Why Does Sex Feel Good?

Various Chemicals

Sexual arousal mainly stems from anything you see or think about that turns you on, in addition to your brains response to erotic imagery and other types of stimulation such as thoughts, sounds and touch. This is also scientifically referred to as a neurochemical mechanism. Neurotransmitters play a vital role in making sex feel good as they send signals from your brain to other parts of your body. Hormones are also present in your body during sexual excitement and both can tell us a lot about the reasons why does sex feel good.

Below are the hormones and neurotransmitters that play a key role in sexual pleasure.

Serotonin: Serotonin is a neurotransmitter which is produced when you are sexually excited. It is believed to increase your levels of happiness and well-being.

Oxytocin: This hormone is believed to be responsible for creating feelings of closeness, intimacy and affection and released with prolactin.

Prolactin: A hormone which comes immediately after you orgasm and creates feelings of sexual satiety after climax. This has also been linked to why it is difficult to orgasm immediately a second or third time.

Norepinephrine: A neurotransmitter is responsible for making your genitals more sensitive to touch. Your blood vessels in those areas and other parts of your body become constricted or dilated during sexual stimulation.

Dopamine: This is a neurotransmitter which is secreted during sexual arousal and it has also been used to treat sexual dysfunction.

Each of these neurotransmitters and hormones are present in your body and work as a combination to make sex pleasurable. Understanding the key roles that each of them play makes it easier to contextualize why sexual stimulation conjures up lots of positive feelings.

Complicated Brain Activity

Why does sex feel good? Are there any other possible reasons? Research shows that there is very little activity in the brain during orgasm, which could suggest that during climax you worry less as pleasure overrides any disturbances from daily life. Also due to the little activity which takes place in a person’s brain during sex, it is believed that they are in a transcendent state. In further detail, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is engaged when we think about ourselves and fears and the anterior cingulate, [also engaged] when we monitor mistakes, decrease in activity during sex, which indicates that pleasure is the most dominant feeling at the time and all other feelings of worry and anxiety are decreased. Other parts of the brain which add to the supposed transcendent state include the temporal lobes, which organizes our knowledge of the world and also the parahippocampus, which represents our external environment. Due to the activity in these parts of the brain being almost inactive, this is why scientists suggest that people during sex are in a transcendent state. It is also suggested that the deactivation of brain activity in regards to the person’s external environment is what intensifies pleasure as well as being in a state of transcendence.

Desirable Sex

Sex is a desire that we derive pleasure from. Pleasure, when looked at beyond its simple terms is much more than a reaction from something desirable. It creates feelings of satiety, plus it’s fun and feels good. Pleasure keeps us alive and functioning and is the key to keep humanity in existence. Sex fulfils our desire to feel good and is one of the biggest and common drives in us human beings.

Evolutionary Causes

According to an article on Quora, for humans, sex from an evolutionary point of view can be about other things beside reproduction. It can be about social interaction and even intimacy. If sex wasn’t so pleasurable, there would be no incentive to procreate and neither would we have such a high population of human beings on earth. The outcome of sex holds a greater good and reinforces intimate bonds which effectively creates stronger and larger social structures.

Pleasure is necessary for humans and one reason why we obsess over it and pursue enjoyment in sex is because it aligns with being smart and social. As a complex species and being the smartest and most social mammals, we have more drives and motives than any other species, therefore pleasure is used as a currency for fun. Sexual excitement and the pleasure we gain from the act itself is down to a number of things such as our drive and need to feel good, coupled with an influx of different hormones and neurotransmitters being present in our bodies. So by taking all of this into account, it is much clearer to understand the different reasons why getting down feels good.