Sexy After 50

Improve Sex and Intimacy by Healing Your Nervous System

If desire has faded, intimacy feels effortful, or your body goes numb where it used to respond — you’re not broken.

You’re adapted.

For many women over 40, loss of desire isn’t about hormones, attraction, or effort.
It’s a nervous system response to decades of responsibility, caregiving, stress, and self-suppression.

Sexy After 50 is a podcast for women who refuse to disappear — and want a grounded, body-based way back to aliveness.

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WHAT THIS PODCAST IS (AND ISN’T)

This show is for women who want intimacy, desire, and connection — without pressure, performance, or fixing themselves.

Inside these conversations, we explore:

  • Desire as a nervous system state

  • Erotic shutdown as a protective adaptation

  • Why libido advice often fails midlife women

  • How over functioning and burnout dampen intimacy

  • Safe, somatic pathways back to sensation and agency

This is not sex tips. However, you may gain some…
This is nervous-system literacy for intimacy in midlife.

IF THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR

This podcast is for you if:

  • You feel emotionally present but physically disconnected

  • Touch feels neutral or overwhelming

  • You avoid intimacy because it feels effortful

  • You miss wanting — not just sex, but pleasure and play

  • You’re tired of advice that asks you to “try harder”

Loss of desire is not a moral failure or a libido defect.
It’s often your body saying, “I don’t feel safe enough yet.”

Reignite Sensation and Desire Safely

If you want to feel something again — not just understand it — start here.

The Desire & Fire Reset™ is a short, contained, nervous-system-based reset designed to interrupt erotic shutdown and restore sensation, agency, and desire.

(This is experiential. No partner required.)

→ Begin the Desire & Fire Reset™

Listen to the latest Episode.

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WHAT COMES NEXT

This podcast is part of a larger body of work exploring how nervous system overload reshapes intimacy in midlife.

Dr. Julie’s upcoming book,
Are We Gonna Have Sex or What? (Spring 2026),
builds on this foundation with a deeper framework for reclaiming desire, confidence, and embodied agency after 40.

MEET YOUR HOST

A woman with long wavy brown hair sitting on a wooden chair outdoors, wearing a red sleeveless top and white pants, smiling and looking at the camera.

Sexy After 50 is hosted by Dr. Julie Merriman, PhD, LPC-S — counselor educator, professor, author, and burnout researcher with more than three decades of experience working with women in high-responsibility helping roles.

Julie’s work sits at the intersection of nervous system science, midlife development, and lived experience. After years of training clinicians, directing counseling programs, and supporting women through burnout and compassion fatigue, she began to see a pattern that wasn’t being named clearly enough: the same nervous system overload driving exhaustion and disconnection was also quietly reshaping desire, intimacy, and embodiment in midlife.

On Sexy After 50, Julie brings academic rigor and clinical clarity to conversations about intimacy—without reducing desire to hormones, performance, or “trying harder.” She helps women understand what their bodies have adapted to over decades of stress, caregiving, and self-suppression, and how to move forward in ways that restore agency, sensation, and connection—without pressure or self-betrayal.

Her approach is grounded, trauma-informed, and deeply respectful of the body’s intelligence—offering women a way back to aliveness that honors both their history and where they are now.