How to Find Pleasure in a Busy Life: Daily Practices to Reconnect with Joy and Sensuality
By Grace Crawford-Smith
Feeling overwhelmed by your schedule?
It’s important to learn simple, intentional ways to turn toward pleasure every day, no matter how busy you are. Reconnecting with your body, joy, and sensuality is possible through small, yet powerful shifts.
Clients often present to sex therapy with a desire to feel better in their body and sex life. However, their lifestyle and routine is extremely busy, with limited time to relax and experience pleasure, and this becomes one of the largest barriers to reaching their goals.
Clients are often wondering why they aren’t having their idea of “enough sex” or “good sex.” It often becomes clear quite quickly though, that they’re extremely busy, running around most of the time in a state of stress (or what we might refer to as hyper-arousal or fight or flight), feeling disconnected from their body, and are often very distracted from sex and pleasure.
We might find ourselves wondering too, why our libido is “broken,” and in fact, “low desire” is one of the most common things we see people coming into the clinic for.
In almost every case, the client is not broken, and nothing is wrong with their libido.
It’s perfectly normal for our bodies to not want sex when we are experiencing much of the week in a state of hyperarousal/fight/flight (think busy, always thinking of the next thing, heavy mental load, no time to just “be”) or hypoarousal/freeze (think scrolling on the couch after work or mindlessly scoffing dinner). This flipping from hyper to hypo arousal without much in-between is kind of like turning the stove top either all the way to high, or turning it completely off - most things actually need to simmer somewhere in between, including our sex drive. When we’re fluctuating drastically from “high” to “off” all the time, we don’t give our libido much change to come alive, because our libido lives at the simmer, or what we’d refer to as a “regulated nervous system state” where everything is balanced.
When it comes to building a life which involves pleasure, sensuality, mindfulness and embodiment then, it’s always best to start simple. It’s helpful to focus on small pockets of pleasure in everyday life. This increases our body and mind’s ability to take pleasure in the day, rather than necessarily thinking of pleasure as an all or nothing type of endeavour that has us delaying our pleasure until we can take vacation or do something big, and trudging through the rest of life in between.
As the old saying goes, what you focus on expands. So let’s have a look at how to build a pleasure-focused routine to help you reconnect with your body and joy.
Building a Pleasure-Focused Routine
Nervous System Support
Firstly, it’s important to have some awareness of how the nervous system impacts our ability to experience pleasure. The state of your brain and body will determine how you perceive the environment, including whether it is perceived as pleasurable or not.
When we are in a ventral vagal state, we are reading the environment and people (and even dogs and cats) as safe, and we’re able to feel connected to others. Our physiology is wired to feel pleasure more easily in this state, so you can firstly focus on regulating your nervous system to help allow pockets of pleasure to arise.
Examples of ways to come into ventral vagal (safe and connected):
Walking outside and making eye contact with people and smiling
Petting a dog or a cat
Talking to a friend who is calm and relaxed while you are speaking
Receiving a cuddle or soothing touch from a friend or partner
Connecting with nature by observing your environment (and bonus points for moving your body while doing this)
Shaking or dancing to release adrenaline or cortisol
Conscious Focus
The brain is characterised by neuroplasticity, meaning we can change our brain by changing what we focus on and creating new neural pathways. This means that when we consciously focus on pleasure, we actually prime the brain to take in more pleasure and then seek more and more of these pleasure experiences out.
Journaling is a helpful way to build neural pathways.
Creating a very simple pleasure journal is a great place to start, and I even recommend clients simply use their notes app on their phone if physically writing it down might be a barrier.
Pleasure Journal practice:
Write down three moments that felt pleasurable in the day
Start with non-sexual pleasure, then you may build the practice to include sexual pleasure in a few months
See if you can involve the five senses. Some examples include:
The warm sun on my face as I stepped outside the house
The soft fur of my dog under my palm as I patted her
The rich smell of coffee and taste of the bitter, chocolatey flavour as I took a sip
The warm feeling in my chest as I hugged a friend
Scheduling Pleasure
Another helpful method to build a pleasure-focused routine is scheduling pleasurable activities just like you would schedule other commitments and priorities.
Scheduling pleasurable activities is also a technique to help ease depression, so you may notice this positively impacts your mood, too.
Pointers for scheduling pleasure-focused activities:
Start with scheduling downregulating (relaxing) activities and incorporating stress-relief to help allow pleasure to be perceived.
Mindfulness helps us connect to our bodies and pleasure lives in the body. You may experiment with scheduling a meditation practice or mindful masturbation.
Breathing and moving your body helps pleasure build and move within you.
Engage in creativity: being creative largely stimulates the right side of our brain which allows for flow states and losing track of time. You may schedule time to draw or play guitar, for example.
Connecting in a playful way with friends and partner(s) helps our brain experience pleasure
Play means fun for the sake of fun, so make sure there is no agenda. You may schedule playing a game of cards, for example, or trying a body-based activity such as pleasure mapping
Play can stimulate oxytocin and testosterone, helping us co-regulate and experience feel good neurotransmitters
When scheduling pleasure, it is helpful to distinguish between “doing” time and “being” time.
If your week is filled with “doing” time, where you are trying to achieve things and complete tasks, focus on adding “being” time, where the focus is on being in the moment, being in your body, and being present with others.
Key takeaways to create time for pleasure everyday: TLDR
Prioritise rest and self-regulation + co-regulation: a certain experience such as a type of touch, taste or sound can be overwhelming and unpleasant when in a fight, flight or freeze state, though the same touch, taste or sound might actually be perceived very differently when in ventral vagal or regulated state (safe and connected).
Prioritise non-sexual pleasure: food, coffee, sun, soft sheets, witnessing a child laughing or a sweet moment among strangers, a juicy stretch, etc. Keep a journal, or share your pleasure moments with partner or friend at end of day.
Schedule time for pleasure: if you run on a schedule, your time reflects what you value. Valuing pleasure means dedicating time to rest, positive sensations and mindfulness.