Serotonin is the hormone what makes us happy, so why aren’t we just injecting it into our body/taking it as tablets to get out of misery on command?
In: Biology
First, serotonin doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier, so no matter how much you put into your body, none of it will reach your brain, which is where it needs to be to affect brain processes like mood.
Second, our bodies are pretty finely tuned machines. They want everything to operate in a pretty narrow window. Having more of something than there’s supposed to be completely throws off this balance and would wreak havoc. Too much serotonin can literally kill you. Too much of *anything,* even things we need to live, like oxygen and water, will kill you. Messing around with the chemical balance of our bodies beyond that narrow window is very bad.
Third, and this ties in with the above point, is that serotonin does a bunch of other stuff in the body besides regulating mood. It’s involve in sleep, digestion, immune response, tissue regeneration, and more. Messing around with serotonin would not just throw your brain into chaos but the entire rest of your body as well.
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