Dr. Emily Jamea is a sex and relationship therapist with over 15 years of experience. Her expertise has been featured in Oprah Magazine, CNN, USA Today, NBC, and more. She hosts Love & Libido Podcast and writes columns for Psychology Today and Healthy Women.
What’s the big idea?
Everyone can experience incredible sex. Mechanical monotony does not have to be the next chapter after a couple’s honeymoon stage. The best sex that science has to offer comes from connecting while in a state of flow. With practice, sex can send ripples of pleasure, happiness, and health across your lifespan and throughout your relationship.
Below, Emily shares five key insights from her new book, Anatomy of Desire: Five Secrets to Create Connection and Cultivate Passion. Listen to the audio version—read by Emily herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Everyone is capable of—and should—experience great sex.
An abundance of research suggests that people who feel sexually satisfied are happier in their relationships and experience lower rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. They also feel their lives are more meaningful and are more physically healthy. And yet, sexual desire is something many people struggle to tap into.
I began paying closer attention to the language my clients were using to describe the sex they wanted. They didn’t seek more frequent sex but rather better quality sex. Clients expressed: “I want to feel lost in the moment; I want the world around me to disappear; I want to experience the effortlessness and ease of the honeymoon phase.” I realized they were using words that describe a flow state.
Flow state is a term coined by American-Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. It describes the state of mind when we are so fully absorbed in an activity that we experience a loss of space and time, total focus, and a sense of unity and merger. Think of a surfer who describes being “at one” with the wave. Mihály identified eight core components of flow:
- Loss of self-consciousness.
- Complete concentration.
- Balance between challenge and skills.
- Intrinsic reward.
- A sense of effortlessness and ease.
- Clear goals with immediate feedback.
- A sense of control and surrender.
- An altered perception of time.
I turned to the academic literature to see what I could find about the relationship between flow and great sex and came up completely blank. So, I initiated my own research study. In support of my hypothesis, I found that people who experienced a flow state during sex were significantly more sexually satisfied. I called my research participants with the highest scores to learn more about what they did to get into a state of flow during sex. Several themes emerged, and these “secrets” are innate within all of us. Tapping into them is a matter of reconnecting with parts of ourselves that already exist within.
2. Reinhabiting the body for immersing in a sexual experience.
Many of my clients complain of being unable to quiet the mind enough to focus on a sexual experience fully. This is a blockade to being a sensual lover. Sensuality is the idea that we are deeply in touch with the five senses. Living a sensual life allows us to inhabit our bodies fully. If you live a typical 21st-century life, chances are you don’t spend much time in your body. We overcommit (which makes us more of human doings than human beings) and multitask more than ever. It’s not realistic to go from split attention all day long to the singular act of sex.
Mindfulness techniques offer a good first step, but my research participants took it a step further. Mindfulness teaches us to be aware of the body, but people who are fully immersed in the five senses are aware as the body. This minor change in preposition packs a major punch. Our bodies are a vital source of information, but many of us have stopped paying attention to internal experience. To experience great sex, you must journey back into your body and attune to its cues. Only then will arousal and desire align, and you can attune to your partner and experience the full spectrum of pleasure during sex.
On an individual level, try single-tasking as much as possible. It’s not realistic to go from doing five things at once all day to the singular act of sex. On a relational level, we need to touch our partners more often in between sexual experiences. Doing so helps prime the pleasure pathways. All of this will make it easier to tap into the flow component of complete concentration, which is essential to experience a state of flow during sex.
3. Have a curious, open mind.
People who have great sex challenge the ideas, beliefs, and values that they may have internalized from their society, culture, religion, and upbringing. My clients often discover that society chips away at what is considered “normal” when it comes to sex, significantly narrowing the spectrum of what they feel comfortable enjoying. My research participants, on the other hand, weren’t afraid to challenge sexual and relationship norms to explore what really fit for them as unique individuals.
Curiosity is an important personal quality. People who are curious feel their lives are more meaningful and have more intimate relationships. Being curious keeps us feeling alive, vibrant, and dynamic—important feelings that translate into the bedroom. Maintaining a sense of curiosity outside of the bedroom fostered energy and newness in people’s sex lives without necessarily trying anything new sexually. According to research on self-expansion, couples who try new things together experience huge boosts in desire and sexual satisfaction. One study found that couples who tried new things, like shucking an oyster for the first time, were 36 times more likely to have sex that day. Satisfaction in the bedroom is not always about trying the latest sex kink. At times, an intangible, energetic shift is what creates exciting intensity, even in long-term relationships.
