Sex File: We are both too stressed to make love 

Young couple sleeping in bed back to back, top view

I'm too stressed and overwhelmed to have sex. My husband and I have full-on jobs and have both admitted to each other that sex just feels like another thing on our to-do list. I feel like I've got a mental block that stops me from getting turned on, let alone taking things further. What should we do?

Stress is a mental block and it has a physiological impact on your body that does stop you from feeling turned on. When you feel stressed and anxious, your sympathetic nervous system inhibits non-essential bodily functions to preserve energy and prepare you for fight or flight. Your adrenal glands pump out cortisol, the stress hormone, which makes blood flow away from your extremities towards your vital organs. While this ensures that no one gets an unwanted erection before they present to the board, it is a fairly pointless evolutionary response because modern stress is so impossibly persistent.

Getting a good work-life balance is difficult, but no one in their dying moments ever wished they had worked harder, and if you are pushing yourselves to your limits but still can't clear your in-tray, it is time to take a step back and question what is really important. What are you trying to prove? And is it worth neglecting your marriage for? Have you talked to your husband about how you are feeling? It sounds as if he is probably feeling exactly the same, and you might find that uniting in antipathy against the tyranny of your jobs creates sufficient common ground for you to steal a quickie and break this spell of stress-induced celibacy.

The longer you avoid sex the harder it is to get things back on track, so whether you feel like it or not, you both need to make sex the number one item on your to-do lists for once. The best comparison is exercise. Often you don't feel like going to the gym but you know you will feel better afterwards, so you do it anyway. Sexual desire is similar, particularly for women.

The response model of sexual desire was developed in 2000 by Rosemary Basson, director of sexual medicine at the University of British Columbia. She recognised that for women in committed relationships, sexual arousal isn't necessarily spontaneous. Instead, for many women, sexual arousal is triggered by the experience of physical intimacy. What this means is that even when you don't have a raging desire to engage in sex, allowing yourself to relax and experience kissing and cuddling triggers your dormant arousal.

There are obviously lots of other great ways to combat stress, but sex is probably the fastest and most powerful antidote. Studies from all over the world have shown that physical intimacy can increase relationship satisfaction, boost mood, decrease stress and make it easier to get to sleep. Orgasm floods the brain and the body with a neurochemical love bomb of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin that makes you feel happier - and much, much closer to the person you have had sex with. If the chemical hit we get from great sex was for sale it would be class A, but because it is a free, natural human high, we don't pay it the respect it deserves.

Stressed, busy people often use lack of time as an excuse for letting sex slide, but it isn't an endurance sport. A 2020 study that tracked 645 women for a year found that the time to orgasm for heterosexual women in stable relationships ranged between 12 and 14 minutes. What else can get you high, relieve your stress and make you fall in love with your husband again in less than a quarter of an hour?

• Send your queries to [e-mail]