Bryan Johnson explains that nightly erections are a health indicator requiring good sleep, blood flow, and hormonal balance. He measured his own erections with a device and found three hours total per night. Shockwave therapy and Botox injections increased his duration from two hours to three.
Okay, so you probably in your sex ed courses or through your friends or through your family, you probably learned about the basics of sex. But what you didn't learn in class is that every night you go through these cycles of having nighttime erections. Men, you get erect and engorged, and women, your clitoris also gets engorged. So males and females have similar erection cycles. It's just much easier to measure a male erection than it is the clitoris. So this is important because your body does this to give your penis and your clitoris a workout. For these things to happen, you need to have good sleep, blood flow, healthy nerves, and balance hormones. If you don't have those things in place, you're not having nighttime erections. When I first started speaking about erections publicly, many of my friends texted me and they said, brian, I don't think I'm having any erections. And I said, well, how's your sleep? And they said, awful. There it is. If you're not sleeping well, you're grinding or otherwise just not prioritizing sleep, you're probably flaccid. Now, this is very problematic because it's an indicator of bad health and bad things to come. Okay, so how do you actually measure nighttime erections? Well, I have some props for you. Here is an eggplant. This is the device made by Adam Health. Now, what you do is you would normally think this is very awkward. It's not. You just put on the penis and you forget it's there. So you put it on the base of the penis. There you go. And then throughout the night, as you become erect, it measures both the engorgement and the duration. So you have a map the entire night of your erection cycles. Now, mine, I had four total erections for a duration of just over three hours. To put this in context, my nighttime erections are the length of the Titanic, the movie, not the boat. And that is better than an average 18 year old. Okay, so what else can we do to measure penis health? Well, a couple years ago, my team and I asked this question. We were measuring the biological age of every organ in my body, like my heart, my lungs, my liver, my brain. What about the penis? And so I said, team, how can I have the most measured penis in the world as one would do? And so we've done a few things. One is we do semen analysis on a regular basis. We measure my nighttime erections. As I just showed you. We actually measured the blood flow in my penis using ultrasound. So that is a flaccid state. An Erect state, you're looking at how robust the blood flow is. If you have good blood flow, it's a good sign. If you have bad flow, it's bad. I had good blood flow. We also did a urine test. You consume as much liquid as you can. You're almost exploding. Then you're in the bathroom, and you have to urinate as hard as you can, as fast as you can, because you're measuring the C max, which is how fast you can pee. And then you also see the total volume of what you are urinating. I also filled out questionnaires on erectile function and dysfunction. I have 25 out of 25 score on function. Also measure my prostate health, both a physical exam and also biomarkers like blood draws and MRIs. And then, of course, all the basic things like sleep and diet, exercise, stress management. And then finally is I did two things to actually improve my nighttime erections. Now, we took my baseline measurement, and my nighttime erections were just over two hours. Then we found two therapies. One is focused shockwave therapy. This is a technology used to repair injuries like ACLs or sprained ankles, which accelerates the speed of healing. And so applied to the penis, it also has rejuvenation effects. Now, many people with ED will use focus shockwave therapy. In my case, because I have a functioning penis, it was used for rejuvenation. And I will tell you, it's painful. You may want to do it for fun, but. But it's generally pretty painful. And then we did Botox. Now, be careful. You don't want to just put a needle into your penis and inject Botox. It has to be done by a doctor who is specialized because otherwise it could be dangerous. Now, after doing these two therapies, my nighttime erections improved from just over two hours to just over three hours. So, friends, there you have it. Nighttime boners is the missing piece of your sex education. You never knew they're really important. Thank you, friends, for being here today. Class dismissed.
