Blog

In the world of men, erectile dysfunction is the closest medical equivalent to a four-letter word. It’s rarely discussed, and when it’s finally brought up, it’s in hushed tones or behind closed doors. Because most men would be so hesitant to talk about such an intimate issue, it’s a medical problem that many remain ignorant on.

If you’ve found yourself recently struggling with your erection, it can definitely feel like you’re in this alone. You can’t exactly turn to your friends about such an issue, and it can feel embarrassing to talk to your partner about the problem. But rest assured, you are far from alone.

Erectile dysfunction is an incredibly common ailment that can afflict men of all ages. Studies have found that ED is becoming increasingly prevalent among younger men, and the numbers of older men suffering from the issue is only rising.

In fact, a recent study found that about 50% of men between ages 40 and 70 suffer from erectile dysfunction, which is higher than previously conducted study numbers. Researchers say this rise can be attributed to higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression, and more men relying upon tobacco and alcohol.

So, while you probably won’t hear your friend group talking about it any time soon, erectile dysfunction afflicts thousands of men, so you are far from alone.

If you’ve found it difficult to achieve and maintain an erection lately, you might be questioning whether your issue is a temporary one or if you should consult your doctor. As the issue gets more obvious, you begin to face facts: you need to see a doctor about this.

While talking to your doctor about erectile dysfunction can be embarrassing, it’s important to remember that it’s the first step towards solving the problem. But with so many questions and concerns, it can be a little difficult to decide just what you need to ask your doctor to ensure that all your fears are addressed.

Well, worry not. Below you will find 8 questions that you should ask your doctor about ED. These questions will allow you to get all the answers you need, while simultaneously helping to establish how this issue can be conquered.

So, when it comes time to pay a visit to your doctor, remember to ask:

1. Could an underlying health issue be causing my ED?
2. Could any of my medications be causing my ED?
3. Could smoking or drinking be the cause of my ED?
4. Could psychological issues such as stress or anxiety be contributing to my ED?
5. If my issue is mental in nature, should I see a sex counselor or psychiatrist?
6. Could an ED drug such as Viagra work for me?
7. With the solution we have laid out, how much improvement can I expect?
8. Should we look into a nonmedical treatment (i.e. implants or surgery?)

The biggest report of the year is due in a couple days, and you aren’t even close to being done with it. Your company is depending on you, your boss is breathing down your neck, and you feel stressed. This stress from work can begin to leak into your normal life, leading to feelings of depression, anxiety, and the inability to focus on anything but the issue that is causing you stress.

While stress can affect your quality of life, it can also translate into physical effects. Too much stress can lead to heart attacks, heart disease, and even erectile dysfunction.

Yes, with your body chock full of stress, this can lead to issues downstairs. This is because stress can lead to increased blood pressure and cholesterol, which in turn can lead to erectile issues. With your blood pressure raised, your body will struggle to supply the body with the optimum flow of blood, which can lead to actions that rely upon blood flow, such as the erection, getting left out in the cold.

Unfortunately, stress-related ED can also become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When a man develops ED, this can lead to stress about this newfound issue, stress about being unable to perform, and stress about what it could mean. In turn, this translates into more stress, which just leads to the issue getting worse.

If you’re dealing with stress-related ED, it’s important to get to the source of your bedroom woes. Work to push stress out of your life, or learn how to better deal with stress. With hard work, you can overcome stress, which in turn can bring your erection back to life.

When you hit the hay, does it sound like a backfiring car engine has ended up in your room? Does your partner often think that a jet engine has set up shop in your bed? You may have a snoring problem, more commonly known as sleep apnea. While snoring is a normal occurrence, think of sleep apnea as snoring on steroids. People afflicted with sleep apnea snore like their lives depend on it, because they actually kind of do. When you’re afflicted with sleep apnea, you tend to stop breathing for 10 to 30-second increments as you sleep, which causes your body to sputter and snore in an attempt to get oxygen.

To add insult to injury, sleep apnea doesn’t just cause your bedroom to sound like the hang out spot for a bunch of chainsaws. Because sleep apnea temporarily halts the intake of oxygen, this can lead to the oxygen count in your body lowering. The lower the amount of oxygen in your bloodstream, the worse your body’s overall function will be, which includes your sexual function.

