Premature Ejaculation And Sexual Performance Anxiety
Like erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation is a very common sexual issue.
Approximately one-third of men under the age of 60 have at least occasional issues with PE. Doctors define early ejaculation as regularly reaching orgasm within one minute after penetration during vaginal sex.
Whether you have chronic symptoms or symptoms that only occur from time to time, PE has the potential to increase the odds of sexual performance anxiety.
As mentioned above, sexual performance anxiety can potentially lead to PE, which can further increase anxiety. It can therefore become a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, there are numerous solutions to help you overcome this issue.
How To Overcome Stage Fright
- Do not drink coffee or any other caffeinated beverages prior to the gig
- Do not drink any alcohol at all two days before the trumpet solo
- Do not let your blood sugar levels be on its way down prior to or during the performance.
- Drink a glass of water 1-2 minutes before you start playing your trumpet solo.
Remember To Privilege Emotional Closeness Over Sexual Performance
Again, the goal of physical intimacy isnt to reach orgasm or to progress through all five dimensions of touch. The goal is to maintain your emotional connection while sharing physical pleasure .
We all want to orgasm , but sometimes its not going to happen! We can have a wonderfully satisfying and pleasurable experience without engaging in erotic touch or intercourse. If we allow ourselves to privilege emotional connection over sexual performance and orgasm, we end up feeling less anxiety and more pleasure. Its literally a win-win scenario!
Heres the recap:
- Identify if you suffer from sexual performance anxiety
- Understand why you might be struggling with performance anxiety
- Practice strategies to help you and your partner develop a physical relationship that creates emotional closeness and physical pleasure a win-win solution!
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Imagining Crazy Sex Fantasies Before & During Intercourse
One day, I had an idea: “While in bed with girl, why not just fantasize about the thing that usually makes me extremely horny! A lesbian orgy for example!”.
Bad idea as well for similar reasons like the thought suppression techniques. Thinking about something else while being in bed with a girl simply added stress for myself. I switched all the time between actual reality and fantasy. And since my mind was just busy fantasizing, I could not enjoy the moment itself. I ended up being even more nervous and did not get a boner.
Perceptions Of Your Physical Appearance
How you feel about how you look may play a role in performance anxiety. Body image and self-esteem are often connected, and it is very normal to feel like you are insufficiently sculpted or to worry about the size of your penis. While most people dont care about the size of their sexual partners package, we get that this doesnt always quell those feelings.
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How Can You Tell If Your Erectile Dysfunction Is Psychological
The key to treating sexual dysfunction and erectile dysfunction is to identify the underlying psychological causes. Because most erectile dysfunction cases are caused by physiological issues your first step should be to talk to your doctor.
Some of the medical causes which are often linked to erectile dysfunction include diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, hormonal disorders, and alcoholism. In order to rule out medical issues, your doctor may order laboratory testing.
There are a few signs to look for which might suggest your erectile dysfunction is psychological.
Asking yourself specific questions.
- Do you experience morning erections?
- Are you under abnormal amounts of stress or anxiety?
- Are you able to achieve an erection while masturbating?
- Do you get nervous about pleasing your partner?
If you answer yes to any of these questions, this may be a sign that your impotence is due to psychological causes.
Show Yourself That It Works
If your penis works when you masturbate, you know your equipment is working from a physical perspective. However, if youre also having the same problems during masturbation, that may be the sign of a more serious issue that requires medical treatment.
Understanding your sexual response by practicing when you are by yourself is a good way to reinforce that there is nothing wrong with you and can help you start to build up your confidence.
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Sexual Performance Anxiety: Can Performance Anxiety Cause Ed
The concept of sexual performance anxiety is one that has been receiving more and more attention these days especially when it comes to its effects on men.
The more we talk about and understand anxiety, the more we are able to identify how it affects our daily lives. Unfortunately, many of those effects are negative.
The hard truth here is that anxiety needs to be confronted head-on as a mental health concern its not about simply sucking it up, and moving forward. Instead, its about pursuing your optimal state of well-being, whether that is professionally, personally, or even sexually.
Male performance anxiety, similar to low testosterone issues, is something many more of us encounter than wed perhaps like to admit. Not feeling at our best in the bedroom can lead to a range of relationship and personal issues, and unfortunately it can be embarrassing to talk about, which makes treating and overcoming it that much harder.
Whats worse is that performance anxiety in men can result in other sexual problems like premature ejaculation or erectile dysfunction. Fortunately, there are a multitude of ways to overcome sexual anxiety but it all starts with the genuine desire to dive into some of the uncomfortable reasons behind it in order to combat it and get back to enjoying every aspect of your life.
