How to Light Your Brain Up with Pleasure with Dr. Nan Wise

Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever, where we uncover the unconscious rules we've been following. We break those rules and we find a new path to being freer, happier, sexier and more satisfied in the second half of our lives. I'm your host, Erin Keating.

I hope your summer has been relaxing and that those of you with kids are getting them back to school and reclaiming a little bit of mental spirit space for yourselves. I love my kids so much and it was actually an incredible summer with them because they are really coming into their own as 13 year olds and sort of showing me who they are going to be a little bit more when they fully land in their adult selves. But Jesus Christ, it is a lot to handle the 24 hour care and feeding of two proto teenagers for nine whole weeks. And nine weeks isn't even as long as it is for a lot of other people whose kids go back to school after Labor Day for some reason. Now August is a school month in California, what a nightmare for them, but thank you to LAUSD on behalf of me and all the other single moms out there. I'm grateful for a little quiet and a little space to think and a little alone time while I'm working from home cooking up all kinds of Hotter Than Ever goodness for you.

You know, part of the purpose of Hotter Than Ever is to help us all uncover what is possible for us in this next uncharted, unmapped chapter of our lives. And today I come back to where the whole podcast started, with the idea of pleasure and why we are so stingy with ourselves when it comes to pursuing what my guest today calls healthy hedonism, which is a healthy, non compulsive, non addictive approach to engaging our senses and feeling good in our bodies, in our skin.

Today My guest is Dr. Nan Wise. Nan is a licensed psychotherapist. She's a cognitive neuroscientist, a certified sex therapist, a board certified clinical Hypnotherapist, say that 10 times fast. And a certified relationship specialist with three decades of experience. She is driven by an intense desire to understand how the brain operates, to create moods and behaviors. Nan's story is so awesome. She returned to academia at the age of 50 to pursue a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, which is so inspiring since Hotter Than Ever is all about how we invent ourselves in the second half of our lives. And Nan really has done just that. Nan's amazing academic work mapped how women's brains responded to the experience of orgasm. So people had to come and have orgasms in her lab thank you to those brave and intrepid women who participated.

It turns out that orgasms light up our gray matter like a Christmas tree and that orgasms provide oxygen to the brain, which explains why I have been feeling really smart this summer. I have had my fair share of orgasmic adventures and I am feeling, shall we say, oxygenated. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, but I just love how Nan takes a healthy, practical and encouraging approach to, to women's empowerment, sexual and otherwise. All right, let's get hot.

Erin: Dr. Nan Wise, welcome to Hotter Than Ever.

Dr. Nan Wise: I am so delighted to be here. Erin, I can't tell you, this is like the, the high point of my week.

Erin: Oh, my God, you're too kind. You are too kind. Well, I am so excited to have you here to talk about sex and pleasure and the role they play in our lives over 40. And if they don't currently play much of a role, why you think women would be much happier if they did. So I would love to start with your personal story and what brought you to the work you do today.

Dr. Nan Wise: So I was born into a family that had some challenges and also a lot of anxiety disorders. So I had my first panic attack when I was 21 and I felt like I was so broken. So this was devastating for me. I was working in a psychiatric hospital at the time. I didn't know, should I drive myself back and admit myself? But what it turned out to be such a gift because what it motivated in me was a lifelong passion to better understand my own brain, mind, and being able to learn to help other people navigate their challenges when it came to emotions. I went to social work school for first and I was a practicing clinician and then I became a sex therapist.

But I was always fascinated with the brain. So during my first graduate studies, we did not have non invasive ways of studying the brain, we didn't have the technology.

Erin: No scans, no sensors, no, no.

Dr. Nan Wise: Well, we, you know, we had things like EEG, but that's probably, you know, pretty much it. So I did not want to work with animals. So that's why I went to social work school. So when I had the opportunity, once my kids grew up and they left the nest, okay, the age of 50, I had the opportunity. Thank to Beverly Whipple, Dr. Beverly Whipple, who was the lady for your listeners who named the G spot. And she is one of the most important, important sex scientists in history. She was working with a guy named Barry Commissure and they were studying the brain and sex.

And they said, come on down, we could use a clinician. So the next thing I knew, at the tender age of 50, I realized that there was no way I could really do that work without going back to graduate school. At first, they didn't want to take me, they told me I was too old.

Erin: What, are they allowed to do that?

Dr. Nan Wise: No, they're not allowed to do that, but did that stop them? So the graduate director said I was too old. So what happened was that they weren't going to support me, they said I could take some classes and they'd see how I did.

Erin: Oh, how kind.

Dr. Nan Wise: Well, during the first semester there, one of the seniors, senior professors had a brain injury and she could no longer teach. So I stepped up and I taught a bunch of her courses because I'd already taught. And they said, oh, Nan can be useful. So the next thing I know, they did support my work, which meant that I did not have to pay for graduate school. They gave me a position as the world's oldest teaching assistant. I had the time of my life, all of the other graduate students were younger than my kids, basically.

So I had such a wonderful experience there, learning. You know, you said cognitive neuroscience, and actually, that was my degree, but more accurately, and there's a term for it's called behavioral neuroscience.

Erin: Okay.

