Sexual life as a barometer of inner state, which I wrote about last time, highlights something we know intuitively but rarely articulate clearly: emotions do not stay in the head. They live in the body. They express themselves through the body. And they filter everything we feel, including pleasure, including desire, including the capacity to be present in moments of sensual intimacy.

It is not a metaphor. It is neuroscience.

The body and the mind are not separate systems that occasionally interact. They are a single integrated system. The research of Antonio Damasio, the Portuguese neurologist who spent years studying the relationship between emotions and the body, showed that emotions are fundamentally somatic processes. Before you name them, before you become aware of them as thoughts, they already exist as physical sensations: a tightening in the chest, a heaviness in the stomach, a lightness in the limbs, a tension in the jaw.

This means that your emotional state is present in the body at every moment, including moments of intimacy. And that it modulates, almost invisibly, the way you receive touch, the way you respond to the other person, the quality of the sensual experience as a whole.

How do specific emotions influence the sensual experience? A few examples I recognise as real.

Anxiety produces somatic hypervigilance, a diffuse state of alert in which the nervous system is oriented towards detecting threat, not towards receiving pleasure. Anxious people in intimacy are, paradoxically, less present to what is happening physically, because a portion of their neurobiological resources are occupied with monitoring, anticipating, managing an imaginary danger. Touch reaches them filtered, diminished.

Active sadness produces a sensory hypersensitivity that can go in two opposite directions. Sometimes, in sadness, the need for physical contact increases, the body seeks the warmth and presence of the other as a form of anchoring. At other times, sadness produces a somatic withdrawal, a thickening of the skin figuratively speaking, in which any touch seems too much.

Unexpressed anger produces chronic muscular tension and a general contraction of the body that blocks receptivity to pleasure. You cannot be simultaneously contracted with anger and open to sensation. The systems are incompatible.

Shame, perhaps more than any other emotion, disconnects a person from their own body. Bodily shame produces a dissociation, a sensation of being outside the body, of observing oneself from above, or of not truly being there. People who encounter bodily shame in intimacy often have difficulty feeling pleasure even when the relational context is safe and good.

What is less discussed and equally important: positive emotions amplify the sensual experience. Joy, a sense of ease, gratitude, a playful state, all of these open sensory receptivity. Oxytocin produced in moments of genuine emotional connection increases sensitivity to touch and amplifies pleasure. That is one of the reasons why sex after a deep conversation or after a moment of conflict repair is often more intense than that which is aseptically planned.

There is a practice that few people do but that fundamentally changes the quality of intimacy: checking in with yourself emotionally before a moment of closeness. Not as a protocol, but as a form of honesty towards yourself. What am I carrying right now? Am I present or is my mind elsewhere? Do I need something before I can truly be here?

And if you discover you are carrying something heavy, communicating that to your partner, not as an excuse but as information. "I am tense today and I need us to be close differently, more slowly, less directed" is a sentence that invites a different kind of intimacy, possibly a deeper one than the one planned.

I believe one of the greatest mistakes we make in sensual life is treating the body as a machine separate from emotional life, one that should function independently of what we feel elsewhere. It does not work that way. And the better you understand this connection, the more present and authentic you can be in moments of intimacy.

What is the emotion you carry most often in your body and which, without realising it, most influences the quality of your intimate moments?