Many women believe that it's 'normal' to not have a libido.
But having a healthy libido is an obvious sign of overall health & wellness!
In this episode, I share with you 4 ways of increasing your libido, including the role that aromatherapy can have in your daily routine!
Episode mentioned:
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Transcript:
Well hello dear friend.
I’m so happy that you are here again today and I’m excited to share with you on the topic of libido.
Last week, I had a conversation with one of my students and she mentioned how she thought I needed to be known as the libido queen. And it’s interesting that she said that, because I then realised that, for many women, the first thing to return when we start addressing their hormone imbalance, is libido.
This was definitely also an area that I saw significant change when I started addressing my underlying hormonal imbalance and so I wanted to share with you today a few practical things that you can start doing to improve your libido.
And I know that this topic interests you, because most of the time, when I ask women what they really need help with, libido will be in the top 3 of those answers.
So I hope you’re ready.
Now, first of all, let me just say this.
Having a healthy libido is really great, but the main reason why I think it is important to have a healthy libido, is that it is a good reflection of how healthy you are.
So if you are doing well emotionally and physically, that will be reflected in a healthy libido.
But if there are underlying issues that you may well not even be aware of, this will also be reflected in a libido that might pretty much be absent.
So your libido can be seen as your health-o-meter.
Now apart from underlying hormonal imbalance, there are also a few other things that can lead to a lowered libido, such as not having enough time to invest in the intimacy of your relationship, being emotionally disconnected due to past trauma, not sleeping enough, physiological and emotional stress, and a poor diet. So we’ll be looking into some of these things today.
But first of all, what I think is really important for you to understand, is that libido actually fluctuates for women. It’s not something that is consistently at the same level or that you can switch on or off. This is pretty much the case for men, but not for women. The natural hormonal fluctuations due to our menstrual cycle leads to an increase and decrease in libido. This is normal and I think it’s really important to learn to understand these fluctuations as it will lead to more reasonable expectations from yourself and your husband.
But the great news is that you can absolutely reclaim your sexy with the help of some simple lifestyle changes and aromatherapy.
Please bare in mind though, you need to identify where the lowered libido is coming from.
What is causing it.
If we don’t address that underlying cause, it’ll be really hard to get any real results.
Potential root causes of low libido include Growing priorities and responsibilities, hormonal changes that lead to fatigue, overwhelm, and as a result low libido, medication, alcohol, smoking, health conditions such as thyroid problems and adrenal fatigue just to name a few.
When we consider hormonal imbalance as another culprit, it can be low testosterone levels and estrogen dominance that can greatly reduce your libido.
And did you know that many oral contraceptives, in other words the pill, can lead to a decrease in testosterone, apart from the fact that the pill has been linked to lowering libido levels. It can also lead to other health issues that will affect libido, such as anxiety and mood swings
Ok, so although you might think of testosterone as a male sex hormone, it plays a major role in a woman’s sex drive. So it’s important for you to have healthy levels of testosterone. Not just for a healthy libido, but also for other health reasons that are really important. But let’s not get into that right now.
A lot of the time, these hormonal imbalances can be hard to deal with without the help of a healthcare practitioner, so if you are dealing with the signs and symptoms of hormonal imbalance, I highly recommend that you get some guidance around that.
Not that you can’t start implementing some real good solutions from today, but I always recommend a full workup
I think it’s important to get some help around how you can navigate through hormonal changes and imbalances, along with these lifestyle changes.
And the Hormone Health Academy is where we do exactly that.
But let’s look at the things you’ve got immediate control over that will play a major role in your libido.
I’ve mentioned a few things earlier but today I wanna focus specifically on stress, lack of sleep, diet and your menstrual cycle.
First of all, let’s talk about stress. I think I probably mention this in 90% of my podcast episodes, but stress is the single biggest contributor to hormonal imbalance, which also leads to low libido.
When your body perceives stress, the sympathetic nervous system is activated, which leads to more blood being sent to the heart, lungs, brain, eyes - to get you ready to either fight or flee.
And as a result, less blood is sent to the less important body systems, which puts them to sleep mode,and these include the reproductive and digestive systems, which work best in our rest & digest mode.
As women, we tend to have our plates really full, always on the run or late for something. Always having our alert system activated.
Being constantly in fight or flight mode like this, is suppressing your body’s reproductive system, altering hormone levels and sending your libido down for a crash landing.
Now of course, nutrition plays a very important role in helping you to deal better with these situations and to increase your stress tolerance. So make sure you
Eat the rainbow every day
Eat plenty of Green leafy veg
Have lean protein every day, and include protein in every single meal and snack
Eat Healthy plant based fats every day and
Eating regularly during the day
So make sure you nourish your body so that it can cope with the high stress load that we all have to cope with every single day!
Another really effective way to help your body to release stress, is to stimulate the limbic system in the brain. And you do this through smell, which can have a profound effect on stress.
Essential oils can play a major role in helping your stress response to respond immediately and regulating your cortisol very effectively, very fast.
Some essential oils, while working on the pituitary gland, can simultaneously decrease cortisol and also increase libido.
Some of my favourite oils for this are Ylang Ylang, Geranium and jasmine.
