Let’s talk about one of God’s most incredible and misunderstood designs — the penis.
In this episode (part one of two) we dive into the fascinating science behind erections — what makes them work, what shuts them down, and what you can do to keep things running at full power. From brain chemistry to heart health, this episode will change how you think about arousal, masculinity, and pleasure in marriage.
It’s science, humor, and hope — all rolled into one episode that’ll help you appreciate just how wonderfully (and hilariously) you’re made.
And don’t miss part two where we tackle testosterone, penis size, and porn.
This episode was inspired in part by The Penis Book by Dr. Aaron Spitz
💡 Want to improve connection and sexual confidence in your marriage? Visit getyourmarriageon.com/program
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors or inaccuracies. For the most accurate and complete experience, we recommend listening to the full podcast episode.
Dan: I have deep respect and reverence for the incredible bodies that God has created. And there’s an aspect of our bodies, uh, penises specifically that I always have had questions about, like, how can I get bigger erections, stronger erections last longer?
What do I do when I lose my erection during sex? And are there things I can do to prevent it? [00:01:00] Are there ways I can use my penis to bring my wife more pleasure? am I big enough? How do I compare to other people? Are there foods or supplements that I can eat that will help boost my sexual performance?
And so on and so on. There’s lots of questions that I have and I’m sure that you have. So I’m gonna tackle this in this podcast. Now we are talking about penises. And penises are just funny. So I’m gonna infuse this podcast with a little bit of humor. But please don’t mistake my humor or maybe crassness at all.
For the reverence and deep respect that I have for this amazing part of our body and this aspect of us that brings a lot of us joy and happiness in our marriages.
Your penis has its own mission control center, a sophisticated hydraulic system and reliable launch and fuel mechanism that would make NASA jealous. Your penis has a nightly maintenance routine you probably didn’t even know about. And here’s the kicker. Most guys are accidentally sabotaging this incredible piece of biological engineering [00:02:00] every single day.
Half of the human population has one, and whether you’re 25 or 75, you probably want yours working at Peak performance. I know I do. I’d like to be enjoying sex well into my eighties and maybe even nineties.
So in preparing for this special episode, I reached out to my community on our private Facebook group and our Instagram with a simple question, what do you want to know about keeping Mr. Happy? Happy? And while did you deliver the responses range from the practical to the hilarious, but they all boiled down to a few core questions, which will cover in this episode. Why does mine sometimes work and sometimes not? What’s actually happening when things go south, down south in the bedroom?
And is my size normal and can I make it bigger? And most importantly, what can I do to keep everything functioning optimally for decades to come? In this episode, we’re gonna answer all those questions. We’ll talk about why your brain is either your penis is best friend or worst enemy. We’ll explore the Nobel [00:03:00] winning prize molecule that makes erections possible.
And yes, it’s the same stuff that makes dynamite explode. We will discuss why worrying about erection is basically guaranteed to kill it and what to do about that vicious cycle. We’ll also cover the surprising connection between leafy greens, the bacteria in your mouth, and rock solid erections. I’ve penetrated surface level internet answers to do a deep research on this topic, and I want to make sure that the facts that I share are firm and solid as firm and solid as you want your penis to be.
I am basing most of this episode on the excellent book, the Penis Book by Dr. Aaron Spitz, and I’ll leave an Amazon affiliate link in the show notes if you want to read this amazing resource and dive deeper too. I found this research absolutely fascinating and it’s changed the way I think about the way I sleep, eat, exercise, and make love to my wife,
and I hope that it might change the way you think about this very important member of your body or your husband’s body too. [00:04:00] Ready? Let’s dive in. All right. We’re gonna first talk about your big head first, and then we’ll talk about your little head Second, your brain is your mission control. And many deep brain centers control arousal.
We use all five of our senses to stimulate an erection. For most men, the most important of those five is visual cues, no surprise, but sense, feel, sounds, taste. They all get involved. Even our memories and associations can also directly trigger the brain to send the signals down the spine that trigger a chain reaction of other signals to the penis to get pumped up.
Ready for launch. The two main brain chemical signals involved with sexual arousal are dopamine and oxytocin. They stimulate erections by sending signals in our nervous system, which cause a cascade of steps that end up with big firm erections. For most of us, a lot of what happens between your brain and your little brain is a lot [00:05:00] out of your direct control, and it’s part of what’s called the autonomic nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system controls many involuntary body functions such as breathing, digestion, and yes, even sexual arousal. It is divided into two main sections, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic system is the flight, fight, freeze side of things. It’s active when well, you’re active.
It increases your heart rate breathing and slows down systems that aren’t key to survival. On the other hand. The parasympathetic system is the rest and digest mode. It lowers your heart rate, tells the body it’s okay to have sexual interest and get erections too. So when you have sexual thoughts that are appealing and happy, your brain releases the signals that tell the parasympathetic system to activate, which in turn activates receptors of nerves at the base of your spine near your lower back, which then sends the signals to your penis to get hard.
[00:06:00] It’s a pretty incredible process. But like any good mission control, there are also abort signals. The main one is serotonin. Serotonin in healthy levels helps us maintain a happy mood and feel satiated, which is why many antidepressant medications work on this part of the brain by boosting serotonin levels, and they’re really effective at helping people feel better.
Serotonin though blocks the parasympathetic nerve signals in the penis that otherwise would stimulate an erection. So serotonin shuts down the pro bono activity of oxytocin in the brain. And guess what? After a wonderfully beautiful, powerful orgasm, your brain sends that feelgood serotonin signal, which makes you feel so good afterwards, which also explains why you tend to lose your interest in sex right after sex, especially after really good sex.
There’s another abort signal. That’s a total boner killer too, and it’s adrenaline. [00:07:00] Adrenaline tells the body to stop erections. And this makes sense, right? Because if you’re being chased by a tiger, you’re not going to want to rest and digest and get aroused.
With so many systems interacting, it’s clear that sexual desire is very complex.
Another aspect is if you’re worried about losing your erection, get what side of your autonomic nervous system is activated. It’s your fight flight, freeze side. This also releases adrenaline, which is that kill switch for erections. So worrying about your erection is almost a guaranteed way to have a hard time getting and staying hard.
It seems like once you have an aborted mission and a failure to launch, it makes it that much harder next time because you’re worried about the failure. You’re literally nervous, and this can go on for many weeks or months. For men, I admit. I’ve been there before too, and it can be quite distressing. Some marriages go completely sexless because of his fear of not being able to get an erection.
If you have experienced a [00:08:00] cascade of launch failures take heart. You can roll it back. There’s absolutely hope for you. And here’s some quick ideas that I hope help and I recommend you sign up for coaching, maybe a session or two if you want to go further in these things. Tip number one, I believe the best sex happens when it feels easy, free, relaxed, and fun, like intimate adult play.
The moment sex is about performing or having a goal to reach in order to feel successful or it feels like work, you may still be able to function, but it’s not gonna be optimal. Anything you can do to put play back in sex will do wonders, not only for your magic wand, but for your marriage too. Tip number two, when the center of this sexual experience is all about your wife and her performance or a certain outcome, it puts a lot of pressure on you to perform, especially on your member.
I see this a lot in men who feel like sex isn’t as frequent as they’d like. So they had this scarcity fear, uh, so that when they finally do get to have sex, they [00:09:00] tend to work overtime to try to help their wives enjoy the experience by having an orgasm so that their wife will like it and
hopefully their wife will want it more frequently next time. And although this is a logical sentiment, it sets you up for failure more often than not, because you’re setting a goal for yourself on something outside of your direct control, your wife’s ability to relax enough to enjoy the experience. In fact, your insistence that she enjoys herself alone puts a lot of pressure on her, which puts pressure on you, and then you’re both left wondering why the sex isn’t as satisfying.
You and your wife can work through frequency issues. You and your wife can work through feelings of sexual scarcity. You can work through sex that she may frankly not find appealing or be excited about because it feels like a project or feels like work. You can work together to put the fun, creativity, and joy back into sex.
Tip number three, if you feel like your erection is unpredictable or you tend to ejaculate prematurely, [00:10:00] the tendency is to get in there the moment you get hard, before you go soft, even if it means she’s not quite warmed up yet. But this again, makes sex more about work and not play, and you miss out on the intimacy of the experience.
You’re letting your penis control the depth of intimacy and connection of sex rather than your heart. You let urgency steal intimacy. The solution is to learn how to make love with your whole body, not just your penis. The reality is. Erections come and go, but they often do come back even during the same steamy session.
So if you’re in the middle of making love and you lose your erection, don’t worry about it. It’ll come back most of the time. Okay. In addition to unreliable erections, being a minuteman mic in bed is like when you come too quickly, can also be really distressing or embarrassing. Studies show one in four men experience premature ejaculation, which is they come way sooner than they want to.
Feeling [00:11:00] like it ruins the fun of the experience. And as you can probably guess, the systems that control arousal, erections, and ejaculation. Are really complex and there’s a lot of variables at play and there’s no one size fits all solution to premature ejaculation If you tend to have a sensitive trigger, one theory is that it could just be good old genetics.
I read of a study that brothers and families tend to share premature ejaculation symptoms indicating there could be a genetic link to why some men are predisposed to premature ejaculation. But that’s a really tough thing to study because it’s hard to find a significant number of test subjects that you can study in Father-son pairs in a lab, right?
I mean, wouldn’t that be awkward conversation with your own father asking about his struggles with the PE and then saying, Hey, let’s go to the lab together and hook us up to monitors and whatever they want us to do, masturbate together, measure how quickly we come. [00:12:00] Like that’s a very difficult thing to study.
