And in a culture where women have to spend so much time with the brakes on, saying no, it’s no wonder we have fantasies about abandoning all control, relaxing into absolute trust (turning off the brakes) and allowing ourselves to experience sensation.

Why we fall in love is attachment, which is sort of a biological pursuit of wholeness.

has either long-term, high-intensity stress, or is in the process of healing after trauma.

Learning to recognize the contexts that increase your brain’s perception of the world as a sexy place, and having skills to maximize the sexy contexts, is key to increasing your sexual satisfaction.

We build walls for a lot of reasons. To protect vulnerable parts of ourselves. To hide things we don’t want others to see. To keep people out. To keep ourselves in. But a wall is a wall is a wall—it’s an indiscriminate barrier. If you hide behind a wall to protect yourself from the pain of rejection, then you also block out joy. If you never let

“This is a drug that will relax you,” not only feel more relaxed compared to those who got the drug but not the information, they also have more of the drug in their blood plasma.11

She began talking about how much she loved him, how she relied on him for her sanity in a life that seemed specifically designed to make her crazy, how she wanted to show him, not just tell him, how important he is to her, but every time she considered initiating sex, she just felt swamped and overwhelmed and her body shut down on her.

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

According to their “dual control model,” the sexual response mechanism in our brains consists of a pair of universal components—a sexual accelerator and sexual brakes—and those components respond to broad categories of sexual stimuli—including genital sensations, visual stimulation, and emotional context. And the sensitivity of each component