People are masochists because the human brain doesn’t draw a clean line between pain and pleasure. The same neural machinery that processes painful stimuli also triggers the release of the body’s natural painkillers, which in turn activate reward circuits. This overlap means that under the right conditions, discomfort can produce genuine enjoyment. But the reasons go well beyond brain chemistry. Psychology, personality, and emotional regulation all play roles in explaining why so many people voluntarily seek out experiences that hurt.
Your Brain Rewards You for Enduring Pain
When you feel pain, your brain releases endorphins, chemicals that function like the body’s own version of morphine. These endorphins bind to the same receptors that opioid drugs target, blocking pain signals from nerve cells. Once endorphins latch onto your brain’s reward centers, they trigger a release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter most associated with pleasure and motivation. This is the same cascade responsible for what runners call a “runner’s high”: the aching muscles come first, and the euphoria follows.
A brain region called the nucleus accumbens plays a central role in this process. It’s one of the key structures in the brain’s reward system, and it responds not just to pleasant things but also to painful stimuli. Research published in the journal Neuron found that the nucleus accumbens actively tracks the predicted value of a painful experience, particularly the relief that comes when the pain stops. In other words, your brain treats the removal of pain as a reward, and it starts anticipating that reward the moment the pain begins. This built-in mechanism means that pain isn’t purely negative. It carries a reward signal baked into its resolution.
Benign Masochism: Enjoying Pain You Know Won’t Hurt You
Psychologist Paul Rozin coined the term “benign masochism” after years of studying why people love chili peppers. The concept covers a wide range of common behaviors: eating painfully spicy food, watching horror movies, taking freezing cold showers, pushing through brutal workouts, riding roller coasters, or listening to music that makes you cry. The key ingredient is a constant awareness that you’re not in real danger. Knowing that the threat isn’t serious is actually a prerequisite for the pleasure to work. Without that sense of safety, the experience just feels bad.
Benign masochism is surprisingly widespread. Research in the Journal of Research in Personality found that people who score high in this trait tend to specifically enjoy stimuli that are both highly intense and negatively charged. They don’t just like excitement in general. They’re drawn to the particular combination of “this feels bad” and “this feels strong.” This distinguishes them from simple sensation seekers, who enjoy any high-intensity experience regardless of whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant. Benign masochists have a narrower, more specific appetite: they want the rush that comes from something that should be aversive but isn’t truly dangerous.
People who enjoy one form of benign masochism tend to enjoy others. Someone who orders the hottest item on the menu is also more likely to love horror films or intense exercise. This pattern suggests a shared underlying trait rather than isolated preferences.
Pain as an Escape From Self-Awareness
One of the most influential psychological theories of masochism comes from social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who argued that masochistic behavior serves the same basic function as alcohol, meditation, or any other activity that quiets the inner monologue. Self-awareness, while useful, is often unpleasant. It forces you to confront your mistakes, your shortcomings, the gap between who you are and who you want to be. Pain is so immediate and consuming that it drowns all of that out.
This applies to both sexual and nonsexual forms of masochism. Intense physical sensation pulls your attention entirely into the present moment. There’s no room to ruminate about work, relationships, or personal failures when your nervous system is overwhelmed by something happening right now. For people who carry a heavy burden of self-criticism or mental overactivity, this forced presence can feel like relief.
Pain Offset Actually Improves Your Mood
Research from the Association for Psychological Science tested what happens to people’s emotions right after a painful experience ends. Participants showed increased positive emotions and decreased negative emotions immediately following pain offset. The effect was especially strong after high-intensity pain: the sharper the discomfort, the bigger the emotional boost once it stopped. Even low-intensity pain produced a measurable drop in negative feelings afterward.
This “pain offset relief” appears to be a natural emotional regulation mechanism. The study found that both healthy individuals and those with a history of self-harm showed similar levels of relief when pain was removed, suggesting this isn’t a sign of dysfunction. It’s a feature of how the nervous system works. Your brain essentially recalibrates your emotional baseline after processing pain, and the new baseline feels better than where you started. This helps explain why people sometimes feel calmer, lighter, or more emotionally grounded after intense physical experiences.
Sensation Seeking and Personality
Benign masochism is reliably linked to sensation seeking, the personality trait that drives people toward novel, intense, and sometimes risky experiences. Sensation seekers show higher sensitivity to intense stimuli but lower sensitivity to stress, meaning they can tolerate the unpleasant parts of an experience long enough to access the rewarding parts. They process the same pain signals everyone else does, but the balance between discomfort and excitement tips differently for them.
That said, the two traits aren’t identical. Sensation seekers enjoy anything that’s intense, whether it feels good or bad. Benign masochists are more selective. They specifically gravitate toward experiences that carry a negative emotional charge, like sadness, fear, or physical pain, combined with high intensity. Someone who loves skydiving purely for the thrill is a sensation seeker. Someone who loves a movie specifically because it devastates them emotionally is closer to a benign masochist.
Sexual Masochism and Mental Health
Sexual masochism, where a person finds arousal or satisfaction in receiving pain or humiliation during sex, has historically been treated as a disorder. But research over the past two decades has challenged that framing significantly. A large study comparing 902 BDSM practitioners to 434 controls found that BDSM practitioners were less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, and reported higher subjective well-being than the control group. They were also less sensitive to rejection. The researchers concluded that BDSM is better understood as recreational leisure than as a sign of psychological problems.
Within the BDSM community, people who preferred dominant roles tended to score slightly better on psychological measures than those who preferred submissive roles, but both groups outperformed the control group on most indicators. This doesn’t mean BDSM automatically makes someone healthier. It does mean that the desire for pain in a sexual context isn’t a red flag for mental illness on its own.
Why Evolution May Have Kept This Wiring
From an evolutionary standpoint, the ability to find meaning or even pleasure in pain has practical value. Pain signals danger and motivates avoidance, but an organism that collapses at the first sign of discomfort won’t survive long. The endorphin-dopamine cascade rewards you for enduring pain, which keeps you functional during injuries, childbirth, or physically demanding survival tasks. The emotional relief that follows pain may have helped early humans recover psychologically from unavoidable hardships.
Social pain follows similar pathways. Exclusion from a group triggers responses that overlap with physical pain, and sensitivity to that social pain likely motivated behaviors that kept individuals connected to their communities. The capacity to process pain as something other than purely negative, to extract relief, bonding, or even pleasure from it, gave our ancestors tools for resilience that remain wired into our nervous systems today.