You don’t need to be a biologist or neuroscientist to benefit from such deeper understanding of yourself. Even with simple insights into how your brain’s chemistry regulates how you feel, you can gain much greater control over your mood, motivation, and thinking capacity. This way, they can become more a product of your conscious creation rather than something dependent on the events of a given day or your general life circumstances.
What Everybody Should Have Learned More About From Their Biology Lessons.
As you may remember from your biology lessons, your stream of thoughts and everything you feel are orchestrated by the electric signals of your brain cells called neurons. However, there is something evenly important that is rarely taught in school: how your mood, motivation, and thinking capacity are regulated by chemical substances produced by your brain itself.
How Neurochemicals in Your Brain Regulate Your Mood and Influence Your Thinking.
You’ve probably noticed that when you’re in a worrisome state of mind, it can be very difficult to imagine how things could work out well. However, when you feel great, it’s hard to understand why you sometimes feel so worried or powerless.
These opposing perspectives arise because different areas of your brain take control when positive or negative thoughts and feelings dominate. In this process, a special type of molecules, called neurochemicals, are used to regulate which regions of your brain become more or less active. These neurochemicals are released at specific nerve connections to either amplify or dampen the activity of surrounding regions.
Learning how to enhance the activity of neurochemicals that suppress stress-related brain regions, while stimulating areas of the brain associated with positive thinking and emotions, is key to improving your mood and motivation at any time. In fact, we all already do this indirectly when we engage in activities that make us feel good or steer our thoughts toward subjects that make us feel better. However, because subconscious processes play a major role in controlling our neurochemicals, these methods of self-regulating mood and motivation do not always work reliably.
Fortunately, there are ways to overcome this problem. To fully understand how they work, it’s helpful to first take a quick look at the most important neurochemicals that regulate your positive and negative mental states.
The Three Most Important Neurochemicals You Can Learn to Control in Order to Steer Your Mood in Positive Directions.
Although more than 60 neurochemicals circulate in your body and brain, there are three key ones whose optimal ‘cocktail’ brings out the best version of yourself. When these neurochemicals are sufficiently active in the right circuits of a healthy brain, the others typically follow their lead, ensuring you feel clear-minded, motivated, light, energetic, yet fully relaxed and in control from head to toe.
1. Dopamine
Dopamine is the driving force behind motivation and gives you a sense of reward from successful activities. It is mainly released when you make progress with meaningful activities, helping you keep going. It enhances your thinking capacity and learning processes. Dopamine can make you feel excited, energized, and creative by amplifying signals in the brain areas responsible for positive thinking and engagement. Setting meaningful goals and making progress towards them is the best way to keep the so-called dopamine reward pathways in your brain consistently active.
2. Serotonin
Serotonin helps you feel comfortable, joyful, and satisfied by dampening signals in brain areas responsible for stressful thinking. It also interacts with sensory pathways, enhancing the enjoyment of pleasurable stimuli like taste, touch, and music.
This neurochemical is also crucial for overall health as it signals the nervous system that ‘everything is fine,’ enabling maintenance processes like the removal of toxic substances and DNA repair.
Serotonin is also essential for sleep quality, as melatonin, the sleep hormone, is produced from it. Engaging in activities that release serotonin in the evening can help you fall asleep more easily and improve sleep quality, resulting in better mood and motivation the following day.
3. GABA
GABA is another key neurochemical that helps you feel balanced both mentally and physically by driving your body’s relaxation processes.
Like serotonin, GABA suppresses activity in brain areas responsible for stress responses while activating important repair and recovery processes.
GABA also aids in the reduction of the stress hormone cortisol in your blood, which helps slow down the depletion of your body’s daily resources. Therefore, learning to activate GABA during the day to reduce cortisol levels, helping you stay energetic, even after intense workdays. Engaging in activities that release GABA before bed can relax your nervous system deeply, helping to fall asleep easily and experience longer deep sleep periods.
Other Neurochemicals That Can Contribute to a Positive Mood.
There are other neurochemicals worth mentioning that can influence your mood in positive ways, such as oxytocin and endorphins. Oxytocin, often called the ‘bonding hormone’ plays a role in human connection. Endorphins primarily act as natural pain relievers in the body and also contribute to mild euphoric feelings during activities like sports, dancing, or listening to music.
The reason why oxytocin is not mentioned as a primary source of positive moods is that it requires interaction with others to be activated. While maintaining healthy relationships is very important, making your happiness too dependent on others is not a strong foundation for self-control. Besides, oxytocin’s working mechanisms are still poorly understood. It can also enhance negative emotions and amplify prejudiced or discriminatory beliefs and behaviors.
Endorphins are a great ‘recreational’ neurochemical, but like oxytocin, they do not stimulate the brain regions associated with long-term motivation and overall life satisfaction.
The General Misunderstanding About Stress Hormones.
You’ve probably heard of stress hormones like adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol, which, as the term ‘stress hormone’ suggests, play a crucial role in stress reactions. However, these neurochemicals primarily drive excitement and alertness and can contribute just as much to making you feel exceptionally good as to making you feel exceptionally bad.
Therefore, referring to them simply as ‘stress hormones’ leads many people to misunderstand their true nature. They usually increase as part of stress reactions rather than directly causing them. Nevertheless, it’s important to pay attention to them because too much excitement and alertness—whether positive or negative—can exhaust your nervous system and lead to serious mental and physical problems.
If not stress hormones, then what really causes stress and bad mood, and what provides relief from them?
If someone delves deeper into what truly causes stress and bad moods, they will realize that stress is more likely caused by the decrease of neurochemicals like dopamine, serotonin and GABA, which act as brakes on our stress mechanisms, rather than by stress hormones themselves. For this reason, most substances prescribed to treat stress and depression are aimed either at increasing dopamine, serotonin, and GABA activity in the brain or acting as artificial substitutes for them.
In fact, when people experience a good mood, relief from stress, and relaxation at the same time after drinking alcohol it happens mainly because alcohol triggers the immediate release of dopamine, serotonin, and GABA simultaneously.
It is important to keep in mind that neither psychiatric medications or alcohol consumption are the best ways to control mood in the long term. In addition to negative side effects, the frequent use of such substances can unlearn your brain to release your mood balancing neurochemicals naturally by itself. This can lead to dependence, making people feel even worse when they decide to stop using them.
If you want to bring out the best version of yourself every day, it’s important not only to learn what your brain and body need to naturally release the neurochemicals that put you in your best state of mind, but also to understand why your brain may still hold them back, even when they are abundantly present in your nervous system.
To understand better how your neurochemicals regulate your good and bad moods, read also our following article: Why Do Food, Lifestyle Changes, and Practices to Boost Your ‘Happy Hormones’ Fail to Reliably Control Your Mood?
Learn all important aspects of controlling your mood, motivation, and thinking processes from the book Human Mind:
