How to Overcome Performance Anxiety in Bed: 4 Practical Steps

Closing the Show: How to Escape the Performance Trap for Good

In the early 1970’s, William Masters and Virginia Johnson — pioneers in the research of human sexual response to whom we owe…ohhhhh…. so much   — prescribed a strange cure for men to get out of their own head and start to enjoy sex more. Couples at their wits end with the trap I described in the last post were told to go home with an exercise called “sensate focus” which is based on one cardinal rule: no intercourse allowed, zilch, nada, do not even think about it. Not "try not to," not "avoid if possible" — banned outright, sometimes for weeks.

The one thing men  - and their partners - had been taught was the reason and focus of sex was, shockingly, taken off the menu or better off the bed sheets. And it worked. Wait! What? It turns out that once the main spectators are not expected to perform the grande finale, they become protagonists of their own show and actually start enjoying it. Ha, who knew?!

Which brings me, finally, to the question I have been building over the last 3 posts: if intercourse isn't the end goal, and the fear of "failing" at it is often what causes the failure in the first place, how does a man claw his way out of this mental trap?

Not willpower. Willpower is what got him into this mess in the first place — gritting his teeth, using veiled – and not so veiled- threats against his penis, treating a moment of softness like something to resolve through concentrating even more. But concentration does not work. With so much pressure on it, a penis takes one good look at the situation and says…” I am outta here”. You cannot think your way into an erection just as you cannot think your way into falling asleep; For this to work just stop overthinking and let go.

So, first tip. Take this goal off the map. The one thing and the most effective one at that a man can do, is to stop thinking of intercourse as his and his partner’s sole objective and start treating it as one of the many directions an evening of sexy fun can take him. Discover each other’s body, be curious of what makes your partner tick and let your partner find that out about you. This is not a consolation prize— this is what sensate focus is built on. Remove the target and go with the flow.

Spectatoring loves the stories we tell ourselves — that inner voice whispering "is it working, is it still working, how does it look, what is she thinking", while at the same time you partner is experiencing a similar internal kerfuffle “am I doing this right? maybe he does not like me any more, he’s gone soft, I must have done something wrong”. Drop those voices, they are not yours anyhow, they pushed their way in from the environment around you so say “thanks but no thanks, I’ve got better things to do”.  Like what? The temperature of skin under your hand, the sound of breathing, the softness of skin, the scent of a body, the contours of a leg, the curve of a hip….the list is endless. Focus on this and the voices go away.

Second tip, say it out loud. These voices worm their way into our head and the more time they spend in there, hidden, the more they rot. A single sentence — "I sometimes get in my head about this, it's not about you" — does more for a couple's sex life than any amount of private, solitary strategising. Once spoken these thoughts lose their power and the underlying silent tension dissolves into an honest, low stakes conversation amazingly quickly and stress-free.

Third tip, change the routine. If intercourse is all you ever aim for then it becomes predictable, a single act. Nothing wrong with that however those who treat touch, mouths, hands, skin, legs, calves, bellies and butts with a healthy dose of laughter and new destinations in their own right allow new protagonists to take centre stage. Strangely, this tends to be the thing that helps erections show up more reliably, not less; nothing relaxes a nervous penis faster than genuinely not it having to be the sole performer, I mean give it a break!

Fourth tip mostly for the partner, expect the odd off night, and think “so what?”. No matter what blokes boasts, an erect penis is still about only a 7-8% of the total body . With so much

erotic, fun other body parts to discover get your map and start travelling. One flat performance is one flat performance. It only ever turns into a pattern if a man believes it is and is made to believe it.  

None of this is about lowering the bar on pleasure — actually?... The opposite. It's removing the bar altogether, away from an erection's performance, to two people who are actually present and have fun with each other. Do that, and the strange irony is that the thing everyone was so anxious about will resolve by itself.

Four posts ago, I was on the London Southbank, faffing with a colander in front of a bemused bloke, trying to catch the shadow of an eclipse on a sheet of paper. I was frustrated because it was not working at the angle I had told myself would, only because I believed it. We relaxed, looked at a bunch of people enjoying a warm, sunny moment on the Thames and low and behold, tens and tens of mini-eclipses projects on my A4.  This whole series has been an exercise in the same thing: looking at something everyone assumes is one picture, only to find, once you tilt it slightly, that it was never quite what we thought.