Pleasure is necessary for overall health and wellness
Your relationship to pleasure in general (not just sexual pleasure) impacts how you feel about sex
Not prioritizing pleasure in your life contributes to feeling exhausted and unhappy
New resource available for paid subscribers in the Paid Member Vault
Pleasure is key to our overall health, but most people, especially women, have complicated feelings about it. We’ve been conditioned to believe that pleasure isn’t important. We feel guilty about putting ourselves first and prioritizing our pleasure. We’re taught that rest should be earned and pleasure is gluttonous, bad, and even sinful. We’re told to be productive above all else, and that our productivity correlates to our worthiness. That means prioritizing our pleasure comes last if it makes the list at all.
The problem is, when we don’t make pleasure a priority, we create an imbalance between the energy we expend and the energy that nourishes us. As a result, we feel less happy, we’re more exhausted, we’re less productive, we’re less able to manage stress, and we're less healthy. We’ve been told we don’t need pleasure, but if we want to thrive, we do.
Prioritizing pleasure is a powerful form of self-love and self-care. We need pleasure to nourish us and to give us energy. Just as we get injured when we overwork our bodies and don’t rest and recover, we get ill when we focus on our to-do lists and productivity and don’t replenish with pleasurable activities.
If you’re tired of feeling unhappy, exhausted, and drained, and you want more energy and to feel healthy, it’s time to change your relationship to pleasure.
If you don’t prioritize pleasure in general, it makes sense that you don’t prioritize sexual pleasure. If you don’t prioritize sexual pleasure, it makes sense that you don’t feel desire for sex. It all connects back to your relationship to pleasure in general. If you struggle with low libido, addressing your relationship to pleasure in general can help.
The first step to working on your relationship to pleasure is to start prioritizing non-sexual pleasure on a daily basis. Non-sexual pleasure can be physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and relational. What you experience as pleasure is deeply personal and varies from person to person. You may already know what you find pleasurable, or you might have no idea. Regardless of where you are with your relationship to pleasure, going on a pleasure exploration journey can help you discover what you find pleasurable and help you see the value of bringing more pleasure into your life.
To help you discover what gives you pleasure and explore the experience of pleasure in more ways, I created The Non-Sexual Pleasure Exploration Guide. I provide specific examples of pleasurable activities in each category for you to try. You can download this guide and access all the guides in the Paid Member Vault on the Caitlin’s Couch Substack when you become a paid subscriber.
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