Great Sex, Naturally (20 page)

The secret to DHEA’s ability to enhance your sexuality is biochemical: as a precursor to testosterone, it plays a pivotal role in your “hormone cascade.” The diagram below shows how pregnenolone, your “mother” hormone, is a precursor to many of your other important hormones, and how they all interact in your body.

Your hormone cascade.

As you can see, DHEA converts directly into testosterone, and via testosterone, into estrogen—which is why many women need only tiny amounts of DHEA to experience dramatic libido-enhancing effects, particularly during and after midlife. DHEA is most effective when other hormones, especially estrogen, are well balanced, and it seems especially beneficial for women who are overstressed and need to rejuvenate their bodies, minds, and spirits.

While DHEA is busy enhancing your sexuality, it’s also giving you other noteworthy benefits that indirectly support your libido-building lifestyle. Studies show it can improve memory and concentration, and by stimulating cells that lay down new bone tissue, improve female bone density—which can be especially important for menopausal women.

If your DHEA level is low, you’re likely to experience reduced libido, a diminished sense of well-being, and lower overall vitality. Other symptoms may include fatigue, decreased memory, reduced fertility, poorer bone and adrenal-gland health, and a general reduction in your hormonal health. As you move forward in this chapter, you’ll discover how to evaluate your DHEA level and, if it’s low, use natural bioidentical DHEA to correct your symptoms. DHEA is best used under the guidance of a skilled health-care professional; an excessive amount can have effects in your body similar to those induced by androgens (male sex hormones), such as acne, increased facial hair, balding, and anxiety.

Testosterone: Your Even Sexier Hormone

You may think of testosterone as the male sex hormone, but it’s very much
your
hormone, too. Produced naturally by your ovaries and adrenal glands, it’s vital to your sexuality and health. Not only do you need it for a healthy libido, but it also energizes your entire being and helps keep you “jazzed” about your life. Testosterone is mostly yang—exciting; uplifting; and with qualities that allow for growth, outward motion, and creativity—and it can supercharge your sexual chi, which has powerful healing potential for your body, mind, and spirit.

As we touched on earlier in this chapter, testosterone, with the assistance of estrogen, stimulates nerve receptors in your brain, igniting your pleasure circuitry and setting sexual feelings and arousal in motion. At the same time, testosterone can give an added jolt to your sexuality by increasing your clitoris’s sensitivity to touch.

Testosterone can have wide-ranging effects on your personality, giving you an extra “edge” that may be felt in your sexual energy, or anywhere else in your life. For example, it may help you become more assertive, develop a take-charge attitude, maintain your dynamic creative drive, or summon the confidence to hold firm boundaries when you need to.

Like DHEA, testosterone can also increase your sense of well-being. Research has shown that testosterone plays a role in modulating the actions of dopamine—a brain chemical that allows you to feel joy and pleasure. When women have deficient dopamine, they’re subject not only to reduced sex drive but also feelings of hopelessness and decreased ability to handle stress.

Testosterone gives you additional benefits not directly connected to your sexuality: It helps build your bones and prevent bone loss, maintain a balanced ratio of fat to lean muscle mass, and improve your muscle strength. During midlife, it can help reduce hot flashes, night sweats, and headaches. Testosterone can also help protect your brain cells from injury, and research shows that it may help prevent the “tangled-up” neurons in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

You need a sufficient amount of testosterone in your body to make all of its benefits possible. If your level is too low, in addition to experiencing diminished libido and feeling lackluster about sex, you’re apt to be uninterested in trying new activities and feel “drab,” worn-out, and tired much of the time.

Many women who take natural testosterone find that it stimulates both their sensuality and their senses. Along with resurrected sexual desire, they often describe feeling as if they’re having flashbacks to how they felt at earlier times in their lives when healthy levels of hormones coursed through their bodies—more alert and alive than they’ve felt in years, more perceptive, and more attuned to new sensations and their environment. Some say they feel their awareness reawakening, after long slumber, to all the possibilities inherent in their bodies.

It appears that in some situations testosterone can reduce risk of breast cancer. A study reported in
Breast Cancer Research
in 2009 found that when women take bioidentical hormone therapy such as estrogen and progesterone, taking testosterone as part of the regimen may decrease breast-cancer risk. This may be due to several mechanisms of testosterone, including its abilities to increase cancer-cell death and to change receptors on estrogen-sensitive cells (which are otherwise more cancer-prone with estrogen therapy).

Later in this chapter, you’ll discover more about testosterone, including the natural bioidentical testosterone prescription that’s best for many women.

Your Hormones and Your Jing

Practitioners of ancient Chinese medicine couldn’t isolate hormones and examine them with microscopes, and they had no concept of hormones as we know them. But through careful observation they understood their energetic actions and effects on a woman’s sexuality during every phase of her life.

The traditional Chinese notion that perhaps comes closest to reflecting our modern Western understanding of hormones is
jing
—a form of your chi passed down to you by your ancestors, and a part of your life beginning with your conception. The effects of abundant jing in your body can be much like the effects of healthy, balanced hormones in Western medicine.

If you spend your jing carefully, you increase your chances of living to a healthy, ripe old age. You can preserve your jing with a life of moderation, eating good food, getting adequate sleep, and nourishing your body. You can also recycle your jing and strengthen it with certain techniques and sexual practices, some of which we’ll explore later in this book. In terms of your sexuality, if you have abundant jing, you have the energy and vitality to enjoy a robust sex life.

