Q: I do not have morning erection. Why can it happen?
A: Waking up in the morning with an erection is so common for men, but the absence of traditional erection can be the sign of erectile dysfunction. However, it’s too early to worry. To find out the cause you need to know several factors about both processes.
Morning erection serves a usual part of male’s health and life, so it can be noted throughout the lifespan. You can notice constant erections in infants, while pre-adolescents are less likely to experience a morning erection. Later during puberty, such erections are most frequent, with a considerable increase in rigidity, size, and frequency. Such erections appear during rapid eye movement that is a special sleep stage. The whole sleep is a balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems of the autonomic nervous system. During the REM sleep phase, diverse functions of the body are tested, including erectile ones. The parasynthetic nerves usually stimulate the tissues and they become filled with blood. Since REM is the last stage of sleep, men frequently wake up with an erection.
There are several reasons why such morning erections cannot appear: