Eli5 why does ecstasy or mdma make you feel happy and euphoric?
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So your brain cells send chemical messengers to eachother that signals what chemical the next cell should send and so on, like a chain. One of the chemical messengers a cell can send is serotonin. When one of your brain cells sends that serotonin to the next cell, the serotonin binds to a receptor on the next cell telling it to release its own serotonin to its next cell. Then the original serotonin molecule unbinds and gets reabsorbed by the cell that sent it through a channel. The more powerful the signal a cell is sending, the more chemical messenger will be released. What MDMA does is sits and blocks those channels that reabsorb serotonin. Not only do the cells not get their serotonin back, they keep releasing more and more since it hasn’t reabsorbed any of the serotonin its sent out yet. This floods your synapses with serotonin, stimulating the next cell like crazy, and draining all your serotonin. Serotonin is one of the “happy chemicals” like dopamine which is why it feels so good. This is why people get depressed or have a rough time after taking MDMA, and combining certain other substances can have bad interactions.
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