Erectile dysfunction is very common amongst men that suffer from sleep apnea, with a whopping 46% of men with the disease reporting experiencing erectile issues, while 69% of men with the disease reported experiencing reduced sexual desire.

If you’ve found yourself uninterested in sex and unable to get your little guy stand at attention, it could be your sleep apnea to blame. Talk to your doctor about perhaps investing in a CPAP mask or OAT mouth guard, both of which have been found to be very helpful in fighting sleep apnea. With a solution in place, your body will get all the oxygen it needs, and your erection can go back to normal.

When your hair begins to thin, and that once full head of hair slowly transforms into a receding hairline, it can be troubling. Many men opt to rage against this hair change instead of going quietly into that balding good night by investing in hair loss medication. One of the most popular hair loss medications on the market is finasteride, more commonly known by its brand names Propecia and Proscar, with over 400,000 men filling prescriptions for the drug just last year. But while finasteride has been found to be effective at combating hair loss, it’s got the unexpected side effect of affecting your ability to perform between the sheets.

Yes, if you’ve been taking a finasteride-based drug and you’ve recently struggled to achieve an erection, there’s a connection. This is because Propecia and Proscar work by reducing the amount of dihydrotestosterone circulating in your blood stream, which has the benefit of encouraging hair growth. The downside, however, is that dihydrotestosterone is a male sex hormone, and is vital to communicating to the brain that it’s time for the erection to get to work. With reduced sex hormone levels, sexual feelings have a tendency to get scrambled, which results in the body being unable to achieve an erection.

Thankfully, the solution for this issue is simple: stop taking finasteride. If you’re experiencing side effects such as erectile dysfunction, halt taking finasteride and tell your doctor. There are other hair loss drugs on the market, so you can work together to find one that works better for you. And you won’t have to worry about the side effects sticking around, because finasteride has not been found to linger in the body.

Blood pressure is fickle. If it’s not operating at it’s optimum level, the rest of the body can pay the price. So when you develop high blood pressure, it can somewhat nerve wracking. After all, you’ve heard that spike blood pressure levels can lead to deadly problems such as heart attack and stroke. But high blood pressure doesn’t just affect your heart. It can also affect other extremities that are dependent upon the heart, such as the penis.

Yes, while it may feel like you’ve got enough to worry about with high blood pressure as it is, high blood pressure can also lead to erectile issues. That’s not to say that every man that deals with high blood pressure will find himself unable to achieve an erection, but the correlation is high. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that 49% of men between 40 to 79 with high blood pressure reported suffering from erectile dysfunction.

It’s easy to understand how high blood pressure can lead to ED. Your erection is dependent upon your heart, which causes important blood vessels to dilate as blood is passed through the body. With high blood pressure, the heart can be dealing with this newfound stress, which in turn can lead to arteries not dilating properly, which equates to not enough blood being supplied to the penis to achieve an erection.

So, short answer, yes, men with high blood pressure are at a higher risk of developing erectile dysfunction than normal men. If you find yourself experiencing erectile issues, speak to your doctor and work together to figure out how to beat the problem. Your plate is full enough with high blood pressure, so there’s no reason to add ED to the mix.

While intercourse is supposed to be a fun, relaxed experience, many men find themselves nervous to perform. A new partner means new likes, new dislikes, and new quirks to learn and discover, and the fear that you won’t be able to satisfy your partner can be overwhelming. For some men, this anxiety can translate into the inability to rise to the occasion. This performance anxiety induced erectile dysfunction is very common, and it can be very frustrating. Thankfully, there are ways to overcome this issue.

Sexual performance anxiety-induced ED is related to your brain. Your brain interprets your anxious feelings, and this jumbles up the signals of sexual excitement that are being sent from downstairs, leading to your brain not communicating to your penis that it’s time to get to work.

First and foremost, you need to remind yourself that sex is supposed to be fun, not nerve wracking. Relax and enjoy the ride. If you get in your head that this, that, and the other could go wrong, you’ll struggle to get it up. Shake off your nervousness and focus on enjoying the experience.

