Recently, I had a large gap between clients and a to-do list a mile long. You know the kind: emails, projects, scheduling, phone calls to return, bills to pay, and a zillion loose ends. All those tasks pressed in and pressured me to “be productive” with the freed up time.
My first instinct was exactly that: use the gap to get more done.
Then I caught myself.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
The sun was shining in a cloudless sky, and almost immediately I could feel myself relaxing and paying attention differently. Then came the real gifts: Yellow-headed blackbirds, a bald eagle, a Cooper’s hawk, and a Red-Tailed hawk.
For a bird lover, that's quite a treat!
There was no goal. I wasn't counting steps or trying to improve my cardiovascular fitness nor was I listening to a podcast so I could learn something while I exercised, just taking in the fresh air and beauty.
When I returned to work, I felt restored. My mind was clearer, my energy was invigorated, and I was dramatically more productive than I had been before I left.
But here's what bugged me: Why had work automatically seemed like the more legitimate use of those two hours?
I have spent a great deal of my life thinking about health, human development, and what helps us thrive. Yet, I still had to catch the automatic reflex to make productivity more important than pleasure.
Think about what comes to mind when you hear the words “healthy lifestyle.”
Eat nutritious food. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Manage stress. Track hydration. Reduce sugar. Meditate. Take your vitamins. Keep your brain active.
Of course, they’re all worthwhile, but notice the underlying verbs: manage, monitor, limit, improve, prevent, maintain. We can become so focused on taking care of ourselves that self-care starts to resemble another job.
For many adults—particularly women with careers and children—enjoyment can migrate to the bottom of a very long list of important roles: work and parenting obligations, care of aging parents, friendships and relationships to nurture, households to keep up with, and a hundred invisible responsibilities.
And it’s not because we've consciously decided pleasure doesn't matter. There is simply always something “more important” to do first.
THEN we'll do something we enjoy.
Except “then” has a sneaky habit of never arriving or waiting until “we’ve earned it.” Perhaps we've left something important out of our definition of health.
First, let's clear something up.
Pleasure is not the same thing as indulgence. When I polish off a pint of coffee Häagen Dazs, that's indulgence. And “it feels good” does not mean “it's good for me.”
Plenty of things can feel pleasurable in the moment and have harmful consequences. Whether something contributes to well-being depends on what we're doing, how much, under what circumstances, our motivation, and what it costs us afterward.
Pleasure, happiness, joy, life satisfaction, and well-being are often used interchangeably.
However, researchers are more likely to study things such as positive affect, positive emotions, enjoyment, leisure satisfaction, or intrinsic motivation. Each tells us something useful, but none is a perfect synonym for pleasure.
For our purposes, I think of pleasure more simply: the experience of genuinely enjoying something while we're living it.
It can be energetic or quiet; sensory or relational. A belly laugh with a friend, listening to music you love or creating something with your hands. Pleasure can be playing with your dog, dancing with your spouse or enjoying a relaxing, gourmet meal. It can be as simple as getting lost in a novel.
For me, walking around a pond and unexpectedly spotting an eagle was sheer delight.
Pleasure doesn't have to be extravagant. Sometimes, it is the parts of life that make being alive enjoyable.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's influential broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions offers an interesting way of thinking about pleasure.
Fredrickson proposed that positive emotions such as joy, interest, contentment, and love can temporarily broaden the ways we think and act. Different positive emotions may encourage responses such as play, exploration, savoring, and connection. Over time, these experiences may help people build psychological, intellectual, social, and other personal resources.
Yet, this perspective doesn't prove that pleasure itself makes us healthier.
It does challenge another assumption, though: that positive experiences are frivolous extras we receive after we've handled the important business of life.
Positive emotions appear to have functions of their own.
A major 2019 review in the Annual Review of Psychology similarly found that positive affect is associated with a range of physical-health outcomes. Researchers have proposed biological, behavioral, and social pathways that might help explain these relationships.
But let’s resist a possible oversimplification. Association is not causation.
Healthier people may experience more positive emotion. Positive affect may influence some aspects of health. Other factors may affect both. Researchers are still working to understand these relationships.