“One study found that couples who tried new things, like shucking an oyster for the first time, were 36 times more likely to have sex that day.”
Curiosity sets people up to experience one of the most sure-fire ways to experience flow: the challenge/skills ratio. When the challenge of what you’re doing is too far above your skillset, you feel anxious. If it’s too far below, you feel bored. This is where a lot of people get stuck. They fall into the same monotonous routine and lose interest in sex. Novelty is important, but it doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. Research on flow finds that people can experience a state of flow when the challenge of what they are doing is just four percent greater than their skillset. People in my research study described that smaller, subtle changes could yield the most profound intensity in the bedroom. It’s about striking the right balance between familiar and new.
4. Emotional vulnerability with your partner is required.
Another research study I conducted examined the relationship between sensuality and curiosity with sexual satisfaction. I found that people who scored high on the sensuality and curiosity measures reported higher levels of sexual satisfaction—but there was a caveat. It didn’t matter how high their numbers were on those assessments if they felt they could not open up emotionally to their partner. Without feeling that they could be emotionally vulnerable, their sexual satisfaction scores plummeted. The emotional connection we share with our partners sets an important foundation.
A lot of people use “intimacy” as a euphemism for sex when intimacy is the one thing that sex lacks. A lot of my clients are eager to try new things to spice up their sex life, but many cower when I suggest looking into each other’s eyes when they make love. Reducing sex down to a juxtaposition of body parts eliminates one of the main components that makes human sex so wonderful: emotional connection. The research participants I spoke with who had optimal sex saw sex as not just an opportunity for physical pleasure and emotional connection; they were also vulnerable enough to see it as an opportunity for self-expression. Their partner was safe enough to create a space in which they could tap into parts of themselves or their psyche that they might otherwise not explore.
The flow element that shows up alongside vulnerability is the paradox of control. A lot of my clients complain about being unable to surrender to the sexual experience, which makes total immersion impossible. A lot of people think of surrender and control as complete opposites. But surrender is not possible if you are not also in control. Imagine doing something like skiing. You cannot surrender to the exhilaration of flying down a mountain if you are not in control of your skis. The same concept applies to sex and relationships. Often, people cannot surrender because there is not enough emotional safety, or control, in the relationship. Learning to establish more emotional vulnerability provides a springboard from which couples can surrender and explore during sex.
5. Flow-state sex is better than honeymoon-stage sex.
In the honeymoon stage, we get a rush of dopamine, norepinephrine, and oxytocin. But unfortunately, serotonin levels dip. This is what makes us so obsessive about a new partner in the early days. It’s almost like we develop short-term OCD thanks to the drop in serotonin. During a flow state, however, we get a surge of dopamine, norepinephrine, and oxytocin—just like we do in the honeymoon phase—but in addition to that, our serotonin levels increase. If that’s not enough, we get a rush of anandamide (which makes our body feel charged) and endorphins (which can help us forget our pain). I spoke to more than one research participant who saw flow-state sex as a welcome relief from chronic pain issues.
“Anything that’s good, joyful, and pleasurable requires time, practice, and intention.”
Flow doesn’t happen just because you want it to. Anything that’s good, joyful, and pleasurable requires time, practice, and intention. Flow is the third stage in a series of four stages. The first stage of flow is the struggle phase. In this phase, the body is flooded with stress hormones, causing us to tense. This is when a lot of people throw in the towel when it comes to cultivating good sex. But we must be patient because, eventually, we move to the release phase. In this second phase, we relax, and stress hormones leave the system. Next, we enter flow. This is when we focus, and everything seems to click. Finally, we enter the integration phase. In this phase, your brain categorizes what worked and what didn’t.
People who are new at this may hang out in the struggle phase for a while. You won’t experience that sense of effortlessness the first several times you try getting good at something. But I am a firm believer that great sex is possible for anyone who wants it and can be sustained across the lifespan.
To listen to the audio version read by author Emily Jamea, download the Next Big Idea App today:
