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
If you do something to get your brain to have more serotonin, it says “Oh shit, too much. Better back off on that.” So you make *less* natural serotonin. You then can develop serotonin syndrome, which is not a good thing at all.
Too much serotonin is a very, very bad thing. Serotonin syndrome has a ton of very nasty symptoms, and allowing people to take the stuff whenever they feel a little down would end in massive tragedy.
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Hormones like serotonin are like ingredients in a recipe. You need them to be in the right balance for a dish to work.
Imagine serotonin as sugar, if used sparingly, you would enjoy it as a glaze or sauce in your entrees and finish your meal with a sweeter dessert. If you dumped a container of sugar on every dish of your meal, none of it would be enjoyable.
People’s bodies, like their tastes, differ as well. Some people like their dishes sweeter while others do not. Therefore a set sweetness for one person would not be enjoyable for others. This is why it is difficult to find the right medicine to treat neurological diseases like depression because every person is different.
The body also has limited tools to communicate with other organs. Serotonin affects mood in the brain but also appetite and digestion in your digestive system. Some of the side effects from drugs increasing or decreasing one hormone is due to the body reusing the hormone for many functions.
Lastly, the body is naturally ~~lazy~~ efficient. If it’s getting a hormone from an injection or pill, it is less likely to make it. Therefore, when a person stops taking the injections or pills the body goes into withdrawal because it stopped making that hormone, causing other symptoms. This can cause a dependence on the substance, otherwise known as an addiction.
Your brain is surrounded by a barrier that is very selective about what can pass through it. Serotonin is manufactured by your body inside this barrier. Injecting or ingesting sarotonin won’t do anything because it cannot cross that barrier.
However, the chemicals from which serotonin is manufactured (such as tryptophan) *can* pass through that barrier and, indeed, you can purchase purified tryptophan for this purpose. But, as with most things, it has side effects.
What goes up must come down. It is not healthy or physically sustainable to keep high levels of anything. You would need a constant supply that over comes any tolerance. You are on to a lost battle from the outset. Then if you stop consuming something like serotonin, you would feel a huge loss and probably end up totally depressed and end up chasing the happiness you once felt
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.
One thing to add that others haven’t mentioned yet it’s that hormones like seratonin have multiple roles, this is why depression and antidepressant meds have such a wide range of symptoms and side effects. Seratonin is also involved in aggression and hunger as well. Adding extra to or bodies could meet with these other functions just as easily as happiness.
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MDMA is a drug that allows more serotonin to accumulate in the synapses. This drug makes you feel really good and would get you out of misery awfully fast. It does not produce more serotonin so you would crash pretty hard after it used up making you feel miserable until a sufficient amount has been made. You could step this up further by taking an SSRI like fluoxetine, this could potentially increase the effects of MDMA making you feel even better for longer. However, I would not recommend trying MDMA and especially not with an SSRI as MDMA is illegal and the likelihood of serotonin syndrome with both drugs would be really high.
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