Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

resistance impairs vasodilation—otherwise known as blood flow—by clogging your artery walls. That decrease in blood flow is all it takes to weaken your erections as well as to potentially cause health problems in your nether regions. And no one wants problems down there.
    In terms of sugars that are okay, you don’t need to spend much time stressing about fruits. Instead, watch out for all the hidden sugars in packaged foods, and be wary of taking in too much dried fruit or juice. We wouldn’t recommend having either more than once or twice a week, and just a serving at that. You’d be surprised what one glass of juice per day could do to your blood sugar levels.
    Watch Less Porn
    For every guy who ever claimed that watching porn was merely for research, you’ve officially been liberated. There’s some serious science behind watching porn, but that’s not a good thing if you’ve made erotica a frequent hobby. According to research published in Psychology Today, watching porn can cause neurochemical changes that kill your ability to become aroused.
    The power player behind this phenomenon is dopamine. You might know dopamine as the neurotransmitter in your brain that influences your ability to feel and experience pleasure. Not surprisingly, when you watch porn, it triggers a strong dopamine reaction. This is a good thing. But it becomes bad when you constantly or repeatedly create a dopamine surge from watching porn. Like any drug, you become resistant. In this case, that means you desensitize your ability to become aroused by sex and other pleasurable experiences.
    This is a very dangerous situation. Too much porn can literally decrease your ability to form intimate relationships, and regular sex will no longer be enjoyable. This has been shown to make people withdraw entirely from actual sex and instead search for more outlandish forms of pornography that might trigger dopamine and cause them to experience arousal.
    What this means is your boundaries will be pushed so far that it’ll be difficult to be aroused by anything basic. Over a long enough period of time, the extended exposure will make it harder for the act of sex to get you aroused.
    While we’re not saying you shouldn’t watch porn, we are saying that you want to be mindful that it can have a detrimental effect on your intimacy and arousal. As they always said at the end of GI Joe, “Knowing is half the battle.”
    Check Your Prescription Meds
    There’s a reason why depression is one of the biggest hurdles to sexual satisfaction. Once you become depressed, there’s a dangerous catch-22 associated with finding your way out of the dark and into happiness. If you’re depressed, some of the most effective drugs you can take are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). These drugs increase the amount of serotonin, another feel-good neurotransmitter. From a chemical standpoint, you almost have no choice but to feel better. There’s just one catch—SSRIs also interfere with sexual pleasure. Some situations are so bad that SSRIs have been shown to inhibit your ability to orgasm. This, in turn, makes you feel bad and can increase symptoms of depression even when physiologically you have medicine that is supposed to make you happier.
    Unfortunately, there’s no simple fix for this situation. You have to experiment on a personal level. Researchers suggest starting with a low dosage to assess if your depression symptoms improve without any negative sexual consequences. But if your sex drive and pleasure disappear, it might be time for a different medical solution.
    Get More Sleep
    Are you starting to sense a theme in this book? Sleeping is incredibly important to many of the fundamental attributes of being a man—and that includes your sex life. The sweet spot appears to be five hours, say researchers at University of Chicago. (Remember, your goal is still six hours. But when you get less than five hours, that’s when the worst consequences appear to take over.) That’s the breaking point where your testosterone levels drop. And like booze, it doesn’t take long to have a significant impact. Just one week of sleeping less than five hours a night can drop your levels to those of someone fifteen years older. That’s significant when you consider that testosterone has been shown to drop up to 1 percent every year after you hit thirty. The men in the study reported that the drop in sleep quality resulted in less happiness, satisfaction,