How to Have Better Orgasms: Why Trying Harder Might Be Getting in the Way
If you’ve ever wondered how to have better orgasms, how to orgasm more easily, or how to orgasm during sex, I’m willing to bet at some point you’ve approached it like a problem you need to solve. Maybe you’ve tried different positions, bought the vibrator everyone swears by, Googled how to have an orgasm, tried to relax (while internally screaming at yourself to RELAX), or found yourself lying there wondering why the thing that worked perfectly last Tuesday suddenly isn’t doing anything at all.
Orgasm is one of the big reasons women come to me for sex & intimacy coaching. They want to know what they need to do to make it happen. And while understanding your anatomy and learning what kind of stimulation your body enjoys absolutely matters, there’s something I think we need to talk about first.
We don’t make orgasms happen. We allow them.
That distinction might seem small, but when you’ve spent years approaching orgasm as something you need to achieve, perform or get right, it can completely change the way you relate to pleasure.
What Actually Is a Female Orgasm?
My favourite sexpert, Emily Nagoski, describes orgasm as a sudden, involuntary release of sexual tension. What I love about this definition is everything that’s missing from it. There’s no requirement for a particular kind of sexual activity, no specific body part that needs to be touched, no penetration requirement and certainly no instructions about how long you should take to get there.
Because female orgasm can happen in all sorts of different ways, and it can feel completely different from person to person and even from one experience to the next. You might orgasm while making love (and sometimes you won’t), while masturbating (and sometimes you won’t), through clitoral stimulation, penetration combined, other kinds of touch, breast stimulation, other erogenous zones or even mental stimulation without any touch at all.
Orgasms can also happen while you’re asleep and while exercising. I came dangerously close during reformer Pilates once…
The point is that orgasm can happen in sexual and completely non-sexual contexts, and the experience itself can be delightful, humdrum, spiritual, surprising, annoying, fun or even completely unwanted.
Which brings us to what I think is one of the most important ideas in Emily Nagoski's work: Pleasure is the measure.
Not what kind of stimulation created the orgasm. Not how long it took you (or your partner) to get you there. Not whether it happened through penetration. Not how long it lasted or whether it looked anything like the orgasms you've seen in Hollywood or porn.
The question is simply: Did you enjoy it? Was it pleasurable for you?
I love this because it takes orgasm out of the realm of performance and puts it back where it belongs: your actual experience.
Do Women Need Penetration to Orgasm?
Unfortunately, we’ve been sold a very different story about what a “proper” female orgasm is supposed to look like. Hollywood and porn have given us decades of women apparently orgasming within approximately fourteen seconds of penetration, while outdated ideas about female sexuality have reinforced the belief that vaginal orgasms are somehow more mature or legitimate than clitoral ones. Thanks, Freud. 🙃
So let's clear this up. Your clitoris is your Grand Central Station when it comes to erotic pleasure. It isn't just the little external structure you can see; most of the clitoris is internal, and its primary known function is sexual pleasure.
Research also tells us that penetration alone simply isn't the most reliable route to orgasm for many women. So if you need or prefer clitoral stimulation to orgasm, that doesn't mean you're doing sex incorrectly or that your body hasn't learned how to have a “real” orgasm.
It means you've discovered something incredibly useful about your body: you know something it likes.
And I'd much rather you become curious about that than spend your sex life trying to train yourself into somebody else's idea of what pleasure should look like.
If you're reading this because orgasm feels consistently difficult or completely out of reach, I've written much more deeply about the different reasons this can happen in my article “Why Can’t I Orgasm? (Even Alone or With a Partner)”. That article explores responsive desire, sexual brakes and accelerators, emotional safety, performance anxiety and some of the patterns that can make orgasm difficult. Read: Why Can’t I Orgasm?
But there’s one particular pattern I want to stay with here because I think so many women will recognise themselves in it.
