Conventional wisdom is to enjoy "everything in moderation." Is that really good advice? And if it is, how much (or how often) is "moderate?" Let me try to answer both questions with an illustration based on my experiences when I was a cigarette smoker.
Treating "10" as the value of the most intense pleasures that I have known, the very best cigarette would rate a value of about 5. That would be the first cigarette of a day with a cup of coffee. If I then smoked a cigarette every 15 minutes for the 16-hour day, the value of each one was very small, about .2 at the most. But if I waited 30 minutes between cigarettes, the pleasure from each cigarette increased to about 1. The pleasure was still greater, 3, if I let an hour go by between cigarettes, and up to 4 by smoking a cigarette every two hours. Now let's put these values into a table
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Please understand that I am not, repeat NOT recommending that people smoke. The evidence is clear that the long-term detriment to health far outweighs the short-term pleasure to be derived from smoking. If it makes the example more meaningful, you can substitute other activities such as eating a candy bar, drinking a soft drink, or listening to a record. Of course, the time frame will be quite different for some activities, such as going to the movies, eating your favorite dinner, or engaging in sex. But the same basic picture applies to them all. A high frequency results in less total pleasure than a moderate frequency, which in turn is better than a very low frequency.
So how do you know what is a "moderate" amount? There is no single answer that applies to everything. As a rule-of-thumb, the optimal rate is to do something less frequently than your natural tendency to do it. That is to say, self-imposing a tolerable amount of deprivation between episodes increases the pleasure more than enough to make up for the lower frequency. The only way to find out what is best for you is to try out different schedules.