Sex File: We are both too stressed to make love 

"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."

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.