Dr. Nan Wise: So it's about understanding how the brain creates behavior. So there were so many gaps in the literature, Erin, about just basic science, about the sexual brain, right? So the first thing I did in my first period in graduate school was we mapped the connections between various parts of the female genitalia. The clitoris, the anterior wall of the vagina, the cervix, and then the nipples, which aren't really genitalia. But we thought, gee, we're probably stimulated, right? Well, guess what? They are. Any woman kind of knows that, but what we did was the world's first systematic study of how the connections from the different parts of the female genitalia are processed and represented in a part of the brain that processes sensation. I call it the brain's crotch, because it's actually tucked in between the two hemispheres. And what we found out was stimulation from each of those regions kind of had overlapping but separate sort of territory in this area.

So, hello, the more of those regions you stimulate, the more of that brain territory you're activating, and you get a bigger bang for your buck. So a takeaway there is for, you know, as women age, I talk a lot about menopause, I talk a lot about aging. I just presented to Stanford's geriatric psychiatry department on what happens when we age, you know, look, it's a lot of women do better as they get older sexually, but because we have this idea. I'm going off on a tangent if that's okay, stop me.

Okay. So we have this idea in our culture that old equals ugly for women.

Erin: Right.

Dr. Nan Wise: And it's really the biggest, I think, obstacle to female sexual pleasure as we mature is these ideas that, you know, sex is for young people.

Erin: Right.

Dr. Nan Wise: So what I presented to Stanford showed that there are actually women in their 70s, 80s and 90s who are having better sex than the younger people. Because I don't know if you've heard, we're having a sexual recession that's turned into a sexual depression. Devices and smartphones, that's what I write about my book "Why Good Sex Matters: Developing the Neuroscience of Pleasure for Smarter, Happier and More Purpose Filled Life." Being on these devices has sabotaged the emotional brain. It's become a plague on Gen Z because they are the first phone based childhood phone, meaning when you had the smartphones, they are so hampered because they have not had real experience in the real world.

As Jonathan Haidt in his book "The Anxious Generation" has written, their brains have not properly developed, they don't have social skills enough, they don't regulate well, not all of them, but many of them. Their attention spans are like a food fly, some of them, maybe many of them. And unfortunately, you know, because we've overprotected kids in the real world and under protected them in the virtual world, right. They haven't had the rough and tumble play to learn how to, you know, even a lab rat needs some skills to get laid, as I like to say.

Erin: Is that true?

Dr. Nan Wise: It is true.

Erin: Lab rats need game, they need some game.

Dr. Nan Wise: They need some game, you know, so the, the bottom line was I was always fascinated in emotions and moods and I, when I was a young kid, 21 years old, when I had this awful panic attack while I was working at the psych hospital, I went into regular therapy and talk about a slow game, you know, it was very psycho, dynamically oriented and it was, you know, anything I talked about that didn't have to do with the therapist, he thought I was resisting. So on my own, Erin, I started a journey. It was such a long winding road that once I figured out what I needed, I went from somebody who used to have terrible anxiety, I mean terrible anxiety, public speaking anxiety.

By the time I published my book, which launched the same time we had the pandemic, talk about timing. I was on the Today show the week that New York shut down. My work has been so much generated from my own experience that because I thought I was so broken, I wouldn't be able to help other people. My having learned how to navigate anxiety is my credibility story.

Erin: I think everyone who is in the healing arts comes to it from a place of, like, I need solutions.

Dr. Nan Wise: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. We teach what we need to know, and if we're lucky enough, we'll learn it. You know, not everybody applies with their learning, and it's been such a wonderful journey. So let's circle back to pleasure.

Erin: I would like to circle back to your dissertation because I am fascinated. First of all, it seems to me like not any surprise that we did not understand how female pleasure works, what it does to the brain, what hat parts connect to what. Because we vilify and are terrified of women's bodies, women's pleasure, and the agency that comes from having pleasure. So your dissertation is called "Genital Stimulation Imagery and Orgasm in Women, An FMRI Analysis", and in your book, you talk about women volunteering to come have orgasms in a lab and have their brains scanned while they are orgasming. How did this happen? This seems like something that you would never be allowed to do. Like, it seems like too scary to the patriarch.

Dr. Nan Wise: Well, how do you know that? The credit to that goes to Dr. Barry Commissary because he's a bull in a china shop, so he's a guy who would not take no for an answer. So when he was the first one who studied human. Human subjects at Rutgers Newark, and then he worked with Beverly, and they didn't want her there. They didn't want the studies. What they did was they showed that vaginal stimulation blocked pain. And then actually, in 2004, Barry and Beverly did the first ever brain imaging study of orgasm.

And would you believe their subjects were women with complete spinal cord injury?

Erin: What?

Dr. Nan Wise: Talk about mind blowing. So, you know, technically, you would think somebody who had complete spinal cord injury would never be able to have an orgasm because they would have no sensation.

Erin: And they wouldn't feel it.

Dr. Nan Wise: Would be severed. But what Barry and Beverly did--here's a game changer-- they realized because they've had women consistently report some women, not everybody, with spinal cord injury, they would say they had menstrual cramps. Some of them said that they had orgasms. And you know what the doctors would say to them?

Erin: No, you don't.

Dr. Nan Wise: It's all in your head, it's all in your head. Well, Barry and Beverly did the study, and what they showed was when women with the spinal cord injury got stimulation to the vagina, areas in their brain would activate. And what we think is going on is that the vagus nerve, which does not go through the spinal cord, that there's a version of this, of the vagus nerve that carries sensations probably to the cervix and to some other parts of the female genitalia, the uterus and the cervix, so that they're getting. They were getting sensations from vaginal stimulation. So Barry and Beverly, they basically, they broke through that, I guess it's a glass ceiling to get research done.