Spectatoring: When You’re Having Sex but You’re Stuck in Your Head
You can know what kind of stimulation you enjoy. You can be attracted to your partner. You can desperately want to orgasm. And still struggle to get there because you're not really inside the experience anymore. Emily Nagoski talks about spectatoring, which is essentially what happens when you stop experiencing sex and start watching yourself have sex. Instead of being immersed in the sensations happening in your body, part of your attention has moved outside of yourself and started monitoring, judging and evaluating what's happening.
You might be wondering whether your stomach looks okay, whether you're making enough noise, whether your partner is enjoying themselves, whether you're taking too long, whether you're close yet, whether this is finally going to be the time you orgasm through penetration.
And then comes the killer: Why isn't it happening yet?
You’re physically there, but intellectually you’ve moved into the control room and started monitoring the whole bloody operation.
This is something I also explored in “How To Be A Sexually Confident Woman”, because sexual confidence isn't just about looking confident or being adventurous in bed. It's also about being able to remain connected to yourself rather than constantly viewing your sexuality through somebody else's eyes.
Read: How To Be A Sexually Confident Woman
And when body image is part of what pulls you out of the experience How do I look? Is my stomach showing? Does my body look sexy from this angle? — that self-monitoring can make it incredibly difficult to stay connected to sensation.
The cruel irony is that the more desperately you want to orgasm, the more you can start checking whether you're getting there. The more you check, the less attention you're giving to the pleasure that's actually happening. And suddenly sex has become another performance you're trying to get an A+ in.
Underneath all that spectatoring is often one deceptively simple question: Am I doing this right?
But what if there is nothing to do right?
What if your job isn't to produce an orgasm, but to become more available to the sensation, pleasure and experience already happening in your body?
Why Relaxation and Body Awareness Can Help You Experience More Pleasure
This is where I like to bring in another one of my teachers, Michaela Boehm. One of the things I love about Michaela's work is her emphasis on relaxation and sensitisation — becoming more capable of actually noticing and receiving sensation rather than constantly trying to manufacture a particular response.
Because think about what happens when you're trying really hard to orgasm. You're often concentrating, monitoring, holding your breath, tightening your body, wondering whether it's happening yet and becoming increasingly frustrated when it isn't.
And then we tell ourselves to try harder.
I’m much more likely to tell you to try slowing down. Try and become curious about what you can actually feel. Notice where you're holding tension and where you feel soft. Notice warmth, tingling, pressure, movement, pleasure, numbness or even the places where you don't feel very much at all. Notice what happens when you breathe. Notice what happens when you stop asking every sensation to take you somewhere.
This connects beautifully with something I've written about before in “Why Do I Feel Numb During Sex? How to Reconnect With Your Body and Pleasure.” If you've spent years living largely from the neck up, disconnecting from your body or performing intimacy rather than inhabiting it, sometimes the work isn't immediately about creating more sensation. It's about rebuilding your capacity to notice what is already there.
Read: Why Do I Feel Numb During Sex?
And this is where I think we need a much bigger definition of learning how to have better orgasms. It isn't simply learning the right technique. It's learning your anatomy, yes. It's discovering the kinds of clitoral stimulation and touch you enjoy, absolutely. But it's also learning to stay with sensation, communicate what you want, notice when you've disappeared into your head, recognise what helps your body feel safe and understand the conditions that make pleasure more accessible for you.
What If You Stopped Making Orgasm the Goal?
One of the biggest shifts I encourage women to experiment with when they're struggling with orgasm is temporarily taking orgasm off its pedestal.
And it’s not because I don’t think orgasms matter, I absolutely fucking love orgasms.
The problem is when orgasm becomes the only measure of whether sex was successful. We turn pleasure into another achievement.
So instead of asking, How do I make myself orgasm?, try asking, What feels good right now?
Instead of Why isn't this working?, ask, What would my body like more of?
Instead of constantly checking Am I close?, see what happens when you simply stay with a pleasurable sensation without demanding that it lead anywhere.
That shift from achievement to curiosity is also incredibly relevant if you've been struggling with low sexual desire. Desire, arousal and orgasm don't happen in a vacuum; the context your sexuality is trying to exist within matters enormously. I've written about this more in “Why You Don’t Feel Like Having Sex: How Context Affects Female Desire,” including how stress, pressure, exhaustion and your environment can put the brakes on sexual response.
