Why Pleasure Matters

How to escape from our own comfort zones

What is pleasure?

Why do we experience it?

It’s a delightful feeling for sure, but nature is dispassionate, a web of hungry predators and prey, red in tooth and claw. Yet some evolutionary force has arranged our atoms just right, just so we can occasionally feel nice. But why do we feel something rather than nothing?

As an erotic writer, I write about pleasure all the time. Not just the sensual joys of smacked bottoms or the euphoric floods of orgasms, but also the emotional satisfaction arising from submission and strictness. Virtually every piece of erotic writing describes what pleasure feels like, but understanding why it exists at all requires venturing beyond art, and into the realms of psychology and neuroscience. I think it’s well worth the journey.

Pleasure exists because inside all of us lies an infernal trap of our own creation.

Everything in the universe wants to expend the minimum possible energy, from electrons to flowing water. Every entity in existence seeks the path of least resistance, and that includes us.

We evolved to survive in a threatening world. Being alert keeps us safe, but continuous vigilance is exhausting, but as we want to use the minimum possible energy too, we create a region of safety in our minds. This is like a national boundary, complete with our own internal checkpoints and border guards to keep the scary stuff out and let only acceptable feelings in.

Inside this carefully curated realm is what we consider to be us, our beliefs and habits, everything that defines our lives. It provides us with a feeling of calmness and security, where we can relax and be ourselves. We have a name for this place, we call it our Comfort Zone.

Leaving our comfort zone can provoke intense feelings — our alert emotions, like fear, anxiety, embarrassment, even shame. Since we feel the same kind of anxiousness regardless of whether our situation is truly perilous, or merely just awkward, we can come to regard these feelings as rather inconvenient. But our warning emotions are not faulty alarms to be silenced, they play a vital role in keeping us safe.

Thus anxiety is double-edged, it protects us, but it also makes us wary and risk-averse. But our species has flourished by exploring and taking risks, so we clearly need an even more powerful emotion to lure us out from our cosy havens. Something that can encourage us to try daunting things, that dares us to step into the unknown and take on new unfamiliar challenges. You may be surprised to learn that impetus is what we call pleasure.

The Satisfaction Loop

Personally, I’ve always found motivating myself to get out of my comfort zone challenging. It’s not that I have a problem with fear per se. I’ve done some outrageously scary things, like extremely deep scuba diving, climbing to the calderas of erupting volcanoes, and hiking solo into the wildernesses of faraway countries.

Looking back, what all those events had in common was: I wanted to do them. I wanted to do them so much it was agonising to contemplate not doing them. I spent weeks, months even, planning and anticipating, booking flights, pouring over maps, imagining how amazing the experiences were going to be.

For a while, I’ve been wondering how to recreate that feeling of boldness. If I could summon that kind of impetus on demand, it would be like lightning in a bottle. I’d have the energy and drive to do anything!

My curiosity led me to look into the neuroscience of pleasure which, I reasoned, was a good subject for an erotic writer to be familiar with, if nothing else. There’s a good summary here of some of the current scientific thinking for those interested in delving deeper themselves.

It turns out that pleasure is the reward we receive when we close a crucially important psychological loop. It starts when we imagine some outcome, then we muster the desire to make this vision happen, this establishes the motivation necessary to achieve hard things.

This process can be stated in a sentence:

Before we can achieve something, we must first imagine it, and then we must want it.

If we subsequently achieve what we initially imagined, having expended effort, we are rewarded with the feeling that we know as pleasure — this, is our Satisfaction Loop:

There’s one of these loops running in our minds for every active dream we possess, each at a different stage of completion. We may be making great progress towards some, whilst others may still just be nebulous ideals.

David Bowie put the same idea like this: “Discipline is… you conceive some thing, then you decide whether or not it’s worth following through… then you follow it through to its logical conclusion, and do it to the best of your ability.”

What image springs to mind when you think about pleasure? Something sensual? Like being cuddled or fondled, or the euphoric rush of an orgasm. Or something mouth-wateringly delicious? Or the feelgood glow of praise or accomplishment?

When we think of pleasure, we tend to think of its outcomes, the view from the summit, rather than the trudge up the slope. That’s actually quite significant, as we don’t get nice things without putting effort in first. That’s why the loop exists, it’s a process of focusing our intentions, and mustering our psychological energy required to change things.

The closing part of the loop, where we actually experience pleasure, is the reward granted by our mind for making our initial vision real. This is our pay-off for being bold enough to venture beyond our comfort zones and do new things. If pleasure is our currency, happiness is our bank account.

And discipline is the pursuit of pleasure, because we can not make a full circuit of the satisfaction loop without it.

As someone who writes about spanking, I’ve always believed there’s a profound connection between discipline and pleasure. I know so many people who crave structure and strictness, and eroticise discipline — I think that’s an acknowledgement of a fundamental aspect of human nature.

In the Satisfaction Loop, the precursor of pleasure is validation. So it’s not surprising that Praise Kink (giving praise for erotic enjoyment) is so popular. Calling a partner a “good girl” or a “good boy” is a confirmation of just how proud we are of them, reassurance they’re meeting our expectations completely and have no need to be anxious. This praise is more than a compliment, it’s both permission to be vulnerable and a pledge of acceptance, no wonder it feels so satisfying.

Getting Stuck

The Satisfaction Loop describes how we travel, but as with every journey, there’s always the possibility of getting stuck, or losing the path entirely.

We might get stuck getting started at the imagining stage, unable to properly imagine what we really want. Or we might only have a vague notion, which turns out to be a mashup of ideas borrowed from others. We can end up imagining someone else’s dreams, like that profession our parents wanted us to achieve. Getting past this block requires a clear idea of what we’re striving for and why we actually want it. Is it a distraction, or something to keep us busy, or is it aligned with our true identity and purpose?

If you’re a recovering perfectionist like me, it’s very easy to get stuck at this initial imagining stage. We might avoid getting started because our initial vision doesn’t seem perfect yet, or feel we’re not quite prepared enough. So we embark on more planning, more reading, as we attempt to mitigate away every aspect of potential risk in advance. We procrastinate, waiting for the “perfect” moment to arrive. Trying to make everything predictable so we won’t have to endure the awful pain of failure.

To overcome this block we must make peace with our own fear of failure. The passage of time does not make success more likely, and perhaps the very best time to take action is right now. Maybe the measure of success we’re using is deceptive, and the real value is not in winning the game, but playing it, learning its lessons, and improving ourselves. Or perhaps serendipity will strike, and our efforts will open up new unexpected opportunities.

We can also get stuck on the wanting stage, where we know exactly what we could do, but feel little enthusiasm for doing it. This might be going to the gym, or doing an assignment early, or attempting to learn something new where we know we’ll start off looking like a fool.

Sometimes a negative pressure gets us past this block: like imminent deadlines, or the embarrassment of accountability, or the fear of something worse if we do nothing. Or we might be inspired by positive support, the love of friends, or our desire to do something for others.

We can also get stuck in the achievement stage. This is more subtle, as we assume if we want something enough, we’ll inevitably get it — but sometimes life doesn’t reward us, despite all our efforts. If we don’t receive the pay-off of satisfaction that makes our mind look forward to it next time, we’ll feel disheartened, rather than enthused — and so won’t be dashing back to join the queue for another ride.

No one is immune to this kind of disappointment. We can experience it in love, when relationships fail, and employment, when companies falter, or we find ourselves redundant. It’s like working without being paid, it makes us feel like slaves to the grind, it saps our willingness to invest such intense effort ever again.

The best way to avoid the agony of being blocked right at the end of the loop, is to choose our emotional investments wisely.

Choose Simple Goals

If you ask someone what the opposite of pleasure is, most will say pain. Yet when we expect a pleasurable reward but none is forthcoming, it’s not physical pain we feel, but emotional hurt. As someone who writes about spanking, I find this particularly interesting, the opposite of pleasure is far worse than an excruciating flogging, it’s the despair of disenchantment. Being whipped can be very arousing, but the agony of being emotionally crushed turns nobody on. Pain isn’t the kryptonite of motivation, disappointment is.

That’s why failing to close the Satisfaction Loop has a high psychological cost. So when choosing our goals, we should follow Einstein’s famous advice and make them “as simple as possible, but no simpler”.

It’s better to pursue a succession of small wins, each of which are tractable and achievable, than chase a highly complex dream full of dependencies you don’t properly understand, and can’t influence anyway. The more complicated your imagined goal, the less likely you know what to do, making it much more likely you’ll get stuck early, and never feel the vital glow of satisfaction you need to stay motivated.

Choose goals that are in your power to achieve, like turning up somewhere, writing a new work, creating a new product, or learning something new. Not moonshots like becoming a millionaire. Strategic planning can be useful sometimes, but carries the risk of creating chains of imaginary futures, “if X would happen, then I could do Y, and then that would unlock Z”.

There’s a difference between working towards our dreams, and wishful thinking that stops us living in and fully enjoying the present moment. Sometimes we do have to make sacrifices, but without the validating feedback of gratification, we risk numbness and burnout. Our biochemistry is designed to operate in cycles of excitation and rest. Our psychological health demands we close the Satisfaction Loop. If we don’t, our brain will apply its own emergency safety brake, before we suffer complete emotional exhaustion.

I write this from personal experience, as someone who’s burned out several times. After each crash, I swore I’d do things differently next time, but made the same mistakes all over again, believing I was mentally stronger now. But our ability to function is governed by molecules not willpower. I pushed myself hard, chasing complex, barely achievable goals. I was in a hurry to get out of the present, and live in an imaginary future, always feeling I was just one more push away from achieving the satisfaction I craved. But without repose, eventually everything breaks.

So if we want to remain motivated, we must imagine something, then want it, then achieve it. Realising this has helped me immensely, because I can now understand what stage I’m stuck at, and how I might address it. It helps me appreciate that pleasure isn’t some silly transient hedonistic buzz, pleasure is the return on my precious emotional investment.

The Neurochemistry of Pleasure

When we do something stimulating and challenging, and venture outside our comfort zone, our brains reward us for learning something new with a flood of feelgood neurochemicals, including:

• Serotonin — prompts feelings of comfort and contentment, involved in moderating our moods, rewards and learning, and forming memories
• Dopamine — prompts feelings of satisfaction and gratification, drives what we want, essential for focus and motivation
• Endorphins — a family of physical and emotional painkillers, enabling us to tolerate pain and discomfort
• Norepinephrine — the brain’s own adrenaline, gives the bounce of feeling mentally energised, and tightens our focus
• Anandamide, the bliss chemical, associated with feelings of awe, and sexual activity, promotes lateral mental connections, and encourages new insights
• Oxytocin, the cuddle chemical, rewards us for social interactions

So what we call pleasure is basically just biochemistry, but it’s biochemistry with a vital rationale. These neurochemicals are disbursed in our brains as we travel around the Satisfaction Loop. They encourage us to keep moving forward, even when what we’re doing is deeply uncomfortable. The feelgood high from accomplishing challenging things is our tangible reward for staying on target, and learning new things.

Pleasure is a rich nourishing meal of all the essential neurotransmitters. Of course, it’s also possible to try to hack our Satisfaction Loop, and skip straight to the delicious sugary dessert. Our minds crave novelty, and finding it will grant us a little dopamine rush, without having to put in all that inconvenient laborious effort.

Pleasure can be a meal, but also a snack. Meals take time to prepare, consume and savour, and that investment of effort is rewarded by a sense of deep lingering satisfaction. Snacks are momentarily pleasurable diversions, like sugar rushes, pale imitations of nourishing meals.

This indulgence of stimulating activities that only provide a transient buzz has been nicknamed “Cheap Dopamine”. Examples being binge watching, comfort eating, endless scrolling, and masturbating mindlessly to porn. All may feel pleasurable momentarily, but they ultimately add no real long-term value to our lives.

Not that there’s anything wrong with masturbation, of course. Reading, or fantasising, or playing a naughty game, or spanking yourself — all involve mental improvisation, the stimulation of your mind, not just your genitals. The ubiquity of porn means new erotic imagery is easily obtained, but titillation doesn’t sate us for long, and soon feels naggingly empty.

Intimacy with others is riskier than watching porn, we have to make ourselves vulnerable, and place our trust in the hands of another. Our minds reward us for that courage with a much richer cocktail of neurochemicals, which includes the magic potion of oxytocin. That’s why sex with others feels so much better than exactly the same physical sensations given by ourselves.

We can obtain gratification without effort, without any need to imagine, with certainty of getting what’s wanted. But this seems like an abuse of the reward dispenser built into our primaeval brain, the same one that keeps all animals instinctively motivated, as they follow a dopamine breadcrumb trail encoded into their genes. For human beings, the pursuit of quick buzzy stimulation can become a hazardous habit, leading to negative avoidant behaviours rather than facing up to life’s awkward challenges.

Nature has designed pleasure carefully, so it is unwise to try to outwit it. Pleasure is deliberately transient, so we do not become anaesthetised by our own bliss. This is the basis of what psychologists call the Hedonic Treadmill, we must keep ourselves in motion, devising new goals, and striving towards them. The worst error we can make is to become fixated on one lofty goal in the expectation everything will be perfect thereafter once we achieve it. The rush of triumph will soon fade, and then, what?

The continuous journey around the loop — our lived experience — matters. Philosopher Robert Nozick created an influential thought experiment called the Experience Machine, which asks if you’d be happy to be connected to a machine that took you straight from imagination to pleasure. So you’d be able to skip the awkward struggles of wanting and striving. Nozick argued the journey is as important as the destination, that the act of doing and struggling connects us in a deep, fulfilling way to our external reality. Otherwise we’re all just solipsists, living in a drugged reverie trapped inside our own heads.

Why Pleasure Matters

I wanted to write this essay because modern culture has a rather disdainful view of pleasure. Be careful not to over-indulge, we’re taught, take everything in moderation. There is a vein of asceticism in western culture, one dating back to the post-Reformation work ethic, where diligence and denial were evangelised, pleasures of the flesh were denigrated. The true pleasures, of course, awaited the virtuous in the next life.

Even if we’re not religious, contemporary culture lionises those who hustle. We’re told to be strivers rather than skivers, and that hedonism — the pursuit of pleasure — is a fey indulgence. Achieving pleasure from our own bodies is disparaged with words like seedy, slutty, sinful, filthy, even perverted. But this has consequences for all of us: once we become embarrassed about feeling good, we will find it increasingly difficult to be kind to ourselves.

Pleasure matters not because it feels good (though that is a delightful side-effect), but because it’s the feeling of your mind stretching, like a muscle getting stronger through repeated use. Pleasure is the feeling of your brain actively learning.

This is why skipping straight to pleasure without expending effort is such a false economy. It’s like spending on your emotional credit card, without working to earn it. It diminishes how we value effort, risk, and reward. This matters because pleasure is an incentive that helps us turn the volume of anxiety down, it encourages us to be bolder and more curious, so our first instinct is to take one step forward rather than one step back.

Fundamentally, our mind is trying to help us develop a better sense of what’s real jeopardy, and what’s illusory. Pleasure counterbalances our safety-first warning system, ensuring we don’t become too afraid of the world. Most noises in the dark aren’t perilous, and most people aren’t out to get us. Our mind wants to reward us for being brave rather than running away.

We spend so much energy and waste so much of our lives trying to create and preserve our own comfort zones. Calm little oases of predictability where incoming events are never extreme enough to worry us, and outcomes are always what we wanted. But like every oasis, it is a delusion. Personally, I’d rather live behind a Schengen border than a North Korean one.

To escape our comfort zones, we must first understand our internal Satisfaction Loop. We must know, and then imagine what we truly want. If we truly desire something, we’ll yearn for it, and nothing will be able to keep us from it. This isn’t a perfect recipe though, as we can never guarantee life will deliver the reward we crave. But if we fail, we will at least have been on an adventure, and better still, it will have been our own unique outrageous adventure.

Originally published at https://spankingtheatre.substack.com on Feb 28, 2023.