Step 01
Your answers set the order
A short questionnaire first, and the plan comes back sorted for where you are now, not for men in general. Nobody asks you to describe anything out loud.
When your body decides sex is something to get right, it runs the same response it runs for danger, and that response sends the blood to your arms and legs and away from your erection. That’s why effort backfires, and it’s why sexual anxiety and erection trouble are usually one problem wearing two names. Below: what’s happening, what men do about it, and where Keep It Hard — the program this page comes from — picks it up.
See my Keep It Hard planNone of this is imaginary. An erection starts as a signal from the brain, travels down the nervous system and ends as blood arriving where you want it. Anxiety interrupts that chain at the first link, and it does so for a reason that made sense long before bedrooms existed.
None of that makes the response a character flaw. It’s automatic, and it fires whether or not you approve of it, which is exactly why arguing with yourself about it has never worked for anybody. What practice changes is how often it fires, and what you do in the seconds after it does.
Keep It Hard runs a psychological half and a physical half, and this page is about the first one. This is training. It isn’t treatment, and it doesn’t stand in for a doctor when the cause is physical.
Step 01
A short questionnaire first, and the plan comes back sorted for where you are now, not for men in general. Nobody asks you to describe anything out loud.
Step 02
Guided sessions you listen to, plus short written lessons. Some of it is daily and some comes round every few days; the plan decides which, so you’re following one instead of building one.
Step 03
The mind comes first here and the body second, which is the reverse of what most men expect when they hear that a program has a physical half. You get the psychological work while the physical work is still starting, not once it has finished.
A short questionnaire. Then the program, in the order that fits you.
Something usually starts it — a night that went wrong, a remark from a partner, an ex who made a habit of criticising, a stretch of stress arriving from outside the bedroom — and once it has happened, the episode stops being the trouble and the expectation that follows it takes over the job. Here’s the shape that takes.
There’s no villain in that list. Every step follows from the one before it, which is also the useful part. Five steps means five places to interrupt it. Step one isn’t the only door.
Plenty of men handle these as neighbouring problems: sexual anxiety in men on one side, erection trouble on the other. They’re one circuit, read from opposite ends.
Your body isn’t refusing you. It’s guarding you, at the worst possible moment.
These are the five the program has you practise, in the order it teaches them. Not one of them is an affirmation, and not one of them asks you to talk yourself out of anything.
One of them you just did. The other has an order to it, and that’s what the program is.
Male performance anxiety has four standard responses, and each one of them buys a quiet evening at the cost of a harder night later. They’re worth naming, because most men reading this have already tried at least two of them and concluded from the result that nothing works.
It works immediately and it costs you later. Less sex means more weight on each occasion, which means more pressure, which means more anxiety — the avoidance feeds the thing it was protecting you from.
Alcohol quietens the worry, and heavy drinking sits on the course’s own list of physical causes of erection trouble. Quieter head, less reliable body, and the reason for the bad night gets harder to read afterwards.
Checking whether it’s working is itself a threat check, and that is the one input the alarm is waiting for. The attention that’s supposed to reassure you keeps the system switched on.
Medication has its place and your doctor decides that. What it doesn’t do is quiet the response that interferes with the signal, so men who take one and still lose the erection conclude that nothing works — when what they’ve found is that the psychological half went untouched.
Not by arguing with the thought, and not by trying harder next time. Grounding and breathing come first — those are the two practices above. What follows is the rest of the course’s sequence, and it starts somewhere most men skip.
Here’s a straight answer rather than a careful one.
Users of The Coach, asked after their first four weeks. The figures cover the app as a whole, not the practices on this page on their own.
From the app stores and Trustpilot. Trimmed for length, never reworded.
“I have Only Just Started this Course and Already in my first part have learned so much from it. It seems that Everyone is genuinely trying to help men, who experience ED or similar mental health issues and problems about their health. It is not all about the physical side of Yourself that stops You maybe from having temporary or permanent problems.”
“One of the most valuable parts of the program is its focus on managing performance anxiety and building better body awareness. The app includes structured breathing exercises, mindfulness practices, and pacing strategies that help users stay calm and present. These tools can be especially helpful for men who want to feel more in control and reduce the stress that can affect intimacy.”
“This program has helped me a lot already. I’m 20 days in and it has improved my discipline and confidence. I know I need to get things done for my own health thanks to the notification reminders and I’m looking forward to feeling the end result of the program”
“This app and program is one of the most comprehensive tool and program I’ve tried. It provides you with many strategies and step by step instructions. It focuses not only on a physical side but also on psychic and mental side. Day to day guidenance with focus to understand all aspects of your life and health, both psychological and physical.”