You can't get funding for sexual research. And in fact, when the show Nightline, the correspondent came, they filmed my research. And one of the questions that they asked me, which fortunately did not show up on the air, was, can you tell our viewers why you study sex instead of something important like cancer? I mean, it's like, crazy. Just crazy.

Erin: I mean, God, doesn't that say so much that, like, this thing that is so fun. First of all, it creates human life, number one. I don't know if you know that. Second of all, what an incredibly extraordinary part of the human experience is sex and pleasure and connection that comes through that, like, we are so messed up about this puritanical.

Dr. Nan Wise: Yeah, we are set. We are a lewd, prude nation, we're obsessed with sex, and we have, I mean, if you can have a politician talking about grabbing women by their, shall we say, vulvas, because I'm being, I think, polite.

Erin: I could say pussy, because podcasting is the last free medium.

Dr. Nan Wise: Oh, okay. So, you know, we have a man they can talk about, you know, and be, you know, elected previously as president says something about the misogyny and the patriarchy. But here's the good news. Pleasure is not a luxury, it's an important necessity for the proper functioning of the brain mind, because pleasure is a signal. The brain mind operates with two very important signals, pain and pleasure. So we have seven wired in emotional instinct systems that live in the older parts of our brains that we share with all mammals and many other animals. And these emotional instincts that come in two categories, defenses, and then, like, more of the social affiliative emotions, they're wired in for our survival.

And the pleasure signal tells us hopefully, that we've moved towards something that is good for us. And the pain signal tells us that we're with something that's bad for us. So that's the way it's supposed to work. So the pleasure signal is a feedback signal that reinforces us to engage in behaviors that hopefully feel good and are good for us.

Erin: Right? And pleasure is not just sex. Pleasure is every sensory, engaged experience that feels good.

Dr. Nan Wise: And if you look at us now as a nation, and this is not just us, it's beyond America, but we suffer from something called anhedonia, the inability to have sex, satisfying pleasures. And that underlies all mental health and emotional challenges. People who are anxious, people who are depressed, people who are stressed, people who are struggling with personality disorder psychoses, when we look at it, the people who are not able to experience pleasure, it contributes to those mental health challenges and makes them worse. So unfortunately, the way that we're living, with spending so much time on our devices, the emotional circuits get hijacked. And I'm going to talk about the number one system. So I told you, we have defensive emotions and we have affiliative emotions.

I'll unpack them in a minute. But we have one system that works with all of the other systems, which is the source of our motivation, our enthusiasm. It's called the seeking system, and it's powered by dopamine. So the seeking system is what gets us to explore, to meet our needs, or to get us away from things that are dangerous. So when we're on our devices, those devices essentially hijack the seeking system and create that seeking system to get dysfunctional. And what that contributes to is our dysphoria, our inability to have pleasure and what it's done is it's hijacked us to get us away from literally healthy pleasures, things that feel good and are good for us. So you and I are not in the same room, but we're talking to each other face to face, right? We're listening to each other, and we're interacting in real time.

So what that does is it's a healthy use of our brain minds to have what I would say is healthy pleasure, the pleasure of connection.

Erin: Can I stop you for one second to unpack the phrase brain mind? Because I've heard you say it a couple times, but it's new to me.

Dr. Nan Wise: Okay, so thank you for pointing that out. We have historically thought of as the brain and the body, and then people have different ideas of what is the mind. So, you know, some people have thought of the mind as something separate from the brain, and the brain is separate from the body. When I Talk about the brain, mind what I am really saying, it's one and the same, that the mind is a function of the brain. The brain functions in a way that creates our experiences. Everything, every behavior is rooted in biology, meaning there's stuff going on in the brain and I'd also like to make a distinction between the idea of the body and the brain, mind being separate there the brain, we have a lot of neurotransmitters in the brain.

The neurotransmitters conduct signals. They have one cell talk to another cell. We have tons of neurotransmitters in the body and in the gut and this is really important for our conversation and for, you know, our understanding of this. Our emotions are embodied experiences, we feel them so vividly. We don't really need the fancy equipment for the core emotions because they are embodied, visceral experiences that we cannot ignore.

Erin: I think we all know that to be true from our lives, right? That when something amazing happens, you feel it all over your body, or when something terrible happens, you feel it in your body. When you're in a trauma situation, it's manifesting physically, or when you're repressing stuff, it's manifesting physically. But we somehow, and maybe that's connected to the anhedonia, we somehow want to tease out the brain and emotions and pull everything apart from the body. I feel like I lived like a walking head just ahead for a long time, disconnected from my body. Because if I let myself feel the things that I was actually feeling, then I would have had to make a lot of changes, which I eventually did do in my life, but I think a lot of us live real disconnected.

Dr. Nan Wise: You nailed that on the head. You know, a lot of people live in their heads, and if you ask them, if I ask a client when I'm working with them, what's going on in your body, they go, what? So we are been trained to attend to the experience of being in our minds. And that also gets hijacked by how we're using our attention and we forget that we have a body. Do you know when people sit and they're online, they're on their email or they're online, they're not breathing properly. There's something called screen apnea, email apnea. It's like you're so in your head and you're like basically this being in this. What's called continuous partial attention that we are waiting for the notification. We're vigilant, we're waiting for the shoe to drop, we're constantly armed and we're depleted because we're in that fight or fight mode more of the time than not.

