Healthy Pleasures
The Health Benefits of Sensuality, Optimism, and Altruism
By Dr. David Sobel

My two cents

Health-promoting acts are biologically connected to positive feelings and pleasure.

In our society, many people have been programmed to mistrust pleasure.

Thoughts, feelings and moods can have a significant effect on the onset, course and management of many illnesses.

Imagine a new medical treatment that lowers blood pressure, decreases heart disease and cancer risk, boosts immune function, and reduces pain, anxiety and depression. It's a treatment that is safe, inexpensive, readily available, and whose main side effect is that it makes you feel good. These and other benefits appear to come from pleasure itself.

Health promotion efforts have often emphasized changing unhealthy behaviors. Yet following all the latest behavioral health prescriptions doesn't necessarily explain vitality or insure health. Many people think that to promote health they have to undertake strict weight loss diets, adopt punishing exercise programs, avoid salt, shun cholesterol, and follow all sorts of arduous, pleasure-denying regimens. Fortunately, scientific evidence now suggests that for most people doing what is pleasurable actually pays off in both immediate enjoyment and better health.

We have evolved to experience pleasure. And through evolution, health-promoting acts are biologically connected to positive feelings and pleasure. The healthiest, most robust people seem to know this intuitively. They indulge in many small daily pleasures and cultivate a positive, optimistic view of their lives. Yet in our society, many people have been programmed to mistrust pleasure. This view is reinforced by medical terrorism: if it feels good, it's probably bad for you.

To lower the risk of heart disease, most people have been taught that they should quit smoking, lower their cholesterol, increase physical exercise, and manage their high blood pressure. People may not know that there are also many pleasurable ways to reduce cardiac risk, including humor, having a pet, taking siestas, frequent vacations, and drinking moderate amounts of alcohol.

Sensuality is also health promoting. Touch, massage, and tactile stimulation have significant health benefits for infants, children and adults. Looking at nature, rather than an urban scene, can result in reduced negative emotions and quicker recovery of stress. Surgical patients who looked at nature scenes required less pain medications and some had shorter hospital stays.

Optimism is also good for health. Many people mistakenly think that winning the lottery or other major events will bring us happiness. Studies have shown that it is the small, commonplace pleasures, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, that not only improve our mood, but also our health.

Generosity, altruism, and gratitude are not only moral virtues; they may be essential contributors to a longer, healthier life. Some of the greatest and healthiest pleasures are ones which shift our attention away from ourselves to caring for someone or something outside ourselves –- spouses, children, pets, plants, or religious or humanistic causes.

Working with attitudes, self-efficacy and confidence have been shown to help people living with a variety of chronic diseases. Self-management programs which focus on attitudes, beliefs and moods, rather than on the chronic diseases themselves, have proven to improve overall functioning, decrease fatigue and health distress, and reduce the number of days patients spend in hospitals.

Thoughts, feelings and moods can have a significant effect on the onset, course and management of many illnesses. Studies are showing that simple, safe and relatively inexpensive interventions, such as focusing on healthy pleasures, can improve health outcomes and reduce the need for more expensive medical treatments.