icon-account icon-glass

Popular Searches

Popular Products

The Lean Protein
Whey protein powder for weight-loss.

CATEGORIES

How To Live Your Best Sexually Well Life

11th February 2021

health Life

11th February 2021

By Shivraj Bassi

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, it’s the time of year when people tend to take stock of their sex life. Sexual wellness is just as important to overall wellbeing as eating a healthy balanced diet and working out regularly, and it deserves as much consideration and attention in your life as mental and physical health. Unfortunately, sexual wellness can often be pushed to the side because of shame, misinformation and a lack of understanding and ability to know what being sexually fulfilled means. 

It’s possible to have a flawless exercise regime, to be eating all your fruits and vegetables every day and doing yoga and mindfulness every night and still be sexually unhappy. Sexual wellness impacts every other area of your life, plus of course affecting your relationships, both with others and yourself. 

Kate Moyle is a psychosexual and relationship therapist and host of The Sexual Wellness Sessions podcast. Having worked in the business for eight years, she’s an expert when it comes to fulfilling your sexual destiny, overcoming issues and knowing how your sex life can impact other areas of your existence, both positively and negatively. Innermost spoke to her about what sexual wellness means, and how we can all practise some self-love this Valentine’s Day. 

Hi Kate! Tell me about what you do and why you do it. 

I went into sexual therapy because I never understood why we don’t talk about sex and sexual happiness in the same way we talk about other problems. I want to change the messaging around sex, normalise having conversations about it and improve sex education. It felt to me as though all of these hugely important issues were playing out behind closed doors and if I can change that, I will have a huge impact on people’s lives. 

I think it’s the best job in the world. I get to help people make changes that they’re desperate for, and take away their shame and embarrassment. 

Why is sexual wellness important?

Our whole lives, we’re picking up stated and unstated messages about sex. Then when we get to the point of being sexually active, we’re expected to be experts on the subject despite having had almost no guidance. School sex ed is almost wholly inadequate, and this way of being is confusing and damaging. 

What happens in the bedroom affects our mental health, self-esteem and self-confidence. Sex can be a microcosm of what else is happening in our lives and it drastically affects our identities and how we see ourselves. By normalising talking about sex in an open, honest, unembarassed and curious way, people will know that they’re not alone and that will help to create a cultural shift into making society a sex positive place. 

What are some of the most common problems people experience around sexual wellness?

Photo by Malvestida Magazine on Unsplash

Performance anxiety is right at the top, such as worry around if you're doing a good job, being inexperienced. Having a previous negative sexual experience, having a bad breakup or being nervous about being in a relationship again are also common. For men, this can look like erectile dysfunction, for women, vaginismus or pain. Other common issues include distraction and not being able to get into a sexual headspace. 

To start thinking about working through these issues, we need to think about what desire means, what pushes on our accelerators and what pushes on our brakes, as well as working on understanding our bodies. 

How does sexual wellness interact with overall wellness?

The biggest problem is the assumption that these two things aren’t linked. For example, if someone is experiencing stress at work, comes home and then can’t get into the right headspace for sex, we can see how their work life is impacting their relationships. These relationship and sexual worries then feed into their work life, and the cycle goes around and around. 

Sexual wellness should be sat alongside all other forms of wellness. Everything else in our lives has a massive impact on sex, especially mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, and medications for those conditions. 

What are some signs that someone isn’t thriving, sexually?

You have to think about it in terms of where you’re at in terms of your sex life. Do you feel happy, is what you’re doing working for you, are you enjoying it? Give yourself a sexual self-review, check in with yourself and really ask yourself how you feel about sex. The biggest sex organ in the body is the brain, so how we think about sex matters. 

With Valentine’s Day approaching, what tips would you give to people who want to improve their sexual wellness?

Open up how you think about sex and the definition of it. Most people have gone through life thinking about sex in one way and never questioned that until it became a problem. 

Sex in so much more than penetration - it’s about pleasure, fun and mixing up your routine. 

Communication is the most important part of it, even when you’re talking to yourself. Your pleasure matters, and you have to dedicate some time to your body and be kind and positive with yourself to have a positive, healthy and satisfying sex life. 

A good way to start a conversation about sex is asking your sexual partner what they like and talking about your sex life together in positive ways, such as saying ‘I really enjoy it when you do that’. This will help you move towards an open dialogue with each other. Our partners are not mind readers, so without communication everything is based on assumption. 

