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

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

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.

Further exacerbating this connection between pain and pleasure is our difficulty with tolerating any measure of negative feelings. At the first sign of pain, we take an aspirin. At the first sign of emotional discomfort, we may be told to take an antidepressant. In fact, as a culture, we are encouraged to not feel too much of anything. In reality,

My life’s work has taught me that the ability to notice, experience, and tolerate the sensations in the body that accompany the thoughts in the mind is critical to empowering wholeness and well-being. We dwell so much in our thoughts, our interpretations of our experiences, our strivings, and our expectations that we register very little of what is

The brain is not only the command center for sex, it’s also a generator of pleasure. These two functions—enabling sex to happen and setting us up to actually experience pleasure from sex—are inextricably linked in both the brain and the body.

We’ve been told by sex experts that the cause of an inability to enjoy sex is sexual dysfunction, brought on by age, hormonal disruptions, or other diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, or depression. And yes, these conditions all play a role in sexual shutdown. However, the underlying causes for sexual dysfunctions that im

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.

In these studies, I also wanted to understand more about female sexual response, which was so understudied, and how exactly the brain is involved. I looked at how some of my ladies of the lab responded under two different conditions: orgasm brought about when a woman stimulated her own genitals, and that induced by a partner’s stimulation of her ge

the brain was also having a very powerful experience. In fact, my research was showing that as genital stimulation led up to orgasm, numerous brain regions involved in processing sensations, emotions, rewards, and pleasure were becoming highly activated, with more and more brain areas lighting up, until at the apex of orgasm the brain looked like a