What can too much stress do to your sexual desire? "It massacres it," says Lou Paget, sex educator and author of How to Give Her Absolute Pleasure (Broadway, 2000). "For most people, not having enough time and being tired are the two things that most interrupt desire. Being stressed snuffs out the candle of your libido," and it happens more often, and to more people, than you might think.

Any kind of stress-that of everyday life, work, marriage, lack of sleep, pain or chronic illness-affects the adrenal glands, which produce the hormones that regulate blood sugar, including adrenaline, your body's stress-response hormone. When you're anxious or upset, your body produces adrenaline to help you cope with the anxiety, and as your adrenaline rises, your interest in sex drops. This helps explain why people tend to feel sexier while on vacation, when they're more relaxed.

So how do you cope with stress and reignite passion? "You have to make your intimate relationship a priority," Paget says, "and you have to be adult enough to know only one thing gets to be number one at any time." She also suggests creating a quiet personal space, even if it's only a chair in the corner of a room, to which you can retreat and decompress.

When dealing with a spouse's stress, "different things work on different people, but the most seductive thing for both men and women is knowing that their partner is thinking of them and considerate of them," says Paget. Doing something for her or him-picking up the dry cleaning, doing the dishes, sending flowers, even a phone call-can help ease the tensions of everyday life and spark desire.

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