Analysis: You can boost your stocks of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins in a number of different - and surprising - ways
There are six pillars of lifestyle medicine: sleep, stress management, eating healthy food, physical activity, managing alcohol and tobacco, and cultivating positive relationships. "Every single one of those, if you take out alcohol and tobacco, have a massive boosting impact on our four neurotransmitters", explains Dr Padraic Dunne. "All the common sense lifestyle medicine stuff - eat healthy food, get some exercise, and get some adequate sleep - most of those will boost all those four."
Dunne is an immunologist, psychotherapist and certified lifestyle medicine professional based at the Centre for Positive Health Sciences at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. "Dopamine kind of gets a bad rap, with things like online shopping, one click dopamine hits and stuff," he explains. But on the positive side, succeeding in mini crosswords or mental puzzles like Wordle can give you a "dopamine hit". Sleep and exercise also impacts your body's release of dopamine.
READ: All you need to know about your 4 'happy' hormones
When it comes to the love hormone oxytocin, any kind of mammalian touch, whether it’s from a human or a pet, will boost it. "You know the stupid baby talk that people do and the silly faces that we make when we're talking to babies?", asks Dunne. "Or even we're talking with dogs sometimes? Our voice will go up high pitched and that activates the parasympathetic nervous response, which then leads to a production in oxytocin.
"What that does is it strengthens the bond between us and another mammal. All that kind of social bonding really is oxytocin. Breastfeeding is the ultimate in terms of producing oxytocin. Petting any type of animal will boost oxytocin, therapeutic massage, hugs, all those kinds of things will boost oxytocin."
Dunne explains that you get more serotonin produced in the gut than you would in the brain. Our gut is full of small epithelial cells and it’s thought that when they’re stimulated by healthy gut bacteria, like bifidobacterium and lactobacilli, this produces serotonin. "One of the reasons why serotonin is produced in the gut, is not actually for mental health, it's for what they call smooth muscle relaxation. That means that serotonin is good for preventing cramps and stuff like that."
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When it comes to the release of serotonin, Dunne has some good news for those who love cheese "The other way to get buckets of serotonin made by these bugs in the gut is eating things like cheese. Cheese has tons of the amino acid tryptophan and tryptophan is the main precursor of serotonin," he explains. The bacteria in your gut metabolise the tryptophan and turn it into serotonin. "Then that serotonin is released into the system and that can cross the blood-brain barrier and that's thought to be one of the reasons why the gut is so important for mood, among other things."
Many people don't realise that getting exposure to daylight is important for serotonin and that’s linked to vitamin D, because vitamin D then also has a role in converting tryptophan into serotonin, he says. "Adrenaline produced by, say, long-term stress actually converts tryptophan into another molecule called kynurenine. So stress actually diverts serotonin being produced from tryptophan."
Finally, if you want to hit all for of your feel-good hormones? Exercise is "the biggest bang for your buck," especially high intensity internal training (HIIT). "They're all so intrinsically linked. We love isolating out things and kind of dissecting them and putting them in boxes, but the reality is these things are usually produced together. They're kind of floating around at the same time."
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