Read: Why You Don’t Feel Like Having Sex
Sometimes you don't need a new vibrator or another sex position. Sometimes you need less pressure. Sometimes you need more time. Sometimes you need more direct clitoral stimulation. Sometimes you need to feel more emotionally connected. Sometimes you need to address the shame or “Good Girl” conditioning that taught you your pleasure was secondary to somebody else's. That's something I explore in “How Good Girl Conditioning Affects Your Sex Life.”
How to Reconnect With Your Body and Become More Receptive to Pleasure
If you want to experience more sexual pleasure, one of the most useful places to begin might actually be outside the bedroom. You can practise noticing sensation when there's absolutely nothing to achieve. Notice the feeling of water against your skin in the shower, the sensation of stretching, the warmth of the sun, the feeling of your breath moving through your body or the pleasure of slipping between freshly washed sheets.
You can begin asking yourself: What can I feel? What feels pleasant? Where am I holding tension? What happens when I slow down? What does my body want more of?
It might sound incredibly simple, but you're practising something many of us have spent years losing contact with: the ability to listen to your body without immediately judging, analysing or overriding it.
And this is exactly why I created my monthly embodiment session, Become Your Own Lover.
It’s a fully clothed, non-sexual embodiment session where I guide you through practices designed to help you slow down, reconnect with your body, sensitise your awareness, release tension and begin noticing what your body actually needs in order to soften, open and become more receptive to pleasure.
There is no performance, no expectation that anything particular needs to happen and certainly no pressure to orgasm. We're practising the thing that comes before all of that: learning how to actually inhabit and listen to your body.
Become Your Own Lover — join the next live session
Because the more familiar you become with your sensations, preferences, responses and boundaries, the easier it becomes to recognise what actually feels good for you.
And ultimately, isn't that what we're looking for? Not the most impressive orgasm. Not the most “advanced” orgasm. Not the orgasm you think you should be having. Your pleasure. Pleasure is the measure.
What If You Need Help Understanding Your Desire?
Sometimes you can read all the books, make all the lists and understand the theory intellectually…and still feel completely stuck. You might know that stress affects your desire, but not understand why you feel so disconnected from your body. You might know you need more emotional connection, but not know how to ask for it. You might recognise that you're always exhausted, but have no idea how to make intimacy feel accessible again.
Or perhaps you've realised that your relationship with sex has become shaped by years of conditioning, people-pleasing, body image worries or feeling responsible for your partner's experience.
This is exactly the kind of work I do with women.
As an intimacy coach, I help women slow down enough to understand what's actually happening underneath their sexual struggles. We look at your relationship with your body, your desire, your boundaries, your patterns, your context and the things that make intimacy feel possible (or impossible). We don't need to fix your libido, we need to understand it.
What happens is that once you understand what your body has been responding to all along, you can start creating very different conditions for pleasure.
Ready to Understand Your Desire?
If you're asking yourself “Why don't I feel like having sex?”, “Why has my desire disappeared?” or “How can I feel more connected to pleasure and intimacy?”, you don't have to figure it all out alone.
I'd love to help you explore what's actually happening for you and what might make intimacy feel more accessible, pleasurable and fun.
Book a FREE 45-minute Discovery Call and we can talk about where you are, what you're experiencing and whether working together feels like the right fit.
BOOK YOUR FREE DISCOVERY CALL →
With wilde tenderness,
Sabina Wilde xx
About Sabina Wilde
Sabina Wilde is a 500-hour Certified Integrative Sex Coach & Educator, holding a Bachelor of Psychology and a Master of Teaching. She specialises in helping women reconnect with their bodies, desires, pleasure, and authentic selves through a trauma-informed, body-centred approach. Drawing from psychology, embodiment practices, nervous system education, and intimacy coaching, her work supports women to move beyond shame, numbness, burnout, and self-abandonment into deeper self-trust, aliveness, and connection. She is the founder of the Wonderfully Wilde Women's Collective and offers 1:1 online coaching, women's circles and workshops around the world.