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The Pleasure Zone: Why We Resist Good Feelings & How to Let Go and Be Happy
There is an enormous untapped potential for pleasure in every one of us that has yet to be fully explored. So says psychologist Stella Resnick who, for more that twenty years, has been helping people stop focusing on what's wrong in their lives and begin noticing what's right. Stella Resnick recognises that people often have a fixed ceiling on how much pleasure they think they can tolerate. In this ground-breaking work she clears these boundaries of pleasure by linking optimism, physical health, emotional fulfilment in love, deeply gratifying sex and positive ageing to our ability to enjoy eight core pleasures which she identifies. Complete with inspiring stories of people who have learnt to reclaim pleasures they have cut themselves off from, each chapter concludes with a set of simple personal experiments designed to aid readers in gaining skill at enjoying that pleasure more completely.
297 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1997
23 people are currently reading
179 people want to read
About the author
Stella Resnick
12 books7 followersI’m a psychologist and psychotherapist who specializes in relationship and sexual enrichment.
In my thirty five years of practicing, researching and writing I have developed a method for personal self-discovery and couple’s enhancement that is based on these fundamentals:
LIFE SKILLS:
Good therapy teaches skills for taking the distress out of stress and enhancing capacity for joy and pleasure in everyday life, work, and relationships.
INTIMACY SKILLS:
An intimate, committed love is a great source of joy and pleasure, an inevitable source of stress, and a great incentive for growth.
SEXUAL FULFILLMENT:
Sexual pleasure contributes to physical and mental well-being and to the bond of intimacy, can be enhanced through sensual awareness, and nurtured and enjoyed throughout life.
BODY-MIND ATTUNEMENT:
To create lasting change in any area of life, especially in an intimate relationship, you need to become more attuned to your body.
I call this approach Full-Sprectrum Therapy. Please visit these key areas to learn more about my work and how we may work together.
In my thirty five years of practicing, researching and writing I have developed a method for personal self-discovery and couple’s enhancement that is based on these fundamentals:
LIFE SKILLS:
Good therapy teaches skills for taking the distress out of stress and enhancing capacity for joy and pleasure in everyday life, work, and relationships.
INTIMACY SKILLS:
An intimate, committed love is a great source of joy and pleasure, an inevitable source of stress, and a great incentive for growth.
SEXUAL FULFILLMENT:
Sexual pleasure contributes to physical and mental well-being and to the bond of intimacy, can be enhanced through sensual awareness, and nurtured and enjoyed throughout life.
BODY-MIND ATTUNEMENT:
To create lasting change in any area of life, especially in an intimate relationship, you need to become more attuned to your body.
I call this approach Full-Sprectrum Therapy. Please visit these key areas to learn more about my work and how we may work together.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 12, 2016
When a self help book starts off with some excellent practical advice but towards the end starts tacitly endorsing certain strains of New Age pseudoscience and makes a worrying claim about ties to our reptilian ancestry. I still recommend it.
January 4, 2009
Therapist-approved.
October 5, 2016
Interesting Read ..
October 4, 2019
Its the best book about pleasure that i ever read. I translated it into Russian for myself to re-reading it over and over again.
March 20, 2012
The overall premise of this book is that many people are somewhat afraid of pleasure. We're afraid of losing control and going hog wild, so we stick with the proper, practical, uptight, or no-fun options whenever we have a choice. I've done that quite a bit in my life; I'd definitely say there's some truth to it. The book presents suggestions for how to let yourself embrace pleasure without wrecking your life. Basically, relax and be compassionate with yourself. If you're not so restrictive with yourself, you won't feel such an intense desire to do things that are self-destructive anyway, and it will all work itself out.
Notes:
p. 52 "In the sixties, Bob Dylan sang, 'He who isn't busy being born is busy dying.' There's a basic truth to these words."
p. 157-158 A woman had a recurring dream where an evil-looking stranger pursues her, and usually catches up to her, and she can't scream. She and the author talked about the dream, what a dialog with the stranger would be like, etc. "Then, I asked her to redream it all again, only this time to see if she could let herself scream. This she did with such a force that my next-door neighbors started banging on my office door to make sure we were ok. At that point, she developed a falling-over case of the giggles, which turned out to be very infectious for me. The session ended with both of us howling in laughter.
"Less than a week later, Leslie had the dream again, but this time, she told me, she whimpered for a few seconds and then let out a scream that blasted her husband out of bed and onto his feet. She awoke with her heart racing but ecstatic. Her husband told her he was sure her scream had taken a few years off his life, but he thought it was probably a psychological milestone for her and for that he was happy."
