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

And yet, I also found that when they started talking about their sexuality in sessions, we were able to get at the heart of their other issues more quickly and with more insight. Once this door opened, they wanted to know why they couldn’t have satisfying sex, why they didn’t even want sex, and what, if anything, they could do about it. If they wer

What this distinction actually misses is the important role that pleasures of mind and body play in our emotional lives—moving us toward what will be good for us and moving us away from painful or toxic experiences that will harm. Pleasure as an emotion is meant on some level to help us live more effectively.

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.

We are deeply into sex, but at the same time, deeply at odds with it, often misunderstanding our own urges, needs, and desires. We judge our sexual longings, we curtail our desires, and we cut ourselves off from all that it affords us. We convince ourselves that we just don’t need it or want it. This is a problem that speaks to an unhappiness at ou

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.

One of the original goals of my research was to fill a huge gap in the scientific literature—to figure out the basic sensory wiring of the female genitals. It’s still hard for me to believe that this basic and important work was not done until 2011, when we published a study that systematically mapped the projections of the clitoris, anterior wall

It is evidenced directly in the enormous increase in the use of prescribed medications including antidepressants (up 400 percent since 1998) and opioid painkillers.

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.

When it’s overactive, your FEAR system is so tweaked that you may overreact to threats and end up depleted by chronic stress; this is common with generalized anxiety. Your exaggerated fear no longer serves you and becomes depleting and part of the problem.

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.