August 12, 2025
Oxytocin's Role in Conception, Pregnancy, and the Postnatal Phase: Podcast Episode 303
Kristin Revere talks with Susan Bratton about oxytocin’s role in conception, pregnancy, and the postnatal phase with Susan Bratton. Susan Bratton is an intimacy expert to millions and the creator of The Sex Life Bucket List. Oxytocin helps couples develop a profound connection that strengthens their relationship for years to come.
Hello, hello! This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to chat with Susan Bratton today. She is an intimacy expert to millions, a sexual biohacker, and the creator of the Sex Life Bucket List. Her groundbreaking work offers a radial reframe for couples on a fertility journey, transforming the stress of timed sex into the most erotically exciting adventure of their lives.
Welcome, Susan! I’m excited to chat with you about oxytocin!
Oh, Kristin, hey, it’s great to see you today, too, my darling! My Michigander! So good to speak with you. Thank you for doing such good work with your doula work. I mean, it is such an incredibly important aspect of just our whole lives as women to be cared for by loving women when we go through the process of having our babies. So thank you! And it’s funny too because if you’re listening, Kristin and I chatted for a minute before we started recording because I had to get some food in me this morning before we started recording, and she was so sweet. We were just chatting, talking about the world and what’s going on in our crazy existence, and I’m eating my oxytocin yogurt while we’re getting ready to have a conversation about oxytocin. I had a fresh yellow stone peach and I had a fresh kiwi in my oxytocin yogurt that I make at home. I put in a big scoop of my protein powder that I like, my vanilla protein powder, and then I sprinkled it with these funny little buckwheat nuggets. They’re almost like grapenuts, but they’re made out of buckwheat because I’m gluten free, and I crunched away while we got to know each other and that was so sweet, that I was literally feeding my gut bacteria what it needs to make as much oxytocin as possible because I’m an oxytocin addict.
It is everything! As doulas, we try to facilitate the oxytocin during labor, and the connection with couples is so key. So obviously with your work in the fertility space, that has a big impact pre-conception, as well.
Well, and it’s funny, too, because what I’ve been doing – this is my second career. For the last 20 years, I have been a publisher of passionate love-making techniques, bedroom communication skills, and intimate health and wellness. And basically what I do is I transform having sex into making love. I teach people how to have a sex life that keeps getting better and better and better and kind of unmaking the world that we’ve grown up in that’s very male-dominated, lots of religious repression and shame around sexuality, lots of sexual trauma, lack of information and knowledge, especially about female-forward pleasure. And I’ve published the work of my mentors, and I’ve also written 34 books and programs of my own. And it’s interesting that sex techniques are great, but you have to have good communication skills and you have to have good working parts. Your genital systems have to work well. And when they do, and you realize that sex isn’t anything that anyone could really – your parents couldn’t teach you; they didn’t know. You have to learn it yourself, but all we see is this patriarchal stuff. How do you find people like me? It’s hard because we’re censored and shadow banned, and so podcasts do a huge service because we can have frank talk about things and help women understand, there’s nothing wrong with them and that it’s everything to do with all of the stuff we’ve seen out there that’s really focused on male arousal, male sexual performance, male pleasure, and we think there’s something wrong with us. And there’s nothing wrong with us.
I did a keynote for the DNA company. They had a fertility event, and I did a keynote called Sexy Fertility: Planting Seeds for a Lifetime of Passion. I thought that was a pretty good double entendre. Planting seeds, you know, ha ha? And after I did that keynote, it went over so well with all the women who were in their fertility window, on their fertility adventure, because it always is. And I said to my publicist, Corinne – oh, Corinne, I think this would be something where I can really help a lot more women. Will you send this note out to some of the top fertility podcasts because I’d like to talk more about what I consider the three keys to conception, teach people about getting a real full, big dose of oxytocin before pregnancy, why that’s helpful, all these different things. And it’s been a very popular subject. So I’m really glad to meet you because I feel like women during their fertile window – when you’re trying to conceive, and then when you’re pregnant, especially the first time, there’s so much stress and fear. And almost all fear comes from a lack of knowledge. And so if you and I together can help women get excited about their fertility journey with regard to their sexuality and give them a couple of things that can make a really big difference, that’s so good. So thank you for having me here!
Yes! And so obviously pre-conception, and as doulas often say, what brings baby into the world is going to help bring baby out, your delivery process. I know before I had kids, I watched the documentary Orgasmic Birth and was fascinated by again the intimate connection and how childbirth doesn’t have to be painful. We teach HypnoBirthing at Gold Coast, so we’re very mind-body focused, very partner-focused. And so I love talking to students and clients of mine about how the intimate connection of a partner and our client is so important in facilitating the natural oxytocin. Of course, there’s synthetic oxytocin.
Yeah, it’s funny, I had dinner last night – because I was telling you my birthday was yesterday, and I had dinner last night with one of my besties, and I was her ecstatic birth partner. She had a doula, as well, and her doula is so darling. She wanted to have an at-home birth, and she was 44 when she had Zoe, I think. And throughout her entire pregnancy, I massaged and pleasured her breasts. I rubbed butter into her belly for the stretch marks. And I slowly gave her yoni massages. Whenever we could schedule it, I would go over there or she would come to my house. And I really helped her get a mind-body connection to her vulvovaginal system. I helped her work on tightening her pelvic floor, pushing out on her pelvic floor. I helped her access her G-spot pleasuring. I helped her soften her perineum. I mean, I really did a lot, and it was interesting because we have a nonsexual relationship. We have a sisterly relationship. I’m kind of like her mom, really. I’m old enough to be her mother. But we’re very, very close friends. I’m like her sister-mother or something. I’m very motherly, anyway, generally. People are attracted to me because of my mommyness. I like to mommy everybody. It’s just a joy for me.
It was really nice to be able to have this relationship with a woman where we were very, very close, and I was giving her pleasure. She was having orgasms. But it wasn’t like I was trying to give her orgasms. It was more like we were just finding our way in sensual nurturing and healing touch together, and it was really not sexual. It was non-sexual, but it was sensual and orgasmic, and baby moved so much during those sessions. That little girl was just flipping around, and she was enjoying the contractions. It was such a lovely experience to really help my girlfriend feel honored, safe, secure, in touch with her body, in touch with her genitals, activated, pleasured. It was an incredible experience. And I taught her how to make the oxytocin yogurt, as well, and I think that really helped a lot, too.
Yes, that is so fantastic. So since you were at the birth, did it facilitate a quicker birth? And with some of the work that you did on stretching the perineum, did she avoid tearing? I would love to hear some of the outcomes.
I was not able to be there. I had to go out of town, and she kept the baby in for an extra month. She wasn’t ready to let it go, and she didn’t feel like the baby needed to come out, and the hospital was really pushing her to have it and to induce, and she wouldn’t do it. And she really wanted to have a home birth, and she was very stubborn and she was really feeling into herself. And she was not allowing anyone to push her. Finally, she labored for three days and baby didn’t want to come, and I had to leave. I felt so bad about it. I wasn’t there. But she had a doula. She had people who knew what they were doing, and that wasn’t me. She ended up having to go to the hospital and she did end up having to be induced, and the baby was fine, and she came out so big and healthy. I mean, my God. I feel like they take babies too soon, when you see the difference between a baby that was able to be, like fully browning in the oven. It was incredible. She came out and she was like, bigger, smarter, faster, more capable than all of the other kids who were born at the same time that she was. It was amazing, the difference.
So I did not get to see how it went, but I think it went, from all the stories that Jenna’s told me, everything was fine, and she realized she had to do it that way at the end. So she just couldn’t dilate. She didn’t dilate. That was what happened.
Yeah, it’s important to have modern medicine available for issues like that, and obviously, she did as much as she could to get her body ready. Did you ever work with couples to get that connection with oxytocin going or give your clients advice about the labor process? You mentioned she had a transfer to the hospital, but if they’re delivering intentionally at the hospital, it can be harder to get the oxytocin going with frequent interruptions and a more medicalized setting. So I would love to chat about that for a minute.
I don’t have a lot of experience with labor because that’s not my area of expertise. What I’m mostly doing is teaching people how to have better intimate pleasure by understanding how their bodies work, the genital structures, especially the female genital system. I also love to explain to people why they’re low in oxytocin and that a part of what happens with people struggling to – I would say that most people feel like they should be having more intimacy than they are, but they don’t know quite how to make it happen. And I think that upping your oxytocin helps grease the skids towards more intimacy because it’s very interesting. We talk a lot about estrogen and progesterone and testosterone and cortisol and thyroid hormone, but we don’t really keep oxytocin in that same category, even though it’s more like a master hormone similar to DHEA where it’s kind of running a symphony. But the thing about oxytocin is that most people by this time in their lives generally are very low oxytocin producers, and there are a number of reasons why.
The most common is that, of course, the more Cesareans we end up having, the less vaginal births we have, the less inoculation of all of our bacteria, all our good bacteria, the biome, doesn’t get transferred to the babe. So that’s one aspect of it. The second thing that then is kind of like a double whammy for all of us – and by the way, oxytocin is as important for our husbands as it is for us, as it is for our children. It’s a hormone people need, not just women, and not just during pregnancy and breastfeeding. And the second double whammy is that the particular bacteria that makes it, which is called lactobacillus reuteri – L. reuteri – that bacteria is extremely susceptible to antibiotics, broad spectrum antibiotics. And who in our country hasn’t been blasted with antibiotics, probably by the time they’re 8 or 9? So we are walking around as low oxytocin producers, and you can measure it, which is interesting, but in all honesty, there’s no upper limit to how much oxytocin your body can produce. You’re never going to give yourself too much or make too much oxytocin. The higher your oxytocin levels, the better off you are, the less anxiety you have, the less depression you have. When you start topping up your oxytocin stores, and really, my goal in this conversation is to teach you how easy it is to do it, and to do it, especially if you have kids, trying to get them to have high oxytocin counts, will keep them from future problems as well, like feeling disconnected from the environment, from other children, from the family. There’s all kinds of things that oxytocin really creates a benefit for, and one of the things you’ll notice as your oxytocin comes back is that people piss you off less. And Kristin, we literally started our conversation today with how annoyed we are at what’s going on in the universe at this moment, right? I mean, it’s freaking annoying out there.
There’s a lot. Women’s health in general, I feel, is the most pressing topic. We both work in that field in different ways, so right now, I mean, healthcare needs reform, but everything from Medicaid to just options and …
Yes, bodily autonomy.
Right.
So it’s really easy to walk around being pissed off all the time. And so what oxytocin does, when you build your stores back up – likely, you’re a low oxytocin producer at this point in your life, just being born and being in this particular world in this particular moment. And when you get your oxytocin stores built back up – and you can take intranasal oxytocin. You can intravaginal oxytocin. You can get oxytocin as a prescription. But I like to make endogenous production, not exogenous application, of oxytocin because it’s so easy, and I want to say one more thing about what I think the benefits are. The benefits are interesting because what oxytocin also does, not only does it bond you to your babies and your lover, but it bonds you to your friends and your family, as well. It’s not just like an intimate skin to skin. Skin to skin produces oxytocin, but oxytocin, when you have enough, it actually makes you feel more connected to your humanity, which we need right now, and it give you a sense of awe for beauty, nature, music, the arts, good food, friends and family. Like, the things that make life worth living, oxytocin makes you feel the awe from them. So if you feel flat, deadened, attenuated, suffocated, isolated, oxytocin mitigates that. These are not things that people are generally talking about with oxytocin. They’re still stuck in the, it’s the love chemical, kind of thing. And that’s cool. That’s one point. Fine. But I have this thing I call the three keys to conception for people who are trying to conceive, and I had a bit of a rough time myself conceiving, so I am speaking – I’m not a doula; I’m not working with clients on a day to day basis in this way, but I am no stranger to what happens when you’re trying to conceive and it’s harder than you think.
And the three keys to conception are relaxation, connection, and engorgement. And I can come back and explain why those, I think, are the three keys, but two of the three are supported by having higher stores of oxytocin. And engorgement, it helps with that, as well. It’s fascinating.
So oxytocin is definitely a fertility hormone, 100% a fertility hormone. Obviously, it’s known to improve cervical mucous production, which creates better lubrication, which means that the semen can transport the sperm up to the cervix and through it and into the uterus. So that uterine receptivity is a very, very beneficial aspect of oxytocin during attempts at conception. So the sperm transport is a very important thing. But I really think the superstar thing about oxytocin during the time of trying to conceive is that oxytocin is kind of like the antidote to cortisol. It has a cortisol lowering effect. It attenuates the cortisol, which is the adrenaline, basically. Other people call that adrenaline. It gets you going.