After that, the dream evolved to the point where one time he was following her, and she invited him to her party and introduced him to everyone. It turned out he really wasn't a bad guy, just someone from a bad neighborhood, like herself.
When I read this, I found it very powerful. I've had recurring frustration dreams, where I can't run or want to punch somebody but can't move my very heavy arms. To turn it around like that is really awesome. Also, this tale made me think about all the stuff nobody ever teaches us about how life works and made me want to create some kind of Life 101 out of all the stuff I had to learn in therapy. I always figured everyone else knew all this stuff, but for the most part, they don't.
p. 242 "The great paradox of lust is that when you maintain your erotic yearnings, while at the same time you struggle to resist them, the anticipation and longing for sex makes for arousal that is the most intense of all... Three of the scenarios that are most likely to drive us wild with lust usually involve some aspect of forbiddenness, sweet pain, and overcoming some challenge."
This totally explains the insatiable appeal of a certain ex nobody could understand what I saw in!
p. 274 You don't have to believe in God to pray. You might be talking to God, yourself, or a wiser, more compassionate side of yourself. Either way, it can still be inspiring and/or comforting.
p. 281 "Mark Twain once poked fun at our concepts of life after death, in the character of archangel Satan who visits Earth and writes letters about it to Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel in heaven. How strange, writes the visitor, that the best heaven humans can conceive of contains not a single feature humans actually value--like making love--and consists of nothing more than diversions they care nothing about, like walking around all day playing harps and singing hymns. Yet somehow they're convinced they would like it in heaven!"...
"Since we really don't know anything about death and probably can never really know about it, as an absolute fact, why not consciously fashion an afterlife you could believe in and could invest yourself in? There are good reasons for seriously examining the kind of afterlife you'd prefer to believe in--in terms of what would positively motivate you the most and bring out the best in you. For one, whether you're right or wrong, you're likely to meet with the same fate after death anyway. If your belief system doesn't change your after-death experience, why not choose one that can impact your before-death experience--one that inspires you, gives you courage, hope, solace, and a reason for reverence?" If you pick something that brings out the best in you, it will change the way you live on in the hearts and minds of those you leave behind, and that's the only afterlife we can be sure of. Possible bonus: if you visualize it vividly enough, you may get to go there, so you might as well invest in the way you want it to be.
This idea made me really happy. I spent several hours pondering what my ideal afterlife, and the more I thought about it, the happier I got. It's not that complicated: in my ideal afterlife, we'd all still be able to eat, and sleep, and create, and dance, and do all the things we like to do now, but we wouldn't have to. Everybody's needs would be met, so we'd be totally free to pursue the top of Maslow's pyramid: self-actualization.
You could still help people, but they wouldn't suffer if you didn't, because they have everything they need. Also, judgment wouldn't matter any more because all of your needs would be met and even if you weren't good at something right now, you wouldn't mind because you'd know you had all eternity to get better at it.
Most importantly, time wouldn't be a constraint any more. You wouldn't be bound by its rules. So if you were writing, you could just keep writing until you didn't feel like it any more, and you wouldn't have to worry about the phone ringing or the cat needing to be fed or wrecking your body by sitting too long in one position or missing the dance. If you felt like napping, you could do that, and totally wallow as long as you wanted without missing anything else. If you wanted to talk to your friends or family, same thing, and meanwhile, you wouldn't be dissing them of blowing them off all the times when you were doing all those other things. You could cook or bake if you wanted to, and enjoy the hell out of the food you made, but you'd never _need_ to eat or cook because time is irrelevant, so you don't really get hungry.
You could do all these great things, whatever you wanted, EVERYTHING you ever wanted, for as long as you wanted, and you'd never get interrupted or miss anything. If you suddenly felt like dancing or going to autocross, you could just go and it would be "time" for that.
Notes:
p. 52 "In the sixties, Bob Dylan sang, 'He who isn't busy being born is busy dying.' There's a basic truth to these words."
p. 157-158 A woman had a recurring dream where an evil-looking stranger pursues her, and usually catches up to her, and she can't scream. She and the author talked about the dream, what a dialog with the stranger would be like, etc. "Then, I asked her to redream it all again, only this time to see if she could let herself scream. This she did with such a force that my next-door neighbors started banging on my office door to make sure we were ok. At that point, she developed a falling-over case of the giggles, which turned out to be very infectious for me. The session ended with both of us howling in laughter.
