I take Melatonin most nights to sleep better. Sure would love to have a serotonin pill as well.
In: Biology
It’s called mdma. Turns out it’s not so healthy being constantly that happy is pretty bad for your brain. Constantly flooding your brain with reward chemicals eventually leads to desensitisation towards serotonin
But it is also more complicated than that. Even though serotonin plays a role in feeling happy it doesn’t do that entirely alone and scientists still haven’t figured it out yet otherwise we would have better antidepressants. Even they do not make you happy. They cause a buildup of serotonin, which in theory should make you happy buy it doesn’t.
Ever taken ecstasy? It causes the release of dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine from nerves, and makes you feel really happy and empathetic.
Then it wears off, you crash off it because you’ve used all your serotonin and dopamine up, and you feel terrible. If you take it too often you can also permanently damage your serotonin and dopamine levels and cause untreatable depression, and if you take too much you can get serotonin syndrome and potentially die.
If you were constantly taking an external source of serotonin, your body would acclimatise to it and may stop producing its own, to disastrous effects if you stopped the medicine suddenly.
People would rapidly abuse any drug that made them feel euphoric, which is why the SSRIs other commenters have mentioned are safer for you; they help people feel normal rather than high.
Serotonin is thought to have a major role in how our gut functions, so we wouldn’t want to fiddle with this either.
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