Erin: Right. We're not made for that.

Dr. Nan Wise: No, we're not made for that. It's too much stimuli, it's not the proper stimuli, and it's not how we can really. What makes us feel good, Erin, is we have something called the care system, all mammals and many other animals have these instincts to care for their young and it's powered by our own internal opioids. Our body minds make these opioids, and that's the system that we get our feelings of well being with and through activation of the care system.

So when you think about it, this, this thing, this head brain mind is a. Basically it's like a medicine cabinet. We release so many chemicals and so many substances from our experience and that give us experiences. For example, I showed in my research, like I had basically two experiments. One was just having my women think about having a dildo inserted versus think about having a speculum inserted. And I showed in my, in my data, the results really strongly suggest that just thinking about pleasurable stimulation lit up the brain in a way that looked a lot like an orgasm, but not the speculum. So here's a good takeaways.

The brain mind is the most important sex organ evolved because how we, what we're thinking about, what we have attention on, will either be an accelerator for sex or a brink for sex. The second part of the study, and this is the women stayed in the scanner the whole time and they had two orgasms, one by their own genital stimulation of their clitoris and the other one their partner, reaching, simulating. Now, bear in mind, the scanner is the least sexy place in the world. And you have to stay still, you've got this mask on that looks like Hannibal Lecter happy helmet. And I don't know, maybe Donald Trump saw the mask that we use for our studies because he's crazy. For Hannibal Lecter, that's another craze.

Erin: Yeah.

Dr. Nan Wise: So we, you know, we had. What we showed was as the general stimulation, whether it was by a partner, by yourself, led up to orgasm. There were so many brain regions that got so much oxygen because you know how we know a brain region gets activated, oxygen runs to that place. And oxygenated blood has a different hemodynamic quality than unoxygenated blood. So an FMRI, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, basically, it's a way of kind of seeing what parts of the brain are active. You're not really studying the neurons themselves, but you're seeing where the blood flows.

Erin: Right, the pattern.

Dr. Nan Wise: So what we found was there was the release, the stimulation and release of all of these places in the brain that put out things like serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, the endorphins, which are your own opioids, the enkephalins, and also the endocannabinoids, your brain's old marijuana stuff. So that's why sexual stimulation and orgasm feels good, and it's actually good for you because it creates all this blood flow, all of this nourishment, all of this really good functioning of the brain. In fact, they came out with this thing that having orgasms, after we published our studies, better for your brain than sudoku or crossword puzzles or what have you.

Erin: It feels better.

Dr. Nan Wise: Yeah. So, you know, we need to understand that pleasure is not a luxury, and it's a necessity for getting good signals back to the brain. And if we're not able to have pleasure, we need to take a look at our lives and make some changes, some changes to prioritize that.

Erin: Yeah, I really want to talk about that, because I feel like there are so many women who are in the second half of their lives, and so many things are going great for them, and they've accomplished so much, and they've built families, and they've built careers, and they've done all this stuff. But somehow along the way, they've gotten really disconnected from themselves and their pleasure. And whether that's because there's something janky in their marriage, you know, where there's resistance or there's, like, old entrenched dynamics that they can't get over, or, you know, like what happens in the brain. I was married for 17 years. We didn't have sex for the last 10 years and I had always been a sexual person, but there was too much bad blood and too much hurt and too much, like, painful stuff to touch that. Like getting intimate and being that vulnerable just felt unsafe for me. And so I convinced myself that I could have a marriage where that wasn't a factor.

And there's so many women in midlife who talk about having no sexual desire. They talk about low libido, which is so pathologized. Their marriages are too, you know, no longer sexual, sex feels annoying, it's complicated, it's kind of unfathomable. At a certain point, if you haven't done it for a long time. What do we do about that?

If, we want our brains to get oxygenated and we want to be that like 70, 80 year old woman who's still feeling pleasure and alive in her body, we're going to live a long time. Like, it's really scary to think about living a pleasure free life in the back half and being so disconnected to this fundamental part of ourselves.

Dr. Nan Wise: Your question is something I grapple with every single day of my clinical life. That's something that I'm dealing a lot with and it's so common. Well, you know, to unpack it, first of all, I do want to say that having active sexual desire is not necessary to have a really good sex life. So I say fuck desire.

Erin: Oh, great.

Dr. Nan Wise: The reason why I say that is. And I have a friend, Kelly Cassperson, who's--

Erin: Oh, she was on the podcast.

Dr. Nan Wise: She's amazing.

Erin: Yeah.

Dr. Nan Wise: She and I both are on the same page about that. Because first off, to have the expectation in a long term relationship that you are going to have active sexual desire, that you're going to be that level turned on by your partner is very unrealistic.

Erin: Yep.

Dr. Nan Wise: Relationships are hard. I think my hardest part of my job is my couples counseling stuff and I love doing it. That's, that's become more of my everyday work is working not just with people who have sexual problems, with people who. People have relational problems which often underlie the sexual one.

Erin: Yeah.

Dr. Nan Wise: So if we understand that we don't have to have active sexual desire to have a great sex life, that can go a good, a good way. And I like to help women and people just in general get turned on by life. You know, when you can reboot the emotional brain and get out of the defenses, the defenses or activations of the fear system, the rage system. The panic grief sadness system is a fascinating system because it's actually the flip side of attachment. We have the care system where we feel good with and through our opioids and, and the connections that we have. The panic grief sadness system gets triggered when we feel a threat to our connections or our resources. It's the substrate of our heartbreak. It's the substrate of grief.

So many of us, because of the way that we live the high stress lifestyles that we have where we're not having enough time and space and energy to prioritize play, to prioritize connection. And when you think about it, where we get socialized as women, what is our value, how we take care of other people?

Erin: Yeah.

Dr. Nan Wise: And strong activations of the care system. When, like, for people who are doing a lot of caretaking, whether it's of sick family members or of young children, that will cock block lust.

Erin: Yeah.

Dr. Nan Wise: So the way, you know, because nature kind of like, thinks, well, if you just had a baby, you don't need to be worrying about lust. It's like your resources go to care, and care mediated by the opioids. When people are doing opiates, they're not horny. Do you ever hear about opiate users? They lose their sex drive like that, right? You know it's not a sex drug, right?

Erin: No, they're just nodding on it, right?

Dr. Nan Wise: It's instead of sex, it's, it's killing their pain. So if you look at it, first of all, we live, we are not equal citizens in this country. We've never been equal citizens in this country. Women have never been equal citizens in very few places have we over history where there have been matrilineal, you know, cultures, there are some of those. But we're not equal citizens.

We don't have the right to our bodies. And guess what? What are we supposed to be objects for other people's desire.

Erin: Right.

Dr. Nan Wise: So you wonder why we get to a certain point, you know, where we're burnt out, where we've been caretaking kids. Now I have five grandchildren. So I have, my parents just died in the fall.

Erin: I'm sorry.

Dr. Nan Wise: So, yeah, it was that's a whole other story, but no, so now I have five grandchildren. So we have all of these responsibilities, and they're a source of joy for me. Can I tell you, my dad used to say, having children, the only reason to do that is to get the grandchildren because they're so much fun, because you can play with them and go here and go home, take them back.

So my point is, is that the expectations for women, we're not equal to men. We haven't been equal to men, we're here to take other, take care of people. And there's also some brain wiring that I want to talk about that predisposes, like, for example, during embryological development. So in the womb, the body and the brain get sexed in two separate stages by two separate hormones. So, in other words, this idea of transgender makes a lot of sense. And some cultures have always thought about having more than two genders, right?

But the point that I'm wanting to make, in the typical male brain versus the typical female brain in the male brain, they have more circuits for vasopressin, which is, like, related to testosterone. So they have, like, kind of gen, like gonads in the brain, which is why across cultures, one of the robust findings is men think about sex more, they want more kinds of sex, they want more sexual partners, where even though if there are cultural factors there, you know, this is so robust. We have, as women, more circuits for oxytocin, which we know is like, people think of it as the cuddle hormone or the tendon befriend hormone. But oxytocin can make us fierce when we're protecting our young. So, you know, all of these hormones have many more functions than just one thing, but what I'm trying to say to you is that everything we talked about, everything, every behavior is bio, has biology, but everything complicated is somewhat biological, psychological, and social. So all of these factors interact.

How we are socialized, how we're socialized in our families, how we're socialized by our cultures, to think like, oh, and if we get too big for our britches as women, what's going to happen? They're going to burn us at the stake.

Erin: That's right, that's right. Or elect U.S. president.

Dr. Nan Wise: Well, you know what? I'm going to drink to that because I think, and one of my bright, my most brilliant friends years ago, Dr. Rudy Ballantyne, author of a lot of very important books on healing, on nutrition, on yoga, he said to me years and years ago, before 2000, in the 90s, early 90s, he said to me, time and space is going to get really strange, and then there's going to be the pushback from the dying patriarchy.

Erin: No, I think we all feel it. I think we all feel it. And it's funny, I laugh at myself for saying the word patriarchy so much on this podcast because it makes me feel like, I mean, I did go to Oberlin College. I was raised in, like, a liberal, liberal bubble. But, like, we didn't even say patriarchy when I was in college. And now I feel like it's like my every thought, it's like, oh, that makes so much sense, that there's this system of power and control that as we get more agency and as we get more impressive and amazing and accomplished, like, there is this, like, fear reaction happening that is punching back at women and trying to disappear us at this age in our lives when we're all like, I'm better than I've ever been.

I have my own money, I had an incredible career, I can start my own thing. Like, the more agency we get, the more scared the system gets and the more bunchy and reactive and controlling it becomes. And I feel like part of the reason why this conversation is, okay, they can think whatever they want, and they can try to do whatever they want to keep us out, but it is inevitable that we are equal.

Dr. Nan Wise: And it's in the air that the, you know, when you think about the weirdos. And this is not really representative of what the Republican Party.

Erin: No, and this is not a political podcast, but it feels impossible not to talk about it at this moment.

Dr. Nan Wise: How these men and some women who are misogynistic at the very least, are trying to legislate what we can do with our bodies. It's just in our faces right now, the patriarchy wanting to control women.

Erin: Yeah.

