When nothing has worked to fix your sex life, it’s easy to decide nothing will. You’ve tried a few things, they didn’t help, and so you stop trying. I understand why. But that conclusion is a belief, not a fact, and it’s the belief that keeps people stuck in their relationships and sex lives for years.
I recorded this episode on a walk around my neighborhood, up the steep hill I’d been begrudging and semi-avoiding for months. Somewhere on the climb I realized the hill wasn’t the problem. My negativity bias was. The same is often true of the things you’ve decided can’t change in your relationship.
In this episode:
- Why avoiding a problem that feels hopeless makes it feel even more hopeless, and how that shows up as low energy, numbing, and overworking
- The belief that the past predicts the future, and why you already know it isn’t true
- How I turned the hill I was dreading into my favorite loop, and what that reminded me about negativity bias
- Why hope isn’t something that falls from the sky and hits you in the head like an acorn, and the simple writing practice I use to build it
- What teaching kids and adults to swim showed me about believing change is possible
- Why every hard change I’ve made, from quitting smoking and drinking to earning a PhD and building a business, started with hope before I was ready to invest the time, effort, or money to actually do it
Hope is the part you build for free. And it has to come first.
Topics: feeling stuck in relationship, improving your sex life, negativity bias, avoidance, building hope, making change
Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and “Shoulds” Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide
Follow me on Substack for deeper dives into the research and notes from my practice at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/
The Guide to Finding Your Secret Turn-Ons includes the Wheel of Erotic Emotions: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel
© Laura Jurgens, PhD, Pleasure Uprising. Quote with attribution and a link to the original. No reproduction in full and no use for AI training.
