Hey you,

Pillow Talk is your 5 minute read on how to enjoy your sex life whilst cultivating a healthy, secure and pleasurable relationship. At the bottom you’ll find:

• 1 thing to try

• 2 questions to ponder

• 3 pieces of content we’re loving

Stuck in the Fetid Bog

Repetition, drudgery, boredom, stagnation, monotony—call it what you want—but how do you get out of it?

A rut is defined as a situation where we feel stuck in a routine or series of habits that we find monotonous or unproductive. This state can often lead to a sense of stagnation in our personal and professional lives.

Sound familiar? It does to me. Recently, I’ve been stuck in a big old rut, or as someone described it to me, ‘you’re in the psychological equivalent of standing knee-deep in a fetid bog’!

In part, this rut is why we haven’t sent a newsletter for 5 months now—sorry for ghosting! However, in the last few weeks, I’ve really missed connecting with you and I’ve decided it’s time to heave myself out of the bog, but how? The same wise person who told me I was in the bog also told me this: ‘dithering merely prolongs your suffering; when you do the brave thing, it won’t be the climax of your suffering—the moment will be the opposite of suffering. Being brave feels good. When you chicken out, you don’t just feel the pain of cowardice; you miss out on the pleasure of courage.’ So, despite writing feeling a little hard at the moment I’ve decided to stop dithering and as I finished this newsletter today, I actually felt like one foot finally touched dry land.

If like me, you’ve felt quite stagnant recently, read on to discover why we get into ruts and how we can get out of them.

Neuroplasticity and Habit Formation

Neuroplasticity can help you grow or stagnate.

Our brains are pretty phenomenal but sometimes they can work against us, just as much as they work for us. Imagine your brain as an amazing garden. In this garden you have lots of paths that when you walk down help you do things, like brush your teeth or boil an egg. When you walk the same path over and over it becomes clearer and easier to walk, which is why things start to become ‘automatic’. This is great when we want to learn new things because we know through repetition our path will get stronger and we’ll get better. However, we create these paths through repetition, for example, if we always snooze our alarm or avoid voicing our needs, these paths will become the easiest and clearest paths to walk and so we walk them, over and over. This repetition reduces our cognitive load but it also leads to boredom as we lack novelty. Remember, variety is the spice of life and boredom is a sure fire way to fall into a rut.

Habit Formation can help us encode helpful or unhelpful behaviours.

When these behaviours become habitual, they get encoded in the brain’s basal ganglia, making them automatic. This also makes them challenging to break. Then we add dopamine into the mix - a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward that feeds on habitual behaviour - reinforcing them even if they’re not beneficial to us in the long run. A delicious little cocktail that leaves us with reduced cognitive engagement, mental fatigue and decreased creativity. Additionally, these persistent routines without variation can lead to feelings of boredom, frustration, and even depression. The monotony of walking the same paths, and being rewarded by the same habitual behaviours reduces our overall life satisfaction and our motivation.

Blergh…a fetid bog indeed!

Behavioural Change and Breaking the Rut

Don’t worry, I’m not about to leave you sinking in the foul smelling bog. Whilst it might not feel like it right now, with the right support, some easy tools and a little bit of hope you can drag yourself out and plant both feet on solid ground.

Practice Mindfulness

I know we harp on about mindfulness a lot - we even named our first program ‘Mindful Sex’ - but for good reason. It’s such a powerful way to bring yourself into the present moment, observe your behaviours without judgement or self-criticism and bring awareness to those automatic habits that are keeping you stuck in the rut.

Cognitive-Behavioural Techniques

CBT is the practice of identifying and challenging negative thought patterns. This is really helpful because we need to stop walking down the neural paths that are keeping us stuck, and start creating new paths that allow us to evolve and adapt. If you find yourself always saying “I’ll never be good at this”, write down 5 ways you have successfully learned new things - even if that means going back to child hood.

Shift Your Environment

Sometimes we need to physically stop ourselves from walking down the same paths. I’ll use myself as an example, I want to reduce the amount of sugar I consume in a week but I have created a 2pm habit of walking to the local bakery and buying the most delicious cookie. I don’t have the mental will power to interrupt that behaviour at the moment so I’ve decided to change where I work Tuesday - Thursday. This simple shift interrupts my automatic behaviour and allows me to create a more helpful 2pm habit instead.

1 Thing to Try This Week

I’m incredibly passionate about helping you enjoy your sex life and cultivating a relationship you truly love. That’s why I’m about to relaunch our popular and successful program, ‘Nurturing Desire’. Over 1,000 women and couples have gone through this exclusive program and totally transformed their relationships and their sex lives. Are you ready to get out of your rut and experience the same? Click on the button below and be the first notified once I open the doors.

Nurturing Desire is perfect for you if:

• You’re navigating any sexual difficulties such as anorgasmia, low libido, painful sex (vaginismus), sexual anxiety or sexlessness.

• You’re having sex but not enjoying it - sex is more for your partner than you or you have sex out of a sense of duty to the relationship.

• You feel disconnected from your sexual self. Perhaps you feel a lack of aliveness, eroticism, vitality, playfulness, like your body isn’t yours, or you don’t like what you see in the mirror (externally or internally).

• You’re worried about the state of your relationship and have fears that if things don’t change you might loose your partner. Or, if you don’t change, you’ll stay in a relationship you don’t want to be in.

• You've become too reliant on porn and it’s impacting your sex life.

It doesn’t matter if things have been like this for 5 minutes, 5 years or 50 years. Whatever the situation, change is possible. A beautiful, intimate, playful, erotic life that fills you with joy is within reach.

Register your interest now - I’ll accept people on a first come basis. This email goes out to 100,000 people and spaces are limited to 20 due to the personalised approach I take. If you’re on the fence or feel nervous don’t worry, registering your interest doesn’t commit you to anything.

Once registered, I’ll send you more information in the coming days. Click the button below and be the first notified once I open the doors.

2 Questions to Ponder

1. Is your sex life in a rut? If yes, in what ways and how does it make you feel?

2. What habits do you have that make intimacy feel monotonous?

3 Read/Watch/Listens

▶️ 3 Minute Game to mix things up and improve communication with Betty Martin

👀 Sensate Focus - a great technique to help bring intimacy back into the relationship💖

📚 Make Your Bed - a beautiful book on changing your life one action at a time

If you’re feeling a little stuck, I hope these tips can help shift things for you this week. And if you’re bog free, let’s keep it that way! Have a beautiful week. ✨

xx Billie xx