How to Treat Delayed Ejaculation (Causes & Treatment)

Delayed ejaculation is a disorder of the ejaculatory system. When a man has delayed ejaculation, it takes him a long time to reach orgasm during sex. In some cases, he may never reach orgasm at all (anejaculation).

How long does it take to ejaculate? Knowing the answer to this question can help you determine if you have DE. The average man takes 5-7 minutes to cum. People struggling with DE have trouble reaching orgasm, with or without a partner, despite a normal erection.

Delayed ejaculation affects about 1-4% of men, but the exact cause of this condition is unknown. Experts believe it may be caused by psychological factors or nerve damage.

If you have DE, you might experience problems with your relationship because your partner might blame themselves for not satisfying you. Additionally, sex could be painful for you and your partner.

Luckily, delayed ejaculation can be treated with medication or therapy. Treating the underlying cause of delayed ejaculation enables most men to eventually reach orgasm and enjoy a healthy sex life.

Let’s take a look at the symptoms and causes of delayed ejaculation and how to treat delayed ejaculation.

What this article covers:

Symptoms of Delayed Ejaculation
Types of Delayed Ejaculation
What Causes Delayed Ejaculation?
Risk Factors
How is Delayed Ejaculation Diagnosed?
How to Treat Delayed Ejaculation

Symptoms of Delayed Ejaculation

Although there’s no time limit for how many times a man can release sperm in a day and how long a man should take to cum, you’re usually diagnosed with delayed ejaculation if it takes you more than 30 minutes to reach climax.

You should consider DE a problem if it is causing you or your partner physical pain and frustration, or if you have to halt sexual activity because of fatigue.

Ensure you see your primary care doctor if:

You suspect that another health problem is causing delayed ejaculation
You have delayed ejaculation and other related or unrelated symptoms
Delayed ejaculation is negatively affecting your marriage or relationship
You worry that you barely ejaculate despite having sex regularly and are wondering how often should a man ejaculate to remain healthy.

Types of Delayed Ejaculation

Based on the symptoms you have, you might be suffering from one of four types of delayed ejaculation:

Situational delayed ejaculation: Your delayed ejaculation only occurs in certain circumstances or with certain partners. For instance, you can ejaculate with oral stimulation but not penetrative sex.
Generalized delayed ejaculation: Your delayed ejaculation occurs in all circumstances and with all partners.
Lifelong delayed ejaculation: This type of DE has been present since you reached sexual maturity.
Acquired delayed ejaculation: This develops later in life after you’ve had a period of normal sexual function.

Identifying your DE type makes it easy for your doctor to diagnose the underlying problem. In rare cases, DE is a sign of other health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.

What Causes Delayed Ejaculation?

There are many potential causes of delayed ejaculation including:

Psychological Causes of Delayed Ejaculation

Several psychological factors that might cause delayed ejaculation include:

Traumatic experiences: Traumatic experiences such as sexual abuse may make it difficult for you to ejaculate.
Mental health conditions: Conditions such as depression and anxiety are linked to delayed ejaculation.
Religious or cultural convictions: If you come from a culture or religion that connotes sex negatively or considers it a sin, you might have a problem ejaculating.
Lack of sexual attraction to your partner: Do you find your partner unattractive? This could be the reason you’re having a hard time cumming. Additionally, if you’re unhappy in your relationship or constantly in conflict with your partner, you might find it difficult to ejaculate.
Performance anxiety: Feeling anxious before sex might lead to different sexual dysfunctions including erectile dysfunction and DE.
Conditioning due to masturbation: If you frequently use pornographic materials to masturbate or engage in specific practices as you masturbate, you might not be stimulated enough to reach orgasm without your specific system in place.

