When Your Body Stops Cooperating: Why Can’t I Get or Stay Hard?
Maybe that title is the question you’ve been asking. But I suggest starting with a different one.
First, ask yourself:
“When can I get and stay hard?”
Erectile difficulties during one or two attempted sexcapades don’t tell us much on their own.
Are you able to get an erection when you masturbate?
Are you able to stay hard with some partners and not others?
Do you have an erection at the beginning of foreplay but lose it once penetration becomes the goal?
When does your erection change?
Those details matter.
An erection is information.
When a penis becomes erect, it’s a physiological response involving multiple systems throughout your body. Your brain, spinal cord, nerves, blood vessels, hormones, and nervous system all play a role.
So if you’re having trouble getting or keeping an erection, something is happening that is creating a roadblock.
Rather than immediately deciding something is wrong with you, try some of the following suggestions.
Be curious about the conditions your body is under when that roadblock occurs.
A good place to start is with a medical evaluation. Your primary care physician or a qualified urologist can help rule out physical contributors, including hormonal, cardiovascular, neurological, medication-related, and other factors.
Once medical contributors have been evaluated, there are plenty of other roadblocks worth investigating.
Sometimes anxiety is the roadblock.
Other times, the sex you’re having simply isn’t arousing enough for you.
Some of my clients find that they’re trying so hard to stay hard that they’ve stopped noticing whether anything actually feels good! If all of your attention is on making your partner happy and satisfied, this could be your biggest issue.
And sometimes you may not know why your erection isn’t meeting your expectations.
That’s okay, too.
You can investigate.
2. Your body isn't a machine that you can command to perform.
That's why understanding what happens when a hot situation with your partner suddenly turns into a mental spiral is critical.
Sex therapy can help you understand your sexual system.
What turns you on?
What shuts you down?
Where does your attention go during sex?
And what happens between you and your partner when your erection changes?
A quality sex therapist can help you work with performance anxiety, arousal, staying present in your body, and sexual communication.
Your question may begin with:
“Why can’t I stay hard?”
Instead, therapy helps us investigate a much more useful one:
“What helps my body stay engaged in sex?”
3. Don’t make staying hard the goal.
While working with men experiencing performance anxiety, I’ve noticed a common theme:
Staying hard has become the main goal.
Unfortunately, that goal can become part of the problem.
Because once your goal is to stay hard, you have to keep checking whether you’re succeeding.
Am I still hard?
Am I losing it?
That checking shifts your attention away from your partner’s touch, the sight of their body, the sensations between you, and what actually feels good. Instead, your brain moves into evaluation mode.
When your brain detects the pressure behind “I have to stay hard,” the stakes go up. Your body can become more activated and vigilant. Instead of simply responding to pleasure, part of your attention is now monitoring for a problem.
And you can end up in a frustrating loop:
“I need to stay hard.”
Am I still hard?
Your erection changes.
“Shit. It’s happening again.”
Now you monitor even more closely.
At this point, your erection has become a performance metric.
Additionally, your brain is now trying to do two things at once: experience sex and watch yourself experience sex.
Your nervous system doesn’t need to understand erectile dysfunction to recognize pressure.
And pressure can make pleasure much harder to pay attention to.
With a sex therapist who is experienced in working with erectile difficulties, you can stop treating your erection like a problem to solve and start understanding the conditions that help your body stay sexually engaged.
Together, we can explore the patterns your nervous system has learned around sex—so you can spend less time monitoring your body and more time actually experiencing what you want to - a fun, connective experience with your body (and maybe even someone else’s)!