"Less than a week later, Leslie had the dream again, but this time, she told me, she whimpered for a few seconds and then let out a scream that blasted her husband out of bed and onto his feet. She awoke with her heart racing but ecstatic. Her husband told her he was sure her scream had taken a few years off his life, but he thought it was probably a psychological milestone for her and for that he was happy."
After that, the dream evolved to the point where one time he was following her, and she invited him to her party and introduced him to everyone. It turned out he really wasn't a bad guy, just someone from a bad neighborhood, like herself.
When I read this, I found it very powerful. I've had recurring frustration dreams, where I can't run or want to punch somebody but can't move my very heavy arms. To turn it around like that is really awesome. Also, this tale made me think about all the stuff nobody ever teaches us about how life works and made me want to create some kind of Life 101 out of all the stuff I had to learn in therapy. I always figured everyone else knew all this stuff, but for the most part, they don't.
p. 242 "The great paradox of lust is that when you maintain your erotic yearnings, while at the same time you struggle to resist them, the anticipation and longing for sex makes for arousal that is the most intense of all... Three of the scenarios that are most likely to drive us wild with lust usually involve some aspect of forbiddenness, sweet pain, and overcoming some challenge."
This totally explains the insatiable appeal of a certain ex nobody could understand what I saw in!
p. 274 You don't have to believe in God to pray. You might be talking to God, yourself, or a wiser, more compassionate side of yourself. Either way, it can still be inspiring and/or comforting.
p. 281 "Mark Twain once poked fun at our concepts of life after death, in the character of archangel Satan who visits Earth and writes letters about it to Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel in heaven. How strange, writes the visitor, that the best heaven humans can conceive of contains not a single feature humans actually value--like making love--and consists of nothing more than diversions they care nothing about, like walking around all day playing harps and singing hymns. Yet somehow they're convinced they would like it in heaven!"...
"Since we really don't know anything about death and probably can never really know about it, as an absolute fact, why not consciously fashion an afterlife you could believe in and could invest yourself in? There are good reasons for seriously examining the kind of afterlife you'd prefer to believe in--in terms of what would positively motivate you the most and bring out the best in you. For one, whether you're right or wrong, you're likely to meet with the same fate after death anyway. If your belief system doesn't change your after-death experience, why not choose one that can impact your before-death experience--one that inspires you, gives you courage, hope, solace, and a reason for reverence?" If you pick something that brings out the best in you, it will change the way you live on in the hearts and minds of those you leave behind, and that's the only afterlife we can be sure of. Possible bonus: if you visualize it vividly enough, you may get to go there, so you might as well invest in the way you want it to be.
This idea made me really happy. I spent several hours pondering what my ideal afterlife, and the more I thought about it, the happier I got. It's not that complicated: in my ideal afterlife, we'd all still be able to eat, and sleep, and create, and dance, and do all the things we like to do now, but we wouldn't have to. Everybody's needs would be met, so we'd be totally free to pursue the top of Maslow's pyramid: self-actualization.
You could still help people, but they wouldn't suffer if you didn't, because they have everything they need. Also, judgment wouldn't matter any more because all of your needs would be met and even if you weren't good at something right now, you wouldn't mind because you'd know you had all eternity to get better at it.
Most importantly, time wouldn't be a constraint any more. You wouldn't be bound by its rules. So if you were writing, you could just keep writing until you didn't feel like it any more, and you wouldn't have to worry about the phone ringing or the cat needing to be fed or wrecking your body by sitting too long in one position or missing the dance. If you felt like napping, you could do that, and totally wallow as long as you wanted without missing anything else. If you wanted to talk to your friends or family, same thing, and meanwhile, you wouldn't be dissing them of blowing them off all the times when you were doing all those other things. You could cook or bake if you wanted to, and enjoy the hell out of the food you made, but you'd never _need_ to eat or cook because time is irrelevant, so you don't really get hungry.
You could do all these great things, whatever you wanted, EVERYTHING you ever wanted, for as long as you wanted, and you'd never get interrupted or miss anything. If you suddenly felt like dancing or going to autocross, you could just go and it would be "time" for that.
June 8, 2018
The book is about why and how to embrace pleasure using simple techniques. The advice is ok although I found the book was a bit wishy-washy and flat.
September 12, 2023
The chapter on Breathing is excellent. Other than that, there was nothing new or different in this book.
February 5, 2024
Pleasure tolerance (in juxtaposition with pain tolerance) and pleasure anxiety were novel concepts to me and appear to hold some relevance. Interesting read.
July 24, 2024
really enjoyed this one - felt foundational
December 30, 2024
I'm going to be thinking about this book a lot.
July 8, 2011
I think I have some friends who would enjoy this book.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews