Can You Train Your Brain to Have Better Orgasms? The Science of Orgasmic Learning
Updated: 3 days ago
What if the secret to having better orgasms isn't necessarily more stimulation, more concentration, or trying harder?
What if part of the answer is learning how to get your brain out of the way?
If you've ever been having an incredibly pleasurable sexual experience, feeling yourself getting closer and closer to orgasm, only to have your brain suddenly barge into the room asking, Are we there yet? Is this happening? What am I supposed to do now?—you know exactly what I'm talking about.
One minute, you're completely absorbed in your pleasure. The next, you're monitoring yourself having the experience.
And somehow, the harder you try to make that orgasm happen, the further away it seems to get.
But here's something fascinating: emerging scientific research suggests that orgasm may involve more than having the right stimulation. It may also involve learning how to enter particular states of awareness that make orgasm more accessible.
This emerging concept is called orgasmic learning, and it brings together some of my absolute favorite subjects: neuroscience, hypnosis, altered states of consciousness, nervous system awareness, and our extraordinary human capacity for pleasure.
Let's talk about what the science actually says—and what it might mean for your own orgasmic potential.
🎧 Listen to the Embodied Magic episode: Can You Train Your Brain to Have Better Orgasms?Research Says YES!
Your Brain Is Part of Your Sexual Anatomy
When we talk about female orgasms, we tend to focus on genital stimulation.
And for good reason! The clitoris is an extraordinary organ, and understanding how to stimulate it effectively can make an enormous difference in someone's experience of sexual pleasure.
But your clitoris isn't having an experience completely independent of your brain.
Your brain participates in interpreting sensation, directing attention, generating emotions, evaluating context, and coordinating the physiological processes involved in arousal.
Think about this.
Have you ever experienced a particular kind of touch that felt absolutely delicious one day, but the next day, that same touch felt irritating?
Maybe you were exhausted. Maybe you'd just had an argument. Maybe you were thinking about the 47 things you needed to accomplish before tomorrow morning.
Or maybe you were in the luteal phase of your menstrual cycle and simply weren't into it.
The physical stimulation might have been nearly identical, but your experience of it was completely different.
Because pleasure is contextual.
Your brain isn't simply receiving sensory information like a computer downloading data. It's actively participating in creating your experience of that sensation.
And if our attention, emotions, expectations, and nervous system states influence how we experience pleasure, it raises a fascinating question:
Can we learn to work with those processes to make orgasm more accessible?
Why Trying Harder to Orgasm Can Sometimes Backfire
One of the scientific models that helps explain orgasm difficulties is called the Sexual Tipping Point Model, developed by sex therapist and researcher Michael Perelman.
The model describes sexual response as the interaction between factors that increase sexual excitement and factors that inhibit it. Think of them as accelerators and brakes.
Or, if you prefer, imagine a whole collection of dimmer switches.
Some of those switches are turning up your arousal.
Maybe you're receiving delicious physical stimulation. Maybe you're enjoying an erotic fantasy. Maybe you're feeling deeply connected to your partner, or experiencing anticipation and excitement.
But other switches may be turning things down.
Maybe you're worried about how your body looks.
Maybe you're distracted.
Maybe you're afraid your partner is getting impatient.
Maybe you're taking a medication that interferes with orgasm.
Maybe you're simply not feeling emotionally comfortable enough to become completely immersed in the experience.
All these factors interact to influence your sexual response.
And here's where things get interesting.
When we struggle to orgasm, we often assume that we need to turn up the stimulation.
More pressure. More speed. More intensity.
Sometimes that's exactly what we need! Sometimes moving a quarter of an inch to the left is the answer. Sometimes we need more direct clitoral stimulation, better communication, a different position, or simply more time.
But sometimes the more useful approach is to turn down the inhibitory factors.
What if you don't need to press the gas pedal any harder?
What if you just need to release the parking brake?
That's where the emerging science of orgasmic learning becomes especially intriguing.
What Is Orgasmic Learning?
In October 2026, researcher Suzanne Mulvehill published a review in Current Sexual Health Reports titled Orgasmic Learning as a Treatment Framework for Female Orgasmic Disorder/Difficulty.
The paper introduces a framework for understanding orgasmic difficulties through the conditions that make orgasm accessible.
Rather than focusing exclusively on physical stimulation, the framework considers whether orgasm may become more accessible through learning to enter and sustain particular psychological and physiological states.
These might involve focused attention, sensory awareness, mental imagery, hypnosis, breathwork, or other practices that influence consciousness and bodily experience.
The idea is that there may be multiple pathways through which orgasm becomes possible.
Some involve direct genital stimulation.
Others may involve changes in awareness, imagination, muscular activity, or our relationship with the sensations unfolding in our bodies.
And perhaps, through repeated experience, some of these states can become increasingly familiar and accessible.
Can Your Brain Actually Learn to Orgasm?
We already have research showing that orgasmic functioning can improve through structured learning and behavioral approaches.
A 2021 review by psychologist Erica Marchand examined psychological and behavioral treatments for female orgasmic disorder.
Among the approaches reviewed, directed masturbation, sensate focus, and psychotherapy had the most consistent supporting evidence.
This matters because it demonstrates that orgasmic functioning isn't necessarily a fixed ability. For some women, learning and practice can make a meaningful difference.
Mulvehill's newer framework proposes an additional possibility:
Perhaps we're not only learning what kinds of stimulation feel good.
Perhaps we're also learning how to enter the mental and physiological states in which orgasm becomes more accessible.
That's a fascinating hypothesis, although it still needs further testing.
And I think it offers a much more interesting way to approach orgasm difficulties than assuming our bodies are malfunctioning.
Orgasm and Altered States of Consciousness
Now we're getting into some of my favorite territory.
Altered states of consciousness!
When we hear that phrase, we often imagine something dramatic.
Psychedelic experiences. Mystical visions. Deep hypnosis. Someone having an out-of-body experience.
But shifts in consciousness don't necessarily have to involve anything supernatural or extraordinary.
Think about what happens when you're completely absorbed in an activity you love.
Maybe you're painting, dancing, listening to music, or walking through the woods.
You're so immersed in the experience that you temporarily lose track of time.
Or think about that delicious space between waking and sleeping, when images begin appearing in your mind and your thoughts take on a dreamy, fluid quality.
Your awareness has shifted.
You're no longer analyzing every little thing that's happening.
You're immersed in the experience.
Sexual pleasure can involve a similar kind of absorption.
And here's what makes the orgasmic learning framework so interesting.
We generally think of orgasm as something that produces an altered state of consciousness.
But what if, for some people, entering a particular absorbed state can also help facilitate orgasm?
What if the altered state isn't just the destination?
What if it's also part of the pathway?
That's one of the possibilities raised in Mulvehill's review.
And it brings us to an important distinction.
Monitoring Pleasure vs. Becoming Immersed in Pleasure
There's a difference between concentrating intensely on achieving an orgasm and becoming deeply absorbed in pleasurable sensation.
One is monitoring.
The other is immersion.
When you're monitoring yourself, you might be asking:
Am I getting closer? Is this enough stimulation? Why isn't it happening yet?
Your attention is focused on evaluating your progress.
But when you're immersed in pleasure, your attention is engaged with the experience itself.
The warmth. The pressure. The tingling. The delicious little changes in sensation that unfold when you allow yourself to become completely engrossed in what's happening.
And that difference in how we use our attention may be an important piece of the orgasm puzzle.
Can Hypnosis Help Women Experience Better Orgasms?
As a consulting hypnotist, this is where the research gets particularly exciting for me.
Hypnosis involves working with attention, imagination, suggestion, and our capacity to become deeply absorbed in an experience.
And despite what Hollywood might have taught you, hypnosis isn't about somebody swinging a pocket watch in front of your face and taking control of your mind.
We're working with naturally occurring capacities for focused attention and imaginative experience.
In the context of sexual pleasure, hypnosis offers an intriguing way to explore how our thoughts, expectations, and states of awareness influence bodily sensations.
Can Someone Experience an Orgasm Through Hypnosis Alone?
Believe it or not, researchers have been exploring connections between hypnosis and orgasm for decades.
Clinical reports from the 1960s and 1970s described improvements in orgasmic functioning following hypnosis.
More recently, research presented in 2025 examined whether hypnosis could induce physiological responses associated with orgasm.
The researchers reported that women experiencing hypnotically induced orgasms showed increases in prolactin, a hormone associated with orgasm, along with muscular responses consistent with orgasmic activity.
What's particularly fascinating is that the women were fully clothed, and the reported orgasms occurred without direct genital stimulation.
Now, this research was presented as a conference abstract rather than a detailed, full-length research report, so we need to be careful about what conclusions we draw.
It certainly doesn't establish that everyone can learn to orgasm through hypnosis.
But it does raise some extraordinary questions about the relationship between consciousness and sexual response.
And I love that researchers are beginning to explore these possibilities.
Because our minds and bodies are not separate systems. They're participating in our experiences together.
Interoception: Learning to Feel What's Happening Inside Your Body
There's another fascinating area of research that connects directly with orgasmic learning: interoception.
Interoception is our ability to perceive and interpret signals arising from inside our bodies.
Things like our heartbeat, breathing, muscular tension, temperature, and other internal sensations.
It's an important component of embodied self-awareness, and something I talk about frequently in my hypnosis and coaching work.
But what does it have to do with orgasms?
Quite a lot, potentially.
A study published in December 2024 examined the relationship between interoceptive awareness and orgasm frequency and satisfaction.
The researchers found that women who reported greater awareness of their internal bodily sensations also tended to report more frequent orgasms.
The ability to regulate attention toward bodily sensations was associated with greater orgasm frequency and satisfaction during solo sexual experiences.
And perhaps most interestingly, a greater sense of trust in one's own body was associated with higher orgasm satisfaction during both solo and partnered experiences.
These findings are correlational, meaning they don't establish that increasing body awareness will automatically improve orgasms.
But they do suggest that the relationship we have with our internal sensations deserves more attention.
Because think about how often we have sex while paying attention to almost everything except what's happening inside our bodies.
We're wondering what our partner thinks.
We're thinking about how we look.
We're anticipating what should happen next.
Meanwhile, all these subtle sensations are unfolding inside us, and we might barely be registering them.
What happens when we begin developing greater intimacy with our own internal experience?
When we become curious about how arousal actually feels?
When we learn to recognize those little shifts in sensation instead of immediately evaluating what they're supposed to mean?
That's where the overlap between mindfulness, hypnosis, and embodied pleasure becomes particularly useful.
What Does Research Say About Practicing Orgasm?
Let's bring this back down to earth.
Because it's one thing to talk about altered states of consciousness and neuroscience, but what does this actually mean for someone who's struggling to orgasm?
A randomized study published in 2020 examined 65 women, ages 18–58, who were experiencing orgasm difficulties.
Participants were assigned to either a video-based cognitive behavioral treatment or a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy program designed to address orgasm difficulties.
Both groups showed improvements in sexual functioning and reductions in sexual distress, along with improvements in aspects of desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction.
Importantly, the mindfulness intervention wasn't clearly superior to the traditional cognitive behavioral approach.
So we shouldn't interpret these findings as evidence that mindfulness is the one secret ingredient everyone has been missing.
But they do suggest that structured psychological and behavioral practices can help some women improve their sexual experiences.
And that's encouraging.
Because it means that struggling to orgasm today doesn't necessarily mean your experience will always be the same.
Our sexual functioning involves multiple interacting systems, and sometimes we can learn new ways of working with them.
Three Ways to Begin Exploring Orgasmic Learning
Now let's talk about how to actually bring some of this information into your own experience.
I'm deliberately calling these explorations rather than techniques guaranteed to produce an orgasm.
Because the last thing I want is for you to take this beautiful information about pleasure and turn it into another thing you have to do correctly.
The point is curiosity, not performance.
1. Become a Pleasure Detective
This is one of my favorite exercises, and I teach it in my free Embodied Pleasure Guidebook.
Start by finding a sensation that feels pleasant.
It doesn't even have to be sexual.
Maybe you're sitting in a warm bath.
Maybe you're enjoying the sunshine on your skin.
Maybe you're holding hands with your partner or squeezing a favorite fidget toy.
If pleasant sensations feel difficult to identify, you can begin with something neutral or simply interesting.
Now, rather than casually noticing that something feels nice, become deeply curious about the experience.
Where do you feel it?
Does it have a temperature?
A texture?
A shape?
Does it seem to move?
Does it have a boundary?
Does anything change when you give it your full attention?
Imagine allowing that one sensation to become a doorway into an entire universe of sensory experience.
You don't have to make it bigger.
You don't have to change it.
You're simply practicing becoming more familiar with pleasure as something you can actually feel, explore, and become absorbed in.
And later, during sexual experiences, you can bring that same quality of attention into your pleasure.
Instead of focusing on where you're trying to get, you become curious about where you already are.
2. Experiment With Your State of Consciousness
This next exploration draws on some principles of hypnosis.
Find a comfortable position.
You might close your eyes or simply soften your gaze.
Notice the support beneath your body.
Feel the places where your body makes contact with the chair or bed.
Allow your attention to settle into your physical experience.
You might notice your breathing or the sensations in your hands.
Then begin imagining something pleasurable.
Maybe it's the memory of a wonderful massage.
Maybe you're somewhere beautiful, surrounded by warmth and softness.
Maybe you're remembering a moment when you felt completely comfortable and relaxed in your body.
As you immerse yourself in the imagery, notice whether your body responds.
Does your breathing change?
Do certain muscles soften?
Do you notice anticipation, warmth, or ease?
You're exploring the relationship between imagination, attention, and physical sensation.
This isn't a direct orgasm-training exercise. It's an opportunity to become familiar with intentionally shifting your awareness and noticing how your body responds.
And those skills may have applications in sexual pleasure, too.
3. Practice Receiving Instead of Performing
This last practice is particularly important for people who get caught up in trying really hard to make an orgasm happen.
The next time you're enjoying sexual pleasure, experiment with temporarily taking orgasm off the table.
Yes, I know.
We're talking about learning to orgasm, and I'm suggesting that you stop trying to have one.
But hear me out.
Sometimes the more intensely we focus on achieving a particular result, the less available we become to actually experiencing what's happening.
So instead of trying to make an orgasm happen, explore the difference between
doing pleasure and feeling pleasure.
Notice whether you're evaluating every sensation.
Are you monitoring your progress?
Holding your breath?
Trying to force your body into the next stage?
What happens when you give yourself permission to simply experience the pleasure that's already happening?
You can still move your body.
You can still change the stimulation.
You can still actively participate in creating delicious experiences.
Surrender doesn't mean becoming passive.
It means exploring whether you can allow pleasure to unfold without constantly supervising it.
And maybe something shifts.
Maybe it doesn't.
Either way, you're learning something about your body and how you experience pleasure.
The Difference Between Training Your Brain and Forcing Your Body
Before we wrap up, I want to make something very clear.
The fact that orgasmic functioning can sometimes improve through learning and practice does not mean that everyone should be able to achieve any kind of orgasm if they just try hard enough.
Women have already spent far too much time being told what our bodies should be doing.
How we should look.
How much desire we should have.
How quickly we should get turned on.
What kinds of orgasms we should experience.
I don't want this conversation about orgasmic learning to become another impossible standard.
There are medications, medical conditions, hormonal changes, pelvic floor issues, pain disorders, neurological factors, and relationship circumstances that can significantly affect sexual functioning.
Sometimes the most helpful next step is medical evaluation or specialized sexual health care.
And sometimes our pleasure simply changes.
What worked beautifully at one stage of life might not work the same way anymore.
Our bodies are dynamic. Our nervous systems are nuanced. Our experiences change.
The opportunity here isn't to force ourselves into becoming some idealized version of an orgasmic woman.
It's to develop a more curious, compassionate, and intimate relationship with ourselves.
The Real Goal Isn't Performing Pleasure. It's Experiencing It.
When I talk about becoming more orgasmic, I'm not talking about turning yourself into a pleasure-performing machine.
I'm talking about becoming more intimately acquainted with yourself.
Recognizing what feels good.
Learning what you want.
Discovering how to communicate your desires and boundaries.
And exploring how your mind and body can work together to create opportunities for richer, more satisfying experiences.
Because the beautiful thing is that these skills have meaning outside the bedroom, too.
Learning to recognize what you're feeling.
Trusting your own experiences.
Noticing what feels pleasurable and what feels uncomfortable.
Giving yourself permission to want what you want.
Those are all parts of living a more empowered, embodied life.
And that's what this work is really about for me.
Pleasure isn't necessarily something that just happens to you. It's something you participate in discovering and cultivating for yourself.
And I think we deserve so much more research, education, and curiosity about the extraordinary things our minds and bodies are capable of experiencing together.
Ready to Explore Your Own Orgasmic Potential?
If you're curious about taking these ideas beyond intellectual understanding and into your own embodied experience, I'd love to invite you into Becoming Orgasmic.
This upcoming training is designed for women and nonbinary people with vulvas who want to explore their capacity for deeper, more satisfying orgasmic pleasure.
We'll explore sexual response, desire, arousal, attention, nervous system awareness, and how hypnosis and other embodied practices can support the experience of pleasure.
Not to promise you a particular kind of orgasm.
But to help you develop a deeper relationship with your own capacity for pleasure.
And if you'd like a free place to begin, download my Embodied Pleasure Guidebook, which includes pleasure education, embodied exercises, and a guided hypnosis recording to explore feeling safe enough to receive pleasure.
Because your pleasure deserves more than pressure, expectations, and another impossible standard.
It deserves your curiosity.
Frequently Asked Questions About Orgasmic Learning
1. Can you actually train your brain to have orgasms?
Research suggests that some aspects of orgasmic functioning can improve through learning, practice, and psychological or behavioral interventions. Approaches such as directed masturbation, sensate focus, and cognitive behavioral therapies have demonstrated benefits for some women experiencing orgasm difficulties.
A newer scientific framework called orgasmic learning proposes that practicing particular states of awareness may also make orgasm more accessible. However, this specific framework is still emerging, and researchers haven't yet established how reliably these states can be learned or whether they improve orgasm for everyone.
2. Why can't I orgasm even when the stimulation feels good?
Sexual arousal and orgasm are related, but they aren't the same thing.
You might enjoy stimulation and feel sexually excited without reaching orgasm. Factors such as distracting thoughts, performance anxiety, inadequate or unsuitable stimulation, medications, hormonal changes, pelvic floor conditions, and relationship dynamics can all influence your response.
The Sexual Tipping Point Model helps explain how factors that increase arousal interact with those that inhibit it.
Sometimes the answer is changing the physical stimulation. Other times, reducing distractions or performance pressure may help. Persistent or distressing orgasm difficulties are worth discussing with a qualified sexual healthcare professional.
3. Can hypnosis help you have better orgasms?
Hypnosis may offer a way to explore the relationship between attention, imagination, bodily sensations, and sexual pleasure.
Historical clinical reports have described improvements in orgasmic functioning following hypnosis, and preliminary research has investigated whether hypnosis can produce physiological responses associated with orgasm.
However, the scientific evidence remains limited. Hypnosis is not yet an established, reliably effective standalone treatment for female orgasmic disorder.
For people who enjoy imaginative and embodied practices, it may be an interesting complementary approach to exploring pleasure without making orgasm the required outcome.
4. What is the difference between mindfulness and hypnosis for sexual pleasure?
Mindfulness and hypnosis are different practices, but they share an important feature: both can involve intentionally directing attention.
Mindfulness generally emphasizes observing present-moment experiences without judgment, while hypnosis often uses focused attention, imagination, and suggestion to facilitate changes in subjective experience.
In sexual contexts, mindfulness may help someone notice bodily sensations instead of becoming consumed by self-monitoring. Hypnosis may provide opportunities to explore how imagination and focused awareness influence physical experience.
Both approaches can support curiosity about pleasure, although their effectiveness varies between individuals.
5. Can you learn to orgasm if you've never had one before?
Yes, some people who have never experienced an orgasm can develop that ability through education, exploration, and appropriate support.
Research on female orgasmic disorder has identified directed masturbation and sensate focus among the better-supported behavioral approaches.
Learning about clitoral anatomy, experimenting with different kinds of stimulation, reducing performance pressure, and developing greater awareness of bodily sensations may all be useful components of exploration.
However, everyone's body and circumstances are different. There's no universal timeline or guaranteed method, and difficulty reaching orgasm doesn't mean you're doing something wrong.
6. How can I stop overthinking during sex and become more present?
Start by noticing the difference between evaluating your sexual experience and actually feeling it.
If you catch yourself wondering whether you're getting close to orgasm, try gently redirecting your attention toward one specific sensation.
Maybe it's warmth, pressure, tingling, movement, or the feeling of your breath.
Explore that sensation with curiosity rather than trying to intensify it.
You can practice this kind of sensory awareness outside sexual experiences, too.
The goal isn't to eliminate every distracting thought. It's to become more familiar with returning your attention to the experience you want to be having.
7. Does having better body awareness lead to better orgasms?
A 2024 study examining interoceptive awareness and female orgasm found associations between greater awareness of internal bodily sensations and more frequent orgasms.
The researchers also found that attention regulation was associated with greater orgasm frequency and satisfaction during solo sexual experiences, while body trust was associated with greater orgasm satisfaction in both solo and partnered contexts.
These findings suggest that our relationship with bodily sensations may be relevant to sexual pleasure.
However, because the study was observational, it cannot establish that increasing interoceptive awareness directly causes better orgasms.
Practicing body awareness may be a worthwhile exploration, but it isn't a guaranteed solution to orgasm difficulties.
Full Episode Transcript
Can You Train Your Brain to Have Better Orgasms | Orgasmic Learning Research
Can You Train Your Brain to Have Better Orgasms | Orgasmic Learning Research
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Embodied Magic Podcast with Melinda. It's me, Melinda, and I just had my cacao cortado, so I am ready to go. Today we are talking about this very exciting subject, can you train your brain to have orgasms? So the emerging science of orgasmic learning, hypnosis, and altered states of pleasure is a special interest of mine.
And what I really want you to take away from this episode is that orgasm is something that you can learn. You can learn to do it for the first time. You can learn to expand, deepen, have new types of orgasmic pleasure. So I wonder, have you ever been having a really pleasurable sexual experience and you can feel yourself getting closer and closer to orgasm, and then all of a sudden your brain just comes barging into the room like, "Hey, are we there yet?
Is this happening? Are you getting close? What are we supposed to do right [00:01:00] now?" " I feel like something is about to happen," and suddenly you're not really in the experience anymore. You're watching yourself having the experience and evaluating every detail of it. Maybe you're trying harder, you're squeezing harder or concentrating harder, or somehow the harder you try, the further away orgasm and pleasure seems to feel.
Well, what if the missing piece, the missing ingredient, isn't more stimulation, although sometimes it is. What if part of what's happening is that your brain and nervous system haven't quite entered the state that allows the orgasmic experience to unfold? And what if that's something that you can actually learn?
If you're new here, my name is Melinda Love. I'm a certified sex, love, and relationships coach with a concentration in women's empowerment. I'm also a consulting hypnotist, and I'm absolutely fascinated by the relationship between our minds, bodies, and our extraordinary capacity [00:02:00] for pleasure.
Today, we're diving into some fascinating emerging research on something called orgasmic learning, and I'm especially excited about this because it brings together so many of the things that I've been studying and teaching over the years: hypnosis, mindfulness, breathwork, the nervous system, sexual pleasure, and the extraordinary ways that our brains can influence what we experience inside of our body.
A new research paper published in October of 2026 proposes that orgasm may be more accessible when we learn how to enter particular states of awareness, and that opens up some really interesting questions about whether we can practice becoming more receptive to orgasm.
We're talking about understanding how orgasm happens, how the mind participates in the process, and what we might be able to learn about ourselves through deliberate, pleasurable exploration. And I think it's a really empowering conversation because so many women struggling [00:03:00] with orgasm come with this underlying feeling that something is wrong with us, that our bodies aren't working correctly, that we should be able to do this thing that seems to come easily to everyone else, or so we think.
And instead of approaching our bodies with curiosity, we start approaching them like they're a problem that we need to solve. So today, I wanna offer you another way of looking at this. What if your orgasmic capacity isn't necessarily something that's missing? And what if there are conditions to make it easier or harder to access it?
And what if learning about those conditions could change your relationship with pleasure? So let's jump right in. Part one of this conversation is that your brain is a part of your sexual anatomy. Yes. When we talk about having orgasms, we spend a lot of time talking about genital stimulation,
and obviously genital stimulation is a very important part of sexual pleasure for [00:04:00] most people. But your clitoris isn't having an experience completely independent of your brain.
Your brain is interpreting sensory information, evaluating context, generating emotions, directing attention, and participating in the physiological process that makes up sexual arousal. So the experience of pleasure is never just about what's happening in your body or your genitals. It's also about what's happening in your consciousness, in your awareness.
So think about that for a minute. Have you ever had someone touch you in a way that felt absolutely delicious one day, and then the next day, the exact same kind of touch just feels annoying or irritating. Maybe you were exhausted. Maybe you had an argument. Maybe you were thinking about 47 other things that you needed to get done before tomorrow morning.
Maybe you're in the luteal phase of your cycle and you just aren't into it today. The physical stimulation [00:05:00] might have been almost identical, but your experience of it was completely different. Why? Because pleasure is contextual. Your brain doesn't just receive sensation like a computer downloading information.
It participates in creating the experience of that sensation. And I think that's where orgasmic learning becomes such an interesting concept. Because if attention, emotion, expectation, bodily awareness, and nervous system state influence our experience of sexual pleasure, then perhaps learning to work with those processes can influence how easily we can experience orgasm.
Now, that doesn't mean that you can simply think your way into an orgasm at this point, and certainly it doesn't mean that every orgasm difficulty is psychological. I don't want to make that mistake. There are medications, medical conditions, hormonal changes, pain disorders, neurological factors, and [00:06:00] all kinds of other things that can affect sexual functioning, but that's a very small percentage of the population.
But it doesn't mean that the mind-body relationship deserves a much bigger place in our conversations about orgasm.
So part two of this conversation is the sexual tipping point. One of the scientific models that this new research builds upon is called the sexual tipping point model, developed by sex therapist and researcher Michael Pearlman. And I love this concept because it gives us really useful ways of thinking about why something might work beautifully on one day and not work at all the next day.
So the basic idea is that the sexual response emerges from the interaction between factors that increase sexual excitation and factors that inhibit it, so the brakes and accelerators. Imagine a set of dimmer switches now. Some of those switches are turning up your arousal, and maybe you're receiving delicious [00:07:00] stimulation.
Maybe you're having an erotic fantasy. Maybe you're feeling deeply connected to yourself or your partner. Maybe you're experiencing anticipation, excitement, or curiosity. Now, all of these things are contributing to your sexual excitement, but at the same time, you might have other switches that are turning things down.
You're worried about your body or you're distracted, feeling rushed. You're afraid that your partner is getting impatient, or maybe you don't feel emotionally safe. Maybe you're taking a medication that makes orgasm more difficult. And the balance between all these factors influences whether your sexual response crosses that tipping point into orgasm.
Now, here's what I find especially interesting. We tend to assume that when we can't orgasm, we need to turn the stimulation up. More pressure, intensity, or more speed. But what if the more useful thing is to turn down some of the inhibitory [00:08:00] factors, to let off the brakes?
What if you don't need to press the gas pedal any harder, and you just need to release the parking brake?
And I wanna be a little bit careful with this metaphor because sometimes the answer really is that you need a different type of stimulation
Sometimes moving just a quarter of an inch to the left is the answer Sometimes the answer is better communication or a different position, more time, more patience, or direct clitoral stimulation. But sometimes the issue isn't that your body isn't receiving enough pleasurable input, it's that there are other processes interfering with your ability to become absorbed in the pleasure mentally.
And that brings us to this new research on orgasmic learning
So part three, what is orgasmic learning?
In October 2026, researcher Suzanne Mulvihill
published a review in Current Sexual Health Reports exploring the possibility that orgasmic response may be developed or [00:09:00] made more accessible through repeated experiences of particular psychological and physiological states. She calls this orgasmic learning. And one of the central ideas is that orgasm isn't necessarily dependent on a single pathway.
There may be multiple ways to create conditions in which orgasm becomes possible. Some of those involve direct genital stimulation, others mental imagery or focused attention, hypnosis, breathwork, and coordinated muscular activity. The paper also examines research involving substances that alter consciousness, but those approaches come with additional medical and safety concerns, and they're not something I'm recommending for self-exploration
And they're not something we're talking about in this conversation. What interests me most is the non-drug related research
and holistic methods of getting to orgasm because the paper process is something I find absolutely amazing. For some women, [00:10:00] accessing orgasm may involve learning how to enter a particular state of awareness, a particular state of consciousness. And the more familiar that that state becomes, the more accessible it might be under the right circumstances.
The more often we practice this altered state of consciousness, the more safety we feel inside of that state of surrender to let go into orgasm. Now, that's a hypothesis that needs further testing
We already know from established sexual health research that learned behaviors and psychological approaches can influence orgasmic functioning a lot. A 2021 review by psychologist Erika Marchand examined treatments for female orgasmic disorder. The strongest support among the approaches reviewed was for directed masturbation, sensate focus, and psychotherapy.
So we already have evidence that guided exploration, sexual [00:11:00] learning, and changes in our relationship with stimulation can help women gain or regain the ability to orgasm. The new question is whether there's an additional layer of learning happening, Whether we're not only learning what kinds of stimulation feel good, but also learning how to enter the mental and physiological conditions that make it accessible. Part four: orgasm and altered states of consciousness. Okay, now we're getting into the good stuff, my favorite subjects, altered states of consciousness. Because when we think about altered states, we tend to imagine something dramatic.
Psychedelic experiences, deep meditation, hypnosis, like in the movies, mystical experiences. But altered states don't necessarily have to involve anything extraordinary or supernatural. They can simply involve shifts in how we're experiencing awareness
Think about what happens when you're completely absorbed in something, in [00:12:00] flow state. Perhaps for you it's making art or dancing, walking in nature, or maybe listening to music. You become so engrossed in that thing that you lose track of time. Have you ever been there? I know I have. Or maybe you're in that delicious space between waking and sleeping where images begin appearing in your mind and your thoughts start taking on this dreamy, fluid-like quality.
Your awareness has shifted. You're not necessarily analyzing every little thing that's happening. You're immersed in the experience. And it feels like a part of you remains in your body and in the conscious world, and another part of you is allowed to be in this dreamlike flow state. And your sexual pleasure can involve a similar kind of absorption.
You become less concerned about what's happening outside the experience and more absorbed in the sensations, emotions, and imagery happening within it. Some research has found an [00:13:00] association between altered states of consciousness and greater sexual responsiveness. And this new orgasmic learning framework proposes something especially interesting.
Rather than viewing an altered state solely as something that happens because we have an orgasm, perhaps entering a particular absorbed state can sometimes help facilitate the orgasm. So in other words, the altered state might not just be the destination. For some people, it might also be part of the pathway, and that makes me think about how often we're taught that the secret to having an orgasm is to concentrate really hard, to focus on making it happen.
And there's a difference between being intensely focused on achieving a goal and being intensely focused on the absorption with the pleasure of the experience. Those are two very different relationships with your attention. One is monitoring, the other is immersion.
[00:14:00] And I want you to think about which one you're practicing when you're trying to have an orgasm. Are you monitoring your progress? Are you checking off boxes? Or are you becoming absorbed in the pleasure itself?
Part five, can hypnosis actually help women experience orgasms? Now, this is where things get exciting for me as a hypnotist because hypnosis is fundamentally about working with attention, relaxing the conscious mind, relaxing the body. We use suggestion, imagination, and our capacity to become deeply absorbed in an experience.
And I think hypnosis is one of the most misunderstood holistic practices in our culture. People hear the word hypnosis and they imagine someone swinging a pocket watch in front of their face, taking control of their mind, or making them bark like a dog or hop like a frog on a stage.
That type of hypnosis is not what we're doing in the therapeutic setting
We're using this natural [00:15:00] mechanism of the brain to focus attention, imagination, and suggestion to explore experiences that might be more difficult to access when we're constantly evaluating and analyzing everything, or if we have thoughts that come up that tell us negative things about the thing we're trying to do.
And when we look at hypnosis through the lens of sexual pleasure, there are really some great possibilities
So what about the history of hypnosis and orgasm? Is there one? And one thing I found particularly interesting in this new research is that hypnosis actually has a history of being used to address orgasmic difficulties. There were clinical reports published in the '60s and '70s describing women who experienced improvement in their orgasmic function following hypnosis. I find it really amazing that this connection has been explored for so long, and there's some newer research that makes the subject even more intriguing.
A study presented in 2025 investigated [00:16:00] whether hypnosis could produce psychological responses associated with orgasm. Researchers reported that women who experienced hypnotically induced orgasms showed changes in prolactin, a hormone that increases following orgasm, along with muscular responses consistent with an orgasmic experience.
And what's so interesting about this is that the participants were fully clothed. The reported orgasms were induced through hypnosis rather than bodily genital stimulation. Now, I wanna put a big highlight on that. The findings were published as a conference abstract, which means we don't have the same detailed methods and results available for evaluation that we'd have in a full research paper, but it raises a fascinating possibility Can the brain generate orgasmic experience through attention, imagery, and suggestion without physical stimulation?
I can firsthand account that it can and
according to these studies, [00:17:00] some people are capable of experiencing something like this
This suggests that the research between consciousness and orgasm deserves a lot more research
Because one of the things I love about hypnosis is that it invites us to explore what becomes possible when we stop trying to consciously manage every aspect of our experience
Part six: Why paying attention to your body matters. There's another area of research I wanna bring to this conversation, and that's something called interoception. Interoception is our ability to perceive and interpret signals coming from inside the body. Your heartbeat, your breathing, hunger, temperature, muscular tension, those subtle changes that help you recognize what you're experiencing internally And I've talked about interoception on this podcast because I think it's such an important component of embodied self-awareness.
But especially interesting is the relationship with sexual pleasure a study published in December [00:18:00] of 2024 examined interoceptive awareness and orgasm experiences in 318 women, and the researchers found some really interesting associations. Women who reported being more aware of their internal bodily sensations also tended to report experiencing orgasms more frequently.
The ability to regulate attention toward bodily sensations was associated with greater orgasm frequency and satisfaction during solo sexual experiences. And feeling a sense of trust in one's own body was associated with greater orgasm satisfaction in both solo and partnered experiences
how often do we have sex while paying attention to almost everything except what's actually happening in our bodies? We're thinking about how we look, wondering what our partner is thinking. We're evaluating whether we're taking too long or anticipating what should happen next. And meanwhile, there are all these little [00:19:00] sensations unfolding that we might barely register.
So part of developing greater intimacy with our pleasure may involve becoming more familiar with our own internal experience, noticing the subtle sensations of warmth, tingling, or expansive feelings inside of the body, discovering how arousal unfolds for you in particular, learning what different experiences actually feel like.
And this is where mindfulness and hypnosis have some interesting overlap
They aren't the same practice, but both can involve deliberately directing attention toward particular aspects of our experience. And learning to direct attention can be an incredibly useful way that we're trying to become more engaged with pleasure
Part seven, what the research actually says about practicing orgasm. So here's where I wanna bring it back down to earth Because it's one thing to talk about neuroscience and altered states of consciousness, but what does this mean for [00:20:00] somebody who is actually struggling to have an orgasm? So let's look at a study published in 2020.
Researchers recruited 65 women between the ages of 18 and 58 who were experiencing orgasm difficulties. They randomly assigned participants to one of two groups. One group received a video-based cognitive behavioral treatment, and the other received a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy program designed specifically for women experiencing orgasm difficulties.
Now, both groups showed improvement in sexual functioning. They also reported reductions in sexual distress and improvements in aspects of desire, arousal, orgasm, and sexual satisfaction. And now here's something important. The mindfulness group wasn't clearly superior to the cognitive behavioral group.
So we shouldn't interpret the study as an evidence that mindfulness is the secret ingredient everyone's been missing. But what it [00:21:00] does suggest is that structured psychological and behavioral practices can improve sexual experiences for some women.
It means that sexual functioning isn't necessarily fixed, and there is room for learning, experimentation, and change. And I think that's a much more compassionate way to approach orgasm difficulty than simply deciding that you're someone who can't orgasm, or that something is wrong with you. Now, of course, there are circumstances in which medical evaluation is important.
Certain medications, pelvic floor dysfunction, changes in sensation, hormonal conditions, chronic pain, and neurological conditions can all influence sexual response. So this is never about dismissing the biological side of sexuality, but it's about recognizing that our capacity for pleasure involves multiple interacting systems, and we can work with more than one of them.
Part number eight, three ways to begin exploring orgasmic learning. So I wanna leave you with three practices that bring some of these [00:22:00] ideas into your own experience, and I'm deliberately calling these explorations rather than techniques guaranteed to create orgasm. Because the last thing I want you to do is take this beautiful information about pleasure and turn it into another thing that you have to do correctly.
The whole point is to become more curious about yourself and your experience. So practice number one is train your attention to recognize pleasure. The first practice is called the pleasure detective, And I cover this in my Embodied Pleasure guidebook. If you haven't already downloaded it, go ahead and head over to the website and grab that for yourself.
If you've listened to my previous episodes of Embodied Magic, you may have heard me go through this one too. But I wanna bring this one back today through the lens of learning Because when you're learning a new skill, part of what you're doing is becoming familiar with sensations and responses that you might not have paid much attention to previously. So I want you to begin with [00:23:00] something really simple. Find a sensation that feels pleasant. If you can't find one that feels pleasant, find one that feels slightly different or neutral
Just find one that is grabbing your attention. It doesn't even have to be sexual. Maybe you're sitting in a warm bath, maybe you're enjoying the feeling of sunshine on your skin
Maybe you're holding hands with your partner
Maybe you're even squeezing a fidget toy Instead of just casually noticing what feels nice, I want you to become really curious about the experience
Allow yourself to become so immersed in that particular sensation that it becomes like a doorway, a portal into another world full of pleasure. This one sensation is completely absorbing your attention. Where do you feel that pleasure? Is it warm? Does it have a pressure to it? Is it tingly or soft?
Does the [00:24:00] sensation have a border around it? Does it seem to have movement to it? Does it change when you pay attention to it? And notice what happens when you let yourself become super absorbed in that experience. You don't have to make it bigger or try to change it any way. You're simply practicing becoming more familiar with the pleasure as a felt experience and bringing your attention there, treating it as though it's its own little world, its own universe inside of your body And later, when you're exploring sexual pleasure, you can bring that same quality of attention, of absorption into that experience.
Rather than thinking about where you're trying to get, you become curious about where you actually are right now
Practice number two, experiment with your state of consciousness. This next practice brings in some of the principles of hypnosis
because one of the things I want you to recognize is that [00:25:00] you can experiment with your shifting state of awareness without needing to achieve some extraordinary trance-like experience
Begin by finding a comfortable position. You might close your eyes if that feels good, or simply soften your gaze, and allow yourself to notice the support beneath your body. Feel the places where your body makes contact with the chair or the bed, and begin allowing your attention to settle into your physical experience.
You might notice your breathing. You might notice the sensations in your hands. You might imagine warmth moving gently through your body. There's nothing that you have to force. And now just invite yourself to imagine a pleasurable experience. Perhaps you remember the feeling of a particularly wonderful massage [00:26:00] or a moment when you felt completely relaxed and comfortable in your body Or you might imagine yourself somewhere beautiful, surrounded by warmth and softness And notice whether your body responds to that imagery As you immerse yourself in this visualization What does your breath do?
Where does your attention go? What muscles inside of your body soften?
Are you noticing a pleasant sense of anticipation or ease? Just becoming curious about that Because you're exploring how attention and imagination can influence your embodied experience of [00:27:00] pleasure ...
this exercise is an opportunity to become familiar with shifting attention and noticing bodily responses And those skills can be useful in many experiences, including sexual pleasure.
