Why Good Sex Matters: Understanding the Neuroscience of Pleasure for a Smarter, Happier, and More Purpose-Filled Life

A client may not realize that they are experiencing an emotional imbalance, but they do know if they can’t orgasm. Our sex lives are often the bellwethers of our emotional issues.

By looking through the lens of how our brains are wired for pleasure, we will learn how to reclaim our innate, biologically wired capacity and need for joy, fun, exuberance, curiosity, and humor in all aspects of our lives.

Since sex embodies pleasure, it affords us a particularly powerful lens through which to understand pleasure more broadly. It captures the complicated interplay between emotion, neural pathways, and personal experience—indeed all the factors that go into being able to have—and appreciate—true pleasure.

Capturing this evidence of blood flow to the brain also showed that an orgasm not only feels good but is good for us. We are meant to experience pleasure.

Our culture has deep roots in a Calvinism that associates pleasure (especially sexual or sensual) with shame and places a higher value on stoicism. A number of recent studies have shown that modern-day Americans, even those who aren’t particularly religious, continue to be influenced by traditional Puritan-Protestant morality. This infuses us with

And yet, what I observe daily in my clinical practice is that for all of this pleasure-seeking behavior, all this wanting of pleasure, very few of us seem able to fully experience the sensations or satisfaction we seek.

But most of us who experience anhedonia do so without this outward cry of rage and despair; indeed, the majority of people suffering from anhedonia do so in relative silence, living lives tangled up in a stew of negative emotions, unable to experience the pleasure that would break them free. Though this silent majority may be leading otherwise prod

It’s a vicious cycle of emotional dysregulation: the inability to have pleasure drains us of enthusiasm for life; anxiety and depression rob us of the appetite and enthusiasm to pursue pleasure; and these negative emotions keep feeding off of one another.

Year after year, throughout my practice, hundreds and hundreds of people have showed up in my office, trying to understand why they feel so flat, so angry, so irritable, so anxious, so depressed. Many reports in recent years both highlight and quantify an increase in anxiety, depression, suicide, and acts of violence.