Great Sex, Naturally (19 page)

As long as all of these hormones work well together, you’ll have hormonal harmony and sexual health. To experience full sexual arousal, you need to be contractive and relaxed (yin), but you also need to be expansive and stimulated (yang). Let’s take a look at each of the hormones on your yin–yang continuum, and how they influence your sexuality.

Estrogen: Your Compassion (and Passion) Hormone

Estrogen is your great connector; it enhances your feelings of intimacy and tenderness, and facilitates your ability to bond deeply with another person. Essential to your sexuality, it sustains and promotes your femininity, keeping your libido primed to flow in abundance. Estrogen is also life giving; when you were in your mother’s womb, you were bathed in a protective layer of uterine tissue that was stimulated to develop by estrogen.

From the Chinese medicine perspective, estrogen is important to your vitality, and very yin because it softens, moistens, nurtures, allows for greater flexibility, and accentuates your deepest feminine nature. As you’ll discover, it’s because of fluctuations in your estrogen level that your body releases your “Heavenly Water” during much of your life.

At puberty, a surge of estrogen fleshed out your hips, breasts, and curves, and developed body hair in your most intimate places, as you magically blossomed into a young woman. Each month during your menstruating years, estrogen enhances your fertility and forms the lining in your uterus—the endometrium—to cushion and support a potential embryo. If pregnancy doesn’t take place, as your estrogen level drops, the lining sloughs off and becomes your menstrual flow.

Through your menstrual cycles, estrogen connects you with the phases of the moon. For many women, the monthly rise and fall of estrogen creates cycles that closely correspond to the lunar calendar. Ancient cultures recognized this link between menstrual cycles and the natural world: the words
month, moon
, and
menstrual
all share a common ancestral root.

Estrogen, which is made in your ovaries and adrenal glands, is critical for your sexual energy and vitality in many ways. One of the most important is its ability to support your libido by interacting with testosterone in your brain. You need adequate amounts of both estrogen and testosterone to turn on your brain’s arousal circuits. When you have optimal estrogen, testosterone can effectively stimulate nerve receptors to create the sparks that kindle passion and pleasure.

Estrogen can help you feel good in other ways as well. It’s directly linked with your sense of well-being, because it works with serotonin (your “feel-good” brain chemical) to enhance your moods. Serotonin increases feelings of happiness and decreases feelings of anxiety, and research shows that estrogen and serotonin levels rise and fall in tandem. This is why many women have mood swings, feel depressed, and experience erratic food cravings before their periods, but not at other times in their cycles.

As you discovered in
Chapter 3
, estrogen plays a key role in your potential for sexual pleasure by maintaining the health and elasticity of your vaginal and vulvar tissues, including your clitoris, urethra, and inner and outer labia. These tissues are estrogen-dependent, which means they need adequate estrogen to stay flexible and moist. Without sufficient estrogen, they can lose much of their natural lubrication, making pleasurable sex difficult or impossible. (Estrogen also supports connective tissues throughout your body—it can serve as a natural moisturizer; improve collagen content; help prevent wrinkles; and give you soft, smooth, supple skin.) And as you’ve also seen, estrogen helps maintain the ideal pH of your vaginal tissues, thwarting vaginal infections due to bacteria or yeast, as well as urinary tract infections—either of which can obstruct your enjoyment of sex.

Estrogen not only played a major role in enlarging your breasts at puberty—like fertilizer to soil, it allowed them to bloom from tiny buds to the fuller breasts of a woman—but during each of your menstrual cycles, as your estrogen levels wax and wane, so does the volume of your breast tissue. Estrogen also heightens the touch-sensitivity of your breasts, which are important for your femininity, integral to your sensual arousal and response, and attractive to your partner.

Other benefits of estrogen include increasing your stress tolerance, preventing inflammation in your brain, potentially helping to maintain your memory, and supporting your blood-brain barrier—a thin cover that protects your brain from environmental insults and toxins. Researchers hypothesize that women may help preserve their brain cells and prevent age-related dementia if they begin taking estrogen in early menopause.
¹

Your bones thrive in the presence of estrogen. This hormone stimulates cells that build new bone, and inhibits ones that pull calcium from your bones. Having adequate levels of estrogen from your teens to your 40s is important for maintaining healthy, strong bones; it helps you make deposits into your “bone bank”—which you need when your hormone levels and bone density drop at menopause.

Estrogen is your best friend when you have just the right amount, but a foe if you have too much or too little. An excess can lead to breast cysts, heavy menstrual cycles, exaggerated premenstrual symptoms, uterine fibroid tumors, and ovarian cysts, as well as increase your risk of estrogen-related cancers. Insufficient estrogen can cause you to feel irritable and overwhelmed; result in the discomforts some women experience postpartum; and lead to menopausal symptoms of insomnia, anxiety, hot flashes, and vaginal dryness. Later in this chapter, you’ll discover different kinds of estrogen, ways of enhancing your body’s ability to produce the friendliest forms, and how to use natural bioidentical estrogen replacement.

Taking Care of Your Breasts

The health of your breasts is a part of your sexual health, and reflective of your overall wellness. All of the lifestyle tips you’ve explored earlier in this book will help you maintain healthy breasts. To further preserve your breast health, be aware of your risk factors for breast cancer, examine your breasts often, and get screened regularly for cancer. Remember that your breasts are more highly hormone-sensitive than other parts of your body. Use hormone replacement therapy only if you have to, and take the lowest dose you can for the shortest time necessary. If you take estrogen or progesterone for menopausal symptoms, use only natural, bioidentical hormones.