Secondly, take it slow. Skipping foreplay and jumping right into sex could lead to your sexual anxiety getting worse, ensuring that you won’t be able to achieve an erection. Tell your partner that you want to ease into it, and work your way up to sex. Give your body time to relax and prepare for the act.

Temporary ED is very common, but it can be beaten with work.

You’ve always been healthy. Whether it was from exercising daily or eating only the healthiest foods, you’ve always looked after your body. You’re also free of stress, anxiety, or depression, so you like to think that you keep a healthy mind, too.

Then why, you might wonder, are you dealing with erectile dysfunction? You’ve combed over the list of potential causes, and nothing relates to you. You aren’t on any new medication, so that can’t be the cause of your erectile woes. In a moment of panic you start to wonder if perhaps you’re just destined to deal with ED. Maybe, you wonder, it’s simply genetics?

Not quiet. While there are several health ailments that can be inherited through heredity that can lead to erectile dysfunction, ED itself is not a hereditary disease. Medical issues such as diabetes and heart disease are commonly hereditary ailments, and both have been linked to erectile dysfunction. But erectile issues aren’t passed from generation to generation.

However, some experts believe that there are certain genes that can be inherited that make a man more susceptible to erectile dysfunction. These experts suggest that certain gene variables have been linked to high risks of ED developing, and that these genes can be passed from father to son. However, this study is still ongoing, and nothing has been established as of yet.

So while there is the possibility that your genes have dictated your erectile health, it’s likely that your ED isn’t a hereditary issue. You also won’t have to worry about your bedroom issues being passed through your family line, so push that thought out of your mind.

Odds are, if you’re dealing with ED, there’s an underlying cause, though it may not always be obvious. But the solution does not lie in your genes.

The list of things that can cause erectile dysfunction seems to never end. Drinking too much, not working out enough, heck, even not practicing perfect dental hygiene has been found to cause ED. But not all ED causes are physical in nature. In fact, sometimes erectile dysfunction is all in your head.

You see, your mental headspace holds major sway over various aspects of your body, including your ability to achieve an erection. This is because your erection relies upon signals from your brain to know when it’s time to get to work, and when you’ve got a mental block upstairs, signals get crisscrossed and imbalanced.

Scientifically speaking, intense feelings such as depression, anxiety, and stress all have biochemical components that flood the brain. When your brain is full of these chemicals, it can lead to other feelings getting lost in the hubbub. Specifically, when your penis communicates to the brain that it is time to achieve an erection, these signals can get lost in the flood of chemicals being released, leading to missed erections.

The problem with psychological-induced ED is that missing erections can lead to the feelings only getting worse, thus worsening your erectile dysfunction. It’s something of a vicious circle, as your feelings get more intense, which leads to missed erections, which leads to worse feelings.

Psychological-induced ED is very common, with a recent study finding that 61 percent of men that suffered from severe depression reported experiencing sexual problems. Thankfully, it is an issue that can be beaten. Talk to your psychiatrist about the problems you’re having, and together you can determine if medication is needed or how you can overcome the feelings.

The sky is blue, grass is green, and men lose their ability to achieve an erection when they get old. These are just facts as far as the world is concerned, but the whole “loss of erection” thing isn’t as set in stone as everyone seems to think.

While it is true that your body will experience a variety of changes as you grow older, this does not mean that your erection is going to kick the bucket the moment you hit your golden years. In fact, it’s not even a guarantee that you’ll lose your erectile virility even when you’re into your 90’s. It all depends on whether or not you take care of yourself.

You see, your erection depends upon steady blood flow from your heart. As you grow older, your arteries will narrow and your heart might struggle to keep up with the newfound needs of your body, which all equates to reduced blood flow.

However, with healthy living, you may be able to sidestep these issues entirely. Eating well, staying active, and avoiding vices such as smoking and overdrinking can do wonders for your body. By living well, you can ensure that your body won’t have to struggle to keep up with the demands of poor living.

So, while erectile dysfunction might strike one day, you can ensure that it won’t be for a long, long time by living well. If you look after your body, erectile dysfunction isn’t an inevitability. But if you consistently eat fatty meals, live a sedentary lifestyle, and smoke and drink too much, you’re erection will kick the bucket one day and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.