Is Your ED Caused By Your Personality Type? (Study)

One of the most popular models of personality that psychologists have used for decades is the Big Five personality traits model.

This ranks people into five overarching personality categories, each with some sub-traits to flesh them out.

A new study that has just been presented at the European Association of Urology Congress has concluded that men who scored higher on one of these five categories are more likely than other men to struggle with ED.

The big five personality categories and their sub-traits are the following:

1. Openness to experience. Imagination, artistic interests, awareness of own emotions, adventurousness, intellect, readiness to challenge authority.

2. Conscientiousness. Self-efficacy, orderliness, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, and cautiousness.

3. Extraversion. Friendliness, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity level, excitement-seeking, and cheerfulness.

4. Agreeableness. Trust, non-manipulation, altruism, cooperation, modesty, and sympathy.

5. Neuroticism. Anxiety, anger, depression, self-consciousness, immoderation, and vulnerability.

Find a Big Five Personality test (often called an IPIP-NEO test) on the internet and complete it, as it is a lot of fun.

Can you guess which personality type puts you at risk of ED?

Neuroticism is the culprit.

The researchers analyzed 761 men who had undergone prostate surgery for prostate cancer in Norway. They reported on their recovery from the surgery and also completed a personality test.

Prostate surgery often results in ED and urinary incontinence, and the scientists wanted to ascertain if there was a personality type that put men at risk of slower recovery from these problems post-surgery.

On the personality test, 22 percent of participants scored higher on neuroticism, which is around the average for men in developed countries.

These highly neurotic men scored around 20 percent worse on the problematic side effects of the surgery than the non-neurotic men. They all reported ED, urinary incontinence, and bowel problems.

This makes a useful contribution to the literature, because past studies mostly concentrated on the surgical methods and location or severity of the prostate cancer as causes of the side effects and the inability to overcome them.

Now we know that personality also plays a role.

The researchers also warned that one should not think of neuroticism as a psychological disorder. It is a personality trait.

All of us are sometimes anxious, sometimes depressed, sometimes angry, and so on. Those who experience these emotions often are the high scorers.

The good news is that no matter what your personality trait is, there are easy home exercises that can eliminate your erectile dysfunction – sometimes on the very first day. Test drive these easy ED exercises here…