Low sexual desire is one of the most common sexual concerns for both men and women, and it responds well to changes in exercise, sleep, diet, stress management, and relationship habits. About 27% of premenopausal women and over 50% of naturally menopausal women report low sexual desire. The numbers for men are lower but still significant. The good news is that desire isn’t fixed. It’s shaped by hormones, brain chemistry, lifestyle, and psychology, all of which you can influence.
Why Desire Fluctuates
Sexual desire runs on a balance between brain chemicals that push you toward sex and ones that pull you away. Dopamine is the primary driver. It activates motivation and reward circuits, making you want to seek out sexual experiences. Testosterone, in both men and women, supports this process by increasing dopamine activity in areas of the brain responsible for sexual motivation and physical arousal.
On the other side, serotonin acts mostly as a brake. Higher serotonin activity suppresses dopamine release in the brain’s reward pathways, which can dampen desire and delay arousal. This balance explains why anything that shifts your hormones, neurotransmitters, or overall brain chemistry (sleep, stress, medications, food) can change how much you want sex from one week to the next.
Exercise Has One of the Strongest Effects
Regular physical activity is one of the most reliable ways to raise sexual desire, and you don’t need to train like an athlete. Research comparing different exercise volumes found that people with the lowest exercise levels had significantly lower sex drive than every other group. Even moderate amounts of regular activity produced meaningful improvements in desire, arousal, and overall sexual function.
There’s been some concern that extreme training could suppress libido by lowering testosterone, and very high volumes of intense endurance exercise can do this. But more recent data suggests that even men who exercise at high volumes don’t typically experience negative effects on sexual function. The real risk isn’t overdoing it. It’s doing too little. Aim for consistent, moderate exercise most days of the week, whether that’s strength training, running, swimming, or brisk walking. The type matters less than the consistency.
Sleep Deprivation Lowers Testosterone
Pulling an all-nighter has a direct, measurable effect on your hormones. A meta-analysis of sleep studies found that going 24 hours or more without sleep significantly reduces testosterone levels in men. Staying awake for 40 to 48 hours drops it even further. Interestingly, short-term partial sleep deprivation (sleeping less than ideal but still sleeping) didn’t produce a statistically significant testosterone drop in the same analysis, which suggests your body can tolerate a rough night here and there.
That said, chronic poor sleep chips away at desire through other pathways: higher stress hormones, lower energy, worse mood, and reduced sensitivity to pleasure. If your libido has been declining gradually, your sleep habits are one of the first things worth examining. Consistent sleep of seven or more hours, on a regular schedule, supports the hormonal environment desire depends on.
What You Eat Affects Blood Flow and Arousal
Sexual arousal is, at its most basic level, a blood flow event. Anything that improves your vascular health tends to improve sexual function. The Mediterranean diet, built around vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fish, nuts, and olive oil, has strong evidence behind it. It appears to reduce oxidative stress and inflammation while improving the body’s ability to produce nitric oxide, the molecule that relaxes blood vessels and allows blood to flow to genital tissue during arousal.
Extra virgin olive oil specifically has been shown to stimulate nitric oxide production and reduce levels of a compound that constricts blood vessels, which lowers blood pressure and supports healthy circulation. One study found that women who consumed moderate amounts of red wine daily scored higher on measures of sexual desire and overall function compared to non-drinkers, likely because of polyphenols that enhance blood vessel dilation. The key word is moderate. Heavy drinking reliably suppresses sexual function.
Metabolic syndrome (the combination of high blood sugar, high blood pressure, excess abdominal fat, and abnormal cholesterol) roughly doubles the rate of sexual dysfunction compared to people without it. A diet that keeps these markers in check protects your sexual health over time.
Supplements With Actual Evidence
Most “libido supplements” have weak or no evidence behind them, but a few have been tested in controlled trials. Ashwagandha root extract (KSM-66) was studied in healthy men who took 300 mg twice daily for eight weeks. Their sexual desire scores increased by nearly 62% compared to a placebo group. That’s a large effect for a supplement, though the study was in men who were healthy to begin with, not specifically those with low desire.
Maca root has also shown positive results in smaller trials for both men and women, though the evidence is less robust. Neither supplement is a magic fix, but ashwagandha in particular has enough clinical backing to be worth trying if you’ve already addressed the bigger lifestyle factors.
Check Your Medications
If your desire dropped after starting a new medication, that’s probably not a coincidence. Antidepressants that increase serotonin activity are the most common culprits, and this makes biological sense: serotonin directly suppresses the dopamine pathways that drive desire. Among antidepressants, SSRIs carry the highest risk of sexual side effects, with paroxetine being the worst offender. All SSRIs can cause it, though.
Blood pressure medications, hormonal birth control, anti-anxiety drugs, and certain antihistamines can also blunt desire. If you suspect a medication is the problem, talk to your prescriber about alternatives. For antidepressants specifically, there are options that affect serotonin less and tend to spare sexual function. Stopping a medication abruptly on your own is not the solution, but switching to a different one can be.
Mindfulness Training for Low Desire
This one surprises people, but it has some of the strongest clinical evidence of any psychological approach. A randomized trial tested an eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy program designed specifically for women with low desire. Each session included a full hour of guided mindfulness practice, including body scans, breathing meditations, and exercises that trained participants to bring nonjudgmental attention to physical sensations, including in erogenous areas of the body.
The results were striking: sexual desire and arousal improved with large effect sizes (the statistical term for a meaningful, not trivial, change), and sexual distress dropped significantly. The mindfulness group showed even greater reductions in distress than a comparison group receiving traditional sex education and therapy.
The reason this works is that low desire often isn’t about a lack of physical capacity. It’s about distraction, self-criticism, anxiety, or a disconnect between your body and your attention. Mindfulness trains you to notice physical sensation without judgment, which directly counters the mental patterns that suppress arousal. You don’t need a formal program to start. Daily body scan meditations of 10 to 20 minutes, practiced consistently, use the same principle.
Relationship and Communication Patterns
Desire doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In partnered people, the quality of emotional and sexual communication is a significant predictor of sexual function. A study of over 1,200 women found that the ability to communicate about sex mediated the link between emotional regulation skills and sexual functioning. In plain terms: if you can manage your emotions well and talk openly about sex, your desire and arousal are more likely to be healthy.
This effect gets stronger with age. Older women who struggled with emotional regulation showed worse sexual communication than younger women with similar difficulties, suggesting that unaddressed communication patterns compound over time. Sensate focus, an exercise where partners take turns touching each other slowly with no goal other than paying attention to sensation, has been used in clinical settings for decades and was included in both arms of the mindfulness trial above. It reduces performance pressure and rebuilds physical connection in relationships where desire has faded.
If you and your partner have stopped talking about sex, or if conversations about it tend to go badly, that pattern itself may be suppressing your desire more than any biological factor. Starting with low-pressure physical intimacy and honest, non-blaming conversations about what feels good is often more effective than any supplement or diet change.