The Practical Guide To Getting Out Of Your Head During Sex
My husband is on top of me, doing all the right things. The lights are dimmed, the door is locked, the kids are asleep.
By every objective measure, this is exactly what I wanted. So why am I mentally drafting tomorrow's grocery list?
If you’ve ever had this experience, where your body is in one place and your brain is somewhere else entirely, usually somewhere boring like “did I move the laundry to the dryer,” you’re not alone. Researchers call this cognitive distraction during sex, and they’ve found women report it significantly more often than men and at much higher rates than we generally admit. In fact, women’s minds wander during sex about 40% of the time, while men are more like 25%. Sometimes the distraction takes the form of self-monitoring, the inner critic that’s wondering if your stomach looks weird or if you’re taking too long to come (a phenomenon sex therapists call “spectatoring,” coined by Masters and Johnson in 1970). But just as often, the distraction is mundane and external. The laundry you need to fold, the email sitting in your inbox that needs a response, the thing your boss said in a meeting earlier today, the show you were watching ten minutes ago. Either way, your brain has decided the bedroom is not the most important place to be right now, and the encounter suffers for it.
Research has found that the more this happens, the more it correlates with lower sexual satisfaction, less consistent orgasms, and lower sexual esteem. In other words, your brain is doing exactly what most women’s brains do, but this doesn’t mean we should ignore the problem.
Disclaimer: This article is intended for readers 18 and older. It contains explicit adult content and is intended for married women for educational purposes only. Reader discretion is advised.
