I’ve Trained Myself To Orgasm, Now It’s Taking Too Long

What if you accidentally train yourself to take a long time to orgasm since you’re doing it alone. And then when you want to have sex with someone else, you stress out or feel embarrassed because it’s not happening fast enough? It could also annoy your partner if you take too long.

Great question, thanks for trusting me enough to give you a good answer. I think a lot of people think this way about masturbation and sex and find it difficult, so I hope that a lot of people will find this answer helpful. 

You might not have trained yourself

I hear this idea a lot about training yourself to masturbate in a particular way. It may take you a long time, but other people feel they have trained themselves to masturbate in a way that takes them as short a time as possible. For a lot of people this ‘training’ has involved using a particular hand, or toy, or speed, or pressure, or fantasy, or porn, or pillow etc. 

I think that maybe it’s not that we train ourselves, it’s just that how someone has masturbated is how they’ve masturbated. If you masturbate in a particular way, you might have ‘tunnel vision’ about what your body does in response. So it’s not that your body has been trained to work in a particular way, it’s just that you’re asking your body to work in a particular way. If you try being with your body, rather than making it do something, you might find that you haven’t actually trained yourself at all. 

Try the free Teach Yourself Sex Ed course, which has a section on bodies.

Beware the ‘masturbation is bad’ story

It’s useful to remember here that there are a lot of should stories (fancy term for this is ‘discourses’) about masturbation. They say that it’s bad, dangerous, has bad outcomes, and can ruin your sex life. These stories have been around for many hundreds of years and they are hard to shake off. How these stories work is that they are told to us and then we compare ourselves to them, monitoring our bodies and judging ourselves in the process. This disconnects us from our bodies and results in us having a less enjoyable time in our bodies.

This resource about feeling better about your body explains this too.  

So take it from me, a pretty well respected sex educator, who’s been advising young people and adults about sex for 25 years. Masturbation is just another form of sex which is very popular and can be incredibly enjoyable. 

Two different kinds of sex

Masturbation is sex, but you could see solo sex as just being a different kind of sex to sex with a partner. Even if you do exactly the same thing you do when you are solo with a partner there, it’s completely different. It’s a different vibe: made up of different smells, noises, air, feelings, sensations, objects, limbs, faces, eyes, fantasies, desires, wants, needs etc. It’s so different that it just doesn’t make sense to expect the same outcome. 

Outcomes from sex might include orgasm, or ejaculation, or they might not. Other outcomes can include: excitement, raised heartbeat, out of body experiences, feeling like you’re levitating, self-discovery, extreme forms of pleasure, tingling all over, entangling your bodies, a sense of mixing completely with the other. Even if the outcome you want from sex is orgasms, then it’s better to think of every single orgasm you experience as being unique, because it is. Every orgasm exists in relation to all the things going on in and around your body, which are always different every single time. 

Learn to unknow yourself

Too much self-knowledge means that we end up telling ourselves a story about ‘how we work’ which is a) not helpful, and b) not true. So here are two things you can do.

1. When you have solo sex, see if you can pay attention to the smallest, tiniest, differences in what you do, how you do it, and what happens.

2. When you have sex with a partner, try to start with a blank slate and try to forget everything you ‘know’ about yourself. Instead try to think about sex as a way of finding out (which is different to finding out about yourself, and then having sex).  

Assemblages and feedback loops

Sex (all kinds) is an assemblage of different factors. Thoughts, feelings, fantasies, what we see / hear / smell / touch / feel, and how we are when we are naked, and how we are in the outside world.

I think this chart is a useful way of thinking about most things. How is your body affected, what feelings then emotions are those, what do think (plan, fantasise, imagine, anticipate), and what do you and your partner do with your bodies (touch, speak, kiss, lick, stroke, hump, wrestle, etc). 

When you start to notice the things that feel good, that bring you joy, you enjoy it more. It becomes a feedback loop. So the more you can pay attention to this, the more pleasure and enjoyment happens. 

Conversations and consent

This is where consent is really important. Not the yes / no kind of consent you do when you accept cookies reading a website. I’m talking about the on-going, caring, attentive kinds of things we do when we are trying to have a really nice time with someone. When we’ve got lots and lots of consent, then we’re not trying to make someone do something. Instead, we are creating the conditions where pleasure and enjoyment can emerge between us. 

Check out my book Can We Talk About Consent? and also all the many articles here I have about how to make lots and lots of consent happen.

Check out this resource about sex talk and communication.

Making the vibe more relaxing

So the key to enjoyable sex is not to be stressed. If you are trying to make yourself, or someone else, do something the pressure can be stressful. Stress is a boner killer, as I explain in my article about how to deal with stress. Any kind of shame, anxiety, worry, can really affect us. So the key is to make each other feel comfy: it’s all about the vibes. What can we do to make each other feel that little bit more relaxed? 

How to make talking about sex and relationships easier.

A useful thing that you could just say is  “Let’s not try and make anything happen, let’s instead be with things as they happen.” This might be a conversation that will give you and your partner chance to breathe and enjoy it. Then instead of you and your partner getting embarrassed and annoyed, you might instead find yourself having a wonderful time, allowing pleasure to emerge between and through you in what you do together. 

Hope you find that helpful!

Justin

© Justin Hancock, 2026 Find out more about me and BISH here. If you’re an educator, head to my website BISH training, to find out about my resources for SRE and training for practitioners.

Buy the BISH Ebook, the best of BISH one easy to read pdf you can read on your phone. Just £5 or join the Patreon from just £1 a month.

BISH is run by me, Justin Hancock. I’ve been a trained sex and relationships educator since 1999. I’m a member of the World Association for Sexual Health. As well as BISH I also have resources, a podcast, and a coaching service for over 18s, as well as some of the best RSE teaching resources around. Find out out about my other work at justinhancock.co.uk. My work has featured (positively) in the media, like the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Sky One, and Novara Media.

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