00:00:00

Intro

00:00:20

Would you like to work with me?

00:11:00

A bit about Emily’s background

00:16:30

Her origins around sexuality growing up

00:18:00

What people say at a party when she says what she does for a living

00:19:00

All the same parts, organized in different ways

00:24:35

The problem with the term “sex drive”

00:31:25

How couples sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades

00:34:00

What Emily means when she says “context”

00:36:15

How does stress impact sexual response?

00:47:45

The bikini industrial complex

00:53:40

What is non-concordance?

01:02:30

Why don’t most people know about arousal non-concordance?

01:06:15

What are meta emotions and how do they relate to sexuality?

00:00:00

Intro

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 146 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes: www.seven-health.com/146.

00:00:20

Would you like to work with me?

Over the last handful of weeks, I’ve been starting the podcast by mentioning I’m taking on new clients. Client work is the foundation of my business and the thing I enjoy the most. After working with clients for the last decade, I feel confident in saying I’m very good at what I do.

When I reflect on all the clients I’ve worked with over the last couple years, there are a handful of topics that are my area of expertise or specialty areas. One of the biggest is helping women to get their periods back ,so recovery from hypothalamic amenorrhea, or HA. This is often a result of undereating and overexercising and is almost always coupled with body dissatisfaction or fear of gaining weight.

The work with these kinds of clients, as with really all clients, is a mix of understanding physiology and how to support the body, but also being compassionate and understanding psychology and uncovering the whys behind these clients’ behaviour and figuring out how to change this. I recently had one client get her period back after it being absent for 20 years, and in the same week had another client have her first period in 10 years.

I also have worked to help clients who are disordered eaters or have previously been diagnosed with an eating disorder. With these clients, there are symptoms that occur very commonly: water retention, poor digestion, always cold, peeing all the time, often waking multiple times in the night to urinate, no periods or bad PMS symptoms, low energy, poor sleep, low thyroid. There’s also common mental and emotional symptoms: a compulsion to exercise, fear of certain foods, whether that be certain macronutrients or certain amounts of foods, anxiety, low mood or depression, poor body image, fear of gaining weight.

With these clients, it’s using that same mix of understanding science and compassion to help them recover. I know that full recovery is possible, and I’ve had many clients who’ve had multiple stays in inpatient facilities where nothing worked, and then they get to a place where they’re now fully recovered.

The final area is helping clients transition out of dieting and learning to listen to their body. They’ve had years or decades of dieting, and nothing works. They know it’s a failed endeavour, but they are struggling to figure out how to eat when they’re not dieting. How do they listen to their body? What should they be eating? They’re confused, they’re overwhelmed.

With this work, it’s a combination of using Intuitive Eating and non-diet approach, my nutrition understanding, and being able to guide clients towards interoceptive awareness, amongst other things, that helps them put an end to their dieting habits and truly know how to nourish an look after their body.

It’s these kinds of clients that make up the bulk of my practice, and I’m very good at helping them get to a place with their food and with their body and even their life in general that they think is impossible.

If any of these scenarios sound like you and you’d like help, please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat.

Welcome to Real Health Radio, health advice that’s more than just about how you look. And here’s your host, Chris Sandel.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. Thanks for joining me again. Before I jump into this week’s episode, I just want to mention two things.

One is that I got some really lovely emails and comments from people based on last week’s episode. Last week was a solo show where I went through what I do in a day. It really just seemed to resonate with people. So if you haven’t listened to that one, then please check it out.

The other thing I want to mention is that I made a video this week that went out on Tuesday this is the first time I’ve made a video in a while – probably a couple of years, or at least it feels that long – and the video looks at calories and what the body actually needs to function properly. So many people that I work with and those who get in contact with me are confused and are under the wrong impression about this, and it’s leading to them eating in a way that is not supporting their body and not taking in enough fuel to support all the functions that the body has to do.

Again, I got many positive comments and emails from those who watched the video, so if you haven’t watched that, I’ll put a link to it in the show notes so you can check it out. Or you can go to my website, seven-health.com, and it’s on the homepage. It’s called ‘Understanding Calorie Requirements’.

Those are the two bits of housekeeping. Let’s just get on with today’s show. It’s a guest interview. I’m speaking with Emily Nagoski. Emily began her career as a sex educator focussing not only on sex, but on stress and nutrition and physical activity and preventing sexual violence. She went to Indiana University for an MS in counselling/psychology, completing clinical internships at the Kinsey Institute, Sexual Health Clinic, and the IU LGBT Student Supportive Services office. She earned a PhD in health behaviour with a concentration in human sexuality. She taught graduate and undergraduate classes in human sexuality, relationships and communication, stress management, and sex education.

For eight years, she worked as a lecturer and Director of Wellness Education at Smith College before transitioning to full-time writing and speaking. She now travels all over the world, training professionals, teaching college students and other laypeople, and learning more every day about the science and art of sexual wellbeing. She is a trained Gottman Seven Principles educator with extensive specialised training in bystander intervention, motivational interviewing, and cultural inclusivity, including race, gender and class.

Emily’s mission in life is to teach women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies.

Emily is someone I’ve wanted to have on the podcast for a while. If you are a regular listener of the show and listened to my end-of-year episode about my favourite books and documentaries and podcasts, you may recognise her name. She wrote Come As You Are, which is one of my favourite books from last year, and it’s all about sexual wellbeing. She’s also recently written a book called Burnout, which comes out in the next couple of weeks and is about stress. To quote the website, it’s ‘for women who feel overwhelmed and exhausted by all they have to do, yet worrying they’re not doing enough’.

This episode is predominantly about the first book, but Emily does cover both of them as part of the conversation. Some of the things that we cover are: the dual control mechanism for sexual desire or sexual arousal (basically, there is a brake and an accelerator, and she talks about this); why calling sex a ‘drive’ is a problem – and this is something I’ve done many, many times before, but she explains why it’s not a drive, why this isn’t the case, and why thinking of it as a drive can be problematic.

We talk about how stress impacts on sex and on arousal, and Emily goes through some really helpful information about completing the cycle with the stress response and why this is so important. We go through arousal non-concordance. This is hands down the thing that is most mentioned from clients when I suggest that they read this book just because no-one is talking about this. And lots, lots more.

Emily was a great guest, and there is so much content in this episode. Personally, I felt like I was a little flat. I listened back to the show, like I do with all of them, and I feel fairly pedestrian. I guess sometimes we just have our off days. But Emily more than makes up for this.

That’s it for the intro. Let’s get on with the show. This is my conversation with Emily Nagoski.

Hey, Emily. Welcome to the show.
Emily Nagoski: Thank you for having me.

Chris Sandel: I listed your book, Come As You Are, as one of my favourite books of last year. I think it came out in 2015, but I only got round to reading it last year.

