How does your body react to Desire?

Desire: craving, longing, anticipating, wishing 

Desire arises without will, it is a longing or hoping for a person, object or outcome.  

Desire is an instinctive feeling of wanting something or someone, an ‘unsatisfied state’. Though sexual desire is the most discussed, and arguably the strongest driver of desire, your body experiences other desires, such as gratification through food, desire for autonomy, for recognition, for human connection and comfort. 

Your body reacts to stimuli from the emotion of desire that can range from increased blood pressure, sweat glands activating, dilated pupils, increased heart rate, saliva production, faster breathing. Dopamine and Serotonin neurotransmitters are activated and estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone hormones are released into the blood system.

Our body starts with basic wants which become more complex desires over time. Food is not just food but a gourmet experience. Sex is not simply a pleasure to indulge in for procreation. Three different areas of the brain in your body are activated: the orbitofrontal cortex, the mid-cingulate cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. Desires triggered in your body bring rewards, act as life motivators. Desire has been a driving force to create new conditions and an enigma fascinating story tellers, scientists and philosophers ad infinitum. The possibilities are as endless as our individuality, imagination and the advertising industries of persuasion. 

With desire, the feel good chemicals, dopamine and serotonin are released in the body.

Desire, prompted by visual, olfactory, biochemical, emotional and physical signals, works in the reward centre of your brain. Neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin, which create the tingling sensation in your body, the ‘feel good factor’ are released, training your body and brain to associate pleasure and satisfaction with certain things. The feel good factor can come from food, sex, winning, exercise, power of autonomy. This cycle of pleasure and reward, driven by the neurotransmitters, can be addictive, as your body gets used to the ‘dopamine’ high. High levels of dopamine are released around drinking, drugs, gambling, sugar, sex and the body needs more, creating an addictive cycle of consumption/reward which requires more and more input.  

Desire stimulates saliva glands 

Expressions in everyday language such as ‘drooling over’ or ‘salivating’ over something as food or money are based on a physical reality in your body. It is not just sexual desire or animal appetites that activate the reward pathway in your brain. Once this is activated, salivation is a response in your body, triggered by the surge in hormones. ‘A Mouth-Watering Prospect: Salivation to Material Reward’ (Journal of Consumer Research 2012) a marketing study demonstrated that people can salivate over an abstract idea such as money.  

Pupils are dilated in desire

When the instinctive emotion of desire is activated, the ensuing surge in the dopamine and serotonin hormones cause your pupils to dilate. This can happen even when you are looking at a photo of someone or something you find attractive. 

In sexual desire, hormones and neurotransmitters drive physical reactions

Sexual desire is possibly one of the strongest, most discussed and least understood desires in our body. Though many disagree over the social, hormonal, physiological and psychological factors in sexual desire, science has proved that sexual desire is hormonally influenced. In sexual desire, the ‘sex’ hormones estrogen and testosterone are released into your body. In combination with the release of neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin, your body feels a sense of euphoria, a sense of intoxication. In addition, norapenephrine, the neurotransmitter, stimulated when the body needs extra energy, is released during sexual arousal. A cascade of physical reactions follows:  

Sexual desire incites many body reactions 

As your body is excited, flooded with hormones and chemicals that make you feel good and stimulate energy, your heart rate and blood pressure go up. 

Faster breathing

As sexual arousal increases, your breathing becomes faster, more shallow. 

Activated sweat glands

As you get sexually excited, your apocrine sweat glands, the most numerous sweat glands, in areas abundant in hair follicles, such as your scalp, armpits and groin become active.

‘Butterflies in your stomach’ – the physical symptom of desire 

As the norapenephrine, the neurotransmitter, stimulated when the body needs extra energy for action, levels increase as sexual desire stimulated, this can make you cautious or anxious, depending on your soul, your unique personality. ‘the butterflies in your stomach’ are stimulated in the emotional limbic system in your brain, a mild form of the ‘fight or fright’ syndrome’. Nervousness and lust are activated in the same area of the brain but a sexual orgasm activates many more areas in the brain and involves the whole mind.

Arousal of sexual organs 

In sexual desire, either the male or female reproductive organs are aroused as the body prepares for intercourse. The physical symptoms in your body are well known. 

Nerve Zero activated? Smell triggers sexual desire? 

‘A woman’s perfume tells us more about her than her writing’ says Dior. The idea that you have a ‘sexual scent’ has been discussed, studied by scientists and propagated by the perfume and advertising industry. There is a theory that your sense of smell is the path to desire as it can detect chemical signals, pheromones and MHC subconsciously to trigger desire in your body. Wikepedia reports that studies have been conducted on insects and Jiménez et al (1994) proved that mice, through scent signals can distinguish close relatives from distantly related ones, which avoids inbreeding.  Studies on humans are inconclusive. Healthline  reported  on Dr Martha McClintlock’s study which shows how female menstruation becomes synchronised over time, which she and others believe to be an example of humane female pheromone communication. Healthline also reports on ‘cranial nerve zero’ or the ‘terminal nerve’, a nerve that runs from the nasal cavity to the brain, which is believed to be the key to the mysterious workings of pheromones. Dr Fields has conducted experiments in animals and discovered that stimulating nerve zero triggered automatic sexual responses in animals. He, and others believe that cranial nerver zero may be responsible for translating the signals of sex pheromones.  

Sexual desire: an instinctive bodily urge for procreation? 

Some argue that all sexual desire is driven by the instinctive need to procreate and our preferences are simply a search for the ideal mate in child rearing, thus women seek older men with status or men are attracted to women with wide hips. This theory cannot account for same sex attraction or desire post procreation. 

Sexual Desire: lust of love? the brain imaging is unclear 

Scientists, with fMRI brain imaging techniques are able to scan people’s brains in real-time to see what regions are active or inactive during particular acts or thought processes. During sex and at time of orgasm, more than thirty systems  in the brain across your processing centres are activated, not only those relating to touch but the limbic system (emotions and memory), the hypothalamus (body movement control), the pre frontal cortex (judgment and problem solving). There is no sexual centre in the brain, it is scattered everywhere. There is no straight path between stimulation and emotional/sexual interest. Regardless of the biological sex, the brain imaging during orgasm is the same. 

Instinctive emotions are like the weather, beyond your conscious control. For a balanced life, the first step is to understand human instinctive emotions, how they work and practical steps to take in order to avoid situations that are destructive to emotional wellbeing. Not every instinctive emotion that is acted on has positive consequences. Sometimes, it may be best to take shelter from the storm. Desire in your body is complex, not entirely understood by science. It is a powerful physical urge that also involves your mind and your soul.