Pleasure is a Healthy Part of Sex

Sex can help you create a connection with another person and sexual pleasure has lots of health benefits — whether you’re with a partner or not. When you have an orgasm your body gives you a natural high. You release endorphins, which are hormones that block pain and make you feel good.

What is Pleasure?

Pleasure is a feeling of enjoyment. When it comes to sexual health, pleasure can often be forgotten. It is common in the area of sexual health to focus on topics such as pregnancy prevention, sexually transmitted infections (STI’s), and health exams to name a few concerns. While these topics are incredibly important, we don’t want to forget about an equally important area, which is pleasure.

Sexual pleasure can include the feelings of enjoyment through sexual activities, but it is much broader in also including the aspects that involve sensuality (through the senses) that are not always necessarily sexual. For example, individuals can feel pleasure through the sound of certain music or the feeling of a particular fabric on their skin. These pleasurable feelings may be sensual and erotic, or not. Pleasure is abundant when we think about all the different ways that humans experience it.

The Biggest Sex Organ

What is interesting to note is that pleasure often begins in the mind. Did you know that the brain is the biggest sex organ? So often what we are thinking in our mind can influence our sexual enjoyment.

Mindfulness Techniques

Pleasure beginning in the mind can be helpful where, perhaps, the body does not respond sexually, such as in the case of individuals who have certain physical disabilities or injuries. These individuals might lack the ability to enjoy the most commonly recognized sexual responses, but they are still able to experience the pleasure they desire in their minds and/or through other parts of their bodies.

This can be groundbreaking to know because it allows us the opportunity to work with our thoughts. For instance, if we are wanting to experience more sexual pleasure, but find that certain thoughts are impacting us, tools such as mindfulness techniques can help us to examine these thoughts and gain more awareness. Mindfulness techniques allow us to non-judgmentally pay attention to the present moment. 

Work in the areas of mindfulness and sexual pleasure can be useful tools to help us connect to our thoughts/minds/body in the moment and, hopefully, build upon pleasurable experiences. In today’s fast-paced world, we might be trying to enjoy sex, but if we keep thinking about the grocery list or to-do lists, for example, mindfulness can help us avoid distractions and connect to what we are feeling in the moment, which hopefully is pleasurable.