Change Your Brain Every Day - Sex on the Brain – Part 1 of an Interview with Dr. Emily Morse

Episode Date: April 10, 2017

Dr. Emily Morse is the host of “Sex with Emily,” a live radio show and top downloaded podcast on iTunes. Morse has appeared as a guest expert on countless radio and television shows, as well as been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle for her expertise in sex and relationships. Emily’s first book Hot Sex: Over 200 Things You Can Try Tonight was released in October 2011. In this episode, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana talk with Emily about how to prioritize intimacy, and how “communication is lubrication”.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics. Amen Clinics represents a true paradigm shift in mental health, utilizing SPECT imaging technology for assessing brain function. Amen Clinics focuses on personalized treatment plans and has an 85% proven outcome rate for patients. For more information, visit amenclinics.com or call at 1-888-288-9834. Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond and welcome to the Brain Warriors Way hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health

is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amen. Welcome back to the Brain Warriors Way. This is going to be a fun day. We are discussing sex with Emily. Now I know that doesn't sound quite right, so let me explain. We're here today with Dr. Emily Morse, who is a sex and relationship expert. She's also the host of the top downloaded podcast, Sex with Emily. She's helped millions of struggling couples achieve sex and relationships they desire

in order to maintain happiness and longevity. She's the number one dating and sex expert on datingadvice.com and Twitter. She's launched Sex with Emily radio show and podcast and became Bravo Television's personality on Misadvised. I'm gonna just read some of the highlights on her bio because we would literally be here all day. She is definitely the sex expert. She is author of the popular book, Hot Sex,

Over 200 Things You Can Try Tonight. She's the weekly guest and co-host of the nationally syndicated radio show, Loveline, with Dr. Drew Pinsky, who is a friend of ours. We love Dr. Drew. And earned her Doctor of Human Sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. Some of this I'm going to save for the next podcast, or we'll be here all day. So we have four with Emily. So it's our week of sex with Emily. Thank you so much for being part of the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Talk to us about about why sex and how you became passionate about this topic. Okay. I became passionate about sex because I was one of those very late bloomers when it came to sex.

I didn't have a lot of information about it, a lot of education about it, like a lot of people, right? And I don't think it's changed much today. But also, I've always been very confused by sex and also very intrigued by it and i thought i don't understand how people continue to have sex for a lifetime and keep it interesting and also why i just well okay going back to early on i never masturbated it didn't occur to me to masturbate when i was a child and i was having sex i'm like this isn't so great this seems kind

of overrated and and also as i got older i was like i don't see how you have sex with one person and i was a documentary filmmaker before i started this podcast and i thought well we all learn from each other's stories and i'm always asked a lot of questions so i i started this podcast 12 years ago i invited a bunch of friends over, married, gay, straight, single, and I just started interviewing them about their sex lives and their relationships. And I thought, well, I want to understand, like, what am I not getting? Because when people used to say, oh, I had the best sex in my life last night, or sex is amazing, this and that, I thought, I don't think that I've had the best sex in my life. And I've been covered too,

so I was like, well, maybe I'm missing something. And so it really just came from this mission to better myself and to hear other people's stories because I feel like we all learn from each other's stories. So that's where it started. And now 12 years later, I realize that sex is everything. I believe we need a lot better sex and sex a lot more frequently and we need to be in a much better world right now well and one of the things one of the reasons

we wanted to have you on our show is because this is an issue for people who have brain issues too so like you said if your sex isn't good in a relationship in a marriage and an intimate you know you don't have that intimacy it can can really damage relationships. But if you've got brain issues like ADD or head injuries, or you're too impulsive, or you don't know how to communicate right with your partner, it can damage relationships. Oh, it devastates them. You know, I've been a psychiatrist for 35 years and people who have affairs or people who have bipolar disorder, where when they go into a manic state, they become hypersexual. It's just devastating. Although, you know, I'm always trying to find the positive way to reframe things. I had one ADD guy that had been married 11 times. And,

you know, my first session with him, I just, I said, wow, you're really good at getting chicks. Right, right. I like it. Don't shame them. Tell us some of the big lessons that you have learned that really resonate with your listeners. What are some of the big nuggets that are important? I would say that the big nuggets are that, well, you were just saying that sex becomes this huge problem in relationships because people don't talk about it. And I would say communication is a loop patient. And the more that you talk about sex, the better sex you're going to have. And the problem is when people get into a relationship, and if you talk about people

with ADD or with a lot, even in any relationship relationship sex is going to become a little stale a little after a while then you know the novelty isn't there anymore you get busy with family life and children and you put sex in the back burner and you think you know what i'm going to come back and we'll come back to that once we're done you know once the kids are older once the house gets built once i get this job you know but the problem is it's on the back burner and you never go back well i think that's sort of the normal thing we as a society think that's normal so completely harassed we don't prioritize i would never get away with that but that's but that's sort of what we think is normal yeah yeah we do think it's normal we don't here's the problem is that we don't we don't know how to

talk about sex not only are we not taught about sex, we're not taught about our bodies, we're not taught about pleasure, we're just taught about, we're taught in school how to get, you know, using STDs. Right, how to avoid sex and stay away from problems. How to avoid sex and not only that, we're not told that sex is actually important and how to prioritize sex. Right. How to prioritize sex in a relationship and why if you don't prioritize it then you're just like roommates because there's

nothing there to bond you there's not the intimacy you know that's funny if i could interject really quickly our 13 year old daughter gets so mad at us she's so disgusted because we do the opposite and people are going to think that we're crazy but i frequently where we joke around we're affectionate with each other. She's like, ew, gross, gag me, you know, whatever. And so, but privately, I talk to her a lot about it. She's like, she goes, mom, no mom talks to their kid about sex like this. I go, but they should.