The flight or fight that you want to avoid in labor.
Exactly. And so any time you have high cortisol – when you’re stressed out, you get cortisol – that’s a fertility blocker. It’s going to make everything harder. So why do you want to have this oxytocin and how do you make it? My recommendation – I sat here and ate a bowl of my yogurt while I was talking to you before we started recording, and I’m like, oh, my God, it’s so funny that I’m literally eating the thing I’m coming on to tell you about. I’m literally walking my talk this morning. I had a bowl of my homemade yogurt. I’m going to teach you how to make it and why you would want to have it this way. And I had fresh cut yellow cling peaches and delicious kiwi, so ripe, and a little bit of buckwheat sprinkles on it, and I scarfed that up while we were chatting. It has this massive amount of colonizing units of lactobacillus reuteri. I get the reuteri at a company called Oxyceutics. They have three different things. They have L. reuteri in the kind that creates the colonies in your gut that have to be repopulated for your adrenal, your HPA access, your adrenal access to produce the oxytocin molecules again. They also have lactobacillus crispatus, which is excellent for the vaginal microbiome. So sometimes you can make oxytocin yogurt with the reuteri, and other times, you might want to make the crispatus for your vaginal flora. And you can go back and forth with them, and it’s very good to feed your baby, as well. So feeding your children these things is really, really good, too, and your husband. Feed your family this yogurt. And you make it out of nut milk, and you can make it out of dairy. I make it out of dairy because I don’t have any lactose issues. I make it out of full fat half and half, and I use a particular yogurt maker. It’s called the Luvele. It’s a bain-marie, a water bath type of a yogurt maker because the lactobacillus reuteri needs to be cooked, if you will, slowly at 100 degrees. And most yogurt makers do fast production of yogurt, so they don’t have very high colonizing units. There’s not that much in them, and it’s definitely not reuteri. So what you want is this little water bath thing. And you basically put the milk or the nut milk – if you’re going to use nut milk, I like the almond cow nut milk maker. You make your nut milk at home with milk – like, I make it with milk cashews, a little bit of coconut, shredded coconut, and macadamia nuts, because macadamia nuts have that linoleic acid that’s so good for you that you can’t get from a lot of places. So you can also make it with nut milk. Use inulin, which is a ground up artichoke fiber. That’s what the probiotic eats to replicate. And eight to ten capsules – you just open them and stick the capsules right in there and whisk it up. You put it on. You do it for 36 for 48 hours, low and slow at 100 degrees, and it makes the most beautiful batch of yogurt. And maybe the first time you make it, it will be a little thin. But as you make it, it thickens up, and you get more and more colonizing units, because as you eat the first batch, you save some back, and that’s what you make the second batch with. So you’re making new batches with the existing yogurt that you have. It lasts forever in the fridge, weeks and weeks it lasts in the fridge, and it has a beautiful, slightly tart flavor. The crispatus one is a little more sweet tasting. But you can put honey in it, like manuka honey, if you have more a sweet taste. For me, putting my whey in there with the vanilla flavor just makes it perfect for me because I don’t need anything super sweet, and the fruit is so good. So I put it in my smoothies when I make smoothies and I just make bowls of yogurt with it. And you will notice how much closer you feel to your family, how much closer you feel to your husband, how much more kindhearted you become by eating this yogurt. And I really, really cannot recommend it enough.
On the Oxyceutics website – and I didn’t make this up. I got this from my dear, darling friend, Dr. William Davis. Bill and I met in 2019. Absolutely fell in love with him. He’s a retired heart surgeon, and he was sick of putting stents in people and said, I’ve got to find a better way to fix heart disease. And he got onto the lactobacillus reuteri for weight loss. It also does insulin regulation. It helps with insulin stability. And it also in mice, they’ve shown, and there hasn’t been a human clinical trial on this, but I guarantee my coat is glossier, like the little mice they fed the oxytocin to, because my hair is very shiny now that I’ve redone my oxytocin. It’s shiny again. My skin – it’s very skin reparative. But the thing I like the best, and this is nice especially postpartum, is that it whittles down your waist. You know how in midlife, you get fat around the middle?
I’m dealing with that now, yes.
Yes, in perimenopause, you start to get that gut. It literally whittled my waist. I got a waist back. I never had much of a waist. I was never fat, but I was never skinny. And I have a better shaped body – I was telling you I turned 64 yesterday.
Yeah, you look great on video – very impressive!
My body is a nice shape. I have an hourglass figure that I never really had until I started eating oxytocin. So who could imagine that making your own yogurt – oh, and there’s one more thing I love about making my own yogurt and nut milk, and that is I’m not getting the thickeners, the carrageenan, the this and that, xanthan gums, all that crap that gums up your system that they put in these products that you buy at the grocery store to thicken them and to make them creamier. The yogurt is perfect the way it comes out, and it comes out with whey, as well, which even has more colonizing units it. And you can start your new batches just with the whey, and it’s incredible. And then you don’t fill up your recycling bin with plastic bottles, and you’re not drinking stuff that was stored in plastic bottles. The Luvele containers are glass. So I’m getting no endocrine disruptors, no gluey, crappy chemicals, and I’m upping my oxytocin. It’s almost like you’re afraid to believe that something could be this simple and this good. Isn’t everything ruined in this universe? No, there’s still oxytocin yogurt for us!
Well, I can’t wait to make it! Thank you for sharing!
And Bill has the recipes and everything on the website at Oxyceutics, and I don’t make any money telling you this. I’m not selling anything. I just love to help people, just like you do. All of you wonderful people at Gold Coast Doulas – it’s just what we like to do.
So you mentioned that it’s important for partners to also increase their oxytocin, and so it’s not discussed enough in my opinion, but the partner’s role in fertility. And so this seems like a great way for couples to connect and prepare if they’re in that phase of talking about wanting to start or expand a family, and also in that postpartum recovery time, you briefly mentioned wanting to get back to your old figure and as a way to help, but sometimes partners don’t feel as connected when all of the attention is spent on the newborn, or if there are multiples, multiple babies. And so oxytocin is so important not only preconception, during labor and pregnancy, but in that postnatal time. And I find my clients, since we specialize in overnight newborn care and we focus on that first year after baby arrives, that bond and connection with a couple, and women sometimes feel isolated and that it’s all about baby and feel like they’re losing themselves and so any way to increase that connection, and as you mentioned, the love for everything from nature to friends to art and sometimes we just go through the motions after having a baby and we’re exhausted. So I love talking about the role of oxytocin after baby, if you have any final tips for our listeners related to that topic specifically.
Yeah, well, I think that if your oxytocin levels are low, which I pretty much guarantee they are, in all honesty. It’s hard to have enough oxytocin in the current state of our medical system and all of that kind of stuff. So you’re likely very low in oxytocin and you don’t even know it because you don’t know what you don’t know when it’s missing and it’s not there. You don’t know you’re missing it. But once you up those stores, you start making the yogurt and eating the yogurt, and you up your stores, it’s going to make your breastfeeding experience a lot more soulful and pleasurable because when you get nipple stimulation from the suckling, that generates oxytocin for you, but if your stores are low, you can’t generate that. You literally can’t produce that much. It’s not like it’s going to automatically happen. You just need to start with the raw ingredients, and so if you don’t have the raw ingredients, you may not be enjoying breastfeeding that much. It may just feel like a chore. But when your body is coursing – when you’re topped up in oxytocin, breastfeeding is like so pleasurable and relaxing and heart-connecting and joyful and you feel the awe of the experience. So many women feel depleted from it, and I think the depletion comes from the fact that you already started depleted, and the oxytocin makes you feel not depleted.
