Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

Welcome to this week’s coaching hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners and coach you from afar. If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coachinghotline, all one word, or text your email to +1-347-997-1784 and when you get prompted for the code word, it’s coaching hotline, all one word. Let’s get into this week’s questions.

We have two very different questions this week. Here’s the first one. “I am having a sexual fling with a guy. Sex is amazing, but I can’t orgasm with him because of my thoughts while having sex about needing to orgasm. And if he’s trying to make me, to not take too much time so he doesn’t get bored or tired. So far, these thoughts won’t let me get to climax. I don’t know if this is possible to manage, but I really hope it is. I need to change my thoughts around needing to orgasm.”

Okay, so number one, needing to change your thoughts is not a helpful thought. You could go the rest of your life like this and that would be okay. It’s not the end of the world, right? We just got to make sure that we’re not putting additional pressure on ourselves by getting agitated about how we have to change a thought. That being said, I definitely think this is something you can work on. What you can see here is that your thoughts are, it’s like you’re doing the same thing with your thought work, right? So you’re like trying to rush yourself to get to orgasm just like you’re trying to rush yourself to solve these thoughts. You got to slow down and calm down about both of them.

The main issue here is you have this thought that if it takes too much time, he will get bored or tired, which is the least sexy thing you could think about. So, number one, I want you to check out, there’s an article on Mind Body Green that I wrote about brain hacks to make sex better. And one of the things I talk about is the idea that, number one, women and people socialized as women are more likely to think this way because they are socialized to think that they shouldn’t inconvenience anyone else and that their sexual pleasure is somehow secondary.

You’re thinking of this as if he’s doing a favor for you, right? As if he would get bored or tired and that would be a problem. So I think there’s two different levels to work on it. One is, what if giving you pleasure is a turn on for him? If I like someone and I like pleasuring them and I go down on them, it’s not a chore to me. I’m not bored. I’m not tired. I enjoy doing it. I want to give him them pleasure, right? It pleases me to give them pleasure. So you’re thinking about this as like he’s doing you a favor and he’ll get born and tired. But if you thought about this as him being pleased to give you pleasure, then you wouldn’t feel this way. You wouldn’t have these thoughts so much. For all you know, he wishes it took you longer to orgasm so he could keep doing it. Like you’ve no idea.

The next level of it really is, so what if he does get bored or tired? Why is the fact that he might feel boredom because of his thoughts or have a little physical fatigue in his tongue, why is that more important than your orgasm? Because I’m going to bet if you’re a woman or you’ve been socialized as a woman, you’ve definitely done stuff for your partner’s sexual pleasure that was like a little boring or tiring or physically uncomfortable. And we could debate whether you should do that or not. For sure, like if you’re doing that because of thoughts you don’t like and you don’t like your reasons, then you might want to work on that.

But like my thought about it is, that’s what sex is sometimes. Sometimes it’s amazing and everybody loves what’s happening equally and wants to keep doing the exact same thing and that’s great. And sometimes you do something for your partner’s pleasure because they’re really into it even though you find it a little boring or it’s a little tiring.

Because it’s just like anything else in life. Like it’s great when you have the same interests with the partner, you both want to go to a baseball game and love the whole thing. And then sometimes you just go to the baseball game because it’s important to your partner and they want you to go and you’re willing to go. And women are very comfortable doing that, but we tend to be a lot less comfortable allowing other people to do that for us. And we think that’s going to like put them out and be a problem or that it doesn’t count. When I think it’s the opposite. If I have a partner who’s willing to go down on me until I orgasm even if he’s bored or tired, I’m like, awesome. You’re great, right? What a sign that you care about me and my pleasure. I’m so thrilled that you’re into that, that you’re up for that.

So it was two levels of working on this. The first one is not assuming that someone is doing you a favor by going down on you and so you have to immediately worry about them being bored or tired. The second one is so what if they are bored or tired? Like this is not fatal. It’s not going to hurt them. That’s just part of having sex sometimes or any other part of a relationship is one person feeling a little bored or tired to do something the other person enjoys. And you can see that as a sign of them loving you, right? Or whatever, in your case it may not be love, but like that’s just a sign of a good partner to me. But you’re making it a problem if that happens.

So those are the two ways I would work on this. But also you need to take a little bit of this pressure off. We don’t need to fix your thoughts. We don’t need to fix your orgasm. Like these are all optional things that are nice to have. Obviously I’m a big fan of orgasms, but telling yourself you need to fix the thoughts so that you because you need to fix the orgasm is just going to create pressure. You could just allow yourself to enjoy the process for however long it takes. And if you don’t orgasm, you don’t orgasm. Like the more pressure you put on orgasm for any gender, the more difficult it is to obtain.