Yours comes back from a short questionnaire, sorted for where you are now.
The psychological half was written with sex therapists, an accredited psychotherapist and a research psychologist. The urologists and physiotherapists on this list built the physical one.
Gerard Greene
Specialist men's health physiotherapist and senior lecturer at Coventry University.
Dr. Susie Gronski
Licensed physical therapist, certified sexuality counselor, and founder of a men's pelvic health clinic.
Natalie Goldberg
Certified sex and family therapist dedicated to improving intimate relationships and personal well-being.
Dr. Amy Pearlman
Board-certified urologist specializing in male sexual wellness, performance, and hormonal health.
Dr. Justin Houman
MD, UCLA-trained urologist and male reproductive specialist focusing on sexual health.
Cameron Fraser
Australia's leading men's sex coach, specializing in male sexual wellness and performance.
Dr. Paula Hall
Accredited sexual and relationship psychotherapist, registered with leading professional bodies in psychotherapy.
Dr. Justin Lehmiller
PhD in social psychology and senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute.
Ordinary enough that Keep It Hard gives it a module of its own, not a paragraph. We don’t publish a prevalence figure, because we don’t have one we can stand behind. What’s worth knowing is the difference between an episode and a pattern: one difficult night happens to nearly everyone, and it becomes a problem when the expectation it leaves behind starts arriving first.
A threat response firing where there’s no threat. Something usually sets it going: a night that went badly, a remark from a partner, an ex who criticised, the first time with someone new, stress arriving from work or sleep, or a stretch of drinking. Some triggers are physical, not emotional — the sight of yourself going a little soft is one of the commonest. After a while the anticipation alone is enough, and the original cause stops mattering.
A rough guide, not a diagnosis: if erections show up on your own, in the morning, or with one partner and not another, the wiring works and the trigger is situational. If they’ve faded everywhere, gradually, in every circumstance, see a doctor. That pattern points at the body, and some of its causes matter well beyond sex — narrowed blood vessels can show up as an erection problem years before they show up as a heart problem, which is a reason to get it looked at. Not a reason to panic.
That’s the ordinary route to the psychological kind. The threat response pulls blood towards your arms and legs and away from the penis, so the erection either doesn’t arrive or doesn’t hold. Which means the two problems share a mechanism, and working on one moves the other.
Not in the moment — the moment is too late, and “calm down” has never worked on anyone. What works is practised outside the bedroom: grounding and breathing so the calm side of your nervous system is reachable, then the work on the critic in your head and the voice you build to answer it, then your triggers written down, then meeting them somewhere safe.
What clinicians use here is largely exercises — sensate focus, graded exposure, techniques for the thought loop. Not something you take. The Coach teaches that kind of work in a set order and does not treat, diagnose or prescribe. If the anxiety reaches past sex into the rest of your week, start with a professional.
Sometimes. If whatever started it disappears — a stressful year ends, a relationship settles — the expectation can fade with it, and plenty of men never think about any of this again. More often the avoidance that feels like relief is what keeps it going: less sex puts more weight on each occasion, more weight means more pressure, and the loop tightens quietly while it looks like nothing is happening.
The course makes the case for it with a story. One man traced the voice in his head to an ex-wife who used to ask what kind of man didn’t want sex with her; when he explained the fear to his new partner, she told him she didn’t care about the erection and wanted to be close to him. He could enjoy being close to her after that. Naming it out loud takes the imagined judgement out of the room, and the imagined version is usually harsher than the real one.
That’s information, not a verdict on the relationship. Something in that context is the trigger: how much it matters to you, a memory of a night that went wrong, a fear of one particular reaction. Triggers are specific. Specific things can be written down and planned around.
Medication is your doctor’s call, and the section above explains why it doesn’t step around this. It makes blood flow easier without supplying arousal, and the signal it needs still has to come down from your brain. That’s why men on medication still get nights that go wrong.
There isn’t a separate budget for it. The ten to twenty minutes a day the program asks for covers both halves, and the four to six weeks before most men notice a difference is the whole program too. Within that, the breathing and grounding practices are usable the day you learn them. The critic work is slower. It runs on repetition, and one good session won’t do it.
Keep It Hard, both halves of it: guided audio sessions, short lessons, the practices named on this page, a daily plan built from your answers, and reminders so the plan outlasts your interest in it.
Yes. You manage the subscription in your App Store or Google Play account and can cancel there at any point.
Two ways. Email support@the.coach and a real person on our team gets back to you — usually within a day. Or open the app, go to the Today tab, tap your profile, and hit Support. Both land with the same people.
