Even in the original caves, you could find stress. Can’t hunt down that last mammoth. The wife and kids complaining about the water running down the back wall of the cave. It’s the same today. Under pressure at work with no other jobs to go to if you lose this one, and the home under threat from the bank if you’re short on one more payment on the mortgage. It’s enough to give any man problems in bed. Why do some men under stress find sex difficult? Most of the things we do are under the control of the brain. We know what we want and the body moves to get those things done. This is effective almost all the time for voluntary movements like picking something up or walking. But there are a host of other things that are not voluntary. We get gooseflesh when we’re cold, some blush when they’re embarrassed. Most of the time, both voluntary and involuntary work reasonably well together – even though some young men do find themselves embarrassed by a sudden erection as a response to a very attractive woman. But, when it comes to sex, it’s easy for the simple to become complicated.
To produce an erection, men have to find the situation sexually stimulating. This involves the brain sending messages to the walls of the penile artery telling them to dilate and let more blood into the penis. This should trigger a rise in the heart rate, faster breathing and then arousal. If the situation progresses, blood pressure rises, major plumbing switching to get semen lined up instead of urine. It’s a wonder we ever manage to get to the exciting ejaculation at the end without something going wrong. Except things do go wrong quite often. If men are already stressed, they may just not find the initial situation that sexually exciting. This may be mood or general levels of anxiety. Or having got into the mood, the men then find themselves distracted by the idea of foreclosure and being thrown out on to the streets. This puts a damper on all that surging adrenaline and the erection fails. The National Institutes of Health estimates that about 5% of adult men have this problem with anxiety-related problems more common among older men. (more…)