So, I'm not going to tell you that enjoying your garden will boost your immune system or that an afternoon laughing with friends will prevent disease.
The science doesn't justify those claims.
The research gives us something subtler and perhaps more interesting to consider.
Positive experiences may deserve a legitimate place in how we think about human well-being rather than being treated merely as dessert after we've eaten our vegetables—or a reward for working hard.
Related reading: "Self-Love Begins with Self-Care: a Formula for Heightened Inner Peace."
There's another complication worth understanding.
If positive emotions are associated with well-being, does feeling good automatically make us behave more healthfully?
A meta-analysis of experimental studies examining positive affect and health-related behavior found no reliable overall effect on behavioral intentions or behavior, although researchers did find effects for some individual outcomes.
In other words, feeling good doesn't magically make us choose the salad, go to bed on time, exercise, or abandon unhealthy habits. However, pleasure can support well-being without being a health intervention.
Related reading: "7 Mindset Shifts and Self-Care Activities for a Holistic, Healthy Life."
This connection is where the research on physical activity gets particularly fascinating.
For decades, much of our cultural conversation around exercise has sounded like an obligation: find the best workout, count and burn calories, hit your target weight, push yourself, stay disciplined.
But what if we asked a much simpler question: Do I actually enjoy experiencing life this way?
A 2025 review of reviews based on Self-Determination Theory found that more autonomous forms of motivation—including intrinsic regulation—were important determinants of physical activity. This correlation doesn't mean the most pleasurable workout is automatically the "healthiest." Nor does it mean challenging ourselves or discipline never matter.
It does suggest that enjoyment is a vital component of health.
Related reading: "How to Integrate Healthy Practices into Your Everyday Life."
Here's something else I've noticed over the years. Adults often speak about pleasure as though it requires justification.
We “deserve” a vacation because we've worked super hard or we “earned” the afternoon off. Or, we can read the novel once everything else is done.
We'll take the walk IF there's enough time. We'll return to a hobby we immensely enjoy AFTER life settles down.
Notice what is blurring.
Work and responsibility are treated as inherently legitimate while enjoyment has to build a case or earn its place.
Of course, responsibilities are important and sometimes, they genuinely need to come first. However, when postponing enjoyment becomes our permanent operating system, a problem starts brewing.
We can become extremely efficient at maintaining a life we're barely experiencing. Running on automatic can become a way of life.
That may be why research on leisure deserves more attention than it usually gets in wellness conversations. A large meta-analysis examining leisure and subjective well-being found a relationship between leisure engagement, leisure satisfaction, and subjective well-being across different kinds of evidence.
The above study reminds us that well-being is larger than disease prevention and self-management.
Most of us understand why health matters. We want energy to work, love, contribute, raise our children, explore the world, and be here for the people who matter to us.
But somewhere along the way, it's possible to become so busy managing our lives or maintaining our health that we forget our WHY.
Health isn't only about keeping yourself functional to earn a living. It's also about having a life worth being present for.
My walk around the pond wasn’t valuable because I accomplished more afterward.
Yes, I came back restored and remarkably productive. But IF I use that as the justification for the walk: Pleasure makes me more efficient, I’ve quietly handed productivity the final vote again.
See the cul-de-sac?
Pleasure still has to prove its usefulness.
The sunshine is splendid whether I step outside to enjoy it or check another half dozen things off my to-do list. Seeing the hawks was a thrill independent of anything I accomplished before or afterward.
The pleasure itself enriched my life.
We could take pleasure and immediately turn it into another assignment or one more thing to check off our ongoing checklist.
Schedule 30 minutes of joy three times a week!
Track your leisure!
Optimize your fun!
Ha!
The point isn't to add pleasure to your wellness checklist.
The invitation is much simpler: become curious about the definition of health you're living by.
Here are a few questions for exploration:
Building habits that protect our future while being awake of what makes today satisfying is crucial.
Sometimes taking care of your life looks like doing the difficult thing. And sometimes, when the to-do list is a mile long and the sun is shining, it looks like walking around a pond.
You never know what might be flying overhead.
If you want personalized support, contact us at Heartmanity!