Sex File: Help! I need a few glasses of wine before sex 

Picture: iStock 

I'm in my early 40s and I've recently given up drinking. I realise now that I would often have a few glasses of wine before sex with my husband. It would relax me. Now that I'm teetotal, I seem to be less confident in the bedroom and find it difficult to get in the mood.

Many people begin using alcohol as a crutch because they suffer from anxiety or have low self-esteem, and in moderation, it works. It's very easy to get used to only having sex after a glass or two of wine if you're a couple who tend to have sex in the evening before bed. The disinhibitory effects of a small quantity of alcohol can be wonderful - but not if it becomes essential for your enjoyment.

In 2000, Taisto Sarkola at the National Public Health Institute in Helsinki explored the effect of alcohol on a group of pre-menopausal women. When Sarkola tested the impact of alcohol against a placebo drink, he found that alcohol significantly increased the level of testosterone in the women's bloodstream 45 minutes and 90 minutes after they drank.

Because testosterone is the hormone that governs libido, drinking alcohol in small or moderate quantities can increase your interest in sex and because alcohol is also a disinhibitor, if you are a naturally shy person, drinking can help you to feel more relaxed too.

People drink alcohol for all sorts of reasons, but they usually give up for one: their health.  According to Alcohol Action Ireland, alcohol is responsible for 88 deaths every month or more than 1,000 deaths per year.

If you quit because you were worried that your relationship with alcohol had become a problem, you may have believed that giving it up would make an immediate and positive difference to your sexual and emotional relationship. As you are now discovering, it is a little more complex than that.

Although alcohol can make it easier for an anxious person to have sex, in the long term it is a double-edged sword because alcohol changes levels of serotonin and other neurotransmitters in the brain, which ends up making anxiety worse. Eventually, the thing that helped becomes the thing that hinders, and the situation either changes or falls apart.

All transitions take time, but the good news is that the longer you stay sober, the easier this will get and ultimately, you will end up having a better relationship with yourself and with your husband. Sex and intimacy can make you feel very vulnerable and if alcohol was your way of dulling feelings that you found difficult, getting sober means owning your discomfort and approaching sex as an exploration, rather than a performance.

Learning more about the brain-body connection will help you; read Emily Nagoski's book Come As You Are and pay attention to the section on Erick Janssen and John Bancroft's Dual Control Model of Arousal.

It explains the tension between the things that excite us sexually and the myriad factors (social, cultural, physical or psychological) that inhibit us from feeling comfortable having sex. Ultimately, sexual confidence is inseparable from self- acceptance, so you need to stop listening to your inner critic and start being a bit gentler with yourself. Liking yourself is a very powerful decision and changing the way you see yourself will bring untold positive benefits to your relationship with your husband.

• Send your queries to [e-mail]