So far, this article has examined the various physical causes of erectile dysfunction, and discussed some treatment options, including diet and lifestyle changes. But sometimes, the problem may not have a physical cause. If you are in your 30s, fit and well, with great vascular function and you are not carrying any excess weight or suffering from a chronic condition, yet you still have problems getting and keeping an erection, perhaps you need to look beyond the physical.
Sometimes, a lack of confidence may be the problem. It is not necessarily sexually related. It may stem from a fear of not being good enough for someone you care about deeply. You want to make them so happy – not just sexually, but in every way possible. You want to be a friend, lover and provider. They are the most important person in your life, and you want to be their most important person. The problem is, you want it so badly, that you doubt your ability to deliver.
You may have a great job that pays well, that you enjoy, and that you're good at, as well as being highly regarded by your boss and co-workers. You may even have a lovely home, and have no money worries. You're a good-looking guy, not carrying too much weight, and you've still got all your teeth. And you have the perfect work/life balance, so what's stopping you from enjoying a great relationship with the woman you love? Frankly, you are! You're trying to be the perfect partner in every way, and there is no such animal. Nobody is perfect. All anyone can do, whatever their advantages or disadvantages, is to do their best. The problem is, you may feel that your best just isn't good enough, and that's when the problems start.
It might not even start with sexual performance — chances are everything in the bedroom is rosy at first. It's as you get to know each other better and move toward commitment that confidence issues can arise. The thing is, when a relationship gets to this stage, you start thinking about the future. Up until now, you've been enjoying each other's company — and hopefully each other's bodies — and all you've been thinking about is how much you enjoy being together and how you can't wait for the next time. Once you start thinking about building a life together, worries and doubts start to creep in. Not about your partner — you're pretty sure you can be the one, that he or she is the one. Your doubts revolve around yourself, and your ability to be the partner he or she wants and deserves.
The way to get over this is to focus your thoughts on something else, other than yourself and your perceived failings. It can be a person or a thing, as long as it stops you thinking about yourself and therefore lowers your self-confidence even further. Some psychologists recommend losing yourself in a logic puzzle, or a difficult cryptic crossword or Sudoku. If you're not into puzzles, try burying yourself in a really good book, or even a video game. The important thing is that every time you feel your thoughts turning inward, you distract them before they go into that vicious circle of doubt and worry where you convince yourself that you are a failure, and it eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you can get involved in something that holds your attention, you can break the cycle of negative thoughts and feelings. It may not feel like it, but you can actually take control of your thoughts and feelings, and steer them in another direction. While it's very easy to slide into a spiral of negative thinking, which can result in erectile dysfunction, it's much more difficult to train yourself to think positively and turn your attitude around. Difficult - but by no means impossible.
The problem is, even if the negativity doesn't start in the bedroom, that's where it's likely to end, unless you can break the cycle. Men - unlike women - aren't good about talking about their problems, especially when it comes to sex, because so much is invested in sexual performance, as far as most men are concerned. If there are problems in the bedroom, they see themselves as failures – no matter how successful they are in other areas of their lives, men who can’t satisfy themselves and their partners sexually see themselves as failures. When it comes down to it, the good job, nice house, fancy car and money in the bank count for nothing if they can’t get an erection.
There are only two requirements for an erection – you need to be aroused, and you also need to be relaxed. If you’re lacking in confidence, for whatever reason, you’re unlikely to be relaxed, and if your confidence issues have been going on for a while, you probably can’t get aroused either.
Things You Can Do to Build Confidence
Many people don't realize this but confidence is like a physical muscle—it can be developed through training. It can get better with continued use or weaken as it's unused. The following are good ways to exercise your confidence muscles and develop them even more:
➢ Continue to learn new things. One of the ways you can feel confident is to know things that most other people don't, including sexual tips and tricks. Who says learning can't be fun, eh?
➢ Step outside of yourself and become a better person by doing something nice for other people. How does this help develop confidence? By regularly thinking about and doing something nice for other people, you train yourself to be selfless and the less self-centered you become, the less conscious you become of your perceived "shortcomings," which reduces your tendency to belittle yourself.
➢ Hit the weights at the gym. If you want to look as buffed and macho as Hugh Jackman, Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds, skip the marathon and hit the weights. You don’t build muscle with cardio – you do it with resistance training. I know it sounds superficial, but hey, looking buffed and macho can do a lot to boost confidence.
