I didn’t think I had any problem being in joy and feeling pleasure, these two feelings felt like they came and went naturally as the flow of life kept rolling. As a highly sensitive person, I felt like I had to be entirely careful with how much joy and pleasure I allowed myself to feel, fearing that if I felt too much and then experienced the fall that typically proceeded, it would hurt more.

The more fascinating part is that I didn’t even realize I was doing this until I was confronted by people in my close circle being in total joy, and me feeling stuck in the dark side of my own emotions and numb to life.

So revealed my distorted relationship with joy and pleasure, it felt like they pinned me in a more vulnerable place than I was willing to go. When joy and pleasure entered my orbit, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop rather than enjoy life for life.

Yet at the same time, when I wasn’t feeling them, I was daydreaming about what it would feel like if they were present.

My relationship with these feelings was so skewed and confusing to my psyche, and judging from conversations I’ve had with many people, I also realize I’m not alone in wanting joy and pleasure and then not allowing myself to feel them.

The ‘Numb Effect’ of Not Feeling Joy and Pleasure

It’s not surprising that a lot of people feel the way I describe above, especially women.

Many of us have grown up in environments that are asking so much of us that we are burnt out, exhausted, anxious, depressed and joyless. In extreme cases this is referred to as Anhedonia, or the medical term for the inability to feel pleasure and joy in life.

But before you self-diagnose, I don’t necessarily think this is as common as it’s described, I think many people are in a tricky relationship with their own joy and pleasure and these circumstances of life add fuel to the fire and make leaning in less intuitive.

Additionally, when your sympathetic nervous system is dysregulated and you’re in chronic stress or frequent fight, flight, flee or fawn, it’s impossible to feel pleasure and joy because your brain is telling your body that it’s not safe to do so. A catch-22.

Joy and pleasure live on the spectrum, meaning if we feel on one side, we also open ourselves up to feeling on the other in pain and despair in equal and opposite amounts.

Which makes sense, when we lose someone we love who brought us immense joy, we experience deep pain and despair in their absence. The more that person meant to us, the deeper the hurt.

It also makes sense why feeling joy and pleasure is scary, allowing that feeling to enter makes you more vulnerable to these more painful emotions on the other side, and the coping mechanism for many is to avoid those feelings by also not feeling the full extent of joy either. If you don’t feel deep joy, you don’t have to feel deep pain either.

Whether you’re consciously doing this or not, your subconscious understands this process, and as the subconscious mind works, it’s goal is to keep you safe and operating in the most predictable programming possible. It’s running in the background saying ‘if you feel joy, you’ll have to feel pain too, so don’t do either.”

By not letting yourself feel joy and pleasure fully, you’re essentially agreeing to being at baseline in life, because to feel pleasure means you agree to feel more of everything else too, including the other side of the spectrum. Which explains why not feeling pleasure often results in feeling numb.

Even in extreme instances like being on vacation and not being able to relax, or being with the partner of your dreams and not being able to orgasm. It comes back to the conscious vs the subconscious mind, if your subconscious fears that leaning into the joy ultimately will result in pain, then it’s no wonder you’re struggling to feel the joy and pleasure you desire.

Author and researcher, Dr. Brené Brown, talks about ‘foreboding joy’ because of this exact reason. If you fear feeling joy because you’re afraid that if you feel the joy then something bad is ultimately going to happen, then you’re not feeling the full extent of joy.

It doesn’t mean you’re not feeling joy at all, rather a discounted version of it. The same goes for feelings of pleasure. Thinking, “Wow, I just met this really rad person, I want to get to know them more.” And then immediately thinking “There’s no way they want to be around me or want to spend time with me, I won’t get my hopes up.”

It can be incredibly detrimental to feeling the joy and pleasure of life when this is your perspective on the parts that make up your life. To explain this more, let me dive deeper into my own story.

Defining Pleasure Beyond Sex

As a female, I’ve really only connected the word pleasure in a sexual way. This word felt taboo, I didn’t feel comfortable talking about it in most social settings because it felt so closely tied to sex.

Part of our disjointed relationship with the word pleasure is the fear of talking about sex openly, although it’s a natural part of life.

My relationship with pleasure was not different than what I have briefly described here. It felt taboo, it felt ‘bad’ and I concluded that feeling pleasure was something I was only allowed to do behind closed doors or in some rare cases, with a partner, but also that was hard too.