You can diffuse them individually, or combined or even better, you can use it as a perfume, which is what I love to do.
Geranium is a beautiful oil and I love just putting one drop on my wrist, rubbing 2 wrists together and inhaling it a few times.
Combining these 3 oils in a diffuser can really help you with anxious or depressive emotions, as these oils are really beneficial for emotional wellbeing.
You can also add 10-15 drops of each to a dark glass bottle and mix with water to spritz on your bedding.
Another thing I love to do is mix 2-3 drops of each oil with ½ cup of epsom salts and dissolve that in a warm bath.
So that’s another way of unwinding, helping you get rid of stress and we also know these oils will help increase libido.
Also, don’t forget the power of lavender, which is amazing for stress support!
So you can even add lavender into that combination of oils to create the perfect end of day routine, that will not only release the stress of the day, but activate the rest-and-digest nervous system.
This will help support blood flow to all of your non-fight or flight systems, including digestion and of course reproductive body systems.
Number 2.
You probably know really well by now, that a lack of sleep will affect every single aspect of your life!
And most definitely your libido.
You’re likely to be struggling with 1 of 2 things here.
Either you struggle to fall asleep at night, or you wake up every night around 2 or 3 am, unable to fall back asleep.
So let’s look at some really practical things that you can do to start improving that.
I won’t be going into too much detail today on how to set up your room etc, but it’s so important to sleep in a room that promotes good sleep.
But what I really wanna focus on today, is how a good bedtime routine will help you to slow down, shake off the day and even get in the mood for rolling in the hay!
So these are the things that I include in my bedtime routine every night that might be really beneficial to you too:
Bath
First of all, about an hour before bedtime, turn a diffuser on in your room with some lavender essential oil. You can even again include some ylang ylang and geranium.
The third thing that is really important, is having a late night snack before bedtime. When you don’t you are likely to experience a drop in blood sugar levels around 2-3 am, which will cause a spike in blood cortisol levels, and this will wake you up. So just before going to bed, having a really small snack which includes low GI carbs and a little bit of protein will help you to keep those blood glucose levels stable for the entire night.
And with improved sleep, your body will be much more likely to experience healthier balanced hormones and a healthier libido.
Number 3 - Hormonal imbalance will lead to low or no libido.
If you haven’t listened to episode 33 yet, you can learn more about the causes of hormonal imbalance. But today I just wanna share with you what you can do to support hormonal imbalance.
First of all, you need to manage your stress. See, it always comes back to stress management!
Stress is a major disruptor of hormonal balance, so refer back to my first point where I talked about stress.
And then secondly, there are some essential oils that can be of great help to you to bring your hormones back to balance.
But it’s important to know that these are not magic potions. Essential oils are incredible at supporting the body to heal, but it’s critical that you also get the foundations right.
So for my own hormonal imbalance, there were 2 oils that significantly changed my life about 18 months ago, in combination with some simple lifestyle change.
They were Clary Sage and Progessence Phyto Plus from Young Living, which is not an essential oil, but rather a serum of oils with natural progesterone from wild yam, which has been converted to USP-grade natural progesterone in the lab.
I use clary sage every night, a few drops on my tummy, and Progessence Phyto Plus, a few drops on my inner thigh. These oils are not necessarily very pleasant to smell, but they are amazing at helping balance estrogen and progesterone levels. And when these 2 hormones are balanced, not only do you sleep better, but you’ll be surprised at how it will affect your libido!
The final thing that will affect your libido, is your natural hormonal fluctuations associated with your menstrual cycle.
About 7 days before and after ovulation, libido is naturally higher than during the rest of your cycle.
Now if you’ve never known this or tracked it, it may have led to some tension in your marriage.
Embracing these natural fluctuations and taking my husband along on the journey of discovering my body, has been an incredibly blessed experience. It has created intimacy at another level for us.
He now understands that my libido is very much cyclical and he respects those natural changes.
And therefore, there is much less pressure.
So I wanna encourage you to start tracking your cycle and taking notes of how your libido fluctuates.
Something to take note of though, is that this is for healthy cycles. So if you have hormonal imbalance, it might be that you may have no libido for any part of your cycle, even around ovulation.
So the bottom line is my friends, if you’re struggling with low libido, you need to pay attention to that, as it’s only a symptom of something else going on.
Having a healthy libido is a sign of health.
My challenge to you today is to embrace your fertility!
Fertility is a sign of health!
So did you identify 1 thing in this episode today that you can start implementing straight away?
Maybe I’ve mentioned some oils that you can start exploring with.
If you are interested in purchasing any of these oils, you can refer to the links in the show notes.
It is critical that you buy essential oils that are of very high quality, otherwise it can have the complete opposite effect. It can actually be toxic, specifically the oils that are sold in department stores for 10 - 20 dollars per bottle.
Proper oils are expensive and it’s worth every cent.
Due to the high quality standards of young living, they are the only essential oils that I recommend.
Ok my friends,
As always, thanx for being here and spending a few minutes of your time with me.
I would so appreciate it if you could share this episode with a friend and while you’re here, please subscribe to my podcast and leave a review.
Until next week.
Bye for now