How To Deal With Performance Anxiety
As Masters and Johnson, the great sexologists put it, “Fear of inadequacy is the greatest known deterrent to effective sexual functioning.” Truer words were never spoken.
A lot of us think of sex as an act, a performance, with roles we’re expected to play—especially as a top. Much of our anxiety around sex comes from societal expectations of masculinity (you’re always horny, always hard) and watching porn (you’re big as a bridge, never go soft and cum like a waterfall).
Men typically view sex as goal-oriented, performance-driven, orgasm-centric and erection focused. If any of these cylinders don’t fire they can stir a thick pot of anxiety. For gay men, performance anxiety tends to center around these thoughts:
- You won’t get hard enough
- Your dick isn’t big enough
- You will disappoint your partner
- Your partner will compare you to other guys
- Your partner will judge you and tell the world
- You’ll ejaculate too soon
- You’ll take forever to ejaculate
These anxieties produce stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, epinephrine and norepinephrine, which produce a heightened state of alert. It’s the opposite of feeling relaxed and calm and in the moment, which is necessary for proper sexual functioning.
These stress hormones constrict blood vessels, inhibiting blood flow, which makes erections more difficult. They also increase muscular and body tension, and actually desensitize the genitalia.
How To Deal With Performance Anxiety
The key to getting hard and staying that way is to immerse yourself in desire to such an extent that it crowds out unhelpful thoughts. That means identifying your turn-ons, accessing them during lovemaking and asking for what you want and how you want it. All day long we try to rein Willie in. It’s time to let him run the show.
If you find yourself being derailed by feckless ruminations there are a few things to keep in mind:
Make A Distinction Between What You Can And Can’t Control
Let’s say you were dissatisfied with your last sexual outing because of the quality of your erection. Maybe it came and went, maybe it never came or maybe it went too soon.
You don’t have control over this disappointment but you do have the choice not to catastrophize it. You can choose to stop exaggerating the importance of your perceived failure or shrink the importance of what went right. You can choose to appreciate the pleasure you received before or after the perceived failure.
Keep It In Perspective
It is what it is. Keep your opinion out of it. Didn’t get hard enough? It means nothing but that in that instant you didn’t get hard enough. Don’t “therefore it.” As in, you didn’t get hard enough, THEREFORE you’re a failure or THEREFORE you’ll never get hard again.
Catch yourself when you descend into polarized thinking–when you explain yourself in extreme terms with no middle ground. For example, if you think this “always happens to me,” stop and say, “Whoa! Hold on, that’s polarized thinking. Am I really prepared to say ‘always?’ What about all those other times everything worked fine?”
You should walk away intact if you have a negative experience. If a session didn’t, ahem, rise to your expectation the reaction should be, “Oh, well but everything else sure was hot!”
Don’t turn an attempt at sexual satisfaction into a source of grief. It is what is—a mild disappointment, not an earth-shattering event like a murder or a tsunami. The bigger problem you make it the bigger problem it becomes.
Set Realistic Expectations
You are a man not a machine. You are fallible. We often disappoint ourselves and others but those disappointments don’t define us. It’s not realistic to think that every sexual experience is going to light the heavens or part the waters. It’s realistic to expect a wide variety of sexual experiences—including some awful ones.
Studies show that about one-third of men experience some type of “situational impotence” at least once a year. In other words, over the course of their lives almost 100% of men will experience a “failure to launch” (not getting hard enough or staying hard enough for intercourse).
Experiencing sexual difficulties is the price of being human.