The loop is simple and self-sustaining. Something doesn’t happen once — an erection, arousal, an orgasm. Perfectly ordinary; every body does this.
The next time, you’re watching for it. Attention moves from sensation to monitoring. Anxiety rises. Anxiety is physiologically incompatible with the relaxed arousal state, so the thing is less likely to happen. It doesn’t happen. Now you’ve evidence.
Repeat three times and you’ve a pattern that has nothing to do with the original occurrence.
Spectatoring
The mechanism has a name, from Masters and Johnson: watching yourself from outside instead of being inside the experience. Assessing rather than feeling.
Two consequences. Attention is finite, so surveillance costs you sensation — you genuinely feel less. And the observing position is anxious by construction, because it’s checking for failure.
This is the same process that drives body-image interference, and it responds to the same intervention.
What doesn’t work
Trying harder. Effort is the opposite of what arousal requires.
Checking whether it’s working. Guarantees the observing position.
Reassurance from a partner. Relief for a few minutes, and it teaches you to need it —the same loop as anywhere else.
Avoiding sex until you feel confident. The most common plan and the most reliable way to entrench it, because the prediction never gets tested.
What does
Take the outcome off the table, explicitly. Agree with a partner that for a period, intercourse or orgasm isn’t the goal and won’t happen. This is a standard sex therapy intervention and it works because it removes the thing being measured — and with nothing to fail at, the anxiety has nowhere to attach.
Attention to sensation, deliberately and repeatedly. Where you’re being touched. Temperature, pressure, texture. When you notice you’re watching yourself, return attention to a physical detail. Expect to do it many times; that returning is the exercise.
Say it out loud. To the partner. Almost every partner had interpreted it as disinterest or as being about them, and the correction alone lowers the temperature considerably.
Slow down and breathe. Held breath is close to universal here and it directly reduces sensation.
Reduce the definition. A definition of sex with one required act and one required endpoint creates a pass-fail test. Broadening it removes the test.
Rule out the physical first
Particularly for erectile difficulty. If it happens in all circumstances including alone and on waking, that points toward a physical cause and warrants a medical assessment — and a cardiovascular one, because it’s frequently an early sign. More here.
If it happens only with a partner, or only in certain situations, that points toward anxiety. Both can be true at once, and the anxiety loop frequently outlives the physical cause that started it.