Today we’d like to introduce you to Dr. Nan Wise.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I am a licensed psychotherapist, certified sex therapist, board-certified clinical hypnotherapist, certified relationship specialist with four decades of experience. I have always been fascinated by psychology and how the brain works and wanted to figure out how to help people better manage their moods and live more effectively and joyfully
This journey has been one that is both professional and personal. I grew up in a family wired for anxiety, and I had my first panic attack at 21 — while working, of all places, in a psychiatric hospital. I spent years being ashamed. Then I learned the opposite lesson: own it, soften around it, stop fighting it. That shift changed my life. It’s the same lesson I now teach my clients.
In 2009, that hunger to understand the brain sent me back to school — a PhD in behavioral neuroscience at Rutgers-Newark. My dissertation, “Genital stimulation, imagery, and orgasm in women: an fMRI analysis,” completed in August 2014, used fMRI to map what happens in the brain during female orgasm. Work that filled real gaps in the science. Work that made headlines around the world.
That research became the impetus for my book, Why Good Sex Matters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020). Its message is simple, and I say it every chance I get: pleasure isn’t a luxury — it’s a biological necessity. A well-functioning brain needs it. A well-lived life depends on it. When the book launched, I sat down with Maria Shriver on the Today Show to talk about exactly that — why women’s pleasure matters, and why we’ve been trained to treat it as an afterthought.
I built a framework called the “three-story brain” — Basement, Mezzanine, Top Floor — to show how emotional instincts, learning and habits, and our executive brain functions all wrestle for control of our sexual and emotional lives. And I coined a term for what I see everywhere in my practice: the Pleasure Crisis — that comes from living in a device-hijacked world in a culture that’s taught us to distrust the very thing that makes us thrive.
So what does the work actually look like day to day? I see individual clients and couples in my clinical practice, using neuroscience-informed approaches to help people work through anxiety, disconnection, and stuck patterns in their relationships and sex lives. I write about it regularly for Psychology Today. I co-host a YouTube show, We Need to Talk About It, alongside an OB/GYN, where we bring different clinical lenses to conversations about health, relationships, and mind-body wellness that most people are too embarrassed to have out loud. And I sit on the Scientific Advisory Board of Vella Biosciences, helping bridge the gap between the lab and the lived experience of the people this research is actually meant to help.
All of it is really one mission: bring people back to healthy hedonism, pleasure that feels good and is good for you, backed by real science, not shame.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Have I faced challenges/obstacles along the way?
Absolutely, and the biggest ones were rarely the ones people could see.
The first was my own nervous system. I mentioned that I grew up in a family wired for anxiety. My mother had mental health challenges, and my parents had a very volatile relationship. What I didn’t say is how long I believed that my anxiety disqualified me from becoming a health care provider. Here I was, someone who wanted to help people, quietly convinced that my own mind and emotional challenges were a problem. For years I kept it hidden, worked harder, and white-knuckled my way through. The turning point wasn’t conquering my anxiety. It was making peace with it. Once I stopped treating it as an enemy, it became one of my best teachers. I recognize every client who walks in feeling broken. I’ve been there.
The second challenge was going back to school when most people are planning their exit strategy. I started my PhD program at the tender age of 50. I sat in classrooms and labs with people young enough to be my children, learning statistics and brain imaging from scratch while still running a clinical practice. Plenty of nights, I asked myself what on earth I was doing. But that hunger to understand the brain wouldn’t let me quit, and I’m so glad it didn’t.
Then there was the subject matter itself. Studying female orgasm is not the fast track to being taken seriously. Sex research still carries a whiff of the illicit, and women’s pleasure especially has been treated as frivolous, even embarrassing. I had to learn to stand fully behind work that some people giggled at, and to trust that filling those gaps in the science mattered, even when it wasn’t comfortable to say out loud.
Looking back, every one of those challenges taught me the same lesson I now teach: the things we’re most ashamed of are usually where our real power lives. Soften around them, get curious, and they stop running the show.
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As you know, we’re big fans of Nan Wise, PhD. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
I’m Nan Wise, PhD, LCSW, CST. I’m a licensed psychotherapist, certified sex therapist, board-certified clinical hypnotherapist, and certified relationship specialist, with four decades of clinical experience. I’m also a researcher with a PhD in behavioral neuroscience, a yoga teacher, and a mindfulness instructor. That combination lets me work with both the brain and the body, and bring the latest science directly into the therapy room.
My practice is built on a simple idea: therapy should help you change, not just help you talk about why you’re stuck. I call my approach short-term therapy with long-term results.
I work with individuals and couples on anxiety, disconnection, and the stuck patterns that show up in relationships and sex lives. Everything I do is informed by neuroscience. I help clients understand what’s happening in their three-story brain: the Basement, where our emotional instincts live; the Mezzanine, where learning and habits take hold; and the Top Floor, our executive brain. When people understand why they react the way they do, they stop blaming themselves and start making real changes.
I draw on four decades of clinical experience and a toolbox that includes psychotherapy, sex therapy, clinical hypnotherapy, and mindfulness. I’m also a yoga teacher, so I pay close attention to the body, not just the mind.
What sets my practice apart is what happens between sessions. Change doesn’t happen in one hour a week, so I offer free online coaching in between appointments. Clients can reach out as they practice new skills in real life, which keeps momentum going and helps new patterns stick.
I provide therapy to clients in New Jersey, where I’m licensed, and coaching to clients everywhere else. Either way, the goal is the same: helping people get out of their own way and back to healthy hedonism, a life with more pleasure, connection, and joy.
How do you think about luck?
Here’s where I think luck played out in my journey:
Like a lot of people, I came out of a bumpy childhood with plenty of anxiety. That part isn’t unusual. Anxiety is often just a nervous system doing its best to cope with an unpredictable world. I got lucky to have a father who was endlessly curious. He was a true intellectual, always reading, always asking questions, and he used to take me to the library. Those trips taught me that the world was something to explore, not just something to brace against.
So even at my most anxious, I was more curious than afraid. When panic hit, some part of me always asked, “What is going on in my brain right now?” That question became my way out.
Later, as a neuroscientist, I learned there’s a name for that drive. It’s the SEEKING system, one of the brain’s core emotional systems, the part of us that pushes us to explore, investigate, and lean toward life. Fear tells us to pull back. SEEKING tells us to go find out. My dad helped strengthen that system in me long before I knew it existed.
That curiosity is what sent me back to school in my fifties, what drew me to study a topic most researchers avoided, and what still lights me up when a client and I figure out what’s really driving their stuck patterns. If I had to name my luckiest break, it would be a father who showed me that wanting to know more is one of life’s great pleasures.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://askdoctornan.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/askdoctornan/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AskDoctorNan
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nan-wise-46190961/?isSelfProfile=true
- Twitter: https://x.com/AskDoctorNan
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzD7ahohYEf5SISE-eqDrjg