So they rely on surveys instead, which, aren’t as scientifically sound. so we struggle to really understand the real link with premature ejaculation. Not only that, some people have acquired pe, meaning they used to be fine, but something has happened and now they’ve become a premature ejaculator.
That usually indicates a psychological factor, and so some really good coaching can help understand the processes going on in the brain to help slow things down so you can enjoy longer sex sessions again. Some men work through the struggles of premature ejaculation by distracting their minds, by thinking of other things during sex, like baseball scores or solving a complex math problem.
There’s also the please squeeze ease method where you pull out if you feel like you’re about to come and squeeze the tip hard. So deaden the sensation on the penis a bit. And then once you feel the sensation [00:13:00] has gone away a little bit, then you ease back in. You can also buy and apply numbing sprays and gels that lessen the sensation of the tip of your penis and.
during intercourse too. Now these techniques are gonna work and there might be a time and a place for it, but they do come at the cost of not being focused on the whole point of sex, which is to share loving, intimate communion with your wife. You don’t want your penis to get in the way of love making.
So it really is a balance between you and your wife that you need to find and how to make sex really about making love and not so dictated by the dick, so to speak. He is not a good dictator.
If all else fails, there is medical treatment available. I mentioned earlier how serotonin, the neurotransmitter has a rule in telling the body to stop the erection mechanism.
Some doctors can prescribe a low dose short acting SSRI medication off-label. That will temporarily increase your [00:14:00] serotonin levels, helping you not get so trigger happy. And many men say this works well for them. Okay, now we guys want strong steel hard erections. The fuller and more pressurized the penis the better.
It’s because the more stretched out it is, the greater the surface area and the greater the surface area. The more pleasure sensing nerves come in contact with its surroundings. So you can enjoy the penis, particularly the head of the penis, that much more. It just feels great to be fully aroused. The shaft of the penis is made up of three chambers, two on top, and one on the bottom.
And here’s a weird but helpful visual. Next time you peel a banana and split the fruit, it naturally falls into three sections. Your penis has a similar three chamber design. The two on top, the two chambers on top are called the corpus coosa and are responsible for the bulk of their erection and hardness in your penis.
The third chamber runs along the bottom side. The side [00:15:00] facing your feet, and it surrounds your urethra and it supplies blood and the erection to the head of your penis. Okay. The penis contains the only tissue in the body with a crisscross pattern of dense collagen fibers that stretch when erect. It forms a pressure chamber allowing the penis to go very rigid and tight.
When erect, the penis can hold eight to 10 times the blood pressure compared to when it’s just flacid microscopic chambers fill and hold blood. The membrane of these chambers are such that it prevents the blood from clotting even. So when I think about it and feel it to me, this is a testament of incredible engineering of a very powerful and wise, great creator who’s really thought of everything.
But what controls blood flow in and out of the penis, this is also so amazing. Remember how we talked about the parasympathetic system? That’s the rest and digest side of your autonomic nervous system. The parasympathetic nerves [00:16:00] have fibers that reach deep into the penis, and when activated, it sends signals to the body to release a very key molecule called nitric oxide.
Or no, for short. The researchers that discovered and documented the role of this MO molecule, by the way, won the Nobel Prize in 1998. It’s that important. Nitric oxide, by the way, is what makes dynamite go boom and hot rods go vroom, and you want to have a lot of this molecule available in your body for long lasting raw car directions.
So you can go zoom, zoom, zoom. The parasympathetic nerves send no to microscopic muscles called smooth muscles in the penis to activate, which actually causes them to relax, stretch, and let blood flow into the many chambers inside of the penis. There’s also special cells that line the spongy places of the penis that pump out the no molecules towards these smooth muscles.
So it’s like a [00:17:00] self-reinforcing system powered by no.
Now it would be unhealthy if once you get an erection, you couldn’t return it to a resting state in a normal amount of time. I mean, how would you explain that to your coworkers? It’d be really embarrassing. Right. If, if your penis could never go back to a resting state easily, besides if your penis didn’t return to its resting state and get a fresh supply of blood, you would run out of oxygen.
In your penis and you’d start to feel very sore and quite a bit of pain. So to save private Ryan from overextending itself, here comes another fascinating aspect about our engineering.
So the erection process itself kicks off a time release enzyme called phosphodiesterase or PDE for short. PDE is responsible for shutting down the stimulating effects of no that nitric oxide over time. Fun fact, in the late eighties and early nineties, pharmacy researchers were testing a new heart [00:18:00] medication that had a byproduct of slowing down the effect of the PDE enzyme when it was operating.
The medication wasn’t actually all that helpful and wasn’t working that great in clinical trials for treating the heart condition. So the researchers were about to scrap the whole project. However, the test patients revolted, they said it’s helped them with their erection problems and they don’t want the medical trials to stop.
Finally, they had a great sex life. Again, don’t stop the medical trial. The pharma researchers were quick to capitalize on this discovery, regroup, and refocus on this new trajectory, and that’s how Viagra and other related drugs were discovered. Viagra will not give you an erection on its own as that’s caused by other processes, but once you have an erection, it maximizes the windup benefits of no, by slowing down the PDE enabled wind down process so that you can keep your gains longer.
In my research, I found that there are [00:19:00] many natural foods that also contain these PDE five inhibitors that Viagra has. These foods are rich in flavonoids, which I’ll discuss in a moment, such as black ginger. However, the reality is there’s only a small amount in these foods, and they’re not in concentrated doses like what you’d find from a pharmaceutical created pill.
So there’s not a natural alternative that’ll give you the same kick as what Viagra would. Now it is a fact that erection difficulties come with age. The older you get, the harder it becomes to get hard or stay hard, and it’s just the way it is. It’s normal. A healthy lifestyle will slow the effects of an aging penis, but it’s normal for 50% of men in their fifties. 60% of men in their sixties, 70% of men in their seventies and so on to experience some erection difficulties some of the time.
So let’s age well together. By now, I hope you see that erections are actually very much tied to your heart health. I mean, the better your heart is at [00:20:00] pumping blood to your penis, the better erections you’ll have. In other words, write this down. What’s good for your heart is good for your penis. Exercise that’s good for your heart will be good for your erections.
Food that’s good for your heart will be good for your penis. Food that’s bad for your heart or circulatory system will be bad for your penis. In fact, if you are a generally healthy person. But suddenly have erection problems. It could be a warning sign, like a canary in the coal mine that your heart is in trouble.
And many men’s lives were saved because they paid attention to their inability to get erect. All of a sudden went to a doctor and got the treatment they needed before something worse happened. Not all exercise is created equally. Some exercise can interfere with your ability to maintain erections. For example, long distance bike riding is known to pinch nerves and slow down the blood supply to your penis.
The nerves that connect to your private areas. Run from your back down, your bottom, across the bones, you sit on and enter [00:21:00] into your pelvis that way. And when you sit on the saddle of a bike for long stretches, you actually put a lot of pressure on those nerves and also the blood supply, and that impacts your ability to get it up.
There is though a type of exercise that’s more direct for erections, and it’s called kegel exercises. Kegel exercises are when you squeeze and then relax the muscles that form the sling or the hammock of your pelvic floor. These are the muscles that connect from, you know, your pubic bone in front to your Cox and back.
You know you’re doing it right. If you can stop the flow of urine while peeing just by squeezing his muscles, it might take some practice to isolate or squeeze them without also squeezing your buttocks.
So Kegel exercises will help you have more pleasurable sex and give you more control during sex too. The stronger and more in tone these muscles are and through practice, the better conscious control you gain in gripping and relaxing them, the better they’ll serve you [00:22:00] in sex. For one, when you ejaculate, these are the muscles that squeeze in spasm.
There’s a pleasurable feeling that comes with feeling your body spasm with the ejaculation process. Second, you can actually have more control over your arousal by controlling your pelvic floor muscles.
Third, you can actually slow down premature ejaculation and last longer in bed by practicing relaxing these muscles like gaining conscious control to relax ’em when your body otherwise wants to impulsively get tense as your arousal increases. This is also a key technique to master for men to be able to have multiple non ejaculatory orgasms, which I’ve covered in past podcast episodes.
I mentioned squeezing the your pelvic floor muscles during urination to locate them, but don’t make it a habit of stopping mid pee all the time, but do these exercises throughout the day. The cool part is, is you can do these kegel exercises anywhere without special gym equipment. You can flex your pelvic floor [00:23:00] muscles when waiting online, while driving the kids to school, or even while listening to this podcast episode.
In fact, try 10 reps right now. Squeeze, hold for count, and relax fully. You’re well on your way to training to be a zen master of your own pelvis. And ladies, by the way, you can also benefit tremendously from Kegel exercises too.
Okay. By now you’re probably realizing that your penis is more high tech than you may have ever given it credit for. It’s got its own hydraulics electrical system, its own mission control. It’s practically NASA grade engineering. In fact, even better it’s God grade engineering. We’ve also talked about how your brain and your body team up to make erections happen and also what can abort the mission, right?
And why your mindset matters so much more than you think. But we still have so much more ground to cover. So stay tuned to part two of this episode. We’re gonna dive even deeper. We’re gonna talk about the power of [00:24:00] testosterone, which foods actually fuel your erections, and whether or not your penis size matters and what a normal penis size is and how you measure up.
We’ll also tackle porn supplements and even what your penis does in your sleep. So be sure to queue up episode part two right now as we separate more myths from the hard facts.