All right y’all, I know you’re as tired as I am of having the top podcasts in wellness or health and fitness categories be a bunch of dudes who don’t know anything about socialization and who are not taking women’s lived experiences into account. So if you are looking for ways to support the show and more importantly, make sure the show gets to more people, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. And bonus points if you include a few lines about the way you use thought work and self-coaching or anything you’ve learned from the podcast in your daily life. Those reviews are what teach the algorithms to show us to more new people. It helps us get new listeners all over the world. And I’ll be reading one story from a recent review in each of these question and answer episodes.

Today’s review is titled, “Kara is in my head.” And I hear this a lot from you guys. Says, “I have listened to several episodes and Kara describes exactly how I feel. How did she know? I did not realize so many other women may feel this way. Right now I’m listening to the confidence compass skills and loving the episodes.” And this came from LKC987. So whoever you are, thank you. And for the rest of you, go listen to those confidence compass episodes. They are really good.

Okay, switching gears. Here’s the next question. “I’m a full-time public interest trial lawyer.” This person gave me their whole schedule, which I love. I love when you guys want to give me all your evidence. “I’m a full-time public interest trial lawyer, 8:30 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. when not in trial, with two young kids who fight with each other constantly.” By the way, that’s not a circumstance, just a FYI. “And a full-time lawyer spouse.” That might be a circumstance if you mean he has a full-time job as a lawyer. “Having school drop off, pickup and the nighttime routine, I have about two hours of free time on a weekday and family obligations, soccer, play dates, transport, homework on the weekends.

“My husband helps equally. The kids are a handful for one person. No local family. I can ‘disappear’ only once in a while. My trial prep and performance must be necessarily deficient compared to what it could be if I were like my child-free coworkers who have tons of free time to do as much trial prep as they like and still have time for self-care. I do love the job though. How do I find more time in my schedule for work, family, and self-care? I want to be a better lawyer and remain a good mom.”

Okay, there’s so much mixed up in here, my love, and you think all these are circumstances and they are all thoughts. Almost all of these are thoughts. You have a job and whatever times you’re supposed to be at your office or circumstances. You have two children. You have a husband who has a full-time job as a lawyer. Those are your circumstances and your immediate family lives in a different zip code. Those are the circumstances. The rest of this is thoughts.

So I could coach you on the A line. You need like look at your weekend obligations. Do your kids have to go to all those play dates? Are you always the one driving? Do they have to play soccer? If so, can you carpool? Like there’s all we could do all that, but it’s not about that because when your thoughts are in place, your actions become natural. There’s a couple problem thoughts you have. Well, number one, you think your kids fight with each other constantly and are a handful. I would suggest looking at those thoughts because I don’t think that’s helping, but I don’t think that’s the main issue here.

Number one, my trial prep and performance must be necessarily deficient compared to what it could be if I were like my child-free coworkers who have tons of free time to do as much trial prep as they like and still have time for self-care. That is not a circumstance. I know you think it is, but it is not.

Time is not the same as preparation work or value. And how do I know that? Because I coach a ton of single people on massive procrastination, right? And what is really fascinating is I often hear from my clients and friends who had kids that they got much more efficient once they had kids because they couldn’t procrastinate as much because when they went home, they actually had to leave the office for instance to go pick up the kids as opposed to being able to procrastinate and then do all the work in the middle of the night or whatever else.

So if you believed that having children made you more efficient, you would feel great about it. But instead, you believe that you just need more time. Time is not the same as efficiency, it is not the same as work, and it is not the same as value. So you have to break that association in your brain. I bet before you had kids, your thought was like, well, if I had kids, I’d be really efficient, like those moms, they get it all done fast, right? Your brain is just tricking you. It’s just criticizing you, but you’re taking it to be a true circumstance.

So I don’t think you need to find more time in your schedule for work. I can also guarantee that if these are your thoughts, you are not being totally efficient at work. I am sure that you are procrastinating and avoiding some. So I don’t think you need to find more time in your schedule. I think you need to stop believing that you don’t have enough time. If you believed you had plenty of time and you removed that time pressure from yourself, you probably think then you wouldn’t do anything, but the opposite is true. If you believed that you had plenty of time, then you would actually use your time productively and efficiently and get stuff done if you also did the thought work on whatever your reasons for procrastination and avoidance are.

So we can mess around in your A line if we want and look at how you’re spending your time, but that’s not going to do anything while you still believe all these thoughts. So that’s what you need to work on. You need to work on believing that you have plenty of time. You have enough time to do everything you want. You do not need more time for work. It does not sound to me like you need more time for family either. You might need more time to do some shit on your own. I think that’s what you’re calling self-care. But until you believe that you have enough time for all the things you want to do, it doesn’t matter what I tell you, your brain’s going to come up with like about where to get the time, your brain’s going to come up with an argument to the contrary.

So that’s the work. You need to break your mental association between number of hours available in a day and how good someone is at their job, which are literally completely unrelated. And number two, you need to work on believing that you have plenty of time for everything you want, rather than believing what you do now, which is that you don’t have enough time and that’s a circumstance. And that is true for all of you who worry about time.