Sweetie, I go, there's nothing wrong with sex. You just need to put it in its proper place. You know, when you are married, when you are in a loving, intimate relationship, when you are responsible, it's, that's a good thing that you need to make sure that you actually do understand she's like gross i don't want to hear anymore here's the other problem so i so i feel for parents because we do need to normalize sex because sex is like a bad sex is a bad word and sex is dangerous and it's wrong and women little girls aren't taught like to love your body actually the first thing we learn about sex is to cover up and they're said to be shamed about

there's like a boy there's a point every young girl's life little girl's life you know maybe she's four or five years old and she sells her shirt off and she's riding her bike outside and someone says put your shirt on do something we're just told to cover up that we're wrong that our body parts are dirty you know and and we're never we're never that never is reframed and we're never said you know it's okay to love yourself and your body and it's a lot of pleasure yourself and so here's the other thing about parenting though too i think is that kids don't really want to hear it from their parents necessarily but also even parents who do try to talk to their kids about it typically the conversation goes like this like well if you have any questions,

please come to me. I'm always here for you. And I think the problem with children is they don't even know what the questions are. Yeah. No, we actually just bring it up. I actually think she listens and she appreciates it. She just doesn't want us to know that. Does that make sense? She's taking it in. She just doesn't want us to know it because it would seem weird for her. Okay. So the first big lesson is communication. Communication is lubrication. I like that. That's actually really, that's interesting. That's a good thing. Thoughtful. Before we have to stop, what is the second one you think for couples who are really struggling in this area? I think that for couples who are struggling, I would say foreplay starts after the last orgasm. And what I mean by that is usually to stay connected, to stay, you know, the intellectual stimulation, to stay connected to your partner.

So, you know, text each other, talk to each other. I mean, the brain, like, you know, send a sexy text or what you want to, you know, what you want to do next time you see each other talk to each other i mean the brain like you know send a sexy text or what you want to you know what you want to do next time you see each other talk about your sex life stay engaged with your sex life um and and continue to keep exploring it and keeping it interesting and just prioritizing it and i like that so talk about what you like talk about be affectionate be playful yeah exactly be playful be affectionate, be playful. Yeah, exactly. Be playful, be affectionate. Say, you know what I think?

That's why like, even in my book, 200 Things You Should Try Tonight, it is exhausting. I don't recommend you try them on one night. Open it up and just say, oh, this sounds interesting. Or, you know, just like it's fantasy,

using fantasy too. I think that we're shamed a lot for that as well. And again, if you're, when your brain gets on board for sex, your body will follow. But if our brain is shut down for sex, we're not primed, we're not ready. And men and women are so different with the way we get aroused, right? You know, women are still cookers, men are frying pans.

So you're ready to go. And we're like, I didn't even see you walk in the door. I haven't been thinking about sex all day. I've got, I'm busy. I just got home. I'm making dinner. I'm doing this or that. So I think that the way that we even approach sex is so different.

And then understanding that, understanding that it's okay that we're not approaching it the same way, but coming together. And then also, yeah, talking about it. Like people that go, that's not sexy. I want my partner to know what I want. He should be a mind reader. She should be a mind reader. I mean, I've never met a mind reader.

Have you? So yeah, talking about it, even if it's uncomfortable, even if you're like, I don't know where to start, that's okay. You can say, I don't know where to start, but I know that sex is really, really important. And I know that like, if we don't have sex, that things aren't going so well with us. So let's just, you know, even if it's handholdinging it's massage it's connecting it's keeping that intimacy alive so you said something really important that i like and i want to actually sort of bring it just reiterate it before we go to our next podcast is um that we approach sex very differently and one thing i

have heard a lot from my friends from some of our, is that men get upset because they feel like their wives or girlfriends or whatever are not as interested in sex because they don't initiate as often. And what you just said, that doesn't necessarily mean, because I know because I'm talking to women, doesn't mean they're not as interested. Sometimes they want to be pursued. That's one reason.

The other reason that I've heard is because they do, it takes them a lot longer to sort of unwind and start to think about things. So that miscommunication of you don't want it as much as I do is not necessarily true. That's sort of an ant, an automatic negative thought that we need to work on. Exactly.

It's not top of mind for us. And so we're not thinking what we need to think. It's top of mind for us. I wrote a book. So I wrote two books in this area. One is called The Brain in Love, which was so much fun for me to write. I was a columnist for Men's Health and actually wrote a cover story for them, Sex on the Brain, which was so much fun to write. But then I wrote Unleash the Power of the Female Brain, looking at brain differences between males and females. And men are always looking to be sort

of excited and turned on, which is why they race cars. And women's brains are much busier, like dramatically busier, which means they're more worried and they have more forethought. So they're spinning more and you need to calm them, soothe them. And one of the other big things we learned is not everybody's brain is the same. So we have impulsive people, compulsive people, sad and anxious people. And so know your partner's brain so you can do the right strategies for them. If you are married to an ADD woman, she needs variety. She needs excitement. She's much more likely to have sex with you if you've just jumped out of a plane together than if you

went to a sappy you know loving movie but do that with an anxious woman and she'll never jump out of the plane and she'll hate you and she'll never talk to you again so yes no i i know my wife's brain it's so easy calm holding i'd rather go do something like the plane. Right, no, I take you to the firing range, and all of a sudden you're like all wound up and ready to go. You just said that on our podcast. I did that. Yes, I did. We are going to be back with Dr. Emily Morris.

We're going to continue to talk about sex and the brain. When we come back, we're going to talk about common problems couples have. And Dr. Emily's solutions, stay with us. You're on the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Thanks for listening to today's show, the Brain Warriors Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes,

you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.