When I was describing your book as part of my end-of-year roundup, I said that you have this end goal of promoting women’s sexual wellbeing, but through that lens, you bring so much information. You cover anatomy, evolutionary biology, feminism, Health at Every Size, attachment styles, trauma, breathwork, etc. It’s this long list of divergent ideas that you then funnel through this concept of women’s sexual wellbeing – and I’d say not just women, but men too. I found the book immensely helpful from the angle of client work that I do, but also in my own life and relationships and how I understand the world.

What I’m hoping as part of our time together is to really share your breadth of knowledge, because there is so much that people don’t know that’s in your book, and equally there’s so much incorrect information that needs correcting by your book. I think your book is going to be the source material for my questions, with the intentions of giving people a taste of what’s on offer. This isn’t going to be a substitute for a 300-odd page book, but we can just see what we can cover in our brief time together.

That’s just a basic frame for today.

Emily Nagoski: Fantastic.

00:11:00

A bit about Emily’s background

Chris Sandel: As a starting place, do you want to give a bit of background on yourself? Maybe a brief bio, educational background, what you’ve done up until this point?

Emily Nagoski: Sure. I started out as a sex educator as an undergraduate. I was a big nerd my whole life, so by the time I got to college, I knew I’d be going to grad school for something. I had no idea what. But because I was in college, I was like, ‘I need some volunteer work on my resume to make me look like a good grad school candidate four years from now’.

So I asked the people who lived on my floor, in my residence hall, and one of the guys was pre-med and he said, ‘Hey, come be a peer health educator with me’. I was like, ‘I like health. Sure’. So I applied and I interviewed and I got accepted, and I started being trained to go into residence halls to talk about condoms, contraception and consent. They were the big three, but also stress and sleep and nutrition and physical activity.

Though my degree is in psychology with minors in philosophy and cognitive science, and I have this plan to be a clinical neuropsychologist working with people with traumatic brain injury or stroke, I loved the academic work I was doing. But when I was doing this volunteer work as a health educator, a sex educator, and ultimately as a sexual violence prevention educator and crisis responder, doing that made me like who I am as a person in a way that the intellectual stuff never could.

So that’s the path I chose. I went to Indiana University for grad school. I got a master’s degree in counselling psychology with a focus in sex therapy. I did my clinical internship at the Kinsey Institute and realised in that process that I am not a counsellor by nature. I’m not a therapist my temperament. I am an educator. But I’m also a woman who likes to be in charge of things, so I needed a PHD.

I stayed in school, I stayed at IU, and I got a PhD in health behaviour, which is basically public health – again, with a concentration I human sexuality – and ultimately, shortly thereafter, ended up as the Director of Wellness Education at Smith College. Smith is a small liberal arts women’s college in western Massachusetts. If you’ve ever seen the movie White Christmas…?

Chris Sandel: I don’t know if I have. Maybe I did when I was a kid. When did it come out?

Emily Nagoski: Like 1952.

Chris Sandel: Okay, possibly then.

Emily Nagoski: It’s a Bing Crosby / Danny Kaye musical.

Chris Sandel: Musicals were never a big thing for me.

Emily Nagoski: [laughs] In this movie in 1952, Danny Kaye is trying to convince Bing Crosby to date these two women, and Danny Kaye says, ‘Okay, so maybe they’re not the best and the brightest. They didn’t go to Smith’. That’s the school that I worked at. It’s the alma mater of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and Catharine MacKinnon and Julia Child and all these women who are really iconic in America.

It’s 2,500 almost all women – some trans students also – and I was teaching a class called Women’s Sexuality there along with doing a bunch of other things that we can talk about. So I teach the first class, and it’s the anatomy class, just as the first chapter in the book is the anatomy chapter. That’s just where you start. A student raises her hand and says, ‘Emily, can you explain the evolutionary origin of the hymen?’ [laughs] I had been a sex educator for 15 years by then, and I had never wondered, even, about the evolutionary origin of the hymen, much less ever learned what it was.

So I knew on that day this was not going to be an ordinary semester, and it was not. The students and I kicked each other’s asses all semester, digging really deep into all that stuff you were talking about – the evolutionary biology and attachment theory and all the science of sexuality that busts these long-standing, really damaging myths about how sexuality works.

On the final exam, my last question was: ‘Just tell me one important thing you learned out of all this science. You get the two points no matter what you say’. The two points matters a lot to the students. I thought they were going to say the evolutionary biology, the attachment theory, arousal non-concordance. But instead, more than half of my students just wrote something like ‘I learned I’m normal. Just because I’m different from other women, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me. Just because I’m different from my partner, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me. I can trust my body’.

I was grading final exams in my office with tears in my eyes, reading these answers and feeling like something really important had happened in that class. That was the day I decided to write Come As You Are. Five years later, it got published. [laughs] And now here I am.

The book was so successful that I left Smith and now travel full-time, training college students and medical professionals and therapists and anyone who will listen, basically, about the science of women’s sexual wellbeing, and more globally about women’s overall wellbeing, since the best predictor of a woman’s sexual wellbeing is her overall wellbeing.

00:16:30

Her origins around sexuality growing up

Chris Sandel: Given all of that and where you are now, if we went back to your childhood, would you say you grew up in a sex positive household?

Emily Nagoski: Oh God, no. [laughs] No, everything about – I actually just listened to your conversation with Christy Harrison. You ask one question in that, which is basically ‘Tell me about your relationship with food as a child’, so I was thinking about my origins around sexuality and my body and everyone’s bodies in my household.

I never got ‘The Talk’. I have an identical sister, so I say ‘we’ a lot about our growing up, because it would be done together. Instead, there were medical textbooks, medical encyclopaedias in the house, and I learned about sex by reading these medical encyclopaedias and medical textbooks. And that’s it. There was literally zero conversation that happened in my house.

Chris Sandel: So you ending up in science side of things, no real surprise. You ending up as a sex therapist and everything else along those lines is more of a surprise.

Emily Nagoski: Actually, the science part is surprising too. I come from a family of artists. My father’s a photographer, my mother is a singer and pianist, my sister is a choral conductor, my brother is an ethnomusicologist. And then there’s me. [laughs] I’m the black sheep with my PhD and my science-y nerdiness and my sexuality stuff.

00:18:00

What people say at a party when she says what she does for a living

Chris Sandel: I was just wondering – and this is more out of interest – it’s fairly common when you meet someone at a party or in a social situation to be asked ‘What do you do?’ When you tell someone what you do, is the response that it shuts down conversation and people move on to a different topic, or do you get this barrage of questions with lots of ‘My friend has this thing going on’ type questions?

Emily Nagoski: It does not shut down conversation in my experience. Mostly, people get instantly curious, but they don’t even know what question to ask. They don’t even know where to start. They often ask me, ‘What’s the question you get asked most often?’ or ‘What’s the strangest question you’ve ever been asked?’ and want me to talk about basically the freaky weirdness they assume comes with being a sex educator.

