By Claire Brownlie

A nationwide survey has been launched exploring the nature and extent of Australian’s ability to experience pleasure.

The National Pleasure Audit created by Southern Cross University Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Dr Desiree Kozlowski, is investigating what brings people pleasure, how they seek it, and how strongly they experience it.

There is a link between humans' overall wellbeing and how well they are able to experience pleasure, Dr Kozlowski has discovered. This includes our overall mood, such as stress and anxiety reduction, to boosting our immune system for greater longevity.

“If we build a variety of more small pleasures each day we increase our resilience,” she says. “From stopping to enjoy the smell of coffee and the warm feeling of the cup in your hand, to stepping into a hot shower, or walking on the grass with no shoes on, all these things can reduce our anxiety and stress.”

The anonymous online survey is open to all Australians, and will be collating data to help Dr Kozlowski’s research into boosting pleasure for mental health improvement and satisfaction for life. 

"It has a lot of potential to help people improve their wellbeing, reduce perceived stress, increase resilience. And yet, we don't know that much about it."

According to Dr. Kozlowski, there has been evidence demonstrating that one's ability to savour a moment of pleasure has a link to the state of their mental health.

Whilst most people are aware that experiences like good food, music and nature are pleasurable, Dr Kozlowski hopes that research can link different groups of people to their corresponding choices of pleasure.

"We need a bunch of men and a bunch of women and a bunch of non-binary folk. We just want it to be representative of the population of Australia. That way we can make some more generalized claims as well as drilling into the data a bit more carefully."

The survey will be collecting data until the end of March, with hopes that the research will be available to the public around mid-2022.