And this is one of the reasons I love working with hypnosis. It gives you another doorway into exploring the relationship between imagination
and your physical body sensations
Practice number three. Practice receiving instead of performing. Now, the last one is really important for women who have a tendency to get caught up in trying really hard to make the orgasm happen. And I'm gonna invite you to experiment with something that might feel a little counterintuitive. So the next time you're enjoying sexual pleasure,
See what happens if you temporarily take orgasm off the table completely I know we're talking about learning to orgasm and I'm telling you to stop trying to have one, [00:28:00] but hear me out, because sometimes the more we focus on achieving a particular result, the less available we are to actually experiencing what's happening and letting it expand naturally.
And I want you to explore the difference between doing pleasure and feeling pleasure When you're receiving pleasurable stimulation, whether you're alone or with a partner, notice whether you're trying to manage the experience. Are you evaluating every sensation, monitoring whether you're getting closer, holding your breath?
Are you trying to force your body to the next stage?
What happens when you give yourself permission to simply experience the stimulation without having to make anything happen? You can still move your body. You can still change the stimulation. You can still actively participate in creating pleasure. Surrender doesn't mean becoming passive.
It means exploring whether you can allow the experience to unfold [00:29:00] without constantly supervising it And maybe something shifts, or maybe it doesn't. Maybe you discover what you actually prefer
What you're really paying attention to is what is working for you because you're not trying to become somebody else's version of an orgasmic woman. You're trying to understand your own body, and I think that is where the real learning happens
part number nine, the difference between training and forcing. Now, before we wrap up, there's something really important I wanna address because anytime we start talking about training the brain, neuroplasticity, and learning new responses, there's a temptation to assume that we should be able to accomplish anything if we just practice hard enough.
And I really don't wanna enforce that idea here, especially when it comes to your sexuality, because women have already spent far too much time being told what our bodies should be doing, how we should look, how much desire we should have, [00:30:00] how quickly we should get turned on, what kinds of orgasms we should experience
And I don't want this conversation about orgasmic learning to become another impossible standard for you. The fact that some women can experience orgasm through hypnosis or other forms of mental imagery doesn't mean that everybody should be able to do that. The fact that mindfulness-based approaches can help some women doesn't mean that they're going to work for everyone.
That's why we have lots of different tools in our toolbox. And the fact that orgasmic functioning can sometimes improve through practice doesn't mean that every difficulty is something we simply train away. Our bodies are complicated. We're all very different. Our nervous systems are nuanced, and our experiences are influenced by biology, relationships, learning, culture, and a whole lifetime of accumulated experiences.
And sometimes pleasure changes. Sometimes desire [00:31:00] changes. Sometimes what worked beautifully in one stage doesn't work the same way anymore. That doesn't mean that you've failed. It's completely normal, in fact. It means that you're a human with a dynamic, changing body and mind. And I think one of the most empowering things we can do is develop a relationship with your body and your mind based on curiosity rather than self-criticism.
Because when I talk about learning to become more orgasmic, I'm not talking about turning yourself into some kind of pleasure-performing machine. I'm talking about becoming more intimately acquainted with yourself, understanding what feels good, recognizing what you want, and learning how to communicate it
and discovering how to use your mind to become more absorbed in the pleasurable experiences, and developing a freedom to explore your sexuality without feeling that you have to meet someone else's expectations
And the great thing is that these skills have [00:32:00] meaning outside of sexual pleasure too. Being able to recognize what you feel and trust your own experience, notice when something is pleasurable or uncomfortable, being able to communicate desires and boundaries,
Those are all parts of living a more empowered and embodied life. And that's what this work is all about to me
So you can train your brain to have better orgasms
There is evidence that women can improve orgasmic functioning through learning and practice, and there are intriguing reasons to investigate whether hypnosis, altered states, and other mind-body practices can help facilitate that learning
It's very exciting to see research actually including this in
clinical studies. Female sexuality and pleasure deserve so much more curiosity in our world
Questions that move beyond simply figuring out which body parts stimulate us. Questions about consciousness, attention, the nervous system, [00:33:00] imagination
the relationship between feeling safe and being present and being absorbed in our pleasure. And honestly, I think women deserve so much more research into these experiences. We've spent enough time treating female pleasure like some mysterious, complicated puzzle that we're all supposed to be able to figure out on our own So I love that scientists are asking these questions,
And I love that we can take what we're learning and use it to become more curious about our own experiences. Because the most important takeaway I want you to have today is that pleasure isn't necessarily something that happens to you, it's something you participate in discovering and cultivating for yourself.
It's a gift that your body gives to you, and that doesn't mean controlling it. It means creating more open opportunities for it
And becoming increasingly comfortable exploring the extraordinary things your mind and body are capable of experiencing together. [00:34:00] And if you're listening to this episode thinking, "Okay, Melinda, this is amazing and fascinating and super interesting, but how do I actually begin practicing this stuff?" And that's exactly why I'm creating Becoming Orgasmic.
It's a training for women and non-binary folks with vulvas who want to experience deeper orgasmic pleasure. Because I want you to have access to practical education about sexual responses, along with embodied experiences, hypnotic journeys that help you to explore and unlock more pleasure inside of you, rather than simply thinking and talking about it.
We explore desire, arousal, attention, the nervous system, and how hypnosis and other embodied practices can support the exploration of sexual pleasure.
to help you develop a deeper relationship with your own capacity for pleasure.
You can learn more about how to get on the waitlist for Becoming Orgasmic through the link in the show notes And if you'd [00:35:00] like somewhere free to begin
Download my Embodied Pleasure guidebook, which includes education, reflection, and a hypnosis recording to help you explore receiving more pleasure. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I'd love to hear what this research brings up for you, especially if you've noticed differences in your ability to experience orgasm depending on your mental state, your attention, or how comfortable you feel in your body.
And until next time, go out and explore a little bit more of your own embodied pleasure
Comments