Chris Sandel: You alluded earlier on to the ‘this is normal’, and this is something that gets repeated again and again in the book. There’s a number of phrases you repeat in the book, and for good reason, because you really want them to sink in.

00:19:00

All the same parts, organized in different ways

Another one that you talk about, and it comes pretty early on and is all through the book is ‘all the same parts, organised in different ways’. Can you elaborate on this? What it means, but also why you think it’s so important.

Emily Nagoski: So important that I say it over and over, literally in every chapter in the book.

Chris Sandel: Exactly.

Emily Nagoski: You can tell by my writing that I’m a teacher first and a writer second. As an educator, I know that spaced repetition is how people learn things, which is not how you’re supposed to write a book, but it’s how I wrote Come As You Are because I’m a teacher – and it worked, because see? You got it. Woohoo!

Chris Sandel: It does work, and I would say that I can tell you are a teacher. Not dismissing you as a writer, but I can tell you’re a teacher because of the way that you write. It does, it sinks in.

Emily Nagoski: Which means you only have to read it once, so it ultimately saves you time.

What ‘all the same parts, organised in different ways’ means is that everyone’s sexuality is made of the same basic components, and those parts are organised in different ways. There’s conversation that happens about men’s sexuality versus women’s sexuality. Are we the same, or are we different? And the answer is yes. We’re all made of the same parts, just organised in different ways.

The most literal way to understand this is to think about the structure of our genitals. When a person is born, most of the time, the adults instantly declare ‘It’s a boy!’ or ‘It’s a girl!’ And if a person has the ‘It’s a boy!’ organisation of genitals, there’s going to be a thing on that person’s body that is stretchy where hair is going to grow, and that’s the scrotum, we call it, on that body. If a person has the ‘It’s a girl!’ collection, then there’s a part on that person’s body that’s stretchy where hair is going to grow.

In the uterus, as those body parts are developing, we call that the labioscrotal tissue because it’s the same parts. But around Week 6 of gestation, there’s a wash of hormones, and depending on what the individual’s genetics are, the hormones cause those body parts to organise in a different way. It’s all the same prefabricated hardware right there, but the way the parts get organised is just a little bit different.

If you look at a scrotum up close and personal, you’ll see that there’s a seam running down the middle of it, and that’s actually where the scrotum knit up together. If just a little bit had been different about the hormonal environment or the genetics in utero, that’s where that person’s body would’ve developed labia instead of a scrotum. Literally all the same parts, just organised in different ways. They’re called biological homologues, having the same origin. You can find a homologue for every part – the clitoris and the penis, the labia and the scrotum, ovaries and testicles is the one we all know about.

Literally all the same parts, organised in different ways when it comes to our genitals, when it comes to ‘it’s a boy’ and ‘it’s a girl’ organisations. But also, all of the ‘it’s a girls’ and ‘it’s a boys’ are all different from each other. Every person who has the ‘it’s a girl’ combination of genitals, their genitals are different from everybody else’s, and they are all beautiful, they are all healthy and normal. As long as there’s no pain or infection, there’s nothing you need to change about it. There’s nothing wrong with any of those bodies.

But then it’s not just the organisation of our anatomical parts. There’s also the mechanism in our brain that governs sexual response. It’s called the dual control mechanism, and it’s called the dual control mechanism because there’s two parts.

The first part is the accelerator, or the sexual excitation system is the formal name, that notices all the sex-related information in the environment – everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste or imagine, think or feel that your brain codes as sex-related – and it sends the ‘turn on’ signal. We’ve all got one of these, and it’s functioning at a low level all the time in our brains, including right now. The fact that we are talking about sex is just a tiny bit sex-related, so there’s a tiny bit of ‘turn on’ signal being sent by your accelerator.

Then the other part, if the first part is the gas pedal or the accelerator, the second part must be the brake. It notices all the good reasons not to be turned on right now – everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, imagine, think or feel that your brain codes as a potential threat – and it sends the ‘turn off’ signal. Everybody’s got these brakes.

Some people have really sensitive accelerators and some people have really sensitive brakes. Some people have really not sensitive accelerators. Some people have really not sensitive brakes. The way a person’s sexuality functions will differ depending on the sensitivity of their brakes and accelerators. These are like personality traits. It seems to be more or less innate and inborn and not changeable.

And there’s nothing wrong with any particular sensitivity of brakes or accelerator. People vary. All the same parts, organised in different ways.

00:24:35

The problem with the term “sex drive”

Chris Sandel: With that second piece you were talking about there in terms of the dual control model, is that basically why you say that the idea of sex drive isn’t true?

Emily Nagoski: That’s a major part. That tells us how sex actually does work, whereas drive doesn’t tell us anything at all. This is the least controversial science in the book; it should be an idea that everybody’s like ‘Oh yeah, obviously that’s not true’. And yet it is – I’m going to use a bad word at this point – the only idea in the book that has caused anyone on Twitter to call me a stupid fucking cunt. Because people get super defensive about the idea that sex is not a drive.

Let me explain what that actually means. A drive is a very specific kind of motivational system. Basic hunger is a drive. Thirst is a drive. Thermoregulation is a drive. Even sleep is a drive. These are uncomfortable internal experiences that push an organism out into the world to go solve a problem. It’s like a siren or a flashing red light in your body, saying ‘There’s a problem. You need to go fix it or else’. And the ‘or else’ is ultimately, you could die if you don’t eat, don’t have adequate fluids, don’t have adequate salt. You have a sodium drive. Even sleep. It’s really difficult to die of sleep because your brain will steal and cheat sleep as much as it can, but you can literally die of sleep deprivation.

No-one has ever died for lack of sex. That is not a thing that happens. Sex is not one of those. Sex is instead this thing called an incentive motivation system. Where a drive is the uncomfortable internal experience that pushes you out into the world to go solve a problem, an incentive motivation system is, as it sounds, a pleasurable ‘Ooh, what’s that?’ exploratory, where you are pulled into the world by some desirable or attractive external stimulus.

So instead of being analogous to hunger, sexual desire is actually analogous to curiosity, exploration. Curiosity and exploration are just as innate to us as hunger and thirst, but they’re different kinds of motivational systems. There’s several reasons why it’s really important to me that people understand that sex does not work the way that sleep, hunger, thirst and thermoregulation work; it works the way exploration and curiosity do.

One of the main reasons why is because it helps us to understand that it is normal for there to be variability across your lifespan in how interested in sex you are. We can all get that there are some times in your life when you’re going to be more curious about the world or less curious about the world. When you’re super stressed out and exhausted, is that a time that you’re going to be adventurous and exploratory and want to go learn more about the world? No. We all know that when you’re stressed and exhausted, that’s a time when you want to stick with what’s familiar and you just want to stay safe.

The same is true for sex. Your accelerator is going to be more able to respond to the sex-related information in the environment if there’s not a whole lot of stuff hitting the brake. That is normal. So as your life changes, as more things are hitting your brake or fewer things are hitting your brake, your interest in sexuality is going to change, and that is normal. There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s not a problem we need to solve. You just need to notice, ‘Oh look, there’s more things in my life that are hitting my brake, or fewer things in my life that are hitting my accelerator’.

