Scarleteen

hi,
i’m now almost 19 years old and i have never been able to orgasm. masturbation is too overstimulating and sometimes i truly just get bored of it. i am almost always horny, as are most people my age, but i just can’t orgasm. i have struggled with extreme anxiety most of my life, could this be impacting it in some way? any tips that could help me reach climax?

Hi strawberry-pie,

This kind of situation can be so frustrating! Although, as our boards demonstrate, it's a lot more common than people might think. In your case, it doe sound like anxiety may be playing a role; stress is one of the big barriers to arousal and pleasure, so if we're feeling a lot of it, it can be hard to connect to one or both of those sensations.

Can you give me a sense of how much experimentation you're done with masturbation, both in terms of ways of masturbating and the kinds of things you think about or engage with when you do it? Too, are there times where masturbation does feel pleasurable but just doesn't lead to orgasm?

Honestly, i can probably count on my fingers the amount of times i have masturbated, which is insanely embarrassing. I definitely haven’t experimented enough with it to deduce that i’m unable of achieving climax. I am honestly just kinda in the unknown about my own body and what I like because masturbating is so nerve wracking for me. i haven’t been able to get over this barrier of my own anxiety and just try to enjoy the pleasure. is there any way to get over this?

You know, it's totally okay to not have masturbated much (or at all, for that matter)! We each get to know and be comfortable with our bodies at our own pace.

When it comes to that anxiety you feel, when you try to masturbate does it latch onto a particular topic, like feelings about your body or the morality of what you're doing? Or is it more that you just feel so anxious all the time that that in and of itself makes it harder to masturbate?