You've tried thinking about something else. You've tried tensing everything you own and holding on. You've probably tried a cream. Nothing holds. By now you can feel the evening going wrong before it has started.

Here is what the research actually says.

Researchers gave 500 couples in five countries a stopwatch and asked them to use it at home. The median came out at five minutes and twenty-four seconds. One man in five to one in three has this. Fewer than a quarter of them ever tell anybody.

You're not unusual. You're just the only one in the room who thinks he is.

Slow Burn is a fifteen-week programme. One chapter a week, in order. Each one ends with something you do that week, not something to think about.

It starts from a fact almost nobody is told. Ejaculation is a spinal reflex with a threshold. That threshold sits below anything you can control. Willpower was never in the fight. But the threshold moves. That is what the fifteen weeks are for.

Inside:

- The pelvic floor exercise most men do backwards, and why the usual advice makes many of them worse

- How to find your own point of no return, which most men have never looked at directly

- A breathing ratio from a randomised trial that still held a year later

- Four techniques you can run silently, in any bed, with no equipment, app or subscription

- The one piece of advice everyone repeats that the evidence argues against

- What the ten-year research says holds, and what fades

Diego Segura is an industrial engineer. He holds an MBA and a master's in Digital Technology from Boston University, and he wrote the international bestseller Everything in Excess Is Good. He has worked with Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Boston University.

His method is research. Read everything published on one subject. Then report what it says, including the parts nobody wants to hear.

Nobody can see what is on your phone. Week one starts tonight.

Gender & Sexuality