So the first reason it’s important to me for people to understand that sex is not a drive is that it helps you to understand that it’s normal for there to be variability in your interest in sex.

A second is because it means that the way we experience sexual desire does not have to be the way people – and I keep using hunger as an example, and I know that hunger is a really screwy example because our relationship with hunger is so screwy. So let’s say thirst.

If a person never experienced thirst or hunger or fatigue, there would be a medical problem, because if you don’t have that biological signal alerting you to what’s going on in your life, bad things happen. So if people don’t experience a spontaneous, out of the blue urge/desire to have sex, we worry that there’s something wrong if we think of sex as a drive. But sex is not a drive, so we don’t need to worry if you don’t have a spontaneous, out of the blue, just walking down the street and suddenly you’re like ‘Ooh, I would like to have sex’.

Erika Moen, who is the cartoonist who illustrated Come As You Are, draws this spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt to the genitals, just kaboom! Desire. ‘Can I get me the sexy times?’ That’s totally one normal, healthy way to experience desire.

But there’s also this thing called responsive desire, where instead of being a lightning bolt to the genitals out of the blue, you are maybe just having a loving conversation with your certain special someone and they touch you in a loving certain special kind of way, and your brain receives that information as like ‘That feels really good’, and then you maybe start touching them back, and your brain receives that sensation as ‘That feels really, really good’, and then your partner starts to reciprocate with a little bit more touching, and your brain receives all that and goes ‘Hey, kaboom! How about some sex?’ It’s called responsive desire because it emerges in response to pleasure, whereas spontaneous desire seems to emerge in anticipation of pleasure. And they are both normal and healthy.

So if people experience sexual desire not as a spontaneous thing, but more as a task on their to-do list, where they put it in their calendar, ‘Saturday at 3:00, you, me, and the red underwear, here we go’, and you get the babysitter and you take a bath and put on the sexy underwear and you show up – but when you show up you’re just like, ‘Well, let’s do this thing, I guess’ – and it’s not until you put your body in the bed, let your skin touch your partner’s skin, and your brain goes ‘Oh, right, I like this person. I enjoy these experiences’. That is a normal, healthy way to experience sexual desire, for it to come in response to the pleasure.

00:31:25

How couples sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades

Couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades are not couples who constantly can’t wait to put their tongues in each other’s mouths. That’s fun if you have it in your relationship. Great, go for it. But that’s not what predicts a strong sexual connection over multiple decades.

The couples who manage that sustaining have two characteristics in common. One, they’re really good friends, and two, they prioritise sex. They make an explicit decision that it matters for their relationship, that they stop doing all the other things they could be doing – maybe you’ve got kids, maybe you’ve got jobs, maybe you’ve got other family members to attend to, other friends you want to hang out with. Sometimes, God forbid, you just want to watch some television. You stop doing all that stuff and you set aside time just to do this one, let’s face it, sort of silly thing that we humans do of touching our bodies to each other and putting our mouths on each other’s body parts and our genitals inside each other’s genitals.

So it’s not about the desire. It’s about the pleasure. Did you know that people believe you more when what you say rhymes?

Chris Sandel: I did not know that. [laughs]

Emily Nagoski: That’s one of the things I learned in a book. It’s not just that people remember it better, which they do, but they believe you more. So I made it rhyme and everything. You ready?

Chris Sandel: Yep.

Emily Nagoski: Pleasure is the measure. Pleasure is the measure of sexual satisfaction and wellbeing. It’s not how much you want it. It’s not who you do it with or how often or where or what position or even how many orgasms you have. It’s whether or not you like the sex you are having.

We can only get to this place where we’re like ‘Oh right, if sex is pleasurable, if I’m having fun, then I’m doing it right’ if we can let go of the idea that desire is what it’s about. It’s not about desire. Sex is not a drive. Nobody’s going to die if they don’t get laid. Sex is just a delicious way to connect with somebody who really matters to you. Or it’s a delicious way to get yourself to fall asleep, or a delicious way to relieve some stress, or just a great way to pass the time. It can also be a way to repair a bond if the relationship has been threatened in any way.

Sex serves a whole lot of functions. Not one of them is survival. So no, sex is not a drive.

00:34:00

What Emily means when she says “context”

Chris Sandel: You touched on it there in terms of brake and accelerator, the concept of context. It’s a word that I endlessly use in my practice when talking to clients about exercise and healthy eating and so many other areas where the answer is ‘it depends’. Can you talk about what you mean when you say ‘context’?

Emily Nagoski: I mean it in a pretty nerdy sense, but I’m going to skip over the ultra-nerdy part and cut to the real life example, which is tickling. I know tickling is not everybody’s favourite, but if you’re in a fun, flirty, playful, sexy state of mind and your certain someone tickles you, your brain will receive that information and interpret that sensation as a pleasure. Like, ‘Oh, this feels fun, like a game, and could potentially lead to other things’.

But if the exact same certain special someone tickles you in exactly the same way when you are pissed off at them, it doesn’t feel fun. It feels more like you want to slightly punch them in the face. How could that be? It’s the same sensation, but because your context is different, because your emotional state when you receive that stimulation is different, your brain interprets it in the opposite way.

This is the context sensitivity of our perception of sensation, and it goes for every kind of sensation, not just tickling. Spanking is another great example. If you are already in a very turned on state of mind, where your brakes are off and your accelerator is on, and your partner spanks your butt, that could potentially feel really good, whereas if you’re in the middle of changing the baby’s diaper or making the lunches for the kids for the next day and your partner spanks your butt, you kind of want to spank them back. It does not feel good because the context is different.

When the context is right, your brain will interpret almost any sensation as being erotic or potentially erotic, but in the wrong context, your brain won’t interpret any stimulation – even just straightforward genital stimulation – as being pleasurable or erotic. It will just be irritating and annoying.

00:36:15

How does stress impact sexual response?

Chris Sandel: Again, I think you’ve touched on this a little bit, but it’s something that comes up so much – how does stress feed into this context piece?

Emily Nagoski: People vary. All the same parts, organised in different ways. But for 80% to 90% of people, when they’re stressed – stress biologically is a survival mechanism where you’re being flooded with adrenaline and cortisol in order to survive a threat like being chased by a lion. Is being chased by a lion a good time to be involved in any sort of sex? No. So it makes sense that for a lot of people, when they’re stressed out, they’re in a survival state where sex is not a priority, so stress hits the brakes.

You have to learn how to move through the stress response cycle so that your body can release the stress, it will stop hitting your brakes and you can transition into a sexier state of mind. There’s a whole half a chapter specifically on this, and in fact – the book is crammed with as much science as I could get into 110,000 words, and I was really proud of it, and then I started travelling all over, talking to people about the book, and what I heard over and over was, ‘Yeah, all that sex stuff is really great, Emily, but man, that stuff about stress and emotion processing, that was really the most important thing for me’.

So I went and talked about this to my sister, the choral conductor, and she was like, ‘No duh, Emily. Who ever teaches us how to feel our feelings? And it’s like the most universal thing, how to move through the stress response cycle. I was trained in it as a conservatory trained musician, and I didn’t learn how to do it off the podium until it almost killed me. And once I did learn it, it probably saved my life’, she said. ‘Twice’.

That was the moment that I was like, we should write a book about that. So we did, and it’s coming out in March. It’s called Burnout. The reason we wrote a book about stress is specifically because of how important stress was to readers of Come As You Are. The usual step is once you’ve written a book about women’s sexuality, you write a book about men and you write a book about relationships, and instead, for me, the thing that followed necessarily from a book about women’s sexuality was a book about women’s feeling of being overwhelmed and exhausted by everything they have to do, yet worrying that they’re not doing enough.

I want to talk about cultural stuff related to stress as well, but the physiological part that really matters is this idea that stress is a cycle. We all know the beginning part. You see a lion that’s coming right for you, so you get flooded with the adrenaline and cortisol. Your brain assesses this threat in less than a second and goes, ‘My best chance of survival comes from running’, so what do you do? You run. We all understand that that’s how stress works, but that’s not where it ends.

Once you start running, there’s got to be an ending to the story, and there’s only two possible endings here. Either you get eaten by the lion, in which case none of the rest of this matters, or you survive. If you imagine, we’re in the environment of evolutionary adaption, the savanna of Africa. You are running away from the lion. You run back to your village. Somebody sees you coming. They open their door, they beckon you in and slam it in the face of the lion, and now you’re safe. Eventually the lion gives up and goes away. The threat is gone now, so you jump up and down and you celebrate. You take a big, deep breath of relief. You hug the person who just saved your life.

This is the complete stress response cycle. You transition out of stress into relaxation by doing something that your body recognises as a shift from ‘You are not safe right now’ to ‘Your body is now a safe place for you to be’.

In the environment of evolutionary adaption, that’s worked out just fine, but these days we are, alas, almost never chased by lions. Our stressors tend to be things like our bosses and traffic and our kids and even our sexuality. When that happens, you get a really similar flood of adrenaline and cortisol, but the solution to those stressors is not to run. It is to have a grownup conversation with your boss and to continue being a parent to children, no matter how frustrating being a parent is – which everyone finds frustrating at least some of the time.

In fact, being stressed or running away from your sexuality is a great way to ensure that your sexuality stays a stressor. But because your physiological response is the same, we now have two different processes that we need to engage, and we have to deal with our stressors, but we also have to deal wit the stress itself. The way we deal with the stress itself is by doing the things that our body recognises as a cue that we are now safe. When you’re being chased by a lion, you run.

So the most efficient way to complete the cycle is with physical activity of some kind. If your stressor is your kids or your job or traffic, you don’t have to go for a run, but dance it out in your living room playing Beyoncé real loud, or just jump up and down. Go for a walk around the block. Even lying in bed, close your eyes and tense up your muscles really hard and visualise yourself as Godzilla, stomping around on the patriarchy and whatever else is irritating you that day. Your body will get to a place where it feels like ‘Aah’, because you gave it the tension and the activation that it was longing for – that activation that says ‘I survived. I conquered this threat. I escaped this threat, and my body is now a safe place to be’.

Physical activity is the single most efficient way to finish the stress response cycle, and physical activity, movement of any kind, can look like a lot of different things.

Affection is the next most, or social connection of some kind. This could be anything from a simple experience like the person who’s making your coffee today. Just smile at them, make a little eye contact and polite chit-chat. That reassures your brain that the world makes some kind of sense and not everybody is an asshole, that there is safety in the world, because human beings are still connecting with each other in a kind way.

It can be talking to your neighbour on your commute on the train. People always predict that they’ll be happier if they can sit in silence on the train, but in fact it turns out that both you and your seatmate will be in a better mood by the time you get to work if you have just a little bit of polite chat on the train. Even though people don’t expect that to be true, it actually is true.

And deeper emotional connection can also help to complete the stress response cycle, because again, it’s about that arrival home, of feeling that your body is in a safe place. One of the recommendations is a 20-second hug. You stay on your own centre of balance and you wrap your arms around your partner, and you just hold each other for 20 seconds in a row. That’s a long hug. You have to really like and trust a person in order to stay touching each other for that long. And that’s the point. When you hold each other in that way, it teaches your body, ‘Look, you have this relationship that is a foundation, a home for you to return to’.

John Gottman also recommends a daily 6-second kiss. That’s not six 1-second kisses, but one 6-second kiss. That is a long time to kiss a person. You’ve got to really like them and trust them in order to do that, and that’s why it’s so valuable because it teaches your brain, ‘Look, you have this person who is close enough to you, whom you like and trust enough to touch in this intimate way for this long, every single day’.

I could keep going. There’s seven altogether of social connection. Physical activity. Humour, laughter together, is another one of those forms of social connection that bonds us to each other.

Any form of creative self-expression. It might be journaling. When a therapist recommends journaling, the therapist is not saying that the construction of sentences is inherently therapeutic. What they’re recommending is that you put all your feelings in a place where you let yourself go all the way through the experience to the end, and you dump all this emotional experience onto the piece of paper so that it doesn’t have to live inside your body anymore.

Again, I come from a family of musicians; any musical expression is both creative self-expression and usually connection with other people because there are other musicians that you’re performing with, potentially. Not always, but often.

Any sort of story play, any sort of rough-and-tumble play, so plays and theatre and reading novels and playing with your kids, these are all primary processes, which means they’re as innate to us as curiosity and sex. If you play a sport, if you play rugby or roller derby, those are some of the best because they’re high contact. Rugby is the most war-like sport I’ve ever seen, and it’s awesome because you just slam your body against another human being. You get a little physical contact, you let your body move through a stress response cycle, you activate your rage, and you give it a safe place to go.

And by the end of it, your body’s like, ‘Oh right, I’m actually safe. I’m strong and able to do these things’. It shifts your chemistry out of the stress response of adrenaline and cortisol into the relaxation response, and you feel safe. And that means that your brakes are not going to be hit by the stress, which means that when you show up Saturday at 3:00, you, me, and the red underwear, that stuff isn’t going to be keeping your brakes on, which will make it all the easier for you to transition into a sexy state of mind.

Chris Sandel: Thank you for going into that level of detail. I think so many of my clients really do struggle with the stress piece, and the stress piece comes from many, many different angles. But for a lot of the women I’m working with, there’s the physical stress component of over-exercising and undereating, often to the point where they’re no longer getting their cycles. But then there’s the psychological stress because of poor body image and this amplified concern about not being enough and their body not being enough. So having all those different options you talked about I think can be very helpful.

00:47:45

The bikini industrial complex

Emily Nagoski: In the second book, in Burnout, we call it the ‘bikini industrial complex’. That’s actually my sister’s term for it. She conducts a children’s choir and a college choir, and when she teaches children to sing – they’re as young as ten, eight, even six years old – they already think that bellies are supposed to be flat. So the way they stand is with their tummies tucked in, and you can’t breathe all the way if you’re holding your stomach in. And if you can’t breathe all the way, you can’t really sing all the way. So she has to teach six-year-olds how to breathe, how to relax their abdomens, because they already think that their belly is not supposed to be round.

We all know the research that six-year-old girls are already worried about being too fat, but it goes as deep as teaching children not to breathe all the way down. That’s pretty insidious.

The solution when you’ve got that bikini industrial complex punishment happening in your brain about your body is not to do so much that has to do with the performance of your body, but more to do with social connection – turning toward other people and yourself with loving kindness and compassion.

One of the things we discovered writing the second book is that the feeling of not being enough is actually a form of loneliness. It’s this socially acceptable disguise, this mask that we put on loneliness. So when you have a sense that you are not good enough, that your body is not good enough, that’s a signal that you should be reaching out and connecting with someone whom you care about, who is not going to participate in all the body crap, but is rather going to reinforce the idea that you are enough, that you are safe, that they’re going to be there for you and you’re going to be there for them.

The other piece of it that I wanted to mention was another thing that my sister and I call human giver syndrome, which is from a book I just read last year – it just came out last year – called Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by a moral philosopher named Kate Manne. She posits a world where half the people are the human beings you see, and they have a moral obligation to be their full humanity, to manifest their full humanity. Then the other half of the population are the human givers, and they have a moral obligation to give their full humanity in service to the human beings.

Culturally, it’s way more complex than this, but just sort of at a group level, which one do you think are the women?

Chris Sandel: The givers.

Emily Nagoski: Exactly, for sure. What Amelia and I say is that a human giver has a moral obligation to be pretty, happy, calm, generous and attentive to the needs of others, and if they dare not work on making their physical presentation match other people’s expectations of the ideal, if they dare to have an emotional experience that might make somebody else uncomfortable, if they dare to have a need that they try to express, it’s going to be received as an imposition, and how dare they, and a human giver can potentially be punished – so much so that they might even punish themselves for not meeting the social expectations of being pretty, happy, calm, generous and attentive to the needs of others.

In this world of human beings and human givers, it absolutely is selfish to participate in self-care if you’re a giver, because any resource that you give to yourself is something you could’ve been giving to someone else, and ‘How dare you? You don’t deserve any of those resources’.

Obviously we think the system is bullshit. Pretty sure you agree. And the fact that you do what you do means that you, too, are a human giver, and my sister and I are both married to men who are human givers, and thank goodness. The gender dynamic is nowhere near as simple, but the cultural expectations – women walking around in the world receive this feedback that if they dare not to force their bodies and their mood to conform with cultural expectations of a well-behaved women, then they could be punished.

We use exercise not as a way to complete the stress response cycle, but as a way to force our bodies to conform to a particular expectation, and even as a way to punish ourselves when we don’t. Those are two really different ways of relating to moving our bodies that people do all the time. I’m sure you see both of those things, trying to force your body to conform and trying to punish your body for not conforming – which is different from doing this in order to allow my body to transition into a relaxed stress response instead of this hyper-constant state of threat and ‘I’m about to die’. Does that make sense?

Chris Sandel: It totally makes sense. Or just like ‘this is fun’ as a way of moving your body without trying to put another layer of reasoning on it. Like the way that kids move their bodies.

Emily Nagoski: Yeah, as play. Just because it’s a delight and a joy to live in muscle.

00:53:40

What is non-concordance?

Chris Sandel: There’s one really fascinating part of the book that is probably the most mentioned to me from clients, which is the concept of non-concordance. Can you walk through what this is? I found this really fascinating.

Emily Nagoski: This is another place where everything that we grow up believing about sexual response – turns out, no. None of it. Not even any of it is right. It really comes down to learning to differentiate between pleasure, desire and just straight up genital response or sexual response.

In our brain, the mechanism that governs these things – in pop science journalism, it’s often called the reward centre of your brain or the pleasure centre of your brain. Pleasure is absolutely one of the components. It’s the endorphin-related hot spots in your emotional brain. There are these tiny little discrete places where pleasure pops up when the context is right. You drop sugar water on the tongue of a new-born infant and the pleasure centres light up. It just feels really good.

But that’s a separate system from the wanting system, which is this really big, vast dopaminergic network. Dopamine is not the neurotransmitter of pleasure or satisfaction so much as it is the neurotransmitter of wanting, of ‘Oh, I’m going to get more of that. I want that’. That’s what dopamine is for. Where pleasure is just like ‘Mm, that feels really good’, wanting is your toddler following you around, tugging you on your shirt saying, ‘Hey, can I have some of that? Can I have some of that?’ Wanting is clearly related to pleasure, to liking, but they are not identical. They are different systems.

Then there’s a third system that you might call learning or sexual relevance, which is about the linking up between your body’s response and the kind of stimulus that is coming in in order to generate that response. The traditional example is Pavlov’s dogs. Pavlov trained dogs to salivate in response to a bell. It’s very easy. Anyone can do it. You just put food in front of a dog, the dog will salivate automatically, and you ring a bell. So it goes food, salivate, bell. Food, bell, salivate. And ultimately, bell, salivate. You’ve taught the dog that the bell predicts food. The bell is food-related.

But does that salivation mean the dog wants to eat the bell? Does it mean that the dog thinks the bell is delicious? No. It just means that the bell is linked to food and therefore salivation.

So when there is a non-overlap between these three systems, it’s called non-concordance, and it happens in every emotional and motivational system that we have, including sex. There’s amazing experiments in lots of different domains of emotional response.

There’s one on music and the experience of chills when you listen to certain music. A physiological correlate for that experience of chills is called piloerection, which is the hair standing up. They did a study where they played people the kind of music that typically results in chills, and then they had a video camera along people’s arms, looking really closely to see whether or not people’s hair stands on end. They looked for a correlation between the experience of chills – ‘My Heart Will Go On’, I got chills or whatever, ‘Purple Rain’, I got chills – did their hand stand on end? It turns out there is no significant relationship between the experience of chills and the experience of piloerection, of your hair standing up.

That’s a non-sexual example, but of course, where I’m going is that there is a non-overlap between genital response and your experience of pleasure and desire. This goes for everyone, no matter what their genital arrangement is. A person with a penis may struggle to get an erection in the middle of a sexual experience, but then wake up the next morning with an erection when it’s nothing but a hassle. That’s arousal non-concordance. You’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s totally a thing that happens’.

