Natural Serotonin Boosters, and How they Can Benefit You
A positive mental outlook is critical not only to your mental health, but your physical health and quality of life as well. Since serotonin has strong influence in all these areas, adding natural serotonin boosters to your daily regimen may be your key to improved health and wellbeing.
What is Serotonin?
Serotonin is a hormone which acts as a neurotransmitter, or messenger that relays messages between cells. It is formed in both the brain and intestines, occurs widely throughout your body, and requires the amino acid tryptophan to produce for production.
It is also unable to cross the blood-brain barrier, meaning that which is produced in the brain cannot cross into the body, nor can that which is produced in the gut pass into the brain.
It plays a key role in the central nervous system and is most commonly known for its positive effects on mood and wellbeing. However, it also helps manage sleep cycles, helps smooth muscle contractions, and may play roles in your appetite, cognitive function, motor control and emotions. (1)
And, there are some factors that can lower its production and produce some unwanted effects.
What are the Causes and Effects of Low Serotonin?
Low serotonin can be caused by many factors, with stress and poor diet being two of the most common ones.
Other causes may include:
- Lack of sunlight
- Genetics
- Exposure to heavy metals and other toxic substances
- Certain drugs, including antidepressants
Remember that certain nutrients which stress and poor diet deplete are necessary for your body to produce serotonin. This is one of the reasons why stress and poor diet are often cited as causes of low serotonin.
Unfortunately, this can lead to:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Compulsive or obsessive behavior
- Poor sleep patterns
- Gastric distress (2)
Fortunately, there are natural ways to boost your serotonin.
Natural Serotonin Boosters
First, a word about pharmaceutical antidepressants: even though most antidepressants work by “boosting” serotonin levels, they actually don’t. Instead, most work by increasing the amount of time serotonin remains circulating in your brain, thereby increasing its effects.
However, there is evidence that over time this may increase deficiencies due to an increased—rather than decreased—turnover of serotonin in the brain, which is why antidepressants are not recommended over natural means of boosting serotonin levels in your brain. (2)
Remember too that serotonin cannot cross the blood-brain barrier, which means increasing it in the body through nutrition won’t necessarily affect levels in the brain where it affects mood.
To naturally boost levels in the brain, you can try:
- Enjoying nature and the outdoors
- Getting plenty of bright sunlight
- Exercising
- Drinking enough water each day
- Meditating and performing breathing exercises
- Envisioning pleasant scenarios such as meeting with loved ones
- Expressing gratitude
- Achieving your goals (3, 4)
However, nutrition can be used to boost serotonin in the body, especially by consuming foods high in tryptophan.
This means eating protein-rich foods such as:
- Meat
- Cheese
- Tofu
- Fish
- Poultry
Due to serotonin being produced in the gut, fermented foods and other sources of probiotics can also help.
These include:
- Kimchi
- Sauerkraut
- Yogurt
- Kefir
- Soft, odorous cheeses
- Kombucha tea (5)
A quality probiotic supplement containing at least 5-10 billion CFU (colony forming units) is also recommended, particularly in the absence of fermented foods. (6)
Minding Your Happiness
Your happiness and wellbeing are not only important to your quality of life, but to your overall health and social status.
In fact, according to a 2005 scientific study, happiness can help alleviate the effects of stress by lowering cortisol levels along with reducing your risk of illness by lowering your heart rate and blood pressure. This means reduced risk for diabetes, heart attack, stroke and obesity along with other related diseases and conditions.
Plus, a study performed at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School proves to us that happiness directly relates to productivity. This is important to you since increased productivity means better earning power and opportunity for promotion.
This is in addition to the social effects of happiness, since who doesn’t agree that happy people are simply more pleasant to be around?
Best of all, increasing your happiness may be as simple as trying a few natural serotonin boosters.
So why not give them a try—after all, you’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain!
References:
- https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/232248
- https://www.integrativepsychiatry.net/seritonin-and-seritonin-deficiency.html
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2077351/
- https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/10-ways-to-boost-dopamine-and-serotonin-naturally-1212177
- https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-increase-serotonin
- https://www.probioticsguide.com/is-a-higher-cfu-count-better-in-probiotic-supplements/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197458005002769
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3470734
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