Come as You Are (17 page)

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.

What’s happening here is that freeze has interrupted the GO! stress response of fight or flight, leaving all that adrenaline-mediated stress to go stale inside the animal’s body. When the animal shakes and shudders and sighs, its body is releasing the brake, completing the activation process triggered by fight/flight, and purging the residue. Completing the cycle. It’s called “self-paced termination.”
²

A friend offered this example of her son waking from anesthesia, after waiting in the emergency room for five hours for minor surgery on his finger:

“He came out from under the anesthesia ‘very distressed,’ said the nurses. I translate that to ‘bat shit crazy pants,’ meaning he screamed hysterically, and flailed his arms and legs wildly, and yelled that he hated me and everyone else, and cycled his legs like mad and screamed, ‘I just want to run, I just want to run!’ ”

Cycling his legs and “I just want to run!” are flight. Hating everyone is fight. Anesthesia is medically induced freeze—wild animals who are anesthetized by researchers experience the same thing as my friend’s son. I call it “the Feels,” since it’s just this thing that happens in your body without any obvious environmental cause. The kid wasn’t actually in any danger, but he had a lot of Feels that needed to work themselves out. And his mom did exactly the right thing:

“I held him, remained calm, kept telling him I loved him and that I was keeping him safe, and eventually he calmed down enough to put his clothes on (he’d literally torn them off) and leave with me. By the time we were walking into the parking garage, he was calmly telling me that he loved me very much, and when we got home, he collapsed into sleep.”

He moved through the cycle and got to the relaxation at the end—affection and sleep.

Only rarely in our everyday lives does unlocking from freeze take such a dramatic form. But 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.

stress and sex

By now it won’t strike you as revelatory when I say, “To have more and better sex, reduce your stress levels.” I might as well say, “Exercise is good for you” and “Sleep is important.” Of course. You know this.

In fact, 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.
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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.
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How do the hormones and neurochemicals of stress interact with the hormones and neurochemicals of sexual response, to suppress or stimulate sexual behavior? Nobody knows precisely—but we know some things.

We know that 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.

And we know that the brain prioritizes based on survival needs: breathing, escaping from predators, maintaining the right temperature, staying hydrated and nourished, and remaining with your social group are all first-order-of-business priorities—and of course these priorities sort themselves based on context. If you’re starving, you’ll be more willing to steal bread from your neighbor, even if it risks your membership in a social group. If you can’t breathe, then it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you’ve eaten, you will not feel hungry. And 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?

To sum up:

Worry, anxiety, fear, and terror are stress—“There’s a lion! Run!”

Irritation, annoyance, frustration, anger, and rage are stress—“There’s a lion! Kill it!”

Emotional numbness, shutdown, depression, and despair are stress—“There’s a lion! Play dead!”

And none of these indicates that now is a good time to get laid.

Stress is about survival. And while sex serves a lot of purposes, personal survival is not one of them (except when it is—see the attachment section). So 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
(
enjoying
) even as it increases sexual
interest
(
eagerness
). 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.

Yeah, easier said than done.

When Olivia was stressed, her interest in sex increased—and it was a source of conflict in her relationship with Patrick, since when he was stressed, his interest in sex went down. And worse, sometimes the stress-driven sexual interest made Olivia feel out of control.

How can she manage that feeling?

By practicing completing the cycle.

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, binging, or purging

Of course, all these things 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 a teenager, disordered eating was Olivia’s maladaptive coping strategy. She would binge eat and then exercise, binge and exercise. 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.

She’s been symptom-free for several years. Still, she told me, “I sometimes walk through doors sideways because I think I’m too big to fit. When I catch myself doing it, I make myself go through straight, because what I learned is that it’s not my body that I’m worried is too big. It’s my anxiety.”

Now she runs, both to manage her stress and as a productive outlet for her intensity and energy—and she limits herself to one marathon a year because, she says, “I tend to go overboard, and it helps if I set limits.”

“I think you’re doing something more profound than just setting limits,” I said. “I think you’re allowing exercise to help you complete the cycle instead of hitting the brakes. And you can do the same thing with sex.”

“I can?”

“Yes.”

She chewed on her lip and nodded her head. Then she said, “I don’t see it.”

She’ll see it in chapter 5.

broken culture 
 broken stress response cycles

The key to managing stress effectively is to make efforts to complete the cycle—unlock from freeze, escape the predator, kill the enemy, rejoice.

But stress is more complex in modern humans than in gazelles and gorillas, for a lot of reasons. First, in modern life, we are, as I mentioned, almost never chased by lions. Our stressors are lower intensity and longer duration—“chronic stressors,” they’re called, in contrast to “acute stressors,” like straightforward predation. Acute stressors have a clear beginning, middle, and end; completing the cycle—running, surviving, celebrating—is inherently built in. Not so with chronic stressors.
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).

Second, 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. Our culture is
so
uncomfortable with Feels that we may even sedate people who’ve just been in a car accident, preventing their bodies from moving through this natural process; this well-intentioned medical intervention has the unwanted consequence of trapping survivors of traumatic injury in freeze, which is how PTSD gets a foothold in a survivor’s brain.
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But third, even without medication and an emotion-dismissing culture, our ultrasocial human brains are really good at self-inhibition, stopping the stress response midcycle because, “Now is not an appropriate time for Feels.” We use this self-inhibition in order to facilitate social cooperation—i.e., not freak anybody out. But unfortunately, our culture has eliminated
all
appropriate times for Feels. We’ve locked ourselves, culturally, into our own fear, rage, and despair. We must build time, space, and strategies for discharging our stress response cycles.

complete the cycle!

How?

Well, just as you can’t grit your teeth and make a garden grow, you can’t force a stress response cycle to complete. Completing the cycle requires that, instead of hitting the brake on our stress, we gently remove our foot from both the accelerator and the brake and allow ourselves to coast to a stop.
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To do that, you create the right context and trust your body to do its thing.

So what’s the right context?

Think about what your body recognizes as the behaviors that save you from lions. When you’re being chased by a lion, what do you do?

You run.

So when you’re stressed out by your job (or by your sex life), what do you do?

You run . . . or walk, or get on the elliptical machine or go out dancing or even just dance around your bedroom. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, “Exercise is good for stress,” that is for realsie real.
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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 in the next section); any form of meditation, including mindfulness, yoga, tai chi, body scans, etc. (more on that in chapter 9); 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. If you’ve ever locked yourself in your room and sobbed for ten minutes, and then at the end heaved a great big sigh and felt tremendously relieved, you’ve felt how it can move you from “I am at risk” to “I am safe.”