Stop Your Premature Ejaculation And Last Longer During Sex!This link will take you
straight to the treatment program: Anxiety and premature ejaculationDoes anxiety play a major part in causing premature ejaculation?This question was investigated by Donald Strassberg and his colleagues at the University of Utah. Since the days of Helen Kaplan's pioneering sex therapy it's been believed that men with premature ejaculation are less aware of how sexually aroused they are than men who do not experience premature ejaculation. However, Donald Strassberg's work suggested that all men are equally able to make an assessment of their level of sexual arousal. This has been confirmed by other researchers as well. What's interesting about this is that Strassberg's research revealed that men with PE and men who did not have PE differed very significantly in their estimates of how long it took them to reach orgasm during both masturbation and intercourse. For example, men who define themselves as having premature ejaculation said that they reached orgasm during masturbation on average in 3.4 minutes, compared with 8.8 minutes for those men who did not define themselves as having premature ejaculation. This led to the hypothesis that one of the causes of premature ejaculation is physiological hypersensitivity to sexual stimulation. Bear in mind however that this hypothesis is based on self-reported latency times whose accuracy is uncertain. The purpose of the research reported here was to establish whether or not the hypothesis of hypersensitivity was actually true. In essence, hypersensitivity would mean that men with a tendency to reach orgasm and ejaculate quickly have a lower threshold for genital stimulation of all kinds. As part of this research Strassberg and his colleagues also investigated the experience of anxiety in sexual functioning of men with rapid ejaculation. There were only 32 men in this study, of whom 15 define themselves as premature ejaculators. They all fulfilled the criteria which has often been put forward as characterizing a man as having PE: that they reached the point of ejaculation within two minutes or less on at least 50% of the times that they had sexual intercourse, while experiencing little personal control over the onset of their orgasm and ejaculation. (Men without PE estimated there are ejaculate related see as being three minutes or more on at least 50% of occasions when they had sex). None of the men had taken part in sex therapy and none of them were taking any drugs which might have affected their ejaculatory capacity. All the men in the study answered two questionnaires, one under laboratory conditions and one at home. The first questionnaire was designed to establish what each man thought his ejaculatory latency period had been in the laboratory test conditions, and also established his level of anxiety during both the experiment and during intercourse at home. The second questionnaire was designed to establish the men's estimate of their ejaculatory latency when they were masturbating at home. The study was conducted in a small private office where men were shown explicit sexual activity on video while their heart rate was ostensibly being monitored during masturbation. In reality the subject was being monitored to establish the time between starting self-stimulation and ejaculation. The men were left alone in complete privacy with facilities for masturbation and instructed to operate a switch on the supposed "heart rate monitor" just before they started masturbating (on) and when they had ejaculated (off). This switched a timer on and off and established the period between start of self stimulation and orgasm/ejaculation. After each laboratory session the men were requested to repeat the procedure at home next day, and for this purpose they were given another so-called "heart monitor", a device which was in fact simply the same timer as used in the lab. They were also given a questionnaire which contained questions around anxiety and orgasmic latency period. The orgasmic latency periods of men with premature ejaculation and those men without premature ejaculation were compared in three dimensions: the objective latency measured in the laboratory, the objective latency measured at home, and the report by the men of the latency period in the laboratory conditions which the men estimated as part of the questionnaire. In all cases the men with premature ejaculation did indeed have shorter ejaculatory latency periods than the other men, in fact between 75% and 100% longer. Answers from the questionnaires were examined so as to explore the men's level of anxiety during their sexual experience, and to establish what role that might have played in causing their premature ejaculation. The men were asked to assess the degree of anxiety they felt during various sexual experiences, including during masturbation in the laboratory and during sexual intercourse in normal conditions. Strassberg and his colleagues discovered in this experiment that men who had premature ejaculation reached orgasm in about half the time that men without premature ejaculation did whether they were masturbating in the laboratory or at home. Psychological issues like performance anxiety, anger and the need to be in control are often put forward as explanations for premature ejaculation. But if, as Strassberg assumed, anxiety would be absent when a man masturbated at home, the finding that men with PE still came more quickly suggested another factor was at work. And in addition, the men's responses to the questionnaire suggested that there was no difference in anxiety during sexual intercourse between the men who had PE and those who did not. From this self-reporting Strassberg concluded that hypersensitivity to sexual stimulation, rather than anxiety, may be partly responsible for rapid ejaculation. He acknowledges that generalized sexual guilt or conflict about sex could play a role in causing anxiety and hence promoting premature ejaculation, even during masturbation, but he returns to the finding that the responses from the questionnaire indicated that all the men alike reported very low levels of anxiety during self-stimulation in the laboratory. (What he doesn't seem to have considered is that this may be because the men with PE were simply unaware of how anxious they were.) It's not a rigorous experiment and it goes against a whole body of circumstantial evidence presented in the course of sexual therapy which suggests that men who have premature ejaculation do in fact have an anxious personality type. Nonetheless, Strassberg proposed in his discussion that an alternative model which could explain premature ejaculation would be one in which an individual has somatic or bodily "vulnerability" which interacts with the experience of stress to produce rapid ejaculation. In other words, some men who have a particularly strong somatic vulnerability might find very little anxiety causes them to reach their orgasmic threshold. For others who have less somatic vulnerability, greater degrees of anxiety may be necessary before they manifest premature ejaculation. It's not a new idea, in fact it was first proposed by Shapiro in 1943. Circumstantial evidence to support this view does exist: certain men with PE do indeed seem to be much more susceptible to the effects of anxiety - it appears to play a much stronger role in their PE than it does in other men. The idea that somatic factors play a role in inducing PE may also be supported by the fact that drug treatment is capable of increasing the orgasmic latency time in some men with premature ejaculation. http://www.springerlink.com/content/m613236qq78247j7/fulltext.pdf |
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