The Pleasurometer

The pleasurometer, will give you an objective assessment of the state of pleasure and displeasure in various areas of your life. The 60 statements are designed to evaluate four aspects of your life where you are most likely to feel satisfied or frustrated.
To get maximum benefit from this questionnaire, it is important to be honest and spontaneous. It is no use thinking too long about each question. Even if it has no scientific value, it is still a good indicator. It is a barometer of pleasure and displeasure.

Just subscribe to our pleasuro-news letter, and you will receive the pleasurometer.

The Pleasurometer can be find in the book : The Wisdom of Pleasure.

Anxiety: fear of loosing our pleasure

Anxiety is the first reaction following learned helplessness and its consequent inhibition. We feel anxious when faced with a situation where our well being is threatened. It can be defined as any real or imaginary fear of losing what gives us pleasure or of suffering or simply of being denied pleasure.
How a man feels when his job is threatened is an example, or how a woman might feel worrying about an aggressive husband, or a student thinking he might fail his exams or a woman always afraid that her partner might have an affair. In each of these examples, anxiety stems from anticipating pain of some sort or from the frustration of having the pleasure reduced. The anxious person feels tense because he is preoccupied with the pain, because of his desire to escape the situation - and especially - because he refuses to abandon his quest for potential pleasure.

Direct pleasure

As its name suggests, direct pleasure is a sensation of well being felt directly from and immediately after a stimulation, a thought or an action. Thus experiencing sexual pleasure, enjoying a delicious meal, appreciating music, crying with joy at a reunion, being bowled over by a work of art, bursting with joy from exchanging a look with a loved one and feeling the tingling of discovery are all examples of direct pleasure because the experience is immediate, it has not been deferred and has not been achieved via an unpleasant experience. The only thing which motivates direct pleasure is the wish to obtain it. It has not been put off in time, it is not being used to compensate a frustration, nor to avoid an unpleasant situation. It occurs here and now.

The Wisdom of Pleasure, Chapter 1

THE QUEST FOR PLEASURE !

What we seek above all is what gives us satisfaction, entertainment, fun, pleasure and happiness. The quest for pleasure is the basic motive behind every action and behaviour pattern we adopt. "Everything that we do, we do because it gives us some sort of pleasure either indirect or direct(1)." Never the less, some people may doubt this statement because, as they might say, they get no pleasure from getting up for work, washing the dishes, tolerating the freezing cold winters, paying tax, dinning at their in law's, etc. Of course there are many things in life which we do not enjoy doing, but even these are motivated by the quest for pleasure. The explanation behind this apparant paradox where on the one hand everything we do is motivated by our desire for pleasure and yet on the other we also seem to carry out behaviour which is unpleasant a priori, is that there are two types of pleasures: direct and indirect.

The Wisdom of Pleasure, chapter 1