Stress and Negative Emotions – Canadian Health Care
Depending on your make-up, stress may also affect your erectile function. Stress can make you tense and anxious and bring into play what is called the “flight or fight” response from your subconscious nervous system. Your body’s reaction to stress is to release a hormone called Cortisol. Whereas some Cortisol is necessary for some body functions and have some positive short term effects on memory, increased immunity etc,
its main function is to promote survival, or “flight and fight” as against the positive and friendly response we require for the chance of a sex encounter to develop. With elevated Cortisol levels, you get a blocking of testosterone associated instinctive behaviours like mating and competing. This reduces your psychic and emotional energy for sexual encounters. Presumably this is because you may lower your chances of survival by engaging in sex and lowering your defences.
Prolonged stress can lead to a condition called “chronic stress” which can also lead to long term fatigue. If stressed enough, most men will develop some physical symptom. These range from diarrhoea, headaches, bowel irritability… to name a few. And like taxis, buses or trams, they have a habit of showing up more than one at a time: you can experience The Works.
All this means is that Stress can be a source of your ED condition. One’s constitution is still the subject of gene analysis and therapy, and in the future, gene therapy may be able to treat this ailment after identifying the gene that predisposes men to feel stressed-out. For now we have to treat it with what we know. There are many and various stress management techniques and you can make lifestyle changes in order to keep your body from reacting to stress. My Step 6: Lifestyle and Nutrition and Steps 8 and 9 will get you to bring the Correct Mindset and Relaxed Body to a sex encounter party.
Like stress, other negative emotions such as jealousy, anger, shame, not feeling connected to your partner, and guilt lead to the wrong mindset for your Dick to erect. Or, how about fear of getting the partner pregnant; fear of catching venereal disease; fear of your Dick hitting the Point of No Return and Orgasm too soon? The worst one has to be the fear of not being a good enough lover.
Sometimes, if you are stressed about a situation such as work or financial issues, your mind can get so reoccupied that you may not be actually 100% present at the sex encounter. If the focus of your attention is elsewhere, your brain will miss the sensory messages it is getting from the sex encounter. You may have heard of the scientific test where people are asked to view a basketball game and count scores by a team. Throughout the game a gorilla happens to walk through the game. At the end of the game, they are told that the score is irrelevant and asked if they had seen the gorilla. Very few did! This proves the relevance of focus.
If you feel that your ED stems from sources like these, you won’t need worry beads or anxiety pills as recommended by Mr ED. The good news is that this source is easily treated with my program Steps 8 and 10.
Your upbringing, bad experiences, and psychological factors can adversely affect your predis- posi-position to sex. These influences vary immensely but as common examples to illustrate sexual trauma’s effect on ED consider the following:
– Rejection by a partner for whatever reason can lead to anger, jealousy and even irrational guilt. If the sources of these emotions are not explored and resolved but allowed to fester, they could easily lead to psychological Sexual Trauma and consequent ED.
– It’s common for men to suffer Sexual Trauma as a result of a discovered infidelity by their partner. If the issue is not resolved and emotionally dealt with, any effort to achieve an erection may be undermined by your selfs wrong mind set.
– First, or early sexual experiences can have a major effect on later life. Good starts commonly lead to a relaxed development of one’s sexual persona. Bad starts on the other hand lead some men to be haunted by the early sexual difficulty, setting the expectational bar too high and feed Performance Anxiety. As an example, consider a young fellow whose first sexual experience with his girlfriend was at her house in a room next to her mother’s. Some men may find this situation exciting but for this fellow it turned out to be the source of his anxiety. It built up over the years and was fed by the girlfriend’s negative feedback. Another example involved a young man whose girlfriend wanted a sex encounter right after his father’s funeral. This led to his ED and her continued taunting fed his ED condition.
Sometimes it’s not until we hear the problems of others that we realise how lucky we are. The real problem is that in some societies, men are socialised so that the male role cannot possibly suffer Sexual Trauma. However, for some men it is real and when identified, easily treated. So, think back over your sex experiences and consider whether you have suffered any Sexual Trauma and whether it produces thoughts that haunt or affect you during a sexual encounter. If so, you have to face and deal with it and the mind exercises in Step 8 are invaluable. If it relates to your present partner, my Step 11 is likewise invaluable.