A good place to start is by changing just one thing at a time each time you have sex. The position, using a sex toy or not using one, turning the lights on or off, switching up the location - you don’t have to be intimidated by changing things up and breaking away from your routine. 

What’s your advice on getting over sexual shame, and what are some resources to help improve sexual wellness?

Remember that you’re not alone, and start by challenging the messaging around sex. Start thinking about sex differently by opening up your field of vision in terms of sex and how you define it. Our culture has confusing sexual messages, so you have to actively seek out a way of challenging them and go looking for that information in the right places. 

Read sex positive books, listen to podcasts, learn other people’s sexual perspectives, follow sex positive social media accounts and consider seeing a sex and relationship therapist if you feel you need to. This will open up your field of vision in terms of sex and how you define it. 

< Older post Newer post >

Need Expert Advice?

Take the quiz

Take the quiz

If you're not sure where to start, take our 5 minute health consultation to get product recommendations tailored to your goals.
Read more

Other Insights

The Glow Blend: A Confession

The Glow Blend: A Confession

I need to tell you something I've never said publicly, and it's not flattering. When our product team first brought me a plan for a collagen supplement, my honest reaction was no. Not "let me think about it." A flat no. And if I'm being fully honest about why, it wasn't the science. It was that collagen felt, in my head, like a beauty category. Something for someone else's brand. Not ours. I built Innermost around performance and evidence. Protein, creatine, mushrooms, electrolytes. Things I could point to a study for and feel comfortable talking about at a dinner table full of people who workout regularly. Collagen sat in a different mental folder. Skincare aisle. Jars with gold lids and brand sponsorship by one of the Kardashians. I'd absorbed a version of what "beauty" meant without ever examining it. The argument in the room So we had the argument internally. A proper one. A few people on the team pushed back hard, and rightly so. One of them put it to me plainly: we started Innermost to follow the evidence wherever it goes, not to follow it everywhere except the places that feel awkward. That line stuck with me. Here's what changed my mind, and it wasn't a feeling. It was the research. What the evidence actually says Collagen is the most abundant protein in your body. It's structural, it's in your skin, your joints, your gut lining, and production declines steadily from your mid-twenties onward. That's not a marketing claim, that's basic physiology. The question was never whether collagen matters. It was whether supplementing it actually does anything, and that's where most of the category falls apart. Most collagen products on the market use whole collagen molecules, which are too large to be absorbed effectively when you drink them. The ones that do use hydrolysed peptides, which are broken down into smaller chains your body can actually take up, still run into a second problem: dose. A lot of labels list collagen content that sits well below the 2 to 10 grams used in the trials that show measurable effects on skin elasticity and hydration. You're paying for a placebo with good branding. The ingredient most brands leave out The third problem is the one that convinced me completely. Vitamin C isn't a nice-to-have alongside collagen. It's a required co-factor for your body to actually synthesise collagen at the cellular level. Without adequate vitamin C, the enzymes responsible for stabilising collagen structure don't function properly. You can take a perfectly dosed hydrolysed peptide and still get a fraction of the benefit if the product doesn't include enough vitamin C alongside it. Most don't. They sell you the raw material and leave out the one thing your body needs to use it. Once I saw the category clearly, laid out like that, the decision stopped being about how I felt and started being about what the evidence supported. That's the whole operating principle of Innermost. I couldn't defend saying no to a legitimate, well-evidenced product category. What we built So we built The Glow Blend properly. Hydrolysed collagen peptides at a dose that reflects the research, alongside vitamin C, hyaluronic acid for hydration, biotin and folic acid for hair and nail health. Nothing in it that doesn't earn its place. What surprised me after launch The part I didn't expect was the response once we launched it. A good number of the messages came from women, as you'd expect, and they were generous and specific about what they'd noticed. But a surprising number came from men. Customers writing in to say they'd felt exactly what I'd felt, that awkward little flinch at "collagen," and had quietly bought it anyway because the ingredient breakdown made sense to them. That response told me more about why this category needed an honest voice in it than any research paper did. I'm not going to pretend I have this fully figured out. I still catch myself, occasionally, hesitating slightly before I mention it in a room. Old habits sit deeper than good evidence sometimes. But I take it, and increasingly a lot of men I respect take it too, quietly, without needing to make a thing of it. If this sounds familiar If any part of this resonated, and you've felt that same small resistance to a category you assumed wasn't for you, hit reply and tell me. I'd genuinely like to know I'm not the only one who had to get over it. And if you know someone, a friend, a partner, who could use this exact reasoning rather than a tesimonial, forward it on. It might do more good coming from someone else's honesty.
Read more
Your Summer Survival Kit (From Someone Who Travels A Lot)