Sexual Performance Anxiety: What Is It And How To Overcome It
Sex is supposed to be fun. It can be a time to explore yourself and your partner in new, intimate ways. Or it can simply be a good, connecting time. But if you feel your anxiety always gets in the way of your enjoyment, you might be experiencing sexual performance anxiety. Such anxiety can pose challenges in the bedroom and it can manifest for a number of reasons. Whatever is causing it, you arenât alone in the feeling. According to a 2010 study published in the Sex Med Review Journal, sexual performance anxiety is actually one of the most common sexual complaints. While it can be difficult to deal with, there are ways to overcome your performance anxiety. First, it can be helpful to simply understand what it is and some of the reasons that may cause it.
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Treatment For Sexual Performance Anxiety
Treatment for sexual performance anxiety typically depends on whats causing it. In general, a combination of medication and psychotherapy can be used to treat its symptoms.
- Psychotherapy: Cognitive-behavioral therapy is sometimes recommended for the treatment of SPA.
- Medication: Medication used to treat erectile dysfunction, such as Viagra and Cialis, is sometimes recommended for people who have SPA.
More research needs to be done to find adequate treatment for sexual performance anxiety. Cognitive-behavioral therapy and medication have so far proven to be some of the most effective treatments for SPA. Buspirone, bupropion, and trazodone have also shown potential in helping treat symptoms of SPA.
Anxiety And Performance Anxiety
Performance anxiety can be a serious problem. It can create other types of anxiety, including social anxiety, and in some cases, it can be a symptom of other anxiety disorders that bleed into your confidence in social situations.
No matter what you will need to address your overall anxiety if you want to also reduce your performance anxiety. Anxiety disorders create negative, nervous thinking, and so even if you “cure” your performance anxiety, you are still likely to have disabling thoughts that may affect your performance in the future.
But performance anxiety itself can have a variety of additional causes. Let’s look at the two main types of performance anxiety and see what may cause it, and then go into detail about what can be done to prevent it.
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Performance Anxiety: An Overview
Performance anxiety is often associated with negative thoughts such as fear and worry, which leads to sexual dysfunction. This may be caused by underlying insecurity about genital size and body image and pressure to please their partner sexually and stress.
Other causes include:
- Concern about premature or delayed ejaculation
- Worries about taking too long to reach orgasm or not at all
Performance anxiety may reflect symptoms differently as everyone responds to stress and anxiety in different ways. These symptoms could be premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction , inability to orgasm, or total loss of interest in sex.
Men and women experience performance anxiety, but men of all ages tend to face it more often. Although common, this type of sexual dysfunction is entirely normal and treatable.
How To Cope With Sexual Performace Anxiety
The first step to coping with sexual performance anxiety is removing any shame you might be feeling about not having an optimal sex life. In some instances, sexual performance anxiety goes away with time, especially in situations caused by having a new sexual partner or where a relationship issue with your partner has been resolved.
People with sexual performance anxiety often operate under the false belief that they are somehow inadequate or incapable of satisfying their partners. Focusing more on your enjoyment and that of your partner instead of how adequate your performance is can help you overcome your anxiety.
Here are some other tips that can help you overcome SPA:
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Try A Meditation Practice
This might sound like some new-age hippie idea, but mindfulness meditation practices have been proven to improve anxiety and reduce stress and improve situational erectile dysfunction. In a 2018 study, researchers found great promise in the use of mindfulness meditation for the treatment of situational erectile dysfunction. This suggests meditation may provide tools to deal with the performance anxiety response in a brand new way.
The most useful takeaways from using a mediation practice for sexual performance anxiety is the learned ability to take yourself out of your worried mind and into your physical body.
To become more aware of what you are feeling physically and less aware of future-based worries. When you learn to do this, the anxious thoughts donât have the chance to build up into an anxious frenzy. This is because youâve had the thought, but instead of operating from that thought, youâve anchored your mind elsewhere. Anxiety is future-oriented. A perfect match for meditation, which can work the muscle that encourages us to step out of the perceived future and into the present moment.
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Men Vs Women: Which Gender Is More At Risk
Typically, sexual performance anxiety is discussed among men, because it can lead to the loss of erectile function, or the ability to get an erection. However, Tishler suggests it can refer to any anxiety, in any gender, that interferes with sexual function, orgasm, or satisfaction. For example, men worry about their penis not “measuring up”, premature ejaculation, or taking too long to reach orgasm.
Dr. Fran Walfish, Beverly Hills family and relationship psychotherapist, author of The Self-Aware Parent, and co-star on Sex Box, WE tv., notes the fear of ejaculating too soon is a well-known fear among younger men.
“This is fairly common among young guys in the late teens and early 20s who have had limitedsexual experience and an accumulated high level of excitation,” she told Medical Daily.
Meanwhile, women’s bedroom insecurities focus on not being able to have an orgasm, or enjoy sex.