Dr. Nan Wise: And I don't think that shit's gonna fly so well, because if you listen to, most people want the right for women to have reproductive care as healthcare. If you look at the numbers, and we're just hoping that there's gonna be enough of a showing of people in the places that need to be to really recognize that we as a people want to be connected, we want to be doing good things for ourselves and each other.

So I'm one of those people who, as much as I've been anxious, I am a big optimist, and I honestly believe that most people are good.

Erin: Me too.

Dr. Nan Wise: Most people will do the right thing, most people will help. And, you know, it's really up to us as women to do the number one relationship skill. So when I do relationship coaching, and by the way, any of your listeners can get a, if they write me, they can get a free consult with me in a free session if they want to. When I coach couples, I do it based on what has research shown, because I'm a scientist, I want techniques and tools that are empirically vetted.

Erin: Right.

Dr. Nan Wise: And we know the number one skill that people often, and I would say women, probably even more than men, don't practice, is the ability to take stands for what we want and what we need without making it a big deal that we have to take the stands and do it in a way like a calm, broken record. This is what we need, this is what we want and recognize, that's our job in a relationship. In fact, if you don't do that, you're committing a relationship offense that can be more deleterious than sexually cheating on your partner.

Erin: That's how bad it is when you betray yourself, when you don't stand up for what it is that, you know, you need. The kind of care and treatment, the kind of tenderness, the kind of affection, whatever, participation, partnership like. I think so many of us just get so tired of asking for the same thing over and over again and not getting it that then everything kind of metastasizes into, you know, fucked up relationship dynamics, no sex, disconnection and then betrayal, you know.

Dr. Nan Wise: So you're ready for this.

Erin: Yeah, I love these tools.

Dr. Nan Wise: Thank you. Brent Atkinson, who is a man who has a wonderful, who's done tremendous work on relationships, teaching counselors and therapists. One of the things that we really need to learn is if we're taking stance and they're not going anywhere, we need to learn how to ramp it up, but not in the way that we think. It's not screaming and yelling and leaving.

Erin: Oh, no, yeah, that didn't work for me.

Dr. Nan Wise: No, it's what it's do what it is. It's refusing to do business as usual and doing it from a calm place, like making the bids. Please work with me if something's really important to you, you need to be able to express it, what's at stake, to be clear on it for you and to be effective at communicating to the partner, to enjoin them, to enroll them in working with you. If after taking stands over and over again, you're not getting any anywhere, what you need to do then is to ramp it up, to refuse to do business as usual, not from a place of anger, but to say, you know, like it. This is so important to me. I'll go through the motions of what are the responsibilities that we have if we're co parents or. But I'm going to really leave you to think about what's going on while I go and do my thing and go off and do your thing and take your attention off the fucking relationship and put your attention on developing yourself. And very often the partner goes, ooh, something's happening with this, with my partner. And this looks good, I want some of that, you know?

Erin: Right.

Dr. Nan Wise: So these are the skill sets that we can learn and, and we can practice so that, you know, basically relationships tend to. We, you know, imago theory says we pick partners who will wound us in the way that we need to heal, which means that very often you ready to do.

Erin: Not like that. Say that again.

Dr. Nan Wise: Let me unpack it.

When we run into breakdowns with partners, there's stuff in us that we need to develop. And if we develop ourselves more fully, then we can leave that relationship in a way where we've gotten the breakthrough, where we've developed ourselves. So to backtrack at the idea that we pick people who wound us in the way that we need to heal, it's really kind of a, a way of saying that, you know, we tend to be attracted to people that may be developed in ways other than and are we're developed or we might be running old scripts from childhood that we're looking for something from somebody who reminds us of somebody we didn't get that something from.

Erin: Ding, ding, ding.

Dr. Nan Wise: Yeah, ding, ding, ding. And once we understand that, Erin, it no longer becomes about how the partner's acting or not acting. It becomes about how do we develop ourselves, right? And then we can decide is this learning love or is this lasting love? So partner who can take the wake up call. Isn't that beautiful?

Erin: Can you talk about that?

Dr. Nan Wise: So I think this is from the Hendricks. The learning love is when you get into stuff with people and you're really struggling, like you're really trying to. You might be attracted to them and then what attracts you you to then repulses you and then you're in the thick of it, right? And sometimes if you have a conscious partner who's willing to do their work, to roll up their sleeves and take a hundred percent responsibility for what they're showing up with, that's creating the dysfunction in the relationship, then you can have the breakthrough. Meaning that you get clearer on you and more present time and you let go of like trying to meet old needs that are from childhood and like you really come to being a conscious partner yourself. If that partner that you're with is on that same page, then that can be lasting love, right? But if that, if you've completed the work with the, that you can and that partner and you weren't fitting together, that partner is not on the same page. Then it's just learning love.

Erin: If you learn really profound because it's. Both of those are really valuable and you know, I think we're taught that there's only the one kind, right? I mean look, you've been married for--

Dr. Nan Wise: 50 years together 50 years, married for 43.

Erin: Okay? So you have been with the same person in a loving relationship for 50 years.

Dr. Nan Wise: Yes.

Erin: And I imagine that that has looked all kinds of different ways.

Dr. Nan Wise: Oh, we, we were like young lovers. We explored, we, we after 20 something years, we explored polyamory. We have done so many versions. You have a version of a marriage when you're young, then you have kids and then your kids leave. Actually the two places where marriage is your most, most risky or at at most risk is when you first have children and when the children leave.