Physical Causes of Delayed Ejaculation

In some cases, these physical factors might be the cause of delayed ejaculation:

Medication: Certain medications such as antidepressants, high blood pressure medication, and anti-seizure medication may affect your ability to ejaculate.
Nerve damage: The nerves in your pelvic floor help with ejaculatory control. Damage to these nerves might lead to premature or delayed ejaculation. Some of the diseases and neurological issues that can damage these nerves include stroke, spinal cord injuries, and diabetic neuropathy.
Hormonal imbalances: Low levels of some hormones such as the thyroid hormone or testosterone affect sexual performance and may cause ED.
Alcohol: Excessive use of alcohol has been proven to affect sexual performance and may lead to various dysfunction including delayed ejaculation.
Infections: Urinary tract infections and other infections in your sexual organs may cause delayed ejaculation.
Retrograde ejaculation: This is a condition whereby released sperm goes into the bladder leading to little or no semen when you ejaculate. If you suspect that your DE is caused by retrograde ejaculation and are wondering how to ejaculate longer and stronger, treating retrograde ejaculation could be the answer.

Risk Factors

Delayed ejaculation can affect any man at any point in life. However, several factors might increase your risk of developing DE. They are:

Getting older

The risk of delayed ejaculation increases with age as older men have a waning sex drive. With age comes less intense orgasms, decreased force, volume, trajectory, and other issues such as DE.

Use of certain medications

You might not know it but medicine is one of the major contributors to sexual dysfunctions. Medications such as blood pressure medication can decrease blood flow to your penis, diminishing the quality of your erections and interfering with ejaculation.

High levels of the chemical serotonin are associated with DE, so antidepressants that contain serotonin may factor into your delayed orgasm.

Certain illnesses

High blood pressure may reduce sexual desire and limit t blood flow to the penis. This results in decreased sensation, delayed ejaculation, and other sexual dysfunctions.

Having relationship issues

Always being in fights or conflict with your partner might decrease your desire and you might not enjoy being intimate with them.

Mental health issues such as anxiety and depression

If you struggle with your mental health, you may not enjoy sex fully, leading to delayed ejaculation. That said, different mental health problems have different or no effects on the sexual health of individuals. Only your doctor can confirm if your mental health issues are the cause of DE.

Surgery on your prostate or bladder

Surgeries, such as the Transurethral Resection of the prostate, might result in an enlarged prostate or damage to the bladder valve. This increases the risk of retrograde ejaculation, one of the main causes of delayed ejaculation. Talk to your doctor about how to fix retrograde ejaculation if it’s one of the causes of your DE.

Addiction

Excessive use of drugs and alcohol impairs sexual function and might cause DE

Some of the complications of delayed ejaculation include the inability to impregnate your partner, negativity, and avoiding sex. It might also result in low libido and decreased sexual pleasure.

How is Delayed Ejaculation Diagnosed?

Mostly, a physical exam is enough to diagnose delayed ejaculation. However, if your doctor suspects that there’s an underlying cause, they will recommend further tests. Some of the tests to anticipate when you visit your doctor include:

Physical exam: Your doctor will want to ensure that you have a normal sensation in your genitalia. Therefore, they might examine your penis and testicles.
Blood tests: Certain illnesses diabetes and cardiovascular disease make you more prone to suffering delayed ejaculation. Your doctor might request several blood samples to rule out these illnesses as the underlying causes. Additionally, they will check if some hormonal levels such as testosterone levels are normal.
Urinalysis: A urine test checks for infections, diabetes, or other problems.

How to Treat Delayed Ejaculation

If you have delayed ejaculation, several natural and medical methods exist to treat it. It’s important to understand the underlying cause of your DE before starting any treatment, as this will greatly increase its effectiveness.

Let’s take a look at the best methods to treat delayed ejaculation.

Natural Ways To Treat Delayed Ejaculation

Here are several natural ways to treat delayed ejaculation that you can try at home:

Traditional Behavioral Sex Therapy

This therapy is effective depending on the underlying cause of your delayed ejaculation. Begin by masturbating, then start intercourse when you’re almost ready to ejaculate. Every time you do this, begin intercourse earlier than the last time.

Communicate with your partner so that you can devise different ways that they can help you masturbate. Masturbating with the help of your partner can be beneficial in many ways. For instance, in case you accidentally cum while masturbating, your partner may have tricks that will teach you how to get hard again after ejaculation. You can use androgens (prescribed by a doctor) or toys to increase sensitivity. With time, the time you take to ejaculate will improve.

Lifestyle Changes

Lack of intimacy with your partner can greatly diminish your ability to ejaculate more quickly. Communicate with your partner if you have any sex-related worries. If you have performance anxiety, for instance, letting your partner know can help ease it, helping you relax and enjoy sex.

