Pleasure Zone

While writers including Paul Pearsall, Deepak Chopra, Bernie Siegel, and Joan Borysenko have recently identified the benefits of pleasure, to a large extent they have been concerned with positive mental attitudes and visualizations. Dr. Resnick advances the exploration of pleasure further by linking optimism, physical health, emotional fulfillment in love, deeply gratifying sex, and positive aging to our ability to fully enjoy eight core pleasures. These are: primal pleasure, pain relief, the elemental pleasures of play and humor, and mental, emotional, sensual, sexual, and spiritual pleasure. In this ground-breaking work, Dr. Resnick discusses each core pleasure, pointing out subtle and not so subtle ways we deny ourselves and how each core pleasure is relevant to our health, emotional well-being, and interpersonal relationships. Complete with inspiring stories of people who have learned to reclaim pleasures they had 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.