When Erections Change: The Watching, and How to Stop

There is a moment a lot of men will recognise. Something is happening, it is going well enough, and then a small part of your attention detaches and starts checking.

Is it still there. Is it firm enough. Is it going. Is she noticing that it is going.

From that moment on you are not really in the room. You are somewhere just behind your own eyes, monitoring. And the thing you are monitoring, which needs relaxation and blood flow and a nervous system that feels safe, reliably responds by leaving.

That loop is the single most common thing men bring to me in midlife. It is worth separating into two parts, because they need different things.

The physical part, which is real

Erections do change. From the forties onwards they generally take longer to arrive, need more direct physical touch rather than arriving on thought alone, and are less rigid than they were. The gap needed between one erection and the next lengthens, sometimes considerably. This is ordinary and it happens to almost everyone.

Some of it is not ordinary and needs looking at. Erectile difficulty can be an early warning of cardiovascular problems, because the arteries involved are small and show trouble first. Diabetes, blood pressure medication, antidepressants and alcohol all have direct effects. Please get this checked by a GP. It is a five minute conversation and it can matter for more than your sex life. There is more on the medical side in this piece on erectile difficulty.

The watching, which is the part that compounds it

Here is the sequence almost every man describes. Something does not work as expected, once. It might be tiredness, alcohol, stress, or nothing identifiable at all. The next time, you remember. You are alert for it. And being alert for it is exactly the state in which it happens again.

Now you have evidence. The time after that you are watching from the start.

Within a few months a one off has become a pattern, and the pattern is being maintained almost entirely by the watching rather than by whatever caused the first occasion. Men often tell me they are fine on their own and not with a partner, which is the clearest possible sign that this is what is happening. The plumbing works. The surveillance is the problem.

Why you cannot solve it by trying harder

The instinct is to concentrate. To focus, to will it, to get on top of it. Every one of those moves you further into your head and further from the sensation that would actually help.

You also cannot solve it by not thinking about it. Nobody has ever successfully not thought about something on purpose.

What works is different: giving your attention somewhere useful to go. Not away from the anxiety, which is impossible, but towards something specific and physical enough to occupy you.

What that looks like in practice

Most of the men I work with begin by learning to notice sensation somewhere other than the genitals. Where a hand is resting. The temperature of the room. Weight, pressure, warmth. This sounds almost too simple to matter, and it is the thing that shifts the loop, because attention can only be in one place at a time and it is currently in a bad one.

If you try this and notice almost nothing, you are in good company. Most men have spent decades filtering out everything except one signal. The capacity comes back with practice, but it is genuinely rusty at first, and expecting to feel a great deal straight away is a good way to conclude wrongly that it does not work for you.

The second piece is taking intercourse off the table for a while, deliberately and by agreement. Not as a punishment or an admission, but because the loop needs somewhere to be that has no test in it. Almost everyone resists this and almost everyone finds it works, because an erection you are not required to produce is an erection that has room to turn up.

The third is saying it out loud to your partner, if you have one. Men often do not, because it feels like an admission of something. What actually happens is that she has already noticed, and has quite possibly concluded that you no longer find her attractive. The silence is doing more damage than the erection ever did. There is more on that particular silence in this piece.

What to expect

This is not fast, and it is not linear. There will be occasions that go well and occasions that do not, and the ones that do not are not evidence that nothing is changing. What often shifts first is not the erection. It is how much of your attention the whole question takes up. Men often notice that they thought about it less that week before they notice anything physical.

You are not broken and you are not finished. You have a body that is fifty five rather than twenty five, and a habit of watching it that can be unlearned.

There is more on what changes in midlife on the page for men over 50.