Progesterone: Your Libido-Grounding Hormone

Progesterone helps maintain your hormonal equilibrium and provide a strong, stable basis for your libido. In addition, it can ease anxiety, induce restful sleep, and “relax” your connective tissues. It has primarily yin qualities, but can also be yang in its support of your energy-building adrenal glands.

Made in your ovaries and adrenal glands, progesterone has a unique ability to enhance your sexuality because it can be a precursor to testosterone—as you’ll discover, your sexiest hormone—and promote your body’s production of cortisol, which can also affect your libido. In addition, progesterone influences your sexual energy by supporting your thyroid hormone (which regulates the metabolism of every cell in your body), and nurtures your libido by helping you sleep. Being able to sleep soundly can increase your ability to take pleasure in sex … to sleep, perchance to enhance.

When progesterone is released after you ovulate, it helps prevent estrogen from becoming too prolific, and your uterine lining from becoming too thick. It can also help settle down your nervous system and reduce heart palpitations associated with menopausal hormone changes.

If you’re in your middle or late 30s and you want to become pregnant, taking natural progesterone may improve your fertility by helping prepare your uterine lining for a fertilized egg to implant. Many patients in this age bracket who try unsuccessfully to become pregnant for many months, or years, easily conceive once they start taking natural progesterone.

If you become pregnant, your levels of progesterone soar in support of your pregnancy, with many effects and benefits. You may have a “pregnancy glow,” and the feelings of well-being and vibrant health that many women describe when pregnant; both can be due, in part, to progesterone. By relaxing your connective tissues, the surge of progesterone helps soften your ligaments and allow for the baby’s safe passage through your pelvis.

Progesterone can also come to your aid if you experience postpartum depression. After childbirth your hormone levels, including progesterone, decline sharply. Taking natural progesterone can mitigate feelings of despair during this otherwise special time.

Like many women, you may experience decreasing levels of progesterone in your late 30s or early 40s. This can be the result of a stressful lifestyle or simply because you’re entering a less fertile time in your life. Either way, you may tend to have an imbalance—not enough progesterone compared to estrogen—creating a condition called
estrogen dominance
. Symptoms include increased breast tenderness, breast swelling, water retention in your tissues, bloating (especially of the abdomen), increased premenstrual symptoms, exacerbated menstrual cramps, heavier periods, and more clotting in your menstrual flow.

A classic sign that you may have inadequate progesterone is insomnia in the second half of your menstrual cycle—particularly if you often awaken in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. Another sign is anxiety that occurs only during the second half of your cycle; progesterone has the ability to activate GABA receptors in your brain that induce mental calmness. Both of these symptoms can compromise your libido, since adequate sleep and a calm mind are essential for your peak sexual energy.

Many symptoms of low progesterone can be alleviated with herbal support to enhance your body’s natural progesterone production or by taking natural bioidentical progesterone in the second half of your cycle. As you continue this chapter, you’ll discover more about both approaches.

Your Moon Cycle: The Ebb and Flow of Your “Heavenly Water”

If you’re the typical female, your “moon cycle” begins around age 12 and continues until about age 50, when you experience a gradual cessation of your cycles. Day one of your cycle is the first day of your period; the initial part of your 28-day cycle, typically the first 14 days, is known as the
follicular phase
. During this phase, estrogen predominates, reaching its highest level and stimulating the growth of your uterine lining. If you have regular menstrual cycles, you’re most likely to be fertile at midcycle, around day 14, when you ovulate (release a ripe egg) and your ovaries form a tissue mass called the
corpus luteum
, which releases progesterone. Your sexual appetite crests during the follicular phase, becoming especially yang at midcycle, when your urge to procreate is strongest.

During the second half of your cycle, known as the
luteal phase
, progesterone is abundant, and estrogen is also likely to be high. At the end of your cycle, estrogen and progesterone both plummet, allowing your body to release the endometrial lining as your menstrual flow, and your sexual energy wanes.

Traditional Chinese medicine provides a refreshing alternative to modern terms like
menstrual flow
or the generic
period
. As mentioned in the Introduction to this book, ancient Chinese practitioners didn’t refer to a woman’s menstrual flow as blood, but rather as her “Heavenly Water.” (It was sometimes also called her “Dew of Heaven.”) Like many women in the West, you may feel that the topic of menstruation is saturated with negative connotations. Imagine how differently you might feel about your monthly flow if you consistently described it with such a heavenly metaphor!

DHEA: Your Sexy Hormone

A hormone with far-reaching effects, DHEA (short for the tongue twister
dehydroepiandrosterone
) elevates your libido, induces a sense of well-being, enhances fertility, builds bones, and more. With both yin and yang qualities, it nourishes your brain and ovaries while also supporting your entire hormonal system, especially your adrenal glands, and building your overall health.

DHEA is produced primarily by your adrenal glands, but also by your ovaries and brain. It enhances your sexuality; and sex, in turn, can increase its release in your body. Some of the health benefits of sex that we outlined at the beginning of
Chapter 1
are due, in part, to the release of DHEA during arousal and orgasm.

DHEA’s ability to boost your libido and your moods was demonstrated in a study published in 2005 in the
Archives of General Psychiatry
, which found that supplemental DHEA significantly improved sexual functioning and successfully treated depression in women and men aged 45 to 65. Although the dose was unusually high, it powerfully impacted the libido and mental state of those who took it. Another study, which showed that DHEA can enhance fertility and pregnancy rates in older women (by increasing the quality of their eggs), confirmed its beneficial effects on sex and mood; a number of the study’s participants reported “side effects” of increased libido and improved well-being.