It also happens to people with vulvas and vaginas. I got a phone call from a friend a few years ago now, and she was like, ‘I was in the middle of doing things with my partner, and I was into it and I was ready and I said “I’m ready, I want you”, and he goes, “No, you’re just being nice. You’re still dry”’. My friend on the phone is like, ‘What’s wrong? Should I go see a doctor? Is there something hormonal wrong with me? What should I do?’

I was like, no. Sometimes your body’s response does not fully overlap with your experience. Tell your partner to listen to your words and also buy some lube. Anybody who’s having genital contact with another person for more than five minutes should be using some form of lube because our bodies just are not designed to prevent the friction and tearing when sex lasts that long. Just P.S., by the way.

So arousal non-concordance happens in that direction, and it can also go in the other direction where you’re doing things and your body is responding, and you’re like, ‘Mm, nope, not really. Not working for me’. So you tell your partner, ‘Hey, not working for me’, and because of human giver syndrome, if it’s a man and a woman having a sexual encounter and the woman says ‘It’s not so much for me’, what our culture says is the appropriate response is ‘No, but you’re wet. You are ready’.

And because so many of us get taught to believe other people’s opinions about our bodies, more than we trust what our bodies are telling us, we believe our partner instead of believing what our body is telling us. We get confused, because it feels like the signals are mixed. How come, if I wasn’t into it, my body was responding? Well, because of arousal non-concordance, because that’s a thing that happens. It’s a normal part of how sexual response happens. Blood flow is not necessarily a predictor of your arousal or interest or desire in a sexual experience.

This gets used as a weapon against people of all genital configurations around sexual assault. People with penises are told, ‘Well, you had an erection, therefore you must have wanted it, right?’ or ‘You were wet. You said no but your body said yes’. We would never do that in any other motivational or emotional system, like ‘I know you say you got your chills, but your hair did not stand on end; therefore you definitely did not experience chills’. If I’m Celine Dion or Prince and people are like, ‘Oh, I got chills’, I don’t care what their hair was doing. I just want to know that they had an awesome experience. If their hair stood on end but they didn’t have an awesome experience, their hair is not what matters to me. Their experience is what matters to me.

If I bite into a mouldy, bruised peach with a worm in it and my mouth waters, nobody’s going to say to me, ‘Well, you say you didn’t like it, but you just don’t want to admit how much you enjoyed that mouldy, bruised peach, Emily, because your mouth watered, and that’s what really tells us’. I don’t know where it comes from, this myth that a person’s genitals know more about what they want or like than the person themselves does, but we do definitely live in that world.

Chapter 6 is the chapter. Anybody who’s listening to this, just skip right to Chapter 6 and read this one chapter, and then tell everyone you know, because we need to learn to use language that differentiates between pleasure, desire and this genital response ‘something sex-related is happening right now’. We live in a sufficiently screwed-up world that some of the things that are sex-related that happen around us are neither wanted nor liked.

And sometimes something that is sex-related that we do want and like doesn’t register in our bodies that way because context. Sometimes the brakes stay on. Sometimes the accelerator doesn’t have a chance because stress and parenthood and body image and trauma histories and all the other stuff in our lives that gets in the way.

01:02:30

Why don’t most people know about arousal non-concordance?

Chris Sandel: With non-concordance, how long have we known about this? Is it just that I’m not reading enough of the right kinds of books, or is this something that’s not really talked about very much?

Emily Nagoski: Oh, man. Why did you not already know this? I feel that way too. I first learned about arousal non-concordance in 2003. I saw Meredith Chivers present her research at a conference at Indiana University, and I remember that day because my brain exploded and splattered all over the conference room walls, and I haven’t seen them since. It just changed everything about how I was thinking about it.

But even she is a little bit sloppy in her language about desire, arousal and pleasure. Because these ideas are so tangled up, the people who do this research aren’t always as clear as they need to be about these ideas.

I should also add the people who do research, sex researchers, are not required the way sex therapists and sex educators are to participate in sexual attitude reassessment, which is exposure to as much diversity of sexuality as you can imagine, and much more diversity of sexuality than you want to imagine. It’s part of our professional training to be exposed to all this stuff and really examine our emotional reactions to them so that when our client or our patient or our student walks in and tells us their story, we already have a really strong baseline of being able to respond neutrally to whatever we hear. Because you do not want your sex therapist to go ‘Ugh!’ whenever you say anything about your sexuality. It’s our job to be neutral, to be able to receive all of that stuff neutrally.

Sex researchers do not have to go through that process, so sometimes their biases and ‘yuck’ responses and all the same myths that they carry around gender and sexuality show up in the research in a way that is not too helpful, and if I had it my way, people doing sex research would be required to be trained the way sex therapists and educators are, to really deeply examine their emotional reactivity to sexual stuff.

And then another reason is that the book I wrote is intensely multidisciplinary. My three degrees are in different fields. Clearly, I like to read stuff outside my own discipline because I have more than one discipline. The research on wanting, liking and learning comes not from sex research, but from just general affective neuroscience. Kent Berridge, Morten Kringelbach, those guys. The sex researchers aren’t necessarily reading the research on arousal non-concordance in other emotional systems, so they’re not thinking about arousal non-concordance in the same language as other emotion researchers.

So part of the solution lies also in having sex researchers and other emotion researchers talking to each other, which is only going to happen when other emotion researchers are less afraid to think about sex as an emotional experience that humans have.

So there’s a lot of reasons why you didn’t read it before, and they’re really deeply rooted in the culture. It’s going to take a couple more decades before those transformations happen.

01:06:15

What are meta emotions and how do they relate to sexuality?

Chris Sandel: There’s another bit within the book – and this is kind of how the book is finishing up – talking about meta emotions. This is kind of at the core of all the work. What are meta emotions in the context of sexual wellbeing?

Emily Nagoski: Emotions are how you feel; meta emotions are how you feel about how you feel. When it comes to sexuality, there’s what’s actually going on with your sexuality, which is the dual control model, your brakes and your accelerator, your context, knowing the difference between pleasure, arousal and desire. Knowing all that stuff, that’s how your sexuality actually works.

And then there’s how you feel about how it works. When you were hearing me talk about spontaneous desire versus responsive desire, maybe you noticed yourself identifying with responsive desire and going ‘Oh, so that’s what’s happening with me. I don’t want sex out of the blue because I have responsive desire instead of spontaneous desire’. That’s knowing what’s actually true about your sexuality, and then there’s how you feel about that. You might be tremendously relieved, like ‘Let me welcome this new way of thinking about my sexuality into my life so that I can create more space, more opportunities to really make the most of my sexuality as it really is’.

Or you might hear that and be like ‘Okay, that’s fine, I’ve got responsive desire. But let’s face it, Emily: spontaneous desire is better. Spontaneous desire is how it should be, and the fact that I don’t have it means that there’s something wrong and inferior about me. What you’re telling me is I’m never going to be okay’. That’s how you feel about how you feel.