➢ Get out there and meet people, even if you’re an introvert. One of the best ways to overcome fear is to face it and for most men who lack confidence, one of their biggest fears is facing and meeting new people. Confident men aren’t afraid to make new friends and making new friends does wonders for boosting confidence. So the next time you’re at a social event, get out of your comfort zone and meet new people.
➢ Know what matters most to you. There are times that not knowing what you value can lead to low self-esteem. How? By being all over the place, you may be spreading yourself too thin to achieve anything significant. By knowing what matters most to you, you can focus your time, effort, and resources on those priorities and increase your chances of achieving meaningful things, which can do wonders for self-confidence.
➢ Identify things that are harmful to you and your self-esteem that aren’t really necessary in your life and work to get rid of them. Are you in an emotionally draining relationship with a girlfriend? Break up with her and find your bliss elsewhere. Life is too short to be too preoccupied with unnecessary emotional stress and self-esteem bubbles.
➢ Do something you absolutely dread. Just to keep it safe and healthy, right? Overcoming serious fears helps bump self-confidence up several notches. For example, people who have had near-death experiences tend to become more sociable and confident knowing that they have mastered something that most other people fear the most. Try eating an exotic dish that most people are completely afraid to eat, go bungee jumping or approach that hot chick sitting at the bar to introduce yourself to her and get her digits.
➢ Do some self-searching to identify thought patterns or habits that normally make you feel unappreciative about yourself. After you do this, imagine someone close to you thinking the same way and, as a result, experiencing low self-esteem. How would you talk them out of feeling this way? Do the same to yourself.
➢ Identify the things that truly make you intellectually and emotionally alive and make time to indulge in them on a regular basis. Often times, doing the things that make you alive directly translates to high narcissism.
➢ Step out of the roles you play in life, the ones that you’re squeezing into just to please other people but aren’t really cut out for. If for example, you're trying to become an insurance salesman because your parents expected you to become one just like your dad, but that's really not your thing, there's nothing wrong with giving it up in favor of something you really want to do and be more equipped to figure out what you really want to do and pursue what you want to do. The equivalent of being neutered.
➢ Develop the skill of catching yourself every time you say or think you're not good enough, talented enough or accomplished enough to be successful. Learn to replace those self-deprecation scripts with self-confidence building. One way to help you is to regularly bask in memories of past successes. As long as you don't overdo it, reminding yourself that you're worth something and that you're capable of achieving things can significantly help you have a healthy self-confidence.
➢ Stop the habit of making important decisions without deliberately thinking them through. By thinking through such decisions and being intentional with them, you reduce your risk of making a good and successful one and, as a result, increase your chances of making a good and successful one. Covering the bases of your decision involves acknowledging your concerns and doubts. There is a difference between being pessimistic and being practical. Be the latter, not the former.
➢ Stop dwelling on past mistakes such as wrong decisions, inability to perform as expected or passing up on a great opportunity because doing so will not make things better but will only make them worse. The best thing to do is to learn from them and realize that everyone makes mistakes every now and then. When similar situations crop up, you will be more confident knowing what caused you to screw up a similar situation in the past and how you are now in a position to avoid making the same mistake.
➢ There will always be people who make you feel unsure about yourself with the things they say about you. There’s a difference between constructive feedback and outright putting you down and you don’t have to put up with the latter. Either tell them to put you down or leave them. You’ll be much better off without them anyway.
➢ This may seem unrelated but believe me it is – flirt! Why? The better you get at it with women, the more confident you are about yourself. Trust me.
➢ Be sensitive to others. Being vulnerable allows you to overcome one of the biggest fears for most people – rejection. As you master the art of vulnerability, not just you master the fear of rejection, you will find that people will come closer to you and be vulnerable. You have the side benefit of enjoying more intimate relationships on top of increased self-confidence.
➢ Be humble and admit it when you are wrong. Confidence for the sake of confidence is a fake and doesn’t last long. It’s like building a mansion on sand. What you want is a confidence that sticks and lasts. Admitting your wrongness has the effect of being vulnerable – you let go of your fear of rejection and as a bonus, you earn other people’s respect and confidence too.
➢ Regularly see (visualize) yourself in your mind’s eye as the successful and confident person you want to become. The truth is, our subconscious minds are responsible for our regular behavior and emotions and it cannot separate whether real or not. By visualizing your successful self often, you feed the idea of a successful self to your subconscious mind and over time, it will associate the confidence you have fed it.
➢ Learn to ask for help. Why? You will not be able to do everything by yourself. By enlisting the help of others, you will be able to achieve more meaningful goals, which directly increases your confidence. Knowing that you have other people to back you up on important tasks can make you feel more confident about taking on even bigger responsibilities.
➢ Take risks. No worthwhile accomplishment was ever accomplished without taking risks and the greater the risk, the greater the potential success. If you want to be a successful person and feel more confident, you definitely have to be comfortable taking risks. Just take the well-calculated ones though. Taking risks does not mean giving away your life and security.
➢ Spend more time with people who make you feel appreciated, important, and valued. You can only reassure yourself this way and the validation of others is a very powerful tool for building and enhancing self-confidence.
➢ Fake it till you make it. As you learned earlier in the CBE (cognitive behavioral emotion) model, actions can go a long way toward influencing your thoughts and feelings. If you want to feel and think confident, start acting the part.
➢ Stop comparing yourself to others. It is a well-known fact that there will always be someone who will be better at what you do best. As such, know that comparing yourself to other people is very counterproductive, even if the people you are comparing yourself to are “superior” or “inferior” to you. The only person you should compare yourself to is yourself.
➢ Speak your mind more often during group discussions. For many people, speaking in front of many other people can be quite a scary experience. If you consciously go against your fear of speaking what's on your mind, each time you speak in a group, especially a large one like a large seminar or class, you weaken the fear and will begin to experience a sense of confidence you've never experienced before. Face the fear to beat it and be more confident!
➢ Learn to value yourself for who you are and not who people want you to be. Live your life according to your values and beliefs and begin to experience the unique freedom from people's expectations, which will make you a truly confident person.
For many people, confidence is equivalent to being proud or self-centered. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact is, people who are truly confident about themselves don’t go around bragging about themselves or tooting their own horns. If anyone, confident people are either initially perceived as shy or indifferent. Shy because they often keep quiet about their accomplishments, knowing they have nothing to prove. Indifferent because confident people don’t care about what happens around them or what other people think of them.
To help you become more confident, here is a list of some of the things that truly confident people don’t do:
➢ They avoid insulting or judging others because not only is it wrong, they are secure enough in who they are that they don’t feel the need to bring others down. In fact, they do the opposite: they lift other people up because they are not insecure.
➢ They don’t try to call attention to themselves because again, they are so secure in who they are that they don’t feel the need to seek attention.
➢ They also don’t try to dismiss any attention that is freely given to them. Because of that same sense of security, they are able to receive attention from others comfortably and at ease.
➢ They don’t brag about themselves or what they have accomplished. Why? Why not? They don’t need the approval of others to feel good about themselves, so they don’t feel the need to brag.
➢ They don’t dismiss compliments others give about them and their accomplishments. In fact, confidence in who they are allows them to comfortably receive and accept other people’s compliments without letting them get into their heads. ➢ They are not critical. Because they are secure, they do not feel the need to criticize others and as such, they ooze positivity and charisma, which attracts more people and makes them feel even more confident.
➢ They don’t just talk about themselves. Being confident about one’s identity and persona is one of the reasons why a person has the ability to talk more about themselves than others. They are genuinely interested in others and this leads them to ask a lot about others and genuinely want to get to know others better and compliment them. As such, confident people make for great conversationalists.
➢ They don’t fuss over small things. Because confident people are secure with themselves, they are also confident about being able to handle situations and thus do not fuss when things go wrong. Such confidence leads to a calm and collected attitude when faced with challenges, whether big or small, which inspires those around them to be calm and collected.
➢ Confident people don't focus on things that aren't important. A big part of being confident is knowing what the truly important things are and as such, they are able to keep and maximize their time, effort, and resources on what's truly important.
➢ They don't break promises and commitments. Confident people know when to do and promise and when not to because they know the things they are truly capable of accomplishing. As such, confident people rarely overpromise and underdeliver, but usually underpromise and overdeliver. By doing the latter, they minimize the risk of broken promises and commitments.
