Can Mindfulness Resolve Erectile Dysfunction?

Mindfulness is the ability to stay fully present—aware of where you are and what you’re doing—without being overly reactive or overwhelmed. It’s about learning to manage your reactions.  So you can probably see how having good skills with this would really help with psychological ED.  So much of the problem for so many guys is that they FREAK OUT when they're not hard.  So the idea is that when you're less reactive, your erections are gonna be better.  

Mindfulness and ED research

Research on mindfulness and male sexuality is still pretty scarce, But what's been done is encouraging.  

-A 2018 pilot study done at the University of British Columbia  found that guys with ED reported "significant improvement" in sexual function after attending a four-week group mindfulness program.  

-Another study of about 100 guys done at Brigham Young University concluded that "More sexually mindful individuals tended to have better self-esteem, be more satisfied with their relationships and be more satisfied with their sex lives."

It's always nice to hear the one-off studies that offer good results. What I really like to see, though, are the meta studies.  That's where researchers analyze results from multiple studies to draw bigger conclusions.

Not much to go on here, though. I don't know why but much more research is being done on mindfulness for women's sexual dysfunction than guys. The one meta study I did find, from Spain, concluded that the application of mindfulness improves sexual satisfaction, sexual desire, erectile function, orgasmic function, and self-control.  But they emphasized that good quality research on men is still scarce, And that "More randomized studies with a control group and larger samples are needed to acquire more conclusive results."  

So good...but not great.

My Opinion?

When I'm working with a client, I don't usually ask for them to do a lot of mindfulness training, One because it's not a specialty of mine, but more importantly I just because I find there are faster, more direct or "stronger" ways of helping guys solve the problem.    

That said, there is so much research out there that says that mindfulness is a really effective tool for resolving general anxiety issues.  So even without a lot of high quality research on ED specifically, I don't see any way that developing a mindfulness practice isn't going to help a guy who's dealing with psychological ED.  So if you're considering it and you have some time and patience to learn a new skill, I'd say go for it.  There's good odds it's going to help.