The more you can transition out of a judgmental, critical, ‘it’s supposed to be this way and I’m not going to be satisfied until I change it’ way into kindness and compassion, recognising that this is what is true, and ‘How about I try on the possibility of loving what’s true, even if it’s not what I was taught was true, even if it’s not what I wish were true? Let me try on the possibility of loving what’s true, my body and my sexuality just as it is, right now’.

There’s a wonderful book called Better Sex Through Mindfulness by a researcher named Lori Brotto that I love so much I wrote the forward to it. I love this book so much. If people struggle around sexuality, this is a nice tiny little book with very concrete, specific activities that you can do to practise mindful non-judgment of your body and of sexuality. This is a programme that she’s been using with all sorts of women, including women who are in recovery from trauma or from gynaecological cancers or other cancer treatments as well as women who are experiencing sexual dysfunction.

Better Sex Through Mindfulness helps you with the mindful, non-judgmental noticing of what’s happening inside your body. What Lori says is that sometimes your judgment of your body sexuality is a primary cause of sexual dysfunction. It’s a sort of Catch-22. It feels a little bit paradoxical. Like, how am I supposed to love what’s true about my sexuality when the whole point is that my sexuality is broken?’ Or if you’re experiencing pain with intercourse in particular, ‘How am I supposed to love the pain that I am experiencing, Emily? How am I supposed to do that?’ And that’s exactly where the neutral non-judgment comes in.

My favourite study about this is actually a study about generalised anxiety disorder where they measured all sorts of symptoms in people who are living with generalised anxiety disorder – what kind of symptoms do you have? How often do you experience them? How much do you feel like they impose on your quality of life or your ability to engage in your tasks of daily living?’ It turned out there is no predictive relationship between the kinds of symptoms or even how intense those symptoms are and whether or not they seemed to be interfering with a person’s quality of life.

The best predictor of when a person’s anxiety symptoms interfered with their quality of life was their capacity to be non-judgmental about their symptoms. So they would notice their heart racing or their thoughts spinning or their emotions becoming reactive, and the people whose symptoms did not interfere with their quality of life would be the ones who’d be like, ‘Oh, there’s my heart beating faster’ or ‘Oh, I notice my thoughts are spinning’ or ‘Oh, I notice I’m a little more emotionally reactive than I usually am. Okay, that’s something that’s happening right now’.

The ability to be neutral and non-judging about your internal experience is the best predictor of whether or not any difficulties you’re experiencing interfere with your quality of life. It won’t end the symptoms, but it will end their impact on your quality of life.

For me, I find there’s a strong parallel between this ability to be non-judgmental about your own internal experience and your ability to let go of diet culture and the idea that weight is a measure of health. It feels like there’s a Catch-22. It feels like there’s a paradox there. Like, how am I supposed to let go of this judgment when everything around me is telling me that what’s happening with my body is wrong? How am I supposed to do that?

It takes a kind of leap of faith. I’ve been watching a lot of a TV show called The Good Place lately, where they reference Kierkegaard, where it’s translated better as a leap into faith. You can turn toward your body with kindness and compassion exactly as it is right now and just consider the possibility that everything you’ve been taught about your body is wrong. All of that stuff. The single best source of wisdom about your body is your body. And when you can turn with kindness and compassion towards your own internal experience and let your body tell you what it needs and what it wants, what it likes and what it does not like ,that is where we get our ultimate source of wisdom.

Chris Sandel: What you described there is really at the core of the work that I’m doing with clients. One of the big things I always say is how you think about what you eat is just as important, if not more so, as what you actually eat.

Emily Nagoski: Yes. When I was teaching at Smith – it’s 2,500 women. There’s going to be lots of people with disordered eating. I had to find a way to talk about food and nutrition and a relationship with food that worked for everyone in the room. [laughs] There was everybody, every different kind of relationship with food was in the room.

The language I ultimately landed on, I found because of the way I teach about sexuality. Really, the measure of whether you’re eating healthfully is how you feel about the food while you are eating it. Even if you’re emotional eating – I had a lot of students who beat the shit out of themselves because they turned to food when they were stressed out. I got to a place of teaching them, if you are shovelling food into your face in order to numb the pain, that is one way to have a relationship with food and stress relating to each other.

But suppose you have a really difficult week and you get home and you eat a brownie and it’s just the most delicious thing you ever ate and you’re like, ‘This is an awesome punctuation mark to a really challenging, difficult week, and I’m just going to enjoy the shit out of this brownie. I didn’t have to earn it, I don’t have to do anything afterward. I’m just going to love the hell out of this brownie right now’ – I’m in favour of that, and I don’t think that a student who’s stressed out or anyone who’s stressed out and shifting into a state of a pleasurable relationship with food needs to worry about it being emotional eating.

Same with sexuality. If you just enjoy the hell – pleasure is the measure. If you like it, if you enjoy what you are doing, then you are doing it right.

Chris Sandel: That taps in as well to the being present in the moment and how helpful that can be in whatever you’re doing.

Emily Nagoski: Right. Which is so much easier when you’re not confused as hell about the lack of relationship between, say, your genital response and your sense of pleasure and desire. You can notice, ‘Oh, it’s because the context is wrong right now. It’s because I’m too stressed out. It’s because I’m too worried about being caught. It’s because I’m not worried enough about being caught’. Again, people vary.

Chris Sandel: This has been awesome, and I really loved hearing you chat. As I said at the beginning, you have such a breadth of knowledge. I really want to point people towards your book, Come As You Are. You also mentioned your new book coming out, Burnout. When does that come out?

Emily Nagoski: In the UK I think it’ll be March 12 or right around there, whatever that Tuesday is. Mid-March. Woohoo!

Chris Sandel: Sure. Is there anywhere else you want to be pointing people towards, whether that be website or social media handles?

Emily Nagoski: There’s a Facebook page for the new book, facebook.com/burnoutbookgroup. Otherwise, you can find me for entertainment’s sake on Instagram @enagoski. My website is emilynagoski.com. I have a calendar listing travel, places I’ll be presenting in public.

I’ve got a couple of TED talks. One of them is about arousal non-concordance, so if you’re hearing this stuff and you’re like ‘I want to share this with someone and I want to make sure I get it totally clear’, you can just send them a 12-minute TED talk of me talking about arousal non-concordance and be like, ‘Here, this. This is what I was trying to tell you about the difference between genital response and pleasure’. Just google ‘Emily Nagoski TED’.

Chris Sandel: I will put all of those links in the show notes. Thank you once again. This has been amazing.

Emily Nagoski: Thank you so much. My favourite topic.

Chris Sandel: That’s it for this week’s show. I hope you enjoyed it. As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m currently taking on clients. If you’re someone who is struggling to get their cycle back, if you’re dealing with an eating disorder or disordered eating, or if you’re trying to break free from dieting, all these areas are specialties, and I’d love to help. If this is you, head over to www.seven-health.com/help and sign up for a free initial chat.

I’ll be back next week with another new episode. Until then, look after yourself and I will catch you next Thursday.