On the other hand, if you spend your jing quickly, you’re more prone to illness and low energy, including diminished sexual energy. You can exhaust your jing with a high-stress life; a poor diet; inadequate sleep; and excessive prescription or recreational drugs, smoking, or alcohol.

Cortisol: Your Stimulating Hormone

Produced in the small adrenal glands that sit atop your kidneys, cortisol is the “stress hormone” your body releases when you feel as if you’re running behind schedule, under pressure, and racing to catch up. Your adrenal glands are surprisingly important for your sexuality; cortisol is a stimulating, yang hormone that can make or break your libido. Let’s take a closer look at your critical cortisol-sex connection.

With cortisol, balance is everything. If you don’t have enough, your libido suffers, you tend to feel tired all the time, you lack your get-up-and-go, and your immune system doesn’t work optimally. But if your cortisol is consistently too high, day after day, as a result of chronic stress in your life, your libido is also likely to crash, in part because constant stress is exhausting and depletes the energy you need to be sexually responsive. Too much cortisol also results in feelings of fragility and agitation—not exactly what you need for great sex—and causes you to gain weight, especially around your waist.

Excessive cortisol can wreak hormonal havoc by throwing your other hormones out of balance and jeopardizing many of the benefits they offer for your sexuality and health. Instead of consistent menstrual cycles with balanced levels of estrogen, progesterone, DHEA, and testosterone, your body may experience a continuous “alarm” state. As a result, you may not ovulate, which lowers your progesterone level and in turn can cause much heavier menstrual flow and worsened PMS symptoms—again, hardly what you want to put you in the mood for pleasure. In addition, excessive cortisol can inhibit the function of your thyroid hormone, which, as you’ll discover, also contributes to your libido.

When you have the right level of cortisol, it benefits your health and sexual energy in myriad ways. It gives you the opportunity to fully experience your libido, supports the health of your immune system, and promotes normal blood-sugar regulation. If you have stress in your life, it helps you respond in an appropriate, healthy way.

Your body has a natural cortisol rhythm that also supports your health and sexuality. You feel best when your level is high in the morning and slowly subsides toward evening; you get out of bed bursting with energy, and at the end of the day you feel tired and readily able to fall asleep. Paradoxically, cortisol is a stress hormone that helps you sleep through the night. A healthy cortisol level provides energy you need by day, yet quiets your mind at night, allowing your body to rejuvenate, heal from illness, and maintain a healthy libido.

If your natural cycle of cortisol is out of kilter—as a result of unmitigated stress or low blood sugar—your cortisol level may be low in the morning and high at night. In this scenario, you can experience difficulty waking in the morning, and insomnia at night—a major libido killer.

When you’re asleep, cortisol is responsible for converting sugar into glucose to feed your sleeping brain. You need a steady supply of glucose, throughout the night, to get a full night’s rest, but if your cortisol is too low, you don’t convert enough glucose to let your brain stay asleep through the night. At some point your brain gets “starved” of glucose, and your adrenal glands start sending out adrenaline, another stress hormone, instead of cortisol. You may experience what amounts to an adrenaline rush in the middle of the night, waking suddenly, as if an alarm has gone off in your head, with your thoughts racing. It may be hours before you can fall back to sleep.

Many people are unaware that insufficient cortisol at night can be caused by past lifestyle issues. For instance, if in the past you’ve had chronically high cortisol that resulted from unrelenting stress, your adrenal glands can become “burned-out” and unable to release adequate cortisol when you need it. You can remain in that state long after the period of stress has passed.

Another cortisol imbalance that can deplete your sexual energy, also caused by chronic stress, is known as
cortisol steal
. This happens when a high demand for cortisol “steals” from your production of other hormones. As you saw in the “hormone cascade” diagram earlier in this chapter, your hormones are interrelated, and some can be converted into others. If you have a typical case of cortisol steal, your body responds to the cortisol demand by converting some of your progesterone into cortisol; as a result, your progesterone isn’t able to perform all of its important functions. Cortisol essentially pilfers progesterone, your progesterone gets shortchanged, and your health and libido suffer the consequences.

In an extreme case of cortisol steal, one of my patients survived a frightening near-death experience, after which she remained for years in a state of post-traumatic stress that exhausted her adrenal glands and caused acutely imbalanced hormone levels. Although only in her 30s, she stopped menstruating, her hair turned white, and she effectively went into early menopause. In an effort to meet the urgent demand for cortisol, her body had “stolen” from its production of estrogen, progesterone, DHEA, and testosterone. (Fortunately, she was able to recover, and eventually resumed having periods.) This shows what can happen in a woman’s body under unusual stress, but even low stress, on a daily basis, can gradually increase your body’s cortisol demand to the point that your overall hormone production becomes imbalanced. This can have far-reaching effects on your hormonal health, wear down your body, and deprive you of many of the joys of a healthy sex life.

If you’re chronically stressed as you approach midlife, and your cortisol is in high demand and your adrenal glands can’t keep up with your body’s other hormonal needs—particularly if you’re ovulating inconsistently, or not at all—you may experience an especially difficult menopausal transition. When your ovaries go through their natural midlife “career change” and stop producing hormones, your adrenal glands normally pick up where your ovaries leave off. But if chronic stress has compromised your adrenal glands, they have a hard time stepping up to the plate. This can result in exaggerated menopausal symptoms: excessive insomnia, dramatic night sweats and hot flashes, and erratic mood changes. Healthy adrenal-gland function and cortisol production are essential to a strong menopausal transition and a vigorous midlife libido.