Most men experience times in their life when they are unable to get an erection and suffer erectile dysfunction. Even if it’s not something that they are keen to discuss openly. Sometimes, it can just be the odd time when you’re overtired, stressed or perhaps you’ve had too much to drink. Sometimes it can happen for a longer period, perhaps due to ongoing pressures at work, or if you’re having relationship problems. There are also a variety of medical conditions that can contribute to ED, such as diabetes, and side effects from medication.
So if you’ve had recurring issues of ED, then it is of course important to get it checked out by a doctor. And you’re much more likely to have a strong healthy sex drive throughout your life if you eat healthily and take regular exercise, so it can be a good idea to look at your lifestyle too, and decide if there are any ways you need to start taking care of your health better.
Why erectile dysfunction happens
But as well as these physical factors, there’s a common psychological pattern that can lead to erection dysfunction or triggers that have been set off by medical causes. And it’s called performance anxiety. The feeling of pressure worry or anxiety about whether you’re going to be able to get an erection can actually interfere with your sexual responsiveness as far as your body is concerned, if you’re anxious, this is a sign that could be a real physical danger around in times of emergency. All body functions that are not about immediate survival, like digestion and sex drive are put on hold. You can read more about if erectile dysfunction be cured ?
Unfortunately, just a few experiences of feeling anxious and not getting an erection can turn into a repeating pattern. In your mind, sex becomes associated with pressure and anxiety, which in turn keeps interfering with your sexual responsiveness. It becomes a vicious circle. It is this type of performance anxiety, the hypnosis is excellent at treating as an erection is a spontaneous unconscious response. And it’s not something you can consciously control.
So it’s not your fault that these incidents of impotence happened in the past, any more than it’s your fault when your stomach rumbles, or you blush. However, through powerful hypnotic suggestions you can retrain your unconscious mind to associate sex for feelings of comfort and safety. So you can allow the natural build up of desire and passion to flow through you during intimacy. During and after sessions, you’ll start to notice you feel spontaneously more at ease again during sex as you reconnect with your natural sexual responsiveness and give both yourself and your partner (if you have one) time to get properly aroused, free from that old pressure and anxiety.
Performance Anxiety
A little bit more about overcoming sexual performance anxiety. Nearly all men feel a little anxious around sex occasionally. Sex can be a very important part of a relationship and an important part of your own identifty. So it’s understandable that people sometimes put pressure on themselves around sex. What’s more, many men have unrealistic expectations of themselves under what it means to be a man. When sex is portrayed in films and on TV shows, the implicit message is that to be a real man, you need to be some sort of constantly energised superstar, regardless of the state of the relationship, or the sexual experience and skills of the other person. That gives the cultural belief that a men is only a man when they are successful during sex. Both men and women have doubts, insecurities, and emotional needs. The sex works best when all partners feel comfortable and at ease with each other. One thing that can be helpful to overcome anxiety around sex is to talk things through with your partner or partners so that you both give each other permission to go slowly taking away a sense of pressure to perform. The sexual performance anxiety can also become a conditioned automatic pattern, where you’ve come to associate any form of sexual intimacy with feelings of tension, discomfort and pressure.
Let’s talk about fear and anxiety for a moment. Fear Itself is a vital protective function for human beings. In life threatening situations, your body immediately goes into fight or flight mode. This gives you the energy to rapidly take action so that you can protect yourself from the threat or escape a dangerous situation. Like being confronted with a lion in the wild. Your sexual responsiveness is supposed to switch off. In fact, during highly fearful times, many functions that are not essential for dealing with the immediate threat get switched off. For example, people get drying mouths when they’re afraid because the system is actually putting aside digested responses, which aren’t needed for fight or flight when faced with a potentially life threatening situation. While fear relates to an immediate threat in your environment, anxiety is all about your expectations. You believe that something fearful might happen in the future. Anxiety is processed through the imagination, whereas fear is a response to an actual situation. And the more we repeatedly imagine something that’s scary, the more likely we are to experience the actual situation. with fear.
What can you do about erectile dysfunction?
So if you’ve been putting excessive pressure on yourself to perform during sex, and you’ve been anxiously imagining sexual experiences going badly, then you may have developed an unconscious association between sexual intimacy and the fear response. And that means you need to take steps to recondition your instinctive responses, so that you can naturally associate sex with flowing enjoyment and pleasure.
Helen Birch is a clinical hypnotherapist and sex expert . She is based in Leeds, West Yorkshire. You can book a free consultation call with her here