Erin: That's right. Yeah. I didn't make it through the first part. I mean I can totally see that. And I'm looking at some friends who are, are looking at their marriages and going, oh my God, my kids are going to college. Like what, what is us? What is this? Who am I?

Dr. Nan Wise: You know, it's time for a breakthrough. It's time to reboot. You know how we were rebooting the equipment before we get started?

Erin: Yeah.

Dr. Nan Wise: Relationships can need a reboot. Our emotional systems need a reboot.

Erin: Yeah.

Dr. Nan Wise: We live in habits. The mind is a habit making machine. And as I talk about in my book, there's the seven core emotions, the seeking system. Then we have care, then we have play and we have lust. Those are the social circuits. Then on the defenses we have fear, rage and the panic, grief, sadness and then we have a three level mind. What that means is the basement of the mind is where these embodied emotions the circuits live, the mid level mind is where all the learning machinery is. And what does the mind do? It tries to create habits. Otherwise if we had to do very conscious processing of everything, we'd never be able to leave the house in the morning.

Erin: Get it done. Yeah, right.

Dr. Nan Wise: Remember I talked about pain and pleasure? The pain and pleasure, the signals to the learning brain to pay a lot of attention, kind of going like, pay attention here because if you have bad experiences they will become conditioned painful associations that you may not even remember what they're about, but you just know. You go, you know, like to a situation or person and you feel bad on your body. Like we talked about, it's conditioning or likewise you have pleasure associations that become automatic things. Which actually is why what people get hijacked by drug use because it becomes that's the pleasure they're seeking. It's not satisfying pleasure, but they've made associations between a substance and a payoff. You know what I mean? So one of the big reasons I wrote this book and my next book is going to be more targeted, not about sex.

I'm going to start on it in the new year, really understanding how older experiences like childhood traumas or, or shape our emotional brains in ways that create habits that we can unlearn and make different choices. So that, but the three level mind is you got the core emotions in the basement which you can never not know when you're feeling activation. Then you have the mid level mind whose job is to make associations to pain or pleasure things so you'll approach or avoid, right? And then the top mind, which is supposedly the smart mind, but if the top mind is so smart, why can't we just think ourselves out of depression, think ourselves out of addiction, think ourselves out of bad habits? Because the top mind is not able to completely rally unless you've got the core emotions balance and you've unpacked some of those habits that are part of the automatic learning.

Erin: So there's so much in this conversation that I could like, tease out every thread and then have 900 other conversations about. I feel like even just the notion that, you know, some women are having the best sex of their lives in their 70s, 80s and 90s, like, and some women get hornier and more interested in sex in midlife and others don't. Or some couples manage to keep novelty and exploration and all of these things kind of top of mind and connecting them in their pleasure dynamic with each other, like, there's so much to talk about and so much to think about that is all rooted in this science that you've done that is so, feels so critical and yet so kind of like in opposition almost to this culture that we live in that's so scared of pleasure, that's so scared of the agency that we feel when we feel good in our bodies. And like, that sense of like, I actually can impact how my life goes by connecting with myself and connecting with other people. I don't know, there's just so much there.

I want to bring it around to a question for the listeners and I would like to hear from you. Like, what do you want women over 40, a lot of whom are in this sort of uncharted, potentially reinvention period, where they've kind of reached the top of their career or they've had the marriage and the kids. I feel like culturally, women are at a moment where we are at the top of an escalator that we have been on and now we are looking around going, there is nothing here. There is no map. I could go in any direction. I'm scared, I'm confused. What do I keep, what do I get rid of? Like, what do you want our listeners, women over 40, to know about what their options and their choices are at this stage in their lives?

Dr. Nan Wise: That is such a big, wonderful question. Here's what I would say, and this is something that I'm kind of pondering every day and listening to the women and the people I'm speaking to. Number one, I think, is to create some time and space. Unplug from your devices, take some deep breaths, really ground yourself, and ask yourself over and over again, what do I want? What do I really want? The place I start with clients is asking them, what do you want? And a lot of times for people, that's really a hard question.

Erin: Really hard.

Dr. Nan Wise: But what if we stay with the question? I wonder how I'm going to find what I want. I wonder who can help me create what I want. Ericksonian hypnotherapy, which is, to me, one of the best tools that was ever developed, thank God for Milton Erickson. He was able to help people that people, other people couldn't help. He was an amazing man nd he talked about when you can help people recognize that they have all, all of the inner resources already to create everybody and everything else that they need or want. When you can get into that space of really being in your resources, getting in touch with your resources.

So with my clients, the first thing I ask them is really think about, what do you want? Because people know what they don't want.

Erin: Right.

Dr. Nan Wise: And then I challenge my female clients and also men too, but, you know, this is an issue, I think, as we're talking about that's so prevalent for women. How do we get to feel pleasure in our bodies? So being able to experience pleasure. Pleasure in our bodies, not pleasure about our bodies, not because we like our bodies

Erin: Not because someone tells us we're pretty.

Dr. Nan Wise: Right, to be able to kind of get on the sensation channel. So I'm also trained in Gestalt therapy. And it's like, get coming down into your senses. Your ass is on the chair, your feet on the floor. Being attuned to the body channe, and I think, like, you made that transition, Erin, that you described, that you got in touch with what your body was telling you.

Erin: Yep.

