Struggling with painful sexual intercourse or vaginismus? Contact us for help.

Sleep vs female sexual desire, genital response

Does it matter how much sleep you (a female) get when it comes to sexual desire and genital response?  Does the number of hours you slept a concrete measure of your sexual interest in absence of other contributing factors?

Fact: being tired, exhausted, or overall fatigued will push sexual interest down quite a bit on a woman’s priority list even if she finds herself reflecting on how nice it would be to engage in a gratifying sexual encounter.  This is because sexual arousal is a choice that can be just as easily pushed aside in favor of other, more desired options (sleep? A hot, relaxing bath?).

Fact: women can easily recall ‘hot’ sexual times even if tired or after a short night sleep when excitement was in the air, i.e.  a new relationship, after a long separation, while on vacation, etc.  How so?  The operative word is ‘excitement,‘ as in new and exciting, adventurous, mysterious, promising, exploratory, emotional — the engine behind female sexuality.

Fact: while the clitoris is the female erogenous organ, her mind is the prime sexual organ, filtering and driving sexual desire and genital response.  Both must work in harmony in order to allow sexual response.

With the above, we hope that a March 2015 article titled The Impact of Sleep on Female Sexual Response and Behavior: a Pilot Study will not become a diagnostic tool or a treatment protocol for addressing female sexuality.

About The Author

vaginismus specialist Dr. Ditza Katz team member Women's Therapy Center

Post a comment

Table of Contents