There’s two things I want to say because I know we’re coming to an end. One is that during the time of conception, you are scheduling your sex. You have to schedule it around your ovulatory windows. And it can feel like a chore, but this whole notion of planting seeds for a lifetime of passion is – and you mentioned it when you introduced me and my Sex Life Bucket List. What I tell couples is, don’t think about it just as, okay, I’ve got to schedule sex and I have to have intercourse, because then you end up rushing to intercourse because you think this is the thing you’re supposed to be doing right now, and you don’t get engorged. Remember when I said that the three keys to conception were relaxation, connection, and engorgement? Engorgement means that your genital structures fill with blood. You have to relax so that the blood can be shunted down into your pelvic bowl. And that helps not only lubricate your vaginal mucosal lining – because there’s no glands in your vagina that make your vagina wet. It comes from blood plasma being pumped down into your pelvic bowl and seeping through the lining and wetting it. And that takes 15 to 20 minutes. And you need to get the blood to flow down into the three erectile tissues chambers. If you think about your husband’s penis when it’s erect, basically the whole penis – and only about half the penis sticks out. There’s another – it’s twice what you see, and those shafts go in and down towards the testicles. The whole penis is basically erectile tissue, spongy tissue. Underneath your vulva, wrapped around your vagina, are your three spongy tissue chambers. One’s called your clitoral body. One’s called your periurethral sponge, and the other is called your perineal sponge. And they’re literally wrapped around your vagina, but they are like an English muffin. They’re very slow for the blood to run down and get in there, and so it seeps in. It doesn’t blast in like it does for a penis. The penis has fast acting blood flow, hemodynamics, because it has to get in there and lock off to hold the erection. Yours just fills like a sponge and then it will slowly empty out after you’re done. His fills fast and empties quickly. And we tend to only see sex depicted at the male body’s pace. And the female body’s pace is much slower. So when you’re in your fertility window and even after when you’re trying to hurry and rush – stick it in; I got to go do this thing – you’re doing yourself a disservice. Trying to slow down and realizing, allowing yourself time to let down, let the prolactin down, let your spit run, let your boobs drop a little, let the blood flow into your pelvic bowl, let your vagina start to get wet; be ready and turned on. When you slow down for that, that really helps with conception, and it also really helps with your pleasure and generally your relaxation. And this engorgement is really important, and my number one recommendation of learning new things during sex is while you’re trying to get pregnant, start learning how your husband can give you yoni massages, vulva massages, vulvovaginal massages, to activate that genital engorgement because he’s going to need to do a lot of that after you deliver because you’re not going to be ready for penetration, but you do need – remember how when I was talking about how I touched my girlfriend in nurturing and healing ways, as well as sensual but not sexual? Those are the four types of touch, and if your husband understands that distinction, he can start off when you’re trying to conceive with all of those types, but after you’ve delivered and you’re not ready for intercourse, he can still be giving you those yoni massages, and he can make them sexual and give you orgasms and understand that when you’re ready, you’ll know when you want to be penetrated, and never be penetrated a second before your body is screaming for it, because that will make your body mad at you and him. But the yoni massages will actually hasten your ability to make love with your husband again without putting pressure on you to do it, and priming your pump with lots of orgasms. Nipple-gasms and vaginal, clitoral gasms – really keeps you in good working order, gets the oxytocin flowing, helps with breastfeeding, helps with conception, helps with everything.
Wow, that is amazing! It’s all about connection, so that lack – I feel like our culture is so technology focused, and we talk about the importance even, as doulas, of our clients slow dancing in labor and keeping up with touch and the importance of a couple’s intimate relationship, not only in pregnancy and pre-conception, but definitely postnatal. So I’m glad we touched on that, Susan.
So how can our listeners connect with you to learn more from you?
All of my info – how to make oxytocin yogurt, how to make love, how to do yoni massages, all of that stuff is at betterlover.com. I’ve got hundreds of videos there. They’re all free. And then I have a newsletter at Better Lover that goes out two times a week and talks about pleasuring skills, communication skills, intimate health and wellness information, and that’s also there. You can sign up there. I think that’s the best way to get ahold of me.
I am on Instagram. You have to push my name together because sometimes people try to steal my name. It’s @susanbratton. You’ll find me, and you can DM me if you need to, as well.
Excellent! Well, thank you so much for sharing all of your oxytocin wisdom, and we’ll have to have you back to chat about other relationship focused issues and intimacy.
Yeah, I think the next thing we should do is talk about female arousal and what our bodies really need versus everything we see in patriarchal media and pornography and all that stuff. I think that really helps women a lot with their sexuality. They think there’s something wrong with them when they don’t realize that we’re not men. So I think that’d be a good conversation next time we get together.
I love it. Have a great day!
Love you, girl! Take care! Thanks for doing the good work – you’re the best!
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