Because of this perspective, I spent a lot of my early 20’s faking pleasure to make others feel better. I know I’m not alone in this. As a female, the pressure to perform is heavy, and also mix that with wanting to feel wanted and the fear of abandonment. The perfect storm for making pleasure hard to access, when it’s tied to an outcome like ‘don’t get abandoned’ and ‘this feeling isn’t for me, but for someone else.’

I felt like I wasn’t allowed to experience pleasure because it had nothing to do with me and I didn’t feel safe to lean into that feeling. And yet I was expected to feel pleasure so I faked it.

In this fear state, I was communicating more confusion to my brain about what was acceptable and what wasn’t. I was essentially creating a relationship with this feeling that wasn’t centered the way it was intended to be; I was letting my own misunderstanding of pleasure seep into the rest of my life without even realizing it.

Part of my misunderstanding with specifically pleasure was that it was only in reference to sex, and sexual feelings, which is not true. In fact, you can feel pleasure in your life at any given moment:

• Eating a meal and enjoying the slowness and savoriness of each bite
• Dancing or listening to a song you really like that feels like it takes over your whole energetic space
• Taking a long luxurious bath and enjoying the way the warm water feels on your skin

Pleasure is not exclusive to sex by any means, and by only associating this feeling with that, you cut yourself off to feeling more pleasure in your life in total.

Just like I talked about above with joy, by not letting yourself feel pleasure fully, you’re essentially agreeing to being at baseline in life, because to feel pleasure means you agree to feel more of everything else too, including the other side of the spectrum. Which explains why not feeling pleasure often results in feeling numb. Even in extreme instances like being on vacation and not being able to relax, or being with the partner of your dreams and not being able to orgasm.

So how do you feel more pleasure and joy in your life?

Your brain luckily is trainable, and though it will take time to undo the conditioning of your subconscious that you’ve spent years perfecting, there are ways you can start to feel more pleasure and joy in all of your life.

How to Retrain Your Brain to Feel More Joy and Pleasure in Your Life

Here are some simple and effective ways to begin training your brain to feel more joy and pleasure in your life both in and outside of the bedroom. I’d argue, focusing more on pleasure and joy outside of the bedroom is going to allow you to feel more pleasure and joy in sex and your relationships as a byproduct. So don’t be afraid to focus most of your attention there.

Also, these are a great starting place, and if they don’t feel like they’re working, that doesn’t mean your broken by any means, retraining the brain takes time and patience.

Have grace and give yourself space to make this change.

Practice Gratitude

One of the best antidotes to the fear of joy is to actively practice gratitude. You’ve heard this a million times, but gratitude and having a gratitude practice can drastically change your capacity for more joy in your life by simply giving you more awareness and presence in each moment.

When doing your gratitude practice, be specific about what you’re grateful for, try to steer clear of the overarching themes like “good health.” Rather, get specific, like ‘opening the door on a spring day and smelling the fresh air and hearing the life happening outside.’

When you practice gratitude you lean into the softness of life and joy that’s happening all around you whenever you decide to tap in. Your brain will start to attune to this practice the longer you do it, finding more moments of joy in more obscure places than ever before.

Slow down

Part of allowing yourself to feel pleasure is learning that life is happening in this very moment. Presence and slowness are an essential part of the pleasure and joy equation.

Slowing down means sensing and feeling more, which is why this can be difficult. Many of us chase our to do list and make ourselves more busy so that we can avoid feeling negative emotions we don’t want to feel. And as a result, we also avoid feeling joy because, remember, the agreement: to commit to feeling pleasure and joy is also to commit to feeling everything.

Things you can do slower right now:

• eat slower
• walk slower
• shower slower
• kiss slower
• drink coffee slower

Movement to Feel Good

Moving the body is a great way to feel into pleasure and joy.

This doesn’t necessarily mean sign up for another HIIT class, in fact, I challenge you to try something more intuitive and sensual for the sake of this exercise to feel more joy and pleasure.

This may mean asking your body, “How do I want to move right now that will feel really good?”

Whatever route you decide to take in this movement practice, allow it to be ONLY for you. This is your joy and your pleasure, so give yourself some freedom to take up space. It’s going to likely feel extremely uncomfortable at first, and in time it will get easier

Movement inspiration:

• Put your favorite playlist on and dance around
• Do some moving meditative work where you ask yourself in the meditative state what movement wants to come through
• Do some stretching, foam rolling, or anything else that feels sensory rich on your muscles

Get Creative

Tap into your inner child and try something creative with zero expectation for the outcome. This can be a great opportunity to train your brain into feeling into the present moment and deciding what wants to be expressed.

Creativity is a great way to alchemize emotions on whole spectrum. If you’re someone who struggles to speak about your emotions, it can also be healing to turn to art, a non-verbal expression of feeling. Don’t worry about what you create, rather allow this process to be a flow state of what it feels like to feel.

Creative Inspiration:

• Finger paint
• Write poetry
• Doodle in your notebook
• Buy some yummy ingredients at the store and cook without a recipe

Emotional Expression

Give yourself permission to be in your feelings, especially your negative ones. A huge block of joy and pleasure comes from suppressing negative emotions like anger, sadness, and frustration. If you want to feel more joy, allow yourself to feel more pain as well.

When it comes up for you, allow yourself to express these feelings as they want to come out. As much as you want to hold back, allow yourself to safely be in these difficult feelings. Being witnessed in this expression can also be healing, if you have someone you deeply trust, allow them to be with you through this process.

Because this is also about joy and pleasure, the same process goes. This is all a practice to stop pushing feelings down and to give yourself the freedom to feel whatever you feel whenever you feel it. You’re not alone in thinking this is hard, go low and slow.

One of my favorite ways to access emotional expression is through the intentional use of the sacred plant, cannabis. Because of her deeply somatic properties and ability to release emotions and trauma, it can be a great tool to help access this part of myself. The goal is to use this tool to retrain the brain to allow more emotions to be expressed, rather than use it as a crutch.

Emotional Expression Practices:

• Scream into or punch a pillow
• Breathwork to release
• Break things (that you don’t care about) in an empty parking lot
• Cry

Celebrate More

You don’t need an excuse to celebrate anything in life. To celebrate is to relish in the joy. You can look at life as a celebration every day once you get good at this.

Neuroscientific studies support that celebrating triggers the release of dopamine in the brain. This neuroprocess plays a role in reinforcing behavior and creating positive associations with our actions. Think of this as biohacking your joy and pleasure system.

As you start to retrain your brain to feel more pleasure and joy, pick something small each day to celebrate.

One of mine and my partner’s favorites is to celebrate the meals we share together. We do this by actually dropping into the moment, putting our phones away, and sharing what we’re grateful for. Celebrating this time together increases our intimacy and allows us to feel more intp the joy of life, even when life isn’t going so well, we still find something to be grateful for and celebrate. Not to mention we act as each other’s hype team, which feels so good.

Practice Celebrating These Simple Moments:

• Keep a mason jar of your ‘wins’ every time you have a win, it could even be as simple as going for a walk, write it down on post it not and pop it in the celebration jar, at the end of each month, pour out the contents and read them while sipping on your favorite beverage
• Use my meal example from above, you can also do this alone. Before each meal it helps to close your eyes and practice gratitude for the food in front of you. Allow yourself to celebrate the meal you’re sharing either alone or with someone else and remember that this moment will never come again. Be your own hype man.
• At the end of your workday, throw your favorite song on and throw yourself a 3 minute celebration for getting through the day. You can dance, sing, lay on the ground and smile, whatever you decide, allow yourself to be in the joy of getting through the day. This is a beautiful moment to transition to the rest of your day and go immediately do something that brings you joy.

What’s the Point of Being in More Joy and Pleasure?

There are few common things that most people seek in life, two of them are happiness and joy. These aspirations tie the human race together. Simply put, joy and pleasure specifically are present-driven emotions. They are void of worry and fear because they’re solely about living for the moment and enjoying what’s right in front of you.

If you’re someone who also wants to be in pleasure and joy but when you get there you feel uncomfortable, it’s a good sign that you get the opportunity to practice retraining your brain to have a higher capacity for these positive, feel good emotions.

Giving yourself permission to feel good may sound scary, you’re not alone in that.

If you’re looking for support in navigating this process, I offer free 60 minute consultations to help you identify your goals when it comes to working with your emotions as a catalyst for enjoying more life.