Experts share five tips to help you cope with performance anxiety in the bedroom, from taking it slow to practicing mindfulness.Photo courtesy of Pexels, Public Domain
“Essentially this sort of anxiety is the worst sort of distraction from sexual intimacy,” Tishler said. “Sexual function does not work well in a distracted situation.”
Below Tishler and Walfish share five tips to cope with performance anxiety solo or as a couple.
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Dont Compare Yourself To Others
Sex can be fantastic, but there is a difference between fantasy and reality.
If youre concerned about your sexual performance, its a good idea to take a hard look at what you imagine sex should be like versus what its really like for most people. For starters, banish notions of gorgeous porn stars or celebrities with picture-perfect bodies.
Licensed psychotherapist Vanessa Marin told Mens Health its important to manage your expectations when it comes to sex. Ask yourself: What, exactly, do you think performance means? What do you expect of yourself in the bedroom?
Then, Marin says, make sure your expectations are reasonable. Would you tell your best friend that he needed to live up to those same expectations? Would you expect the same things out of your partners?
Fantasies, such as steamy romance novels or hot porn movies, can be a great way to get in the mood, but they arent representative of reality. Porn actors are just that: actors. They use any number of tactics to stay hard, including numbing creams and medication. They also work under professional lighting and may perform for hours while they shoot a single scene.
Your love life and your sexual performance can be amazing without attempting to make everything perfect.
Mindful Focus: Being In The Moment Not In Your Head
The constructive alternative to self-monitoring is focusing our attention on the experience in the moment, and to to treat any self-evaluative and worrying thoughts as unimportant background noise. This is called mindfulness. For the actor, mindful focus means throwing herself utterly into the role, and saving evaluation until the performance is over. For the conversationalist, mindful focus means focusing with curiosity what is being said in the moment, and saying whatever comes to mind naturally, without scripting.
For the man being sexual, mindfulness means focusing our attention on any or all of the pleasurable sensations we are experiencing in the momenttouch, sight, sound, smell, tasteas well as focusing on any pleasant emotions we may be experiencingexcitement, affection, enjoyment. Mindfulness when being sexual also means distancingdefusingfrom any evaluative or worrying thoughts and feelings we may be having, treating them like unimportant background noise.
Well, this takes a lot of practice! Some of us have become so used to self-evaluating and worrying while being sexualand often before and after being sexual, toothat its unrealistic to expect us to suddenly be in the moment the next time we have sex. And if you wait until having sex to try to be mindfully focused, theres a chance that you will start evaluating how well you are being in the momentwhich will only worsen self-consciousness and self-criticism.
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Negative Thoughts Around Sex
One of the drivers of sexual anxiety is negative sexual experiences in the past. If one time you struggled to get it up or you came sooner than you would have liked, the feelings you felt in these moments can affect you long into the future.
Pornography, by the way, doesnt help in this regard. Real sex isnt necessarily like sex in porn and you shouldnt get caught up in thinking that it should be. If you cannot last as long as pornstars before you ejaculate, or if you compare your penis size to theirs, it is understandable that you may feel self-conscious.
How To Get Over Performance Anxiety In The Bedroom
At some point in everyones life, they have experienced performance anxiety in the bedroom. It can be a result of past traumas, a new sexual experience, or a new lover that you anxiously want to satisfy. Its been scientifically proven that most men at one point or another deal with performance anxiety and erectile dysfunction. The repeated occurrence of these problems might affect sexual life. An unsatisfactory sexual life decreases the overall quality of your life.
So just how do you get over being anxious between the sheets? We have collected some powerful tips that are worth considering.
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Strategies To Reduce Public Performance Anxiety
Fighting performance anxiety in public situations – like a sporting event or speech – is something that primarily takes practice. The more and longer you practice the more these performances become instinctual. Athletes that struggle under pressure are more likely to perform the more they experience the pressure-filled situations. Those that are afraid of public speaking tend to improve when they have performed numerous speaking events.
However, a big part of how you address these issues comes from self-talk. Often the problem with this type of performance anxiety is that the brain tends to focus on the negative and tell itself worst case scenarios. You need to address the way you feel about your performance so that you are not sidelined by mistakes or stressed over the potential to make them. Consider the following:
These may not sound like the most effective strategies, but that’s because performance anxiety is dependent on simply learning to think positively so that bad performances don’t affect you and practicing to ensure that you are ready for any event.
Since so much performance anxiety comes from negative self-talk and psyching yourself out under pressure, the best thing you can do for yourself is:
- Learn how to perform your best at all times reduce your daily anxiety unrelated to your performance, and
- Make sure that you get used to what situations with a lot of pressure feel like.
Talk With Your Partner
Poor communication can hinder a physical and emotional connection, and further trigger performance anxiety. Walfish believes open communication is required in healthy sexual intercourse.
“Each partner needs to feel safe and comfortable saying what feels good and what doesnt, what they like and do not like, what they want and dont want from their partner,” she said.
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