I’ve recently decided to stop talking to a close friend. We had a lot of good times, but there’s no balance anymore. Since then, I always feel urges to message her, but have to stop myself. Sometimes, I’ll be about to do so, before coming to my senses and stopping. What is the chemical reason for this? I presume it’s something to do with dopamine.
In: Chemistry
Humans are animals.
All animals have needs, and these needs evolved from what was required of us to survive our environment. The universal ones are good and water and air. All life needs Oxygen, water, and fuel to maintain itself.
Sometimes evolutionary pressure will cause a species to evolve a new trait to deal with a specific threat or problem. For example, poison dart frogs developed intensely toxic secretions and bright coloration to ward of predators, something that is effective when there are so many potential predators in their environment, all of them bigger than they are. Frogs in the past that were bright and poisonous were more likely to live and make babies, so we have more of those frogs around today. This is natural selection at its core.
For us in the past, early hominids would have had a far easier time surviving as a group. Over time, individual populations of humans who stayed in groups started to outlive and outcompete their nomadic cousins, and so evolution selected for the traits in those early populations that helped the most when it came to being sociable.
So basically, your body is the result of thousands of years of biological engineering geared towards being in a group of other people. It’s been proven scientifically that people get depressed easily when living a solitary life, as our brains are hard wired to *want* to be near others.
In a way, you kind of are going through withdrawals.
Chemically, I don’t know exactly what’s happening, however I do know that dopamine and the reward pathway are directly involved.
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