Pelvic Floor Exercises

Your doctor may recommend performing Kegels or other pelvic floor exercises to strengthen the muscles that control ejaculation.

Kegels are beneficial to those whose DE is a result of aging. Tighten your pelvic floor muscles to stop urine midstream. Hold for about 5 seconds, then release and repeat. Make sure you perform these exercises several times a day.

Ayurvedic Medicine

Traditional medicine that has been used for centuries, such as red ginseng, has been proven to improve sexual function. Red ginseng can help improve penile girth for men whose sensitivity issues are caused by penile narrowing.

Medical Ways To Treat Delayed Ejaculation

Your doctor might recommend the following medical remedies for delayed ejaculation:

Medication

If your delayed ejaculation is caused by taking certain medications, your doctor might recommend reducing the dosage or switching the medicine.

Since DE is rare, psychologists, medical doctors, urologists, and sex therapists don’t understand it well yet. Therefore, there’s no specific medication for treating it. However, some medications used to treat other conditions might help cure DE. These include:

Buspirone – used to treat anxiety
Cabergoline – promotes dopamine levels
Amantadine – used to treat Parkinson’s
Cyproheptadine – an antihistamine
Sildenafil – an impotence drug that improves hardness and sensitivity

Your doctor might also recommend the following hormones:

Testosterone: If your delayed ejaculation is caused by low testosterone, restoring normal function might help cure it. Additionally, higher levels of testosterone might increase blood flow to the penis, making the nerves more sensitive.
Oxytocin: Although this hormone is used in childbirth, it is also produced by the body during orgasm and might help restore normal orgasms.

Psychotherapy

Counseling is effective in treating delayed ejaculation that’s caused by an underlying mental health problem. These include depression and anxiety.

Your counselor might recommend attending sessions with your partner to help you work through all your anger and frustration together. You might also benefit from seeing a sex therapist depending on the cause of your DE.

Aside from helping you overcome stress and pressure from your partner that worsens, psychotherapy might also help improve your self-esteem and instill a positive view of self.

Recovery Programs

If your doctor determines that your delayed ejaculation is caused by alcohol and addiction, they might recommend an outpatient recovery program. Treating addiction has been proven to restore normal sexual function in men. Since addiction is a mental health issue, you should not be embarrassed about getting help.

Supplements

Several supplements for delayed ejaculation might help treat the underlying causes of DE. Before buying a supplement, ensure it is well-studied and clinically proven effective in treating DE. Also, make sure that the supplement can improve your unique DE-related or unrelated symptoms. For instance, if you have low sperm volume, the said supplement should also help increase volume without requiring you to learn new tricks such as how to practice sperm retention.

Semenax pills are a clinically proven supplement that helps men last longer in bed, and improves orgasm intensity, and increases semen volume by 20%. It’s a 100% natural formula that will help you improve ejaculatory control in as little as 3-4 weeks.

Another supplement that might help in treating delayed ejaculation is zinc: Zinc boosts cell growth and immunity. Additionally, it aids the body in producing testosterone. If your DE is caused by low testosterone levels, zinc supplements might help restore the normal production of testosterone. This makes them ideal for treating low testosterone-associated delayed ejaculation.

Conclusion

Delayed ejaculation is a medical condition in which a man takes an extended period of sexual stimulation to reach orgasm and release semen. In some cases, men may be unable to reach orgasm at all.

While the exact cause is unknown, delayed ejaculation may be associated with low testosterone levels, certain health conditions, or medications. Complications can include relationship difficulties and anxiety.

Delayed ejaculation is rare unlike its polar opposite that leaves men wondering how not to cum so quick: premature ejaculation. Therefore, it’s not well understood by doctors and researchers. However, that doesn’t mean there’s no solution for your DE. There are many potential treatments available that can help you manage the condition and improve your quality of life. Additionally, many men improve with treatment.

If you think you may have delayed ejaculation, talk to your doctor about your symptoms and risk factors. If you’re searching for how to treat delayed ejaculation, we hope the above methods will help you on your way! Make sure you speak to your doctor before starting any form of treatment.

Have you enjoyed this piece? Then consider checking other guides: