How does Serotonin work?
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Serotonin is like a lubricant for your nerves to easily send messages from nerve centres like the brain and stomach. It’s a critical part of the brain’s group of chemicals that it “soaks” in. We dont really know for certain what it does but studies do seem to suggest a lack of available serotonin affects mood and appetite. So it seems that when a person has healthy serotonin availability the brain is better prepared to send and receive the right messages accurately. Similarly the stomach has an easy time telling the brain if we need calories or hydration. If the serotonin supply is running dry… the system gets a little “corrupted”.
In the way different instructions pass through computer wires to cause different programs to run, serotonin is just one instruction of many that the brain issues which, depending on the part of the brain receiving the instruction, will result in different activities (less depression, hallucinations, vomiting to name a few)
If you’re talking about serotonin relative to wellness, we have very little idea what causes wellness because it’s such a large complex of feelings, each of which results from a different set of instructions and thus molecules other than serotonin
The body loves to use and re-use a small number of messenging molecules for lots of different purposes. Serotonin is simply one such messenger. Depending on where it is and what target it’s reaching it may make platelets less sticky, propel food through the gut, promote nausea, or have a bunch of complicated and poorly-understood effects on mood, learning, sleep, and more.
It doesn’t, at least for me.
Jokes aside, it’s a hormone (eli5 –chemicals in blood) and a neurotransmitter (molecules sending messages between neurons or neurons to muscles), it helps with brain’s proper functioning of many things.
It’s still under research but we do find a connection between low serotonin levels and long term bad mood/depression, low motivation, low appetite etc. Also works to regulate our biological clock and digestion.
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