How Does Mental Health Impact Our Sex Lives? How Can We Work On Making This Better When It Can Take A Long Time To Get In With Doctors?
There’s a lot here to talk about, but let’s start with the first question.
Our mental health can have a major impact on our sex lives. So much of our sex drive is influenced by how we’re feeling. Physical and emotional fatigue can cause our desire for sex to drop. The same can happen with a thousand other feelings, including feeling stressed, anxious, depressed, and overwhelmed.
With all that said, if you’ve been struggling with your mental health and you’ve noticed that it’s impacted your sex life, that’s completely and totally normal.
Just because it’s normal, doesn’t mean you can’t change it.
If you’re feeling tired or overwhelmed or anything else that’s negatively impacting your sex life, then you need to focus on that. Once you start addressing those issues, odds are that your sex life will start to improve.
Haven’t been exercising lately? Try adding exercise or at least some sort of movement, to your day if you can. Not to quote Elle Woods, but exercise does release endorphins and that will impact your mood.
Feel like you need some help improving your mental health? While it may take some time to get in to see a doctor, as the question points out, you may want to consider using other health care professionals as options. You may also have less of a wait if you are open to doing telemedicine.
If it is taking some time to get in to see a health care professional, do what you can for yourself while you’re waiting. Identify the things that may be impacting your mental health, from the big to the small, and see if you can address it. Feeling overwhelmed by life? Can you find some way to make 5 minutes for yourself to do something you enjoy? This may not make all the problems go away, but it may help change your mind set for a just a few minutes and that can help.
A couple of notes about seeing a health care provider for mental health issues. I’m all about that as an option, but I do need to point out that many doctors in this country receive very little training in anything related to sex, and many focus on treating just the issue in front of them, instead of the whole person.
Add to this that many of the medications that we have to treat depression and anxiety have the potential to cause negative sexual side effects. Combine these two together and you may find your mental health issue is being addressed, but your doctor isn’t talking about the impact on your sex life.
So if you start a new medication and notice a change in your sex drive or sexual functioning, don’t wait for them to ask you about it. Send them a message or bring it up at your next appointment. It doesn’t mean they’ll have you stop using the medication. There are other ways of working around it, but they can’t fix the problem if they don’t know it exists.
Want to hear more about dating with depression? Check out this podcast.
Until next time, be safe and have fun!
Have a question you want answered? Submit it here: https://milsteinhealthconsulting.com/heydrsue
