Can hypnotherapy help improve my libido?
During our lifetimes, we naturally experience fluctuation with our libidos. A loss of libido or a reduced desire for sex is common for both men and women. Often linked to issues such as stress, tiredness, or relationship issues, it is always worth checking with your GP just in case there may be an underlying medical problem.
It’s important to remember: everyone’s sex drive is different. There’s no such thing as normal when it comes to desire and sex drive. Women typically experience a lower libido during pregnancy or around the menopause, while men may experience it at any time.
If you find your loss or lack of libido to be distressing or if it may be affecting your relationship, it may be worth seeking help.
How can hypnotherapy help?
Decrease embarrassment and nerves
By opening up and talking about our problems, we can help dispel some of our nerves or embarrassment around the subject. When we keep quiet about what is making us feel uncomfortable or stressed, we can unwittingly increase these negative feelings, and may even damage our relationship with our partner.
Identify underlying problems
While traditional sex therapy allows both partners to create an open, honest dialogue about what may be troubling each of you, hypnotherapy offers the chance for individual focus and attention.
Hypnotherapy can help you understand and overcome emotional problems that may be affecting your libido. Helping you to identify underlying issues, unresolved feelings, and factors that may be subconsciously affecting you, a qualified, clinical hypnotherapist may be able to help you better understand and identify problems.
Reframe your thoughts
Working with a hypnotherapist can help you to more positively reframe your thoughts around sex. By using regression techniques, they can help you to heal past traumas and remove the anxiety you may be feeling about sex. They may also be able to provide suggestions to help you focus on more pleasurable thoughts during sex, helping you to stay more in the moment and focused on pleasurable activities rather than distracting negative thoughts or past experiences.
Tackle stress
We may not always realise it, but stress can have a bigger impact on our lives than we may know. Impacting our physical and emotional health and well-being, stress can make us feel overwhelmed, anxious, or quick to anger. It can cause us to have trouble focusing, give us headaches, or keep us up at night. It can also have a significant impact on our libidos.
By working with a hypnotherapist, you can discover your sources of stress, and begin changing how you respond to them. Your hypnotherapist should be able to help you identify specific causes and develop new techniques to help you take control of these feelings, as well as introducing you to new relaxation techniques that can help you to focus your mind and feel more present in the moment.
Regain confidence
When we experience problems, our self-confidence can take a hit. The more stressed or anxious we feel, the more these feelings can damage our overall confidence and self-esteem, as we worry about how others may perceive us. Hypnotherapy can help us challenge our negative thoughts about ourselves, accessing the unconscious mind and, using the power of suggestion, facilitating positive change.
Manage symptoms of menopause
A common cause of loss of libido for women, as hypnotherapist Catherine explains, hypnotherapy can help alleviate or control symptoms.
“A study into the use of hypnosis for menopausal symptoms found that hypnosis reduced hot flushes in 80% of women involved. The use of suggestion to the subconscious of an alternative feeling to the symptom experienced such as a cooling breeze to help alleviate a hot flush, feelings of calmness during periods of anxiety or panic, or managing feelings related to an altered body image.
“This can also tie in with a reduced libido can help women negotiate this time in their lives when they should be celebrating their knowledge and wisdom with confidence in their own skin rather than feeling like they’re losing their place in the world.”