Dr. Nan Wise: That was the impetus for so much change, right?

Erin: Yes, a hundred percent.

Dr. Nan Wise: So I would say get in touch with your body, make time and space, get out of your habits, and get out of the idea that your job is to make it okay for everybody or anybody and kind of create some time and space for a pleasure quest. Start and start to, you know, like, one of the hardest things with anhedonia, when people don't get pleasure. Pleasure out of things, is to help them find little tiny pleasure practices. So, like, it could be as little as watching something that you like on television that feels pleasurable. Do that, don't feel guilty about it. It might be, you're gonna laugh about this. But for people who are having a lot of pleasure challenges, if they are okay with marijuana, if marijuana is not something that's, that they have bad reactions to or they think is a bad thing.

Right now I'm very much involved with the Female Orgasm Research Institute in getting conditions. For example, female orgasm disorder being approved as a prescribing condition for medical marijuana. We know that it helps with women also who have low sexual desire. Remember, the endocannabinoid system is actually something that governs so much of our body mind's processes. Sometimes giving a little tweak what marijuana can do for people. And I'm not saying you should go around smoking marijuana all day, but if you can get in touch with having some pleasure in your body, turns up the sensation channel having some different ideas. Psychedelics, you know what they do when they use psychedelics with people, what that does is kind of reboots the brain so it creates more cross talk between different areas of the brain that would, that ordinarily they're just looping the same old loops. So in other words, what I'm thinking about is how can we get creative and getting in touch with pleasure and what really, what's our mission? What's the next leg of the journey? And it's so fucking exciting. I'm very excited about my life now.

Erin: Me too. Me too. It feels like anything is possible and that I have more choices, especially now my kids are 13. Like they're twins. Like especially now that they're. I'm out of the intensive parenting part and I'm out of a marriage where I was also a parent. Like I, I feel like there's so much more room for my own exploration and my own sort of understanding of what it is that I want that I have suppressed in my life in order to do all this caregiving. And I think a lot of our listeners feel that way too and also we're going to live a long time so you know, get busy thinking about what it is that you want and, and drop into your body and connect with pleasure. I love hearing that Nan, that's so amazing.

Dr. Nan Wise: Here's, here's a simple tool I love. I'm all about the tools.

Erin: Yeah.

Dr. Nan Wise: So one of the things that I ask people to do is a self-attunement exercise three times a day. What's on my mind, what's going on in my body, what's my emotional weather? So all of this attention that we've been putting in on caretaking, raising husbands and children and all of that, we can turn that attention over. Think about the seeking system, getting curious and the play system, you know, getting playful, you know, pairing towards ourselves. What's on my mind, what's in my body, what's my emotional weather? So that can be a lovely attunement practice.

Erin: I think that's so simple, so practical, so simple. And I imagine that women, if they, if they actually took that practice on for a period of time would learn so much about what, what they actually want and what's actually going on with them.

Dr. Nan Wise: It's cultivating a caring, attuned relationship with ourselves and that's really the source of all good relationships attunement. So I think it's like when we talk about self care. One of my friends, Dr. Pooja, Pooja Lakshman, wrote the Real Self care book. She's fantastic. She was a postdoc in my lab and that she's so that really what real self care is, is actually making some big decisions about our life. It's not going to get like facials and it's really about putting attention, as I said, on attunement with ourselves and then like you did make some choices about boundaries and changing up and you know, making some changes.

And I think these small little practices like self attunement, you do that 30, 60, 90 days and your attention. What we want to do is create this habit of bringing attention inward, not about consumer shit because we've got all this stuff about let's buy this, let's get this.

Erin: We've been doing that. It's not really working.

Dr. Nan Wise: No, it's not working.

Erin: Yeah. Oh my God. Okay. This is clearly the first of many conversations.

Dr. Nan Wise: Erin, I'm very grateful for you for creating these conversations in your journey. Anybody who wants to come to my website, Ask Dr. Nan, spelled that with all the Dr. Letters can set up a free chat, a consult with me. And you know, when I give people, I usually do like just a couple sessions to help people figure out what and what are the tools that'll help them and then I can support them like a coach via texting and whatever to, to kind of help new habits.

Erin: Amazing.

Dr. Nan Wise: I teach what I need to know, Erin.

Erin: Excellent. I love hearing that. All right, thank you, Nan.

Dr. Nan Wise: Thank you. Have a wonderful, wonderful rest of your day.

Erin: Thanks for listening to Hotter Than Ever. If you loved this conversation, you can find out more about Dr. Nan Wise and the people I talk to on other episodes of this show on our substack at hotterthanever.substack.com or you can follow us on Instagram @hotterthaneverpod, comment on our posts, drop us a note, let us know if this show lights up your brain like a woman having an orgasm. And if you want to be forever in my good graces, please write a review on Apple Podcasts that says something like Hotter than Ever has the same impact on my brain as an orgasm, I feel younger and healthier every time I listen. I will personally call you on the phone to thank you for that review.

Hotter Than Ever is produced by Erica Gerard and Podkit Productions. Our associate producer is Melody Carey. Music is by Chris Keating with vocals by Issa Fernandez.

Happy back to school everyone. Get yourself a new notebook and start writing down what you want in this next amazing chapter of your life. No one else is going to do that work for you. But don't worry, it's a group project. We're going to do all the research and all the homework together.