Your Summer Survival Kit (From Someone Who Travels A Lot)

I'm putting the finishing touches to this post from an airport, which feels appropriate. By my count, I'll be going through three countries in the next six weeks. Meetings, a trip to see family including my niece and nephew, a supplier visit in Italy that I've been putting off for a year. And every summer the same thing happens. The carefully built routine, the one that took months to lock in, gets thrown into a suitcase and I hope for the best. Most people react to this by either giving up on the routine entirely ("I'll sort it out when I'm back") or overpacking so aggressively that half of it never leaves the bag. I've done both. Neither works. What actually works is deciding, in advance, which two or three things earn a place in my bag and which ones can wait until September. So here's mine. Not a wellness influencer's "what's in my bag" video. An honest list, built over about a decade of getting this wrong first. Why travel breaks routines specifically It's worth being precise about what actually changes when you travel, because it isn't just "less discipline." Three things shift at once. You sweat more and drink less water than usual, because you're distracted or the flight dried you out or the hotel room is warmer than home. You're outdoors more, often somewhere sunnier than wherever you live. And your meals stop being yours. You eat what's available, when it's available, and protein is usually the first thing to slip, because sugar, carbs and fat are what's on offer at 6am airport cafes. None of this is a discipline problem. It's an environment problem. The fix is making sure two or three specific things are in my bag before I leave home, so I’m not relying on willpower to begin with. 1. Electrolytes, non-negotiable Most people remember to pack sunscreen. Almost nobody packs electrolytes, and it's the one that actually catches up with you. Water replaces volume, not what you lose through sweat, which is mostly sodium and potassium and magnesium doing the quiet work of keeping muscles firing and fluid balanced properly. Miss that balance for a few days in the heat and you get the symptoms everyone blames on jet lag: the headache, the flat energy, the slight fog by 4pm that a coffee doesn't fix. It's usually not jet lag. It's electrolytes. I take The Hydrate Blend  for exactly this reason. Six electrolytes, no sugar, no synthetic flavouring, dissolves in a bottle of water in about ten seconds. One sachet on a travel day, first thing in the morning, does more for how I feel by evening than anything else in the bag. 2. Something for the sun you're actually going to get Here's the part most people don't think about until it's too late. UV exposure accelerates collagen breakdown, which is a slightly clinical way of saying that a week of proper sun does more to skin structure than most of the year combined. This isn't about vanity. It's a straightforward mechanism: UV generates free radicals that degrade existing collagen faster than your body can replace it. Sunscreen protects against the burn. It doesn't do anything for the collagen you're losing underneath. I've been taking The Glow Blend through summer for this reason specifically. Hydrolysed collagen peptides paired with vitamin C, which matters because vitamin C is a required co-factor for collagen synthesis and most collagen products leave it out entirely, then wonder why customers don't notice anything. It won't undo a week in the sun. It gives your skin something to rebuild with while it's under more pressure than usual. 3. Protein, especially when the meals aren't yours This is the one I've learned the hard way. When your diet goes inconsistent, protein is usually the first macronutrient to drop, simply because it's the hardest to find on the move. Airport food, hotel breakfasts, whatever's left at a conference buffet by 1pm, none of it is built around protein. And the honest science here is less dramatic than people expect: you don't need to train harder to maintain muscle through a disrupted period, you need to keep protein intake somewhere close to normal. That's the whole trick. I'll say this honestly because I'd rather be straight with you than pretend otherwise: my go-to for this is still The Strong Protein (whey based) and The Health Protein (vegan). They earn their place in my bag because they travel well, mix with nothing but water, and does the one job that actually matters on the road, which is making sure protein doesn't disappear from your day just because your routine has. The actual point None of this is about maintaining perfect discipline on holiday. Nobody does that, and if a brand tells you they do, they're not being honest with you. It's about deciding in advance which three or four things matter enough to bring, so the choice isn't being made for you by whatever's in the hotel minibar. If you've got a system that works for you when you travel, reply and tell me. I read every one of these, and I'm always looking to steal a better idea for my next trip. If this is useful, forward it to whoever in your life is about to live out of a suitcase for the next few weeks. It's the email I wish someone had sent me a decade ago.
Read more