Sood x and it's called L root. Harai root e r I.

And you just take those capsules. I personally open the capsules, make my own homemade yogurt, and it has lots of colonizing units. So I get a mass of amount of it and I produce a ton of oxytocin. Now, I like oxytocin because it makes my skin and hair beautiful. It makes me bond to my lover and make me feel more in love. I feel more all in my life and, it whittles my waist. It it has really thinned my waist, which I like as well. And it's really good at, for sugar regulation or insulin regulation.

So we get low on it because when we take antibiotics, it's a very sensitive it's very sensitive to antibiotics and it kills it off. And so you might need to reenact your gut with L rotary. But the oxytocin is essentially when you generate that skin to skin contact you are generating the antidote to cortisol which is your stress hormone. And so that's what gets you exhausted. Adrenal fatigue. Anxiety. All of those loss of resources, loss of intent, low libido loss, internal resources. Oxytocin is the queen of pleasurable connection.

The second thing that having intimacy is nice, but orgasms are better and orgasms are better because they release. They're really good for your vascular system. When you have that, you're pushing a lot of blood up into your brain. It's lighting up your brain, it's oxygenating your brain, it's helping you with your depression, and it's also pushing to the edges to keep you very healthy. Blood flow and vascular strength are a real cornerstone of longevity as well as sexual pleasure. That's why Viagra is a Pde5 inhibitor, which works on the nitric oxide pathway of the vascular system to give men erections.

And now, you know, women have as much erectile tissue as men. We might not have a real visible banana, but the banana is all inside us and it needs the blood flow. So orgasms are very important for that. This other thing that it releases, in addition to the, the nitric oxide is, hormones. So you're going to get good at testosterone production. Also, if you're with a male bodied partner and they ejaculate inside you, you get their testosterone. You get luteinizing hormone to regulate your your cycles.

Even after menopause, you get sperm adding sperm, which support nine of the 12 hallmarks of aging. You get zinc for cognitive function, you get serotonin, you get a boost. It's an elixir, which is a very, very healthy thing. We're very symbiotic in our pair bond. If you're not in a masculine feminine pair bond, it's fine too. Just telling you all of the things that I know. The other really important thing about having good orgasmic sex, and that's all learnable, is that it also releases, IGF one.

It releases NK cells, natural killer cells, which eat up broken cells and cancerous cells. The semen helps with autophagy, which is cellular senescence. So you're living a longer, happier, healthier life when you can find your way to intimate connection, it can start with holding and loving. You can try some toys and some tools, and then you can learn some techniques for more pleasure and connection. And when you know that you can stop any time and there's no pressure, you're more likely to have this cascade of all these incredible neurochemicals, hormones, etc., etc., etc..

So there's just a lot of reasons that you want to have intimate connection that could lead to orgasmic experiences. That is, you know, you just say it's so eloquently and it's just like, yeah, the, you know, medicine is not have to come in a bottle. It can come from semen, it can come from an orgasm, it can come from this pleasure that we're able to experience as humans. So I. Forgot endorphins. It releases endorphins, so it modulates pain. That's why doctors who work with women who have very painful menstrual periods often tell them that orgasms will help with that.

It's the endorphins. They they're the mood lifters. The serotonin is a mood lifter. All these things. Run. Or you could have an orgasm. Yeah, or you can go for a run and then come back and have an orgasm. So where can you know? Where can the women learn more? Where can they learn about the 20 different orgasm pathways and all the things? One of the best things, and this is a gift that I brought for you for this particular summit. This is a little e-book. It's a download. It's going to be a PDF link.

It's at hot to trot. Baucom hot to trot 38. Fascinating facts that supercharge your Sex drive. So if you've been listening to me and you're like, okay, that was a lot to take in. Everything that I've said on this summit is pretty much covered in this little guide, and all of the orgasm information is at orgasmic cross training.com. So all of the things I recommend for stimulating all that pleasure. And if you are with a partner who says, you know what, why would I want you don't need tools, you've got me.

It's like, this is the 21st century. We use electric toothbrushes. We have Instant Pots, we drive cars. We should be using the technology for pleasure that is available to us using toys.

Resources, Website, and Closing Remarks 33:00

And I like to call them tools. Pleasure tools increases your ability to have better orgasms, even when you don't use them, because you're creating those new neural pathways and activating and cross training and awakening all that tissue. And once you create those pathways, they're there. So use all the tools you can solo and in partner play to activate all of that so that it's easier for you to find and have and expand your pleasure. Well, fantastic. What a plus contribution to this. Thank you Sarah.

So goes hard to track books or yes cross training that come. Are you on social media at all. Yeah. Oh gosh. Yes. I'm pretty much on every platform. The best place probably Instagram. It's everything's under my name. Susan Bratton. And I'd recommend that you go to better lover.com. That's where you can sign up for my newsletter comes out twice a week and I teach passionate lovemaking, bedroom communication, and intimate wellness techniques. I give them all away for free and on Better lover.com or 200 videos, including things like how to give a yoni massage, passionate lovemaking techniques, how to make love to an older woman, all kinds of really great.

The 20 kinds of orgasms of the female and male body can have all of these kinds of things are on there in video short, easy to watch videos that you might also enjoy. Awesome. Don't crash her site, people. I'm like, sounds like, you know, let's finish this summit and then we'll go to bed. Or lover.com. That sounds very enticing, because I was going to ask you, you know, where can we if, you know, we're all excited, but we need to kind of get our partner summit. Yeah. And so that's where those are.

Good to watch together with your partner. Awesome. Well thank you, thank you, thank you, thank. You Sharon it's so nice. Oh it is a pleasure. Always a learning experience. And, yeah. Go check out her website. So listen to this talk again and just, you know, start sitting with it and seeing, you know, which which rabbit hole you want to go down first for pleasure because she's got lots of options for you. So great. And yes, if you're in Scottsdale, once the clinic is open, come get your yoni steamed. Yay!

Yeah, you can come with your partner. You can do it as a group. So it's a great thing to do. Okay. We'll be back with another talk. Thanks all for being here and for your open minds.