Anxiety, or an intense fear, worry can cause a lot of problems in a person’s life. Sometimes it can affect how a person works, or how a person reacts during certain social situations.
Unsurprisingly, anxiety could also cause problems in your marriage, specifically your sex life, which can cause problems or misunderstandings between you and your spouse.
Here are some ways that anxiety causes problems in your sex life:
It lowers your libido
The overwhelming feeling of unease and fear that’s caused by anxiety can lower your libido, or your sex drive.
This means that even if you were in the mood to have sex with your spouse, once the anxiety kicks in, you suddenly lose the desire to have sex. That’s because being anxious also causes you to feel stressed, causing your body to be unable to relax, so you won’t feel comfortable when you’re having sex.
It affects your confidence
One of the important things about sex is being comfortable with your body, and being comfortable around your partner. People who suffer from anxiety feel more self-conscious about themselves or become ashamed about their bodies.
Sari Cooper, director of Center for Love and Sex in New York City shares, “If women are continually being self-critical of themselves due to body shame, they shut down the ability to receive sexual pleasure fully and are unable to be fully present emotionally and physically during sexual scenarios.”
It prevents intimacy
Anxiety causes a person to suffer from fear, and sometimes panic. This means that it can be difficult for them to become intimate with someone, even if that person is their spouse.
It’s hard for people with anxiety to be intimate since their anxiety can also be triggered by certain situations, causing them to withdraw or hold back when they’re being intimate with their spouse.
Anxiety makes it hard to orgasm
While it’s possible for someone suffering from anxiety to have sex, sometimes their anxiety can make it difficult for them to reach orgasm, or sexual climax.
In women specifically, it can make your body uncomfortable or even trigger a reaction called vaginismus which causes the muscles to become tense and contracted, making penetration impossible. All of these things, coupled with the anxious thoughts, can make it extremely difficult for a person to reach orgasm.
What can couples do?
The most straightforward way of dealing with anxiety would be to seek help from a medical professional. Psychiatric help or therapy is a good way of dealing with anxiety, as they can give you advice on what you can do to cope with your anxiety, and sometimes prescribe medication to help deal with more severe cases.
Couples can also engage in couples therapy, where they are taught exercises that can help them relax and let go of anxious thoughts. The important thing to remember is to work as